On Oral & Video Testimony

by Yehuda Bauer

Yehuda BauerOral testimonies: Many, if not most historians consider them to be a less reliable source than contemporary written documents. The reasons have often been stated: Memory is fickle, and witnesses are influenced by already published accounts of events; also, they are influenced by their surroundings and their experiences after the events they testify about; sometimes, they want to hide or suppress unpleasant memories, or they want to present themselves in a more favorable light than is justified; with the passage of time, memory is supposed to become even more unreliable, so that if we want to consider testimonies at all, it is argued, we should concentrate on early, not late, testimonies. All of this is true for testimonies about the genocide of the Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany and its collaborators (the Holocaust), but not only for that event. In some well-known cases regarding the Holocaust, people simply invented stories that passed as testimonies (as in the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s invented memoirs, Fragments, 1995).

It is not that these arguments are spurious—they are not. However, what about the reliability of written documents? There is the well-known case of the so-called Wannsee Protocol—the minutes of the meeting in Berlin, on January 20, 1942, of top-level German bureaucrats who discussed the implementation of the “Final Solution,” the mass annihilation of the Jews. The protocol was drawn up by Adolf Eichmann at the behest and under the control of his boss, head of the Central Reich Security Office (RSHA Reichssicherheitshauptamt) Reinhard Heydrich, who instructed Eichmann to “cook” the protocol to reflect what he wanted to preserve as a record of the meeting. Eichmann’s testimony at his trial in Jerusalem not only explained how the protocol was written but also supplied additional information about the background and the actual discussion, which put the Wannsee Conference in a different light from what could have been derived from the written minutes only. Many other examples could be offered to show that documents have to be checked carefully for their veracity and cannot be accepted at face value. Thus, the reports of SS and police from the occupied Soviet Union, from the Baltic countries and Poland are often misleading, because they were drawn up to please superior commanders. The same applies, for instance, to the German reports of the Warsaw ghetto rebellion. Detailed research, involving oral testimonies, shows that German reporting hid a great deal of what occurred. Also, testimonies taken in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust are often laconic, because of the immediate aftereffect of the trauma the witnesses experienced. In time, memory returns, and events that the witness could not relate because of the trauma they represented can be uncovered later in life. Hence, it is not necessarily true to say that later testimonies are to be rated less reliable than earlier ones. This is shown quite clearly in comparisons between testimonies by the same person given at different times in his life.

Education has to be understood in the widest sense: not only of young people but of adults, and of opinion- and policy-makers as well.

All this does not mean that written documentation is not very important; but it does teach us that we should handle the different kinds of evidence with the same care, and yes, skepticism. For the Holocaust, a large number of events cannot be reconstructed by documentation, because it was either destroyed, or never existed. There is no other way to deal with it but to use oral testimonies. Of course, a single testimony about a certain event is not reliable; but if there are a number of testimonies relating to the same event, they can be crosschecked and analyzed. The result of such a procedure is more reliable than a written document. Thus, the testimony of Oswald Rufeisen, the Jew (he later converted to Catholicism) who pretended to be a Polish-German ethnic, and warned an eastern Polish Jewish community (in Mir, now Belarus) of the impending disaster and smuggled arms to them, together with testimonies of other survivors from that place, is considerably more reliable than the brief mention in German documentation. In fact, it is impossible to do work on the Holocaust without the testimonies of survivors, and also of perpetrators and bystanders, though these latter must be treated with greater reserve.

But it is not only in research that testimonies should be used. With the passing of the survivors, video-recorded testimonies must and will be used in the classroom. Not every testimony is suited for such use, and not every testimony is reliable: They must be checked and crosschecked, but then they become an indispensable part of education on the Holocaust. Education should be understood in the widest sense: not only of young people but of adults, and of opinion- and policymakers. The treasure trove of the more than 50,000 testimonies of the Shoah Foundation Institute can and no doubt will be mined for such purposes.

Oral testimonies have been used, and will continue to be used, not only regarding the genocide of the Jews but also in relation to other genocides and mass murders. Use is being made, today, of oral and/or video testimonies in raising public awareness to ongoing genocidal events. There, the use must be even more careful, because misuse for political purposes of doubtful ethical value, and use of doubtful testimonies, is easy. However, judicious presentation of testimonies, when they are deemed reliable, can make it easier to persuade an indifferent audience to look at a reality that is unfortunately very much with us today.

I started my work as a historian with a mix of written documentation and oral testimonies in my Ph.D., which dealt with the Jews of Palestine during World War II. I was director of the oral documentation project at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University from 1961 on, and then recorded testimonies (on wire recorders!) about the postwar organization of the flight of Eastern European Jews to Central Europe and Palestine, called the Brichah, in the aftermath of the war (1944–1948). In 1958, I started my work on the Holocaust with oral testimonies of survivors; I then began to compare those testimonies with the wealth of written documentation, especially on ordinary life of Jews, and of rescue attempts, in Eastern Europe.

Oral testimony is important not only for research on the Holocaust but also for other genocides that cannot be investigated by working through archives only—oral documentation is vital as an addition and as a corrective to archival documentation. It can and should be used for other purposes also, social, economic, and cultural. Sociological, psychological, and sociopsychological studies use oral documentation as well, and rightly so. But people must also be aware of the pitfalls. The principle should be that one testimony is interesting but not persuasive; two converging testimonies create a basis for consideration, 10 converging testimonies are proof.

One can argue, with some justification, that oral witnessing stood at the cradle of historical writing, with Herodotus and Thucydides. It is very much alive today.

Yehuda Bauer is a leading authority on the subject of the Holocaust. He is Professor Emeritus of Holocaust studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Bauer was the founding editor of the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies as well as a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, published in 1990 by Yad Vashem. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and he serves as the academic adviser to Yad Vashem and the Honorary Chairman of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research.

Excerpted from the USC Shoah Foundation’s biannual digest, PastForward Autumn 2010 issue. 

Visit http://sfi.usc.edu/pastforward to view the full publication.