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might have colored in, surely Mordechai Anielewicz - the leader of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - or one of his deputies (e.g., Yitzchak "Antek"
Zuckerman or Marek Edelman) was worthy of a paragraph. Precisely be–
cause they have been mythologized as heroes, Hilberg might have re–
stored them to the human realm.
Finally, Hilberg opens his concluding section on "bystanders" by
noting wisely that even those who saw what was happening to their
Jewish neighbors were absorbed by their own preoccupations during the
war. "The Dutch were worried about their bicycles, the French about
shortages, the Ukrainians about food, the Germans about air raids,"
Hilberg writes. "All of these people thought of themselves as victims, be
it of war, or oppression, or 'fate'." Even so, his examples do not let the
bystanders off the hook completely. Nor do Jewish would-be rescuers get
off very lightly, especially given their deadly equivocating during the war
in the face of eye-witness reports coming out of the camps by escapees
like Rudolf Vrba and underground messengers like Jan Karski. Saul
Friedlander's phrase, "the ambiguity of good," is given full expression in
Hilberg's own discussion of helpers and messengers.
Friedlander has has been widely revered for his powerful and self–
revelatory memoir,
When. Memory Comes
(1978); now he has assembled
the proceedings of a mammoth conference he organized at UCLA into a
weighty volume, devoted to the theoretical limits and possibilities of
Holocaust representation. Dozens of distinguished speakers gathered from
around the world, most of them in Friedlander's words "not the usual
interlocutors in discussions of the Holocaust."
Though painfully aware of the potential unseemliness in turning the
Holocaust into so much grist for theoretical mills, however inadvertently,
Friedlander also writes that he could not ignore the essential conundrum
at the heart of any historian's enterprise: the need to establish a stable truth
of events in a decidedly unstable literary medium. He takes as his starting
point the debate between Hayden White and Carlo Ginzburg. White has
argued long and persuasively that insofar as historical texts are subject to
the vagaries and indeterminacy of narrative, literary metaphor and the
conventions of emplotment, they cannot establish perfectly objective,
universally true history. Ginzburg vehemently rejects this view of history,
arguing passionately against the kind of historical relativism it breeds,
especially if it fails to distinguish between "true interpretation and lies."
White rejoins that he is not arguing for a history that blurs the distinction
between real events and imaginary ones, or that allows one to deny that
events have taken place at all. Rather, he believes that "when it comes to
apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds to be found in
the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its
