Contemporary Witness Accounts

Cover

This book is a late arrival. It collects intense interviews that Martin Doerry, assistant editor-in-chief of Spiegel, conducted with survivors of the Holocaust: with the writer Aharon Appelfeld, the cultural studies scholar Peter Gay, the art collector Heinz Berggruen, the scholar of German Literature Ruth Klüger, the writer Ivan Klima, the sociologist Alfred Grosser, the historian Arno Lustiger, the musician Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the translator Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, the economist Albert O. Hirschmann and the historian Saul Friedländer.

They come from many countries. The Nazi terror scattered them all over the globe and took away their homeland. ‘My identity has emerged from coming to grips with the Nazi period and the Holocaust’, says the historian Saul Friedländer. He was born in Prague in 1932 and survived the terror hidden at a Catholic boarding school in France. He describes the separation from his parents as the wound of his childhood, and the subsequently growing paralysis made it impossible for him to respond to what he had been forced to experience. Study and research became his life. The second volume of his huge history, Jahre der Vernichtung (i.e., Years of Annihilation), has just appeared.

Injustice in the middle of Europe – in spite of integration

Most of the people with whom Doerry spoke came from families that had been assimilated to and integrated into German society. Only the Nazi racial laws made them into ‘Jews’, that is, these barbaric ‘laws’ first excluded them, then bullied and finally deported them in the most horrible manner, or else forced them to emigrate or go underground. The fact of their integration could not protect them against this injustice. Stunned, one reads again and again of how such injustice took place in the middle of civilised Europe.

Almost all the selected interlocutors have already written in one way or another about their experiences. The reconstruction of their biographies is therefore not the sole major subject of the interviews. Most of the interviewees have dedicated their lives to remembrance and to warning against every form of state terrorism. They speak out of the obligation to bear witness for those who did not have this possibility.

Looking back from a distance

The point of the interviews is that they are a looking back from the distance of 60 years. Surprising, almost shaming, for the reader is the calm way in which those interviewed speak and think. The demon of revenge or even hate is nowhere to be felt. The main tone is one of seriousness and reflective sorrow. Again and again one hears the reflection that their survival was pure accident, an arbitrariness which fell out in their favour. Repeatedly the remark is made that the real witnesses are the nameless who did not survive their suffering. Imre Kertesz puts this most drastically. Speaking of Steven Spielberg’s big interview project with Holocaust survivors, Kertesz observes that the project would be more convincing to him if it also included interviews with the countless, nameless dead. This remark goes so deep that it could of course also be read as an objection against the volume under review.

Edgar Hilsenrath and Imre Kertesz have chosen to present the historical experience in literary form. Art and the representation of experience are indissolubly bound up with and determine one another. Kertesz presents most hauntingly the problem of telling about one’s own life and times while not forgetting the extinguished lives of others. He had the further experience of one dictatorship replacing another, the latter of which was also not immune to the poison of anti-Semitism. The doubt lies deep that what was experienced can be passed on to others at all. ‘No one will believe you’, says the historian Arno Lustiger. For decades he was unable to tell his family and his children of what had befallen him.

One notices that many formulations in this volume are ‘remembered memories’, that is, that the public and repeated reporting of the experience has influenced its form. But again and again the reports are concentrated into passages that make one hold one’s breathe because one cannot believe what is being told. For example, when Agnes Sasson tells of an ostensibly friendly gesture of a guard that was immediately transformed into extreme aggression, or when Aharon Appelfeld describes how after the war he found his father, whom he believed to be long dead, harvesting oranges at an Israeli farm. These are moments when an experienced scene condenses into mythic power. One understands that Appelfeld and his father were speechless for hours after.

This is a book that stimulates the reader to further study. In the Introduction, Doerry cites the books by the interviewees. If one reads these, one is soon struck by the impression that no interview with a stranger, no matter how sensitive and perceptive, can reach the depths plumbed by a self-interrogation that has endured over years and long periods of silence.

Excellent photographic witnesses of the time

The book includes photographs of the interviewees by Monika Zucht. Of each interviewee there is a close-up and a situative picture. It is exciting to see how many facets photographs of a person in chosen poses can show. Sometimes one thinks to have recognised in a close-up facial features that reflect a typical character trait, which then recede into the background in the situative shots. The book’s photographs are excellent. They contribute substantially to giving the reader an image of the speakers. They also reveal that no one who survived the Holocaust could live only in the role of a victim.

Soon there will no longer be books of this kind. The people interviewed here were all children or young people when doom descended upon them. Soon there will no longer be witnesses like them, alone for reasons of ageing. This further enhances the value of the book. It is also, in view of how things are, a witness to what can happen.

Martin Doerry and Monika Zucht (photographs): Nirgendwo und überall zu Haus. Gespräche mit Überlebenden des Holocaust, Dva, München, 2006