Abstract
The writing of history tends towards order, towards the elimination of contingency and towards claims that become common knowledge. One such widely held view is that the victims of the Holocaust could not understand what was happening to them or were unable to make sense of their experiences as they were unfolding. In some cases, this claim is accurate: the Jews of Hungary, for example, felt, with understandable complacency, that their position as Magyar citizens was untouchable and that the disaster that had befallen their co-religionists elsewhere in Europe would pass them by (Miron, 2004; Szalai, 2004).
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Stone, D. (2013). The Harmony of Barbarism: Locating the Scrolls of Auschwitz in Holocaust Historiography. In: Chare, N., Williams, D. (eds) Representing Auschwitz. The Holocaust and Its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297693_2
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