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Comparing Jewish survivors’ testimonies
taken by various large-scale historical-memorial projects initiated
and conducted by She’erit Hapletah (The Surviving Remnant) in the
immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, reveals much, not only about
the nature of Holocaust testimonies, but also ways in which they can
serve as sources of historical, literal, psychological,
anthropological, and linguistic research. Comparative studies of the
different historical-memorial projects gauge, for example, the
impact of their geographical, historical, and ideological contexts
on their respective testimonies. As such, it is fruitful to compare
Jewish survivors’ testimonies taken in Displaced Persons camps
(DP-camps) from all over Europe with testimonies taken in the
deportees’ countries of origin. It is especially illuminating to
compare testimonies taken in DP-camps of Jews who had been deported
from one socio-geopolitical unit or country, such as Hungary, with
ones taken of survivors from that same country in local centers,
like Budapest.
Since the testimonies taken in DP-camps were expected to relate the
entire story of the Holocaust, they tend to present a more sweeping
picture than the testimonies taken of survivors deported from one
socio- geopolitical unit. Thus the relatively generalized picture of
the Holocaust emerging from testimonies taken in DP-camps can be
supplemented and refined by testimonies taken in local centers, such
as those in Budapest where Jews who had been deported from a
specific country were interviewed by survivors from that same
country.
The biggest large-scale historical-memorial project in the immediate
aftermath of the Holocaust was undertaken by the Central Historical
Commission of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Munich,
whose structure was modeled on the Central Jewish Historical
Commission in Poland (which later became the Jewish Historical
Institute). By comparing crucial aspects of the activities of the
National Relief Committee for Deportees [Deportáltakat Gondozó
Országos Bizottság, “DEGOB,” henceforth referred to as DEGOB] and
the Central Historical Commission in Munich, I have created a
framework that enables me to fruitfully compare the testimonies
themselves. The comparison of the testimonies, however, remains
essential for the comparative in-depth assessment of the projects’
activities owing to the great discrepancy between the types of
sources documenting the DEGOB and the Central Historical Commission.
The Central Historical Commission undertook the task of documenting
the life of She’erit Hapletah, of its political, cultural,
educational, and memorial activities in the DP-camps and in the
newly-established Jewish communities in Germany. Therefore, it
painstakingly documented every aspect of its own activities as well.
In 1948, its entire archive arrived in Israel. Today, the Yad Vashem
Archives contain many documents and published material concerning
the establishment and activities of the Central Historical
Commission. We can follow step-by-step how policies of collecting
testimonies were formed, debated, and altered, how various ideas
were contested therein, and moreover study the kind of historical
thinking that had informed them. Lectures presented in conferences
of the historical commissions reflect upon the ongoing work of the
commissions, by way of criticisms, suggestions, appeals, reports,
etc. The fact that professional historians—most notably Philip
Friedman—shaped the project of collecting testimonies makes these
debates readily usable for historiographical research.
In the journal of the Central Historical Commission edited by
Yisrael Kaplan, Fun Letzten Hurben, testimonies were published in
order to serve as models for others yet to be given. We have the
various questionnaires, which were compiled to assist in and
somewhat standardize the collection of testimonies. Ada Schein views
these questionnaires as lists of the chapter titles of monographs
that would be written about the destroyed Jewish communities on the
basis of the testimonies. Thus, Ada Schein sees the items on the
questionnaires as guidelines not only for governing the collection
of testimonies but also for staking out the kind of scholarship that
would be constructed upon the collected testimonies.
By contrast, in the case of the DEGOB, we have almost no information
on the assumptions governing the work of documentation. No
self-reflexive literature has been uncovered. We do have a
questionnaire, or rather a set of guidelines, but we do not know who
put the questionnaire together. This questionnaire was clearly
compiled to prepare the staff of the DEGOB for the job of taking
down testimonies. It was definitely distributed among the
interviewers; many pages were created by a stencil duplicator and
numerous copies can be found in the Hungarian Jewish Archives
(Budapest). From the end products, viz. from the protocols
themselves, we can further infer that the overwhelming majority of
the protocols were prepared according to the questionnaire as much
as was possible.
Unfortunately, we have almost no information on the 29 interviewers
of the DEGOB. They took down the protocols in shorthand and later
typed them up. (The Hungarian Jewish Archives hold 3,662 numbered
and approximately 50 unnumbered protocols, which were taken of
approximately 5,000 people altogether, according to the estimations
of Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági.) The shorthand versions can
occasionally be found attached to the typed version. We can infer
from the protocols that the interviewers were trained and
disciplined intellectuals. That was, of course, Philip Friedman’s
dream for the collection of testimonies in the DP-camps, where the
incompetence of interviewers constituted the most serious grievance
on the part of the leaders of the Central Historical Commission. The
only interviewer about whom I had uncovered information in the
American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati, USA) fully supports this
inference: Miksa Weisz, a refugee from Germany, who was interned,
taken to forced labor, and finally deported to Auschwitz, had
studied music and been a teacher of English, German, and French.
The interviewers of the DEGOB were so skilled, that after the
majority of the survivors had returned, alongside their continued
practice of taking protocols of survivors who turned to DEGOB for
assistance, they also engaged in a thoroughly scientific collection
of historical data. The staff of DEGOB visited people whom they
identified as key witnesses of the Holocaust in Hungary. Their aim
was to collect the testimonies of those who had occupied key
leadership positions among Hungarian Jewry. They also collected
testimonies from those who were not prominent persons as such, but
who had valuable information to share. Since the informant of
Protocol No. 3628 worked in Strasshof in the so-called Distributing
Office of Deportees, she had numerical information concerning the
deportees from several ghettos and entrainment centers in Hungary
(for example, on the deportees from Debrecen, Szeged, and Szolnok).
In another protocol, one can find information on the camp in the
brick factory of Budakalász. In the case of this protocol, even the
heading is irregular. Instead of the personal particulars of the
informant there appears the thematic title of the protocol:
“Information on the concentration camp in the brick factory of
Budakalász” (No. 3504). Protocol No. 3632 is also exceptional
because of the special character of the information it contains
therein. Its informant is Miklós Nyiszli, a physician from Nagyvárad
(Oradea, today Romania), who worked under Mengele in Auschwitz.
Later, in 1946, Nyiszli published his memoirs.
Naturally, these protocols have different structures from the ones
taken from returning survivors, since the interviewer was not
primarily interested in the personal experiences of the informant
but rather in the organization or event with which the interviewee
was associated. These protocols were taken either in the informant’s
flat or in their places of work, which also indicates that the
employees of DEGOB were actively seeking information. They even
traveled out to the provinces. For example, one of the employees of
DEGOB, Margit Oblath, conducted an explicit research. She collected
the available data of those Jewish hospitals in Pest, which
functioned during the period of the existence of the ghetto.
We can thus cull some information from the protocols about the
processes and the people involved in their collection. The lack of
self-reflexive documentation, however, still constitutes a
methodological problem in my research. There were historical-minded
intellectuals—such as world-famous statistician, Zsigmond Pál Pach,
and jurist Siegfried Róth who later became the director of the World
Jewish Congress’s office in London—participating in organizations
and activities connected to the DEGOB, but there is no evidence
whatsoever of their involvement in the documentational-historical
work of the DEGOB itself.
Much can be learned in comparing the various guidelines or
questionnaires that were prepared to assist in and standardize the
process of taking testimonies from survivors. These guidelines, in
which specific historical concepts are manifest, determine both the
testimonies—the collection of the data—and the kind of historical,
sociological, literary, anthropological, and psychological
scholarship that could have been constructed upon the collected
data. By comparing the guidelines and the actual testimonies it is
possible to analyze the different underlying historiographic
assumptions, research methods and aims that govern the collection of
testimonies. The novelty of this approach lies in the attempt to
assess the dynamic interrelationship of the changes in the
conception of history on the one hand, and the changes in the
notions of witnessing on the other—all of which occurred as a
consequence of the Holocaust.
Both the DEGOB and the Central Historical Commission collected
testimonies from survivors who were in transition. The initiators of
the Central Historical Commission, especially Yisrael Kaplan,
repeatedly emphasized the uniqueness of the opportunity of having
many survivors concentrated in DP camps, where during the period of
their mandatory suspension, before starting their lives anew
elsewhere, they had time to record their memories. Moreover, they
could help one another in the process of remembering, and check the
accuracy of specific memories.
In retrospect, it seems, actually, that individuals engaged in
documenting the history of the Holocaust of their own regions were
in better position to realize Kaplan’s aims than the large-scale
project of the Central Historical Commission. We can see this, for
instance, in Leib Koniuchowsky’s collection, whose work Philip
Friedman greatly valued.
Koniuchowsky, in his project, collected the testimonies of Jewish
survivors from Lithuania. The testimonies Koniuchowsky took, and
particularly his group testimonies reveal that as a collector of
protocols he was also involved in stimulating the witnesses’
memories. He was especially effective in drawing upon the communal
feelings of witnesses of the same region, which both stimulated
their memories and opened up the possibility of checking facts,
conditions Kaplan had found imperative. Whenever Koniuchowsky took
individual or group testimonies, he made the informants sign every
page. Moreover, in cases of group testimonies he held an official
group meeting during which he read aloud the end product to the
witnesses to ensure the document’s accuracy.
The DEGOB’s activities, in which the DEGOB staff took both
individual and group testimonies, are closer in this respect to
Koniuchowsky’s project than to the large-scale project of the
Central Historical Commission, as the interviewers and the
overwhelming majority of the interviewees were from the same
geopolitical region: Hungary. Thus, sometimes more, sometimes less,
the interviewers could summon that feeling of intra-communal
understanding, which Koniuchowsky had fostered so intensely.
However, the strict institutional setting of the DEGOB, lacking in
projects initiated and carried out by individuals, seems to reduce
the above described effect.
While the Central Historical Commission took testimonies of Jews who
were so-to-say stuck in a transitional period of their lives as they
awaited immigration, the DEGOB, having assisted returning deportees
headed home, collected the majority of its testimonial protocols
from survivors who were in such a state of transition that many had
yet to reach their former home.
The DEGOB endeavored to assist every returning survivor upon his/her
arrival in Budapest, and because of the structure of the Hungarian
railway, the overwhelming majority of the survivors had to pass
through Budapest on their way to their former home settlements.
DEGOB employees were on duty day and night receiving survivors at
Budapest’s train stations. They arranged for the arriving survivors
to be provided with food and transported by various means to
accommodation centers. The majority of the returnees were sent to
the headquarters of the DEGOB at Bethlen Square.
The questionnaire of the DEGOB asks survivors about their future
plans, whereas the historical questionnaire of the Central
Historical Commission seeks information only through to the
liberation. The Central Historical Commission does have a
statistical questionnaire that inquires after survivors’ future
plans.) The fact that the staff of the DEGOB was taking protocols of
people even before they arrived at their former homes accounts for
the frequency of such answers as, everything depended on whom the
survivor would find alive at home.
There are testimonial protocols kept in Yad Vashem Archives and in
the Hungarian Jewish Archives, which were taken in Budapest before
liberation between November 1944 and January 1945. The majority of
these protocols were recorded in the famous Glass House, located at
No. 29 Vadász Street, 5th District, in Budapest. The official name
of the Glass House after 24 July 1944 was the Swiss Embassy’s Office
for the protection of Foreign Interests, Emigration Division [Svájci
Követség Idegen Érdekek Képviselete Kivándorlási Osztály]. Various
Zionist organizations worked there. They organized emigration to
Palestine during the Holocaust.) Some of these protocols later
became part of the DEGOB’s collection but many did not. The taking
of witness accounts during the Holocaust shows that there existed an
elemental need to record recent events. First of all, these
testimonies can be fruitfully compared to other famous projects
documenting the destruction of the Jews in the midst of the events
of the Holocaust like the Oneg Shabbat Archives in Warsaw. They can
also be compared to the survivors’ testimonies taken by the DEGOB
immediately after the Holocaust.
The practice of contrasting testimonies taken by various large-scale
historical-memorial projects can yield illuminating results, one of
which I will describe presently. I have identified an apparently
constant feature of the testimonies taken of survivors deported from
Hungary that is significantly less apparent in testimonies taken of
survivors from other countries. This characteristic is related both
to the special features of the Holocaust in Hungary and to issues of
witnessing. Since Hungary’s Jewish population was systematically
destroyed at a very late stage in the Second World War, survivors’
stories are fraught with particular questions that have relentlessly
haunted them ever since: Why did Hungarian Jews not try to flee or
go into hiding? What did they actually know in the spring and summer
of 1944 about the nature of the Nazi regime and the fate of Jews in
countries occupied by the army of the Third Reich? Why did they
disbelieve witness accounts of Nazi atrocities? Why did they not
hide, at the very least, those women and children that were offered
a hiding place or false papers? The accounts of Jews who were living
within the borders of Hungary in 1944 are permeated with these
questions, which continue to torment survivors who feel that they
could have acted to prevent what had happened to them and their
loved ones if only they had believed witness accounts of Nazi
atrocities.
The survivors were and remain unable to decide precisely what they
knew at the time, which is why an at times contradictory picture
arises, of self-deception, illusion, of at once knowing and not
knowing. This traumatic indecision is evident to a degree in many
survivor accounts about the Holocaust, but it is a positively
central motif and organizing principle in the testimonies of Jews
deported from Hungary. Autobiographical, literary, and even
scholarly writings by Hungarian Jewish survivors simultaneously
claim that the Jews were wholly unaware of the meaning of
ghettoization and deportation, and that they indeed did have some
knowledge, some sound information about the fate of the Jews in
Europe.
Randolph L. Braham, the doyen among historians scrutinizing the
Holocaust of Hungarian Jews, identifies the existence of uninformed
Jewish masses as the central issue of the Hungarian Holocaust in his
book entitled The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary
(New York: Columbia UP, 1994.) Braham turns this problem into a
sharp ethical criticism of the Jewish leadership in Hungary, the
Jewish Council, since according to Braham it would have been the
duty of the well-informed leaders to warn the masses about their
impending fate. In the same book, however, Braham acknowledges that
the Jews of Hungary and not only their leaders did have access to
information, from a variety of sources, concerning the systematic
mass murder of Jews at the hands of the Nazis. The three most
important sources that Braham enumerated were Jews fleeing from
Poland and Slovakia; Hungarian forced labourers, returning from the
Eastern front; and members of various Zionist youth organizations
who had access to information known to the official Jewish
leadership and who travelled in the provinces to inform the Jews
about it.
Even though the DEGOB questionnaire only asks specific questions
about what Jews knew and what they were prepared to believe couched
among the questions concerning ghettoization, boarding the deporting
train, and the journey on the train itself, the interviewees
frequently return to these issues as part of other segments of their
narration, especially in connection to their arrival in Auschwitz
and the first selection on the ramp. The reason for this seems to be
that arrival at the camp marked the final time deportees were forced
to make existential decisions on life and death without the full,
conscious, and inescapable knowledge of the place they had just been
brought to. It was then that a person’s actual knowledge of the
nature of recent events—ghettoization and deportation—and what one
was prepared to believe about them, could still influence his or her
fate. In this respect, whatever happened on the ramps was both the
consequence and the summation of attitudes brought from home. Beyond
the ramps no-one had any illusions: clear knowledge was forced on
all. But on the ramps the question of one’s previous knowledge and
preparedness came up for the last time with utmost force and
clarity. As at home, people were exposed to conflicting information:
German soldiers readily gave reassuring information about hospitals
for the sick and the elderly, about family reunions, and so forth
but, and even though it was forbidden, the Jewish prisoners who
unloaded the trains usually managed to slip in a few words of advice
to newcomers. The deportees had to swiftly decide who to help or
whose hand to hold, who to stay with or which group to join.
Notwithstanding the indifference towards the above-described aspect
of the Hungarian witnesses’ experience displayed by the
predominantly non-Hungarian interviewers of large scale
historical-memorial projects other than the DEGOB, survivors from
Hungary repeatedly insist upon their previous lack of knowledge and
unpreparedness. Tellingly, these issues arise even more frequently
in late testimonies recorded by Yad Vashem, the Spielberg-project,
or by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
Intellectuals had to face the fact that documenting the Holocaust,
especially Jewish life during the Holocaust in the ghettoes and
camps, must be largely based on testimonies, viz. on memories of
individuals. Thus, they needed to think about the nature of memory
and its utilization in historical research on the large scale.
Theoretical thinking about the workings of memory and of memories
themselves, which were increasingly viewed as complex processes
rather than constant givens, became crucial areas of investigation
in psychology and literature. Psychoanalysis and High Modernist
literature fervently addressed the issues of memory from the
beginning of the 20th century-on. In the aftermath of the Holocaust,
however, historical research and documentation initiated by the
surviving remnant had to address these issues on a large scale,
which, in turn, changed historical thinking. Analyzing the
questionnaires and the testimonies prepared by the various
large-scale historical-memorial projects in the immediate aftermath
of the Holocaust, together with existing theoretical and
methodological reflections, we can study the changes in the now
intimately connected concepts of memory and those of historical
research.
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