482
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
has not preserved what Berliner did that morning" - because then one
at least knows where one stands. But the relief
is
accompanied by the
distressing uncertainty about whether that same oral (or written) tradi–
tion had actually preserved all the other details put forth. And when,
toward the end of the book, a long passage is quoted from written
testimony describing a key moment in the rebellion, one reads it with
both fascination and reassurance, so much so that one is a bit reluctant
to return to the author's less authoritative voice.
The blurring of assumptions contained in the "nonfiction novel"
is undoubtedly part of the general ambiguity surrounding contemporary
standards of reality. But Steiner also struggles with the more specific
problem of recreating twentieth-century holocaust. Japanese attempting
to produce what is called "A-bomb literature," like their Western counter–
parts who write of the concentration camp experience, find their crea–
tive powers blunted by the unmanageable dimensions of technological
violence, the absurd or disconnected deaths, and by a particularly
intense form of creative guilt. For whether or not the writer (or artist
in
general) is actually a survivor of one of the two holocausts, he experiences
a survivor-like sense of being bound to the dead. Haunted by what he
perceives as their judgments, he is likely
to
impose upon himself an
impossible standard of literal recreation of "how things were," a kind
of sacred historical truth which leads him to what might be called the
documentary fallacy; or else a need to glorify the dead and deny them
the dignity of their limitations.
Steiner
u
prevented from fully transcending these difficulties by
certain assumptions he makes and by the form he has chosen. As a
secondhand documentary his account cannot have th!! immediacy of
Yoko Ota's and Dr. Hachiya's memoirs of the atomic bomb, or the
early concentration camp writings of Rousset, Levi, Wiesel or Bettelheim,
and he makes no attempt to apply the quality of documentary imagina–
tion which Resnais did in a different medium in
Night and Fog.
Nor
does he embark on the kind of literary experiment which might
be
equal to the subject novelistically, as, for instance, in Rawicz'
Blood
fram the
Sky,
Semprun's
The Long Voyage
or Schwarz-Bart's
The Last
of
the Just.
Yet Steiner does succeed in doing something that no one else
writing about concentration camps has up to now been able to do. By
telling the story of one of them, he powerfully and simultaneously
\
evokes two seemingly incompatible actualities: the combined Nazi and
Jewish numbing associated with mass murder, and the remarkable
accomplishment of a few hundred prisoners in breaking out of that
numbing to rebel and produce a handful of survivors to tell the tale.
