Remembering Survival
By Christopher R. Browning
The summer of 1987 I went to the Center for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes—located in a former women’s prison in Ludwigsburg (north of Stuttgart)—to review all the indictments and judgments on file there that stemmed from the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Two cases in particular caught my attention. The first was the indictment of members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, which included many unusually vivid and incriminating statements by German witnesses, as well as the vital account of the battalion commander, Major Trapp, offering to excuse from the first killing action all men “who did not feel up to it.” Quickly following this to the more than 30 volumes of testimony from former battalion members in the court records in Hamburg, I wrote my 1992 book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.
The second case I encountered at Ludwigsburg that summer that particularly attracted my attention was the verdict of yet another trial in Hamburg. It was the acquittal of Walther Becker for his involvement in clearing the Wierzbnik ghetto—an Aktion in which nearly 4,000 Jews were dispatched to Treblinka without a single survivor and some 1,600 Jews were sent to three labor camps in the adjacent small industrial town Starachowice, where Becker reigned as police chief. Because these factory labor camps provided what Bella Gutterman has aptly called “a narrow bridge to life,” dozens of labor camp survivors subsequently testified at Becker’s 1972 Hamburg trial to his role. Nonetheless, the judge summarily dismissed all survivor testimony as being unreliable, and acquitted Becker. This egregious summary dismissal of all survivor testimony triggered my resolve to research the history of the Wierzbnik ghetto and Starachowice factory slave-labor camps, which resulted in my book Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp. Lacking documentation either from the German industrialists who had confiscated the factories, built the camps, and rented their Jewish slave labor from the SS, or from the local SS/police and civil administration, my study was necessarily based upon my collection of the testimonies of 292 survivors, given over a period of more than 60 years. The earliest dated from the summer of 1945, and my last interview with a child survivor took place in the summer of 2006.
This collection of testimonies can be divided by format into four groups. First and most numerous are the testimonies that were taken by German judicial investigators in the 1960s. They focus on survivor memories of the perpetrators and elicit a wealth of information generally absent from the other groups. They have the disadvantage of not having recorded information deemed irrelevant to the judicial task for which they were being collected. The second group consisted of freeform testimonies (either transcribed or videotaped), in which survivors told their stories without imposed structure or intervention from the interviewer. The third group—the videotaped testimonies of the Visual History Archive—consisted of interviews that were shaped by an interventionist interviewer and sets of standard questions. The fourth group was composed of my personal (audiotaped) interviews with survivors, for almost all of whom I had already read or seen one or more previous testimonies.
Survivors giving very late testimonies in the 1990s were able to broach previously taboo subjects—such as revenge killings among Jewish prisoners—for the first time; I discovered that “late” testimonies given 50 or 60 years after the events could not be summarily dismissed in favor of exclusive reliance on “early” testimonies.
Initially, I thought that the 15 interviews I conducted would form a useful but not essential complement to the other groups. Though the smallest group numerically, these interviews proved to be disproportionately important to me in writing my book. Each of these formats had advantages and disadvantages (there is no perfect method of taking testimony), and it was beneficial to have access to all four.
For the historian, a collection of testimonies of 292 survivors is both a blessing and a challenge. It is perfectly natural that different people, from different backgrounds and vantage points, will experience and remember the same events differently. Presenting these multiple perspectives (preserving “collected memories” and not homogenizing them into one “collective memory” or one historian’s omniscient version) fairly was a conscious goal I set for myself in writing the book. Sometimes, of course, conflicting memories cannot be reconciled, and some accounts (or, more precisely, parts of accounts) must be deemed less accurate (or even totally mistaken) in comparison to others. As the Israeli trial of Ivan Demjanuk and the initial fanfare surrounding Benjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments have demonstrated, uncritical acceptance of survivor testimony does a great disservice to its subsequent use as either historical or judicial evidence. Uncomfortable as the notion may be to some, as a historian born safely across the ocean and after the events I am studying, I nevertheless must make judgments about the memories and testimonies of others who were actually there and experienced the events they relate. Through immersing myself in the materials, knowing the wider background context, and carefully comparing and crosschecking, I could make reasonable judgments about uncorroborated or conflicting accounts and identify cases of “incorporated” memories (in which survivors unwittingly assimilated information and images to which they had been exposed in the postwar period).
Some critics of oral history insist on the primacy of “early” testimonies taken close to the event and are very skeptical of “late” testimonies given decades after. This was a crucial issue for me, insofar as I had only 11 “early” testimonies from 1945–48, some 130 testimonies from the 1960s, and everything else from the 1980s and later. In fact, three of my “early” testimonies were quite vivid and detailed and fundamental to my account. But the majority of my early testimonies were quite cursory and of marginal use, and many of the later testimonies did not lack vividness and detail. Nor in the case of multiple testimonies by the same survivor, did I note widely variant accounts. Consistency, not malleability, of memory was my major finding in this regard. Moreover, survivors giving very late testimonies in the 1990s were able to broach previously taboo subjects—such as revenge killings among Jewish prisoners—for the first time; I discovered that “late” testimonies given 50 or 60 years after the events could not be summarily dismissed in favor of exclusive reliance on “early” testimonies.
Thus I found that—despite the inevitable existence of multiple perspectives and factually mistaken testimonies on the one hand, and the large span of time over which the testimonies were given on the other—I could write, as a professional historian, a history on which I was willing to stake my reputation based primarily on survivor testimonies.
Excerpted from the USC Shoah Foundation’s biannual digest, PastForward Spring 2011 issue. Visit http://sfi.usc.edu/pastforward to view the full publication.