Abstract
Holocaust representation, rather than being a recent phenomenon, has a history, one that goes back to the events of the Holocaust. This history shows Holocaust representation to have been both contested and to contain contradictions. Furthermore, it can be seen that Holocaust representation is mediated by this history — the bearing of witness is inextricably linked with its social and historical conditions. Importantly, the post-war conception and comprehension of the Holocaust as a historical event and the notion of collective memory play significant roles in the construction and reconstruction of representation.
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Notes
See N.G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000). Finkelstein cites as his ‘initial stimulus’ Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life: The American Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Novick also critiques the centrality of Holocaust memory in American society. The British edition of Novick’s book is entitled The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2000).
Sabbath delight — a codename for their clandestine Sabbath afternoon gatherings. See E. Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. J. Sloan (New York: Schocken, 1985). Cf. E. Ringelblum, ‘O.S.’, in To Live With Honor and To Die With Honor!… Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives 0.S. (‘OnegShabbath’J, ed. J. Kermish (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), pp. 2–21.
The Lodz Ghetto Chronicle, compiled by the Department of the Archives of the Jewish Council in Lodz (German: Litzmanstadt) in southwest Warsaw, documents the life of the Jews of Lodi from January 1941 to July 1944. See L. Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941–44, trans. R. Lourie, J. Neugroschel et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). Photographs taken by Mendel Grossman have also survived as part of the archive, see M. Grossman, With a Camera in the Ghetto, eds. Z. Szner and A. Sened (New York: Schocken, 1977). In Kovno (Lithuanian: Kaunas) in central Lithuania, the Jewish Council commissioned artists to make a visual record of Jewish life. An engineer by the name of Hirsh Kadushin became the photographic chronicler of the ghetto. Using a small camera concealed in his clothing, he managed to film many different aspects of ghetto life. He obtained the film from a nurse who worked with him in the ghetto hospital. Kadushin’s buried photographs were discovered after the war and can now be viewed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. For a diary of life in the Kovno ghetto, see A. Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, trans. J. Michalowicz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Archives were also set up in Bialystok in north-east Poland; Vilna (Lithuanian: Vilnius), the capital of Lithuania; Cracow (Polish: Krakow) in southern Poland; and Lvov (Polish: Lwów, Germ. Lemberg) in eastern Galicia.
C.A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, ed. and trans. A.I. Katsch (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 395.
L.L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 31.
However, a prisoner named Filip Muller did survive and wrote his testimony. See F. Muller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, ed. and trans. S. Flatauer (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999). The Sonderkommando were in a unique position: they alone could observe the killing; they were ‘privileged’ prisoners so were able to barter for writing materials; and as they were destined to be killed they were not fearful of being discovered.
For a histoiy of the manuscripts and their discovery, see B. Mark, The Scrolls ofAuschwitz (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1985).
See N. Cohen, ‘Diaries of the Sonderkommando’, in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Y. Gutman and M. Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 526.
Cited in D.G. Roskies, ed., The Literature of Destrucrion: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society of America, 1989), p. 558.
M. Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: Fontana Press, 1987), p. 649.
Ibid., p. 744.
S. Laks, Music of Another World, trans. C. Kisiel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1989), p. 79.
P. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. S. Woolf (New York: Collier Books, 1961), p. 256.
See Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory; T. Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
See D. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and his essay in this volume.
The first of the Yizkor books, Lodzer Yiskor Buch was published in New York in 1943. The first Yizkor book translated into English is Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, ed. B. Kagan (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1997).
P. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 58.
Cited in S. Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 204.
G. Korman, ‘The Holocaust in American Historical Writing’, Societas, 2 (1972), 251–70.
The term holocaust comes from the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scripture, starting in the third century BC when the term holokaustos (translated as ‘totally burnt’) became — via the Latin holocaustum — the Greek version of the Hebrew olah: a burnt sacrificial offering which can be given only to God. It was first used in the translation of 1 Sam. 7: 9, meaning ‘a burnt offering to God’ and was later expanded to refer to the mass murder of human beings. See J. Petrie, ‘The Secular Word HOLOCAUST: Scholarly Myths, History, and 20th Century Meanings’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2 (2000), 62.
A. Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth 1939–1945 (London: Faber, 1996), p. 15.
J.K. Roth and M. Berenbaum, eds., Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 43.
Six million is the figure named by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in its final judgment and is the estimated minimum number of Jews who were murdered — about two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of the world’s Jewish population at that time. See M. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 198.
H. Wermuth, Breathe Deeply My Son (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1993), pp. 1, 139.
Ibid., p. 3.
C. Delbo, None of Us Will Return, trans J. Githens (Boston: Beacon, 1965), p. 1.
S. Kessel, Hanged at Auschwitz, trans. M. Wallace and D. Wallace (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 11.
P. Levi, ‘Revisiting the Camps’, in The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, ed. J.E. Young (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), p. 185.
Cited in A.L. Berger, ‘Elie Wiesel’, in Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. S.T. Katz (Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith, 1993), p. 377.
E. Wiesel, ‘Trivialising the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction’, The New York Times, section 2 (16 April 1978), 29.
Idem., ‘Questions That Remain Unanswered’, Papers for Research on the Holocaust (Haifa University, 1989), p. 4, cited in T. Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. H. Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), p. 158.
J. Magyar Isaacson, Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor, 2nd edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 62.
E. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).
E. Wiesel, One Generation After, trans. L. Edelman and E. Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 235.
G. Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966 (London: Faber, 1967), pp. 204–5.
H.J. Cargas, ‘An Interview with Elie Wiesel’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1 (1986), 5.
E. Wiesel, ‘Twentieth Anniversary Keynote’, in What Have We Learned? Telling the Story and Teaching the Lessons of the Holocaust: Papers of the Twentieth Anniversary Scholars’ Conference, eds. F.H. Little, A.L. Berger and H.G. Locke (Lewinston, ME: Edwin Mellon, 1993), pp. 7–8.
L.E. Bitton-Jackson, I have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing up in the Holocaust (London: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 9.
H.J. Cargas, In Conversation with Elie Wiesel (New York: Paulist Press, 1976), p. 89.
H. Birenbaum, Hope is the Last to Die: A Personal Documentation of Nazi Terror, trans. D. Welsch (New York: Twayne, 1971), p. 245.
D. Rousset, The Other Kingdom, trans. R. Gutherie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), p. 112.
R. Hukanovi, The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia, trans. C. London and M. Ridjanovic (London: Abacus, 1998).
Ibid., p. v.
Ibid.
L.L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 1.
Ibid., p. xviii.
T. Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996).
T. Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 177.
Cited in H. Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 44–5.
L.L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 6.
G. Rose, ‘Beginnings of the Day — Fascism and Representation’, in Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 43.
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Waxman, Z. (2004). Testimony and Representation. In: Stone, D. (eds) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524507_23
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