EDITH KURZWEIL
527
AFTER MORE
AND
MORE archives were made available in the early
I990s, more and more Nazi victims remembered: they opened old scars
to let them ooze, started to dab at their forever festering wounds, and
relived their trauma in public. Especially in response to such individuals
as Faurisson and Bousquet, who were disavowing one or more of the
components of the
univers concentrationnaire,
or the aims of the "final
solution." Knowing they were the last survivors of the Nazi Holocaust,
they wanted to leave a record of their torments for younger and coming
generations. "Never again" became their motto. Whereas to begin with,
emigres born in Germany and Austria had born witness, later on,
Claude Lanzman's
Shoah
(I980) inspired yet another spate of memoirs.
Many of these stories are the meat of Holocaust courses and studies.
As such, these memories are important to historians, as are the testi–
monies in the Yale University video archives. But
I
wonder whether
excerpts from these in book form, in for instance,
Witness: Voices from
the Holocaust
(2000), (edited by Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar),
are as convincing of the enormity of the planned "scientific" deaths as
are the visual ones. Despite Friedlander's thoughtful introduction,
I
doubt that students will grasp the scope of the crimes from relative snip–
pets of experiences. They may well read these voices as those of just
another category of long-dead victims-early Christians, crusaders,
Armenians, Trojans come to "compete" for attention with the descen–
dants of slaves, refugees from the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and polit–
ical fugitives from around the world.
In
the current American Zeitgeist
of multicultural relativizing, Hitler's prey are far outnumbered.
Martin Gilbert's
Holocaust Journey: Traveling in Search of the Past
(I997), which recounts visits to former death camps and abandoned
Jewish monuments, former ghettos and other Jewish living quarters
with a number of his students, seems to me a more successful way of
introducing (relatively few) youngsters to the so-called lessons of the
Holocaust. Gilbert weaves these into the history of places and their for–
mer famous inhabitants. Thereby, past periods of both harmony and
strife come alive. Even the quiet of lawns where gas chambers once
stood can be invoked to recall the desire by Germans to quickly forget
the country's defeat in I945-often referred to as the zero hour
(Stunde
Null)- and
aimed to blame Hitler alone. Moreover, American students'
hands-on encounters with German youngsters, it is assumed, will help
them all to overcome the biases their elders are bound to have conveyed
while they were growing up .
