Whitewashing Murderous Antisemites
Since 1945, there have been repeated efforts by some to subsume or otherwise fine-tune the antisemitism of particular persons engaged in killing Jews. Instead of holding them responsible for their criminal actions, their supporters or apologists have tried to focus on other facets of these murderers, usually by clothing them in more acceptable garbs, emphasizing roles they played as patriots, nationalists, resistance fighters, and otherwise recasting them in ways that stress their more heroic nature.
An early beneficiary of this benign treatment by some Ukrainian historians had been the Cossack, Hetman Bogdan Khmielnicki, who, during his battles against the Poles in 1648-9, engaged in terrible assaults on the Jewish civilian populations in the path of his armies. To this day, his murderous antisemitism is sluffed over by all too many native writers of Ukrainian history. An early 20th century variant is the bloody record against Jews committed by Khmielnicki's countryman, Semyon Petlura; it, too, has been constantly toned down in favor of his other (spurious) identity as a noble fighter for Ukrainian independence between 1918 and 1921.
There are far too many examples of this revisionism connected with the Holocaust. The most famous is the case of Father Josef Tiso, the puppet dictator of the Hitlerian rump state of Slovakia. Again and again efforts are made to rehabilitate this mass murderer, this head of state, who fully cooperated in the Nazi war of extermination of the Jews, by helping to make Slovakia judenrein by the end of 1942. His enthusiastic followers have even gone so far as to try to launch him towards sainthood by calling for his beatification, a move initially receiving some backing from the Vatican! In present-day post-communist Slovakia, the right-leaning ethno-nationalist Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar is keeping up the local cult of Father Tiso, despite the priest's blatant and lethal antisemitic record during the Final Solution.
Most recently this trend to cast criminal antisemites in a better light has emerged in Poland. During September-October 1996, the spotlight fell on Josef Kuras and his band of partisans, "Ogien." Kuras and his fellow fighters became notorious for their killing of Jewish concentration camp survivors trying to return to their home towns in Poland after the war. During the war, to be sure, the Ogien group did fight to expel the occupying Germans from Poland; for that they cannot be faulted. However, they also struggled for a post-war Poland without Jews. Thus, as eagerly as they had killed Germans during the war, after the war, in 1945-6, Ogien led by Kuras killed civilian, unarmed Jews with the same zealotry. His is a mixed record of anti-German patriotism and pro-Polish antisemitism; one ought not to be mentioned without the other. They are inextricably interconnected, two sides of the same conceptual coin.
Instead of preserving a balanced portrait of Kuras, a certain Father Josef Tischner, a fairly well-known radio personality, has chosen to promote Kuras and his fighters as unswervingly loyal to the Catholic Church and, in the spirit of Christianity, should be forgiven their sins; as Fr. Tischner put it so glibly and euphemistically, every mortal is capable of sin, even patriotic heroes. Fr. Tischner was openly supported on Polish national television's Channel One by three prominent academic historians. One of them, Professor Alina Fitowa (Krakow University) praised Kuras for his attempts to rid the region in southern Poland of communists and Jews. Most troubling is, so far, the public silence, the lack of authoritative Polish voices from the government on down trying to stop this naked form of Holocaust Denial by priests and professors on the media.
The temptations to continue this mode of whitewashing is great, especially as national histories are re-written along ethno-nationalist lines following the demise of communism. These incidents will become less and less exceptional in years to come. A sharp eye should be kept on them by educators who teach the Holocaust. The practice is an important index of the times.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
How Many Survivors Are (Were) there?
Accuracy lies at the heart of Holocaust history; without a solid factual base, genocide studies cannot progress from basic information to reliable interpretation. Precise knowledge of the extent of victimization has to be a, if not the, starting point of any entrance into the world of genocide. Victimology the study of both the victims and their victimization has to be rooted in a maximum of corroborated data and a minimum of speculation. The latter tends to rob the history of any genocidal incident of its authenticity, since hypothesis lacking evidentiary support is a weak formulation under any circumstances. Thus, it is incumbent on any student, of the Holocaust in particular, not to stray from the path of unquestionable accuracy and, thereby, avoid providing ammunition to those seeking to discredit the scope of the Final Solution qua bona fide genocide.
Scholars of the Nazi war of extermination against Jews have occasionally seriously stumbled over the issue of accuracy with regard to the number of the murdered. The mystique of six million killed has become a near cultic number, enshrined in symbols, in candelabra, and in annual ritual and rhetoric associated with Yom Hashoah. There is, of course, no way of proving definitively the accuracy of six as against five or even four million. (So far, Yad Vashem has been able to collect the names of about two and a half million.) Nazi records and the calculations of demographers have led to several totals, all pointing toward genocide, but none to an iron-clad final figure. Absolute accuracy in this case must give way to reasonable estimation, itself a legitimate form of accuracy and an acceptable foundation for subsequent reasoning beyond the numbers themselves.
The danger of too strong an attachment to fixed numbers can be shown in the case of Auschwitz. For decades, Auschwitz, which symbolized the epicenter of the Holocaust, was associated with three million Jewish deaths. Monograph after monograph, lecture after lecture, repeated mantra-like this inflated number which, in time, it became almost impossible to challenge. Finally, only a handful of years ago, more careful research broke the taboo of the Auschwitz "Three Million" and led to a soberer conclusion (almost admission by some scholars) that the number killed in this arch-Death Camp was closer to 1.3 to 1.4 million. Meanwhile, of course, countless publications, popular and academic, still repeat and perpetuate the false count of 3 million.
What the lower total means is that as a Killing Center, Auschwitz now looms quantitatively less gigantic next to Treblinka and Sobibor, for example. It has been demoted to a primus inter pares in the Nazi constellation of Death Camps. Demystified Auschwitz is now one among several Death Factories. At the same time, with a more accurate accounting of the Jewish victims, the phenomenon Auschwitz no longer rests on guesstimations and emotive exaggeration. It is, however, no less "Auschwitz" the image now that its rate of death production has been reduced by over 50%. From the perspective of the genocidists it still remains a "success" story; from a Jewish perspective it is still morally fearsome and demonically symbolic, but not at the expense of falsely casting other equally central genocidal sites into the shadows.
Which leads one to the topic of this essay: the survivors of the camps, How many were there in fact? Standard, though unsubstantiated, numbers speak of fewer than 250,000 Jewish survivors of the camps scattered in Displaced Persons Camps right after World War II. Some commentators mention as few as 190,000.
The ranks of concentration camp survivors, however, began to swell with the passage of time, partially bolstered by figures taken from restitution application records. That is understandable and valid, given the chaos of the post-war months and the thousands who wandered over Europe unbeknownst to any refugee organization. By now, the estimation of camp survivors at the end of the war hovers around 300,000 (not counting the thousands who died immediately after liberation).
Whereas this total is a fair estimation, it is by no means the last word. It clashes starkly with the numbers of living camp survivors being quoted about fifty years later. Very recent articles circulated by Jewish organizations and local Jewish newspapers repeat the number 200,000 to 300,000 survivors still alive today in 1995. Clearly there is a discrepancy here. Didn't anyone die between 1945 and 1995?
Either the numbers are grossly wrong or the definition of survivor has changed to accommodate those who had escaped Hitlerism but had not been incarcerated in the ghettos and concentration camps. Among them are resistance fighters in the French Maquis or behind the Eastern front, those who avoided the Nazi roundups, victims of Kristallnacht who spent some weeks and months in Dachau or Buchenwald prior to their emigration, and, possibly, many who lived in hiding or were interned by the French in Gurs before they emigrated to overseas countries.
Whatever the reasons for joining or being numbered among the ranks of survivors, these categories need to be clarified so one can circumvent the present statistical anomaly, namely 250,000 in 1945 and 300,000 in 1995. So that students of the Holocaust's final chapter are not confused by unclear information, precision is called for when enumerating the post-war statistics of the Holocaust survivors between 1945 and 1995. Once again, accuracy is the key to preserving the memory and to an understanding of the genocide that was the Holocaust experience.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
Hollywood, History and the Holocaust
Contemporary pedagogy tends to embrace technology with an over-abundance of enthusiasm. Each new gadget, its classroom practitioners assure us, will "revolutionize" learning; each new invention, they claim, will raise the levels of teaching and learning.
National, indeed, international results speak otherwise. Language and mathematical competencies decline or have remained stubbornly the same below par. While there is no direct correlation between learning and teaching "machines" to improve mental activity comprehension and calculation there is evidence of such causality in tracing the root causes of the general decline of academic performance. Thus, the more "imagery" (illustrations, slides, and film) substitutes for contact with the written word, the less verbally communicative primary school pupils become. Secondary schools tend to reinforce this approach and, therefore, have similarly disappointing results with their high school graduates. There are few college administrators who will deny this paucity of verbal skills among applicants for higher education.
And yet, college and university instructors, especially historians, continue the tradition of instruction-by-pictures, including, today, the latest device, the CD-ROM. (Film {video} collections are one of the fastest growing departments in college libraries.) Not the least "guilty" are those who teach the Holocaust. The temptations, of course, are subtle and the rationalizations to justify this seduction are infinite. A picture, we are told, is worth a thousand words. But is it?
It is difficult to fault the use of documentaries; many are indisputably excellent, but all too many are flawed. How many instructors have placed the French "Night and Fog" on their "reading" list or allocated one lecture hour to its showing? Yet, how many alert their students to the universalistic prejudices of its Marxist-oriented producers who studiously never once used the word "Jew" in their script, only the indefinite and deceptive "les victimes"? The film is now part of the "canon" and virtually impossible to excise from the required material. Reactions to attempts to point out the film's crucial imperfections to instructors vary from the patronizing to the incensed, as if a sacrilege had been committed. (It reminds us of the appeal [See The Genocide Forum I/3] to be more discrete in using the term "liberation" à propos the concentration camps.)
Another example is the more recent German documentary "The Wannsee Conference." This has been hailed as a near-authentic replica of that crucial meeting in January 1942. The irrefutable fact is that there is no verbatim record of the 90 minute gathering. All we have is a short, type-script of the so-called "Protokoll" compiled by Adolf Eichmann after the meeting, amounting to no more than a memorandum of the agenda covered at the session, listing those present and who gave which report.
The dialogue in the film is sheer invention, laudably realistic and persuasive, and superbly acted; but the actual words conversations and speeches are not historical but post facto reconstructions, reflections of the scriptwriter's and producer's fertile imaginations. Verisimilitude? Unquestionably, Yes. History? Decidedly, No! A documentary? Also No! Nevertheless, the film is increasingly structured into course syllabi and is even used now as a reference in footnotes of scholarly publications. (Speak of fiction becoming fact via the power of the moving picture.)
All readers will recall Oliver Stone's powerful blockbuster "JFK." Tens of millions of viewers were exposed to his rendition based on his political biases of the conspiracy theory of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. Via image manipulation and action-packed scenes, Stone fabricates an entertaining but historically unsustained interpretation of a critical moment in American history. Using the power of the medium, Stone literally bombards his public with non-erasable images. It is Hollywood writing history in general, just as the film industry has "created" its versions of the Holocaust in particular.
The most recent violation was Spielberg's "Schindler's List" [see The Genocide Forum I/4] A decade earlier we had Lanzman's epic, Pole-bashing Shoah which leaves one wondering: "Where are the Germans?" For younger generations the impression is given of a Final Solution without German genocidists, the inverse of "Night and Fog" of a Final Solution without Jews. In the mid-70s there was the tasteless soap-opera "Holocaust" TV series. The less said about it as a classroom tool the better; and yet it is occasionally recommended (and listed in resource publications) by teachers who generously replace themselves with humming film projectors disgorging mind-distorting images about the Holocaust.
Why do they defer to the Hollywoods of the world? Laziness, ignorance, a sense of inferiority, or a conviction of the inherent superiority of these film products? Why do they abdicate their control of the classroom to film-producers rank amateurs (or worse) of history to actors and stunt men and prop men? For their students it means learning about the Holocaust via bogus witnesses and participants. Their grasps of the Holocaust will inevitably be as shallow as those who study the American West via Roy Rogers Westerns. Are students of Peronismo going to be quizzed on "Evita"? And will law students turn to "The People vs. Larry Flint" as a guide to the First Amendment?
Instruction of the Holocaust placing more reliance on Hollywood than on genuine data lends a helpful hand to Revisionists and Deniers. Reading Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is not an entrée to the French Revolution; at best it is the voice of a man of the tense days of the 1830s. Similarly, "Schindler's List" tells us more about the early 1990s and the frame of mind of its director than about the actual horrors and perversions of Krakow in 1942-4. We need not be Luddites to teach the Holocaust; nor, however, should we prostrate ourselves before the altar of Mother Technology.
Teachers should avoid the path towards virtual (Holocaust/genocide) reality. The way towards understanding is not via graphic images, whose shock waves tend to erect psychological barriers, but via sober analytic, verbal discourse. In most cases, the photo image is inherently deceptive; but that is a subject for another occasion.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
Another Look: Will the Real Schindler Stand Up!
In an early issue of The Genocide Forum, the question of the historicity of Schindler's List was raised. That the Hollywood version was a fabrication as argued in the "Contra Schindler" article has since been re-confirmed; that the real Schindler had no epiphany on the way to Auschwitz is an indispensable fact; that Spielberg portrayed falsely his "Schindler" visiting Auschwitz is by now an unchallenged conclusion.
And yet, there are those still determined to salvage some redeemable quality of this small-time war-profiteer, despite all that is known about him as an amoral fortune hunter in the midst of the Holocaust, as an exploiter of cheap, forced Jewish labor, an arrangement negotiated via his social connections with the SS, as he played playboy in the decadent and perverse night life in wartime Cracow in the shadow of its ghetto.
Even as further evidence is compiled to deconstruct the screen Schindler, his zealous defenders, instead of challenging the information, predictably shoot the messenger, in this case Schindler's widow. Who should know better what he was or was not than the long suffering wife of a Schindler who openly flaunted his unfaithfulness, his greed, his absolute amorality? In her recently published Memoirs, Emilie Schindler paints an unflattering portrait of her husband that corroborates what is already well known but is consistently deflated in significance by the architects of Schindler the Holocaust Hero: that he was a womanizer, self-centered, opportunitisc, insensitive, crude, and a coward. She adds but one new dimension: her husband Oskar Schindler had been a determined draft dodger. Hence his efforts to remain an "industrialist" beholden to the SS, those "brave" soldiers of death of civilians, notorious for not serving on the military front.
She is heatedly defiled by one Leopold Page, a survivor from Poland, who claims to have known Schindler from 1939 to 1945. It was his version of Schindler that became the "Schindler" of Keneally's book. It is Page's version on which the foundations of Schindler's heroism rests. This, seemingly, leaves us with a classic dilemma: whose version is more credible? The survivor's or the widow's?
Page's version rests on supposed observations, the most important of which have no second independent witness. From what Page reports, he deduces Schindler's good motives, but for which he has absolutely no proof. In contrast, Emilie Schindler's "Schindler" stems from a far more intimate relationship and rests on a far more stable psychological assessment. Whereas Page's view must be colored by the natural but exaggerated, hence distorting, gratitude of a survivor to one who provided an avenue of escape, the widow's remembrance and evaluation originates from an equally biased psychological base, the rancor of a wife deceived.
Which leaves us with having to cut the Gordian's Knot: whom to believe? whom to trust? The German or the Jew? The spouse of a less than minor functionary of the Third Reich or a survivor once "employed" by Oskar Schindler? Luckily there is no need to rely entirely on either. Enough is known of Schindler without recourse to each of the two witnesses. Most of the data adds up to Schindler the "Ordinary Man," a category conceived brilliantly by Christopher Browning, except Schindler was shrewder: he found himself a cushy job to sit out the war. This led him to a marriage of convenience with the genocidal SS, a contact he nurtured till the bitter end, The Jews were a useful device to keep him out of uniform, far from the Eastern Front, hedonistically comfortable and criminally affluent.
Only his motives are in dispute: Page ennobles them because he needs to; and Emilie Schindler debases them because she needs to. Who is right? Reason and realism as well as knowledge of human nature demand that her Schindler is closer to the real one; only idealism and wishful thinking justify Page's essentially sentimental analysis. His is similar to the sympathetic accounts recounted by victims of kidnapping about their captors. Hers may be an all too human exaggeration, but it is essentially correct if common sense prevails.
Definitively, we shall never know the ur-Schindler: neither his wife nor his forced Jewish workers saw the inner Schindler. He was essentially a survivor and did his best to survive a conflict in which millions perished. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He became revered by the arch-victims of the war, the Jews. Yet, had Germany won the war, what would Schindler have been, a philosemite? Would he have lost sleep over their extermination?
His widow knew him and has given us a rendition that conforms to known reality. There is a criterion in literature called verisimilitude; its counterpart in history is credibility. In the light of informed reason Emilie Schindler's Schindler far more approximates the qualities of persons inside Holocaust Reality than those renditions that strive, procrustean-like, to make a Righteous Gentile, however flawed, out of an essentially evil man, however minor in the context of the Final Solution.
Historians have the unenviable task of surgically sorting out evidence and false or tainted information. It is their professional responsibility to salvage as accurate a portrait of the past as the data permits and to stop short of imagined reality. Their bits and pieces must fit into a larger jigsaw puzzle, many of whose pieces are missing. When the gaps cannot be filled by facts, then imagination and hypothesis must be carefully applied with the utmost caution so fiction remain fiction and speculation stops short of becoming truth.
If such discipline is applied to the person of Schindler, the unpleasant and incontrovertible known is a powerful index of the unknown. There is no room for a miraculous metamorphosis of Schindler the uprooted scoundrel from Sudentenland into "Schindler" the Angel of Mercy. On the contrary, everything suggests that he remained at the end what he had always been. It was his good luck he could shield his real self with the aid of "his" Jews, his insurance policy for a post-Nazi life. His gamble paid off. He acquired a new persona, a fiction, but a powerful one, a lie that will take historians some time and much persistence to expose and cast aside. Beneath the Hollywood painted face of Schindler, lurks, Dorian Gray-like, the ugly face of the real Schindler, deeply scarred by his unredeemable connection to the Final Solution.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
The Other Camp Literature
In order to gain new perspectives on concentration camp experience in general, teachers and scholars of genocide ought to acquaint themselves with a body of literature about the Stalin camps, once scattered throughout the former USSR and known as the Gulag, an abbreviation for State Prison Camps. For at least two decades, many of these institutions of mass incarceration were tantamount to extermination camps. From the time of Stalin's 1929 mass deportation of peasants who refused to accept collectivization of their lands till Krushchev's anti-Stalin speech in 1956 and the introduction of the anti-terror policy of The Thaw, millions of Soviet citizens from all walks of life were sent into the Gulag with no plans for their release. In fact, the physical deprivations and cruel mistreatment of the inmates were so extreme that only a small percentage survived: millions died, a few tens of thousands returned, the most famous being Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who became the Dante of the Soviet inferno. But his epic writings are by no means the only ones.
The phenomenon of survival in circumstances designed to kill (slowly or rapidly) needs continual study, and a number of significant diaries and memoirs coming out of the Soviet Gulag, translated into English, have enriched our access to this complex experience and its traumas. Available for a long time has been Nadezhda Aluyeva's Hope against Hope, a piercing chronicle of her eighteen years of incarceration. A useful anthology is the more recent Intimacy and Terror: the Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (The New Press), as well as Mikhail Baitalsky's Notebooks for the Grandchildren (Humanities Press). There are, of course, many more that could be recommended.
In each we witnessed an individual's extraordinary struggle to remain alive and sane in circumstances designed to kill and, first, to break the humanity of each victim. The inmate's only crime was to have offended the state for various catchall "crimes": for being a "kulak," a "right-wing reactionary," a "left-wing deviationist," a "Trotzkyite," an "anti-Party or anti-Leninist," a "betrayer of the Fatherland," and a "bourgeois Zionist." None was sent to the Gulag by Stalin (at least officially) simply for being a Jew. Nevertheless, in many of the categories of prisoners were Jews, both communist and religious. And, among the survivors who recorded their years of survival are many Jewish authors.
It is they who serve as a link between the Jewish camp survivors from Hitler's universe concentrationaire, victims of genocide, and the thousands of non-Jewish victims of Stalin's genocidal social engineering. Both groups share survivorship and its consequences; both carry a message that needs to be heard and learned. Very soon, they may be joined by the recent recollections of the few who survived the Serbian quasi-extermination camps in Bosnia.
As long as mass incarceration in concentration camps remains an instrument of mass destruction of human life, the survivors' literary contributions are an integral part of genocide studies. They must, however, be studied not merely as an exposé of a particular genocide, but also comparatively, in tandem with similar publications, as a view of genocide per se , as a distinct body of knowledge, as a separate literary genre emanating from the survivors whose messages are surprisingly uniform, neither Jewish, nor Russian, nor ideological, but human. They speak the purified language of all suffering mankind.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)