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slowly spreads at the humiliating recollection of his reaction, deceived by the enemy
and his own innocence into not recognizing the fatal significance of that crucial
moment when he was sent to the right and the rest of his family to the left and their
death.
For a videotaped presentation of Lawrence Langer discussing the uses of video
testimonies in studying the Holocaust, see his “Imagining the Unimaginable” in
Appendix 1.
The Act of Recall: A Variety of Voices
Lawrence Langer
A man’s face appears before us, in communion with himself, barely aware of the
video camera that is recording his testimony. He tells of the evacuation of Blechhamer
work camp in the bitter winter of 1944 as the Russians approached--not as bad as
Auschwitz, but bad enough. They walk for hours that seem like days: finally they stop
for the night. He tells of lying on a floor next to another prisoner, an older man, who is
ill. They are brought a small bread ration, the first food all day. And the witness, still
in dialogue with his memory more than with us, whispers: “I waited for him to die, so
that I could eat his bread myself.” An artless, unhappy confession, reviving a moment
nearly forty years in the past, but as fresh in his memory now as if it had happened
yesterday.
Clearly one of the most painful ordeals for the survivor who consents to such recorded
testimony is the reawakening of what we might call the humiliated imagination. “How
can I tell these things to my children?” asks this particular witness, who can scarcely
tell them to himself. “Why should I hurt them with stories of how they [the Nazis]
hurt me?” And his question is unanswerable; of course, he shouldn’t--he is unable to.
Yet if we are to understand the extraordinary demands made by the Holocaust on
man’s moral nature, we must have such honest testimony, and the impersonal camera
plays a vital role in encouraging its expression. A member of a large family himself,
all but two of whom were murdered, this survivor recalls the brother who was in
Blechhamer with him. He tries to explain, still as much to himself as to us, what a
human being is like when he is so weakened by hunger that he can barely drag his feet
along. When you are struggling to survive, he says, and
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just stay alive a while longer, nothing else matters. So when his brother, who is
walking beside him, complains that he cannot go on, and asks for help, the witness
can do nothing; he can scarcely support himself. Then the Germans take his brother
out of line and shoot him. “Today,” the witness says, signs of the humiliated
imagination imprinted on his face, “I ask myself whether I could have done anything.
I should have been able to do something.” Obviously, behavior that seemed inevitable
then appears insufficient now. No bridge crosses the gulf between two alien ethical
moments, between the principle of brotherhood as we define it in our leisured security
and the counterclaims of survival and mutuality in the uncertain moral terrain of the
Nazi system of dehumanization. And the humiliated imagination is left hovering over
this abyss, wondering whether the deficiency lies in oneself, struggling to live with the
unreconciled challenge.
Another voice from these videotapes succinctly expresses the dilemma, one of the
cruelest legacies of the Nazi violation of human feelings: today, he insists, “the
memory of what we were unable to do is worse than the recollection of what they did
to us.” Not all might agree, but the point is forcefully made by the formulation itself.
Returning to Auschwitz recently to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the
camp’s liberation, Elie Wiesel responded to an interviewer’s question about why the
Jews didn’t do more to protect themselves with the reply that Auschwitz was a
universe with rules of its own. Since those rules often contradicted the principles of
behavior that nurture us and those we seek to educate, these tapes, and narratives like
the one I have cited, are invaluable for conveying to the uninitiated certain unhappy
truths about the survivor ordeal with an immediacy that we can share in no other way.
But not all such truths are unhappy. If the humiliated imagination is despondent at the
memory of a will paralyzed without consent, there also exist in these tapes instructive
examples of the gratified imagination (the other side of the coin, as it were), instant
decisions having nothing to do with heroic gestures that saved lives when reflection,
passivity, or procrastination would have doomed them. I think of the French soldier,
captured during the German invasion of France in 1940, who is sent with several
hundred other military men to a prisoner-of-war camp deep inside Germany. Some
months later, a detachment of SS appear one day and at roll call ask all Jewish soldiers
to step forward. All do--with the exception of the witness testifying on this tape. He
says that some of his Jewish friends nod at him as if to ask “Why are you holding
back? Didn’t you hear the order?” But he persists, determined to
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ignore the command. Satisfied with the number they have procured, the SS march off
with their victims. The survivor says he never saw them again. He himself later
escapes, makes his way to southern France, and joins the underground. What
motivated him not to step forward? He can hardly say himself, but he knows that
instant decision is responsible for his being here to tell his story today.
A mind wary of threat perhaps stocks itself with potential strategies: is this one of the
crucial lessons of these testimonies? Sometimes they work; sometimes they don’t. A
husband and a wife testifying together, both physicians from Lvov, tell how they
falsified their papers, changed their names, and passed as Polish non-Jewish doctors
during the Nazi occupation. But one day the local Underground, not known for their
sympathy to Jews posing as Christians, arrange to send one of their members for a
consultation: a recent graduate from Lvov medical school himself. They are terrified:
how does one prepare for such an encounter? What if he recognizes them as former
Jewish classmates? Will he denounce them? He arrives, knocks on the door; it opens-and they instantly recognize each other! But he is more alarmed than they, for he too
is Jewish, posing in the Underground group as a non-Jew, with forged papers! In this
instance, strategy was not necessary; coincidence intervened.
But later this husband and wife are not so lucky. They are trained by the Polish
Institute of Health as experts in lice extermination--his very word, uttered without a
trace of irony--and they are dispatched to Warsaw to help control a typhus epidemic.
At the train station a Polish policeman comes up to him and says “You look Jewish,”
and takes them both to the police station across the street. They inspect his wife’s
papers, which are falsified in several places, and declare them authentic; they examine
his, and refuse to believe he is not Jewish. So they take him into the next room for the
“ultimate” test: he drops his trousers, and is quickly identified as a Jew. The Polish
policeman announces that he is taking him to Gestapo headquarters.
What options are available to the victim at this moment? Had fear paralyzed him, his
doom would have been swift and certain: the Germans did not know the meaning of
mercy. So his instant decision is to start swearing at the Polish police officials,
reminding them that the battle of Stalingrad had recently been lost, that bastards like
them would certainly receive retribution after the Russians arrived, that he was in
Warsaw to protect them against typhus and they were turning him over to their
common enemy--at which point his wife says “Give him your watch,” and he slides
off his watch and thrusts it into the
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official’s hand. The official says one word—“Go.” And their lives are saved.
The witness, as well he might, exhibits great satisfaction at his successful maneuver,
which preserved his own life and probably his wife’s. He attributes the favorable
results of his refusal to accept a fait accompli. But we know that no general principle
of survival behavior can be deduced from his action: in the presence of a Gestapo
official, his strategy would have failed. A year earlier, before the battle of Stalingrad,
it might have failed too. Was it greed, fear for his own future well-being, or grudging
respect for the victim’s determination not to appear craven that motivated the
policeman to release him? So many variables impinge on the situation that it defies
exact analysis. Yet it confirms the value of instant decision rather than hesitation at
crucial moments like these where options are possible.
These videotaped interviews illuminate with stunning clarity the meaning and vital
importance of that expression, “where options are possible.” Later generations will
add to the importance of locale the equally significant temporal complement of “when
options are possible.” Understanding victim behavior requires a clear perception of
the role time and place played in responses to potential atrocity. Expecting the weak
and starving witness from our first example to draw on “instant decision” is as foolish
and uncharitable as wondering why the Jewish doctor posing as a Christian does not
manifest the “humiliated imagination” during his narrative. They come from two
worlds of experience: only we the audience can encompass both.
But no conclusion is conclusive, as anyone who has viewed one hundred of these
videotaped testimonies will verify. Asked at the end of their presentation what they
remember most from their ordeal, the husband-and-wife medical team answer
differently: “My memory is filled with four years of fear,” the wife immediately
replies. And almost simultaneously, her husband insists: “I have no memory of fear.
Only defiance--and always being ready for what may happen!” The humiliated
imagination confronts the voice of instant decision, and we must be wise and
compassionate enough to appreciate the need and the reasons for both. And shrewd
enough to realize that for the survivor the painful act of recall involves judgment as
well as memory, self-justification as well as truth.
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