Claudia MoscoviciNearly eighty years have passed since the Holocaust. There have been thousands of memoirs, histories and novels written about it, yet many fear that this important may still fall into oblivion. As Holocaust survivors pass away, their legacy of suffering, tenacity and courage could be forgotten. It is up to each generation to commemorate the victims, preserve their life stories and hopefully help future generations prevent the greatest human catastrophe of the past. These were my main motivations in writing this heterogeneous book, Holocaust Memory, which includes dozens of reviews of memoirs, histories, novels and films about the Holocaust.
It was exceedingly difficult to choose among the tens of thousands of books on the subject, all of which deserve our attention. I made my selections based partly on the books that are considered to be the most important on the subject; partly on wishing to offer some historical background on the Holocaust in different countries that were occupied by or allied themselves with Nazi Germany, and partly on my personal preferences, interests and knowledge. The subjective element can’t be completely eliminated even from a work that aims to be comprehensive. Ultimately, no book on this subject can be all-inclusive.
I hope, however, that this book can help offer a general audience, and particularly a new generation of readers, some insight and information into the unspeakable suffering of nearly six million Jews as well as the millions of Gypsies, Poles, Russians and other groups who were considered “subhuman” and oppressed by the Nazis. I present the works of others—victims, historians, biographers, fiction writers—to incite readers to go to their invaluable works. Furthermore, in order to offer background into the suffering of the multitude of victims, I also had to offer some information about the victimizers, particularly the Nazi politicians, propagandists, military leaders and “ordinary men”, to use Christopher Browning’s phrase, who perpetrated the Holocaust. This is why Holocaust Memory includes reviews not only of Holocaust memoirs, but also of books that focus on the Fascist regimes and its leaders in various countries that enacted genocide or crimes against humanity.
Raul Hilberg’s monumental studies of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1985) and Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 (HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), inform many of my reviews, not only in content but also in approach. The historian Robert Jay Lifton rightly calls Hilberg “one of the great scholars of our century. More than anyone else, he has exposed the behavior and thought processes of ordinary people carrying out a genocidal project” (front cover of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders).
Although my book does not offer a history of the Holocaust, I review a wide range of books that deal with the victims, the perpetrators, and the bystanders of this human catastrophe, including many history books. In addition, the works of historians such as Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, Alan Bullock, Robert Conquest and Robert Jay Lifton inform the background I offer in my discussion of Holocaust memoirs, novels and films. Via these reviews, I present a wide range of narratives about the Holocaust in all of what Hilberg calls its “stages of operation”: the racial definition of what constitutes a “Jew” or (or other categories of victims); their exclusion from society and the expropriation of their money and property; their concentration in certain areas and ultimately in Ghettos; the exploitation of their (slave) labor, and their ultimate annihilation through mass shootings, starvation and death camps. (See The Destruction of the European Jews, 267).
Since the Nazis targeted the European Jews as their primary victims, my book focuses on them. At the same time, since the Nazis also targeted other groups they considered dangerous and inferior, I include reviews of memoirs and histories about the sufferings of the Gypsies, the Poles and other peoples that fell victim to the Nazi regimes. As Hilberg aptly puts it, “The Nazi destruction process was, in short, not aimed at institutions; it was targeted at people. The Jews were only the first victims of the German bureaucracy; they were only the first caught in its path” (The Destruction of the European Jews, 268). Had Nazi Germany won the war, there’s no telling how many other tens of millions of people would have fallen victim to their race wars. In fact, the signs that the Poles and the Slavs would have been the Nazis’ next targets for extermination were apparent long before the end of WWII.
In the last few chapters, I cover other genocides and crimes against humanity, including the Stalinist mass purges, the Cambodian massacres by the Pol Pot regime and the Rwandan genocide. I want to show that history can, indeed, repeat itself, even if in drastically different contexts. Just as the Jews of Europe were not the only victims of the Holocaust, Fascist regimes were not its only perpetrators.
If there’s one common thread among such diverse human catastrophes it’s (usually) totalitarian institutions. This is why Holocaust Memory begins with an analysis of Hannah Arendt’s groundbreaking The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is essential to understanding one of the key preconditions to the exclusion, dehumanization, oppression and eventual murder of large groups of people. The ethos of mass murder is often spread from above by authoritarian regimes and disseminated to ordinary citizens through propaganda, indoctrination and terror. The spread of Fascism and Communism in the 20th-century, culminating in the Holocaust and the Great Terror, offer a stark warning to posterity. For as long as we will allow totalitarian regimes to take root in our societies, we will continue to remain vulnerable to the unspeakable destruction they can cause.
