The Contribution of Oral History to Historical Research *

Transcription

1 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON THE AUDIO-VISUAL TESTIMONY NATHAN BEYRAK Director Words & Images The Jerusalem Literary Project - Israel The Contribution of Oral History to Historical Research * For the past fifteen years I have been active in documenting the Holocaust through videotaped interviews with survivors, rescuers and eyewitnesses, as interviewer, researcher and project director in various countries and frameworks : from a cooperation between the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Israel, which envolved into extended cooperation between the Fortunoff Archive and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Israel, Poland, Ukraine and Belarus ; independent Holocaust Memorial Museum projects in Poland, Lithuania and the Czech Republic ; to «Words and Images - the Jerusalem Literary project», which I initiated and established with the help of Prof. Geoffrey Hartman, in which we collect video interviews with the world s leading Jewish authors and thinkers, not necessarily Holocaust survivors, but in cases where they are, the interview is conducted in cooperation with the Fortunoff Archive. I thus took part in over five hundred interviews ; I think that in the Israeli project alone, I was personaly responsible for videotaping more than three thousand hours of testimony, so I may be considered to have a very through knowledge of the material. When invited to address here the use of our interviews for historical research, I asked myself in what ways, indeed, has all this material which we have collected enriched * Communication at the Conference : «Searching for Memory and Justice. The Holocaust and Apartheid», Yale University, February 8-10,

2 CAHIER INTERNATIONAL SUR LE TÉMOIGNAGE AUDIOVISUEL human knowledge? What do we know or understand now that we did not know or understand before? And specifically, what is the unique aspect of oral history that cannot be achieved by any other documentation procedure? There are, I think, several such aspects. For many years, possibly whole decades after the Holocaust, the most common response among reflective and creative people was a kind of stunned silence. The prevailing feeling was that, perhaps for the first time in Human history, something of such enormity had occurred that there was no way for art or literature to meaningfully deal with it. The only feasable approach seemed to be through purely factual research, the reporting of the brutal facts and numbers as «dryly» and «objectively» as possible. In the last two decades or so, this silence has been broken. Literature and art on the Holocaust have been created - most of it vulgar, some extraordinary. But meanwhile, simultaneously yet quite separately, an alternative way to deal with the force of the event has emerged, one which has enriched historical research itself with that very dimension that would previously be left to literature and art. As an interviewer listening to the witness s story - actually accompanying him or her, as far as possible, on the voyage to recover the past - I often find myself undergoing a very powerful emotional experience, the way you feel when you realize that you have gained a new and significant understanding of life, of the world. What characterizes these moments is a very concentrated - even, one could say, dramatic - authenticity, perhaps similar to the potency of experience when reading Ida Fink, for example (except that when reading Fink, Aharon Appelfeld, Imre Kertesz or Primo Levi, I m somewhat more shielded, more distanced. Here I am very exposed). And I know that I am not alone : similar reactions recur repeatedly among many who view the testimonies, not all of them, necessarily, readers of literature. I do think, therefore, that oral history, and specifically the videotaped testimony, has become the way for historical research to do what was traditionally the domain of writers and artists : namely to convey, to the fullest extent possible, that which was sometimes in danger of becoming lost among the numbers, names and dates ; the immediate, individual, raw human experience, before and apart from any attempt at intellectual analysis or some definitive interpretation. Thus, for instance, we have a great deal of information on the deportations and are able to follow many of the transport trains to various camps and obtain an almost fully panoramic picture of this chapter of the Holocaust. Oral documentation, however, does something more. It enters into the cattle-cars and brings us face to face - as far as this is possible - with the people inside. And it makes vivid the fact that, in the final analysis, it is impossible to properly study the deportations without examining the experience of the people being transported. For the transports were not just a pause, as it were, in the extermination process, a sort of time-out between leaving one stop and arriving at another, but an integral part of the methodical inflicting of torture, starvation and death. Or, for instance : we have a great deal of written documentation about the Vilna Ghetto choir. In our project, we interviewed a woman who sang in that choir. She performs for the camera the songs which were written in the ghetto and reflected its life and folklore : while she does so, her eyes fall shut, and she says she sees sights she saw then, when she was singing in the Ghetto, describes them and tells us how that chance to sing was a shot of encour- 16

3 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON THE AUDIO-VISUAL TESTIMONY agement, an elixir of life, for her back then. I have no doubt that with the aid of her testimony, we know more about the Vilna Ghetto choir than we could have known in any other way. In addition, however, to fleshing out historical research carried out by other tools, complementing and enhancing it, oral history also brings to light new areas in which there has been no actual research, or almost none. I am referring to those innumerable events that went unrecorded in any documents or photographs, and only the survivors recent stories can testify to the very fact of their having occurred. I will mention just a few examples of new material made accessible through testimonies videotaped by us. Researchers wishing to study these subjects will find valuable material on such topics as : Children in the camps : it was previously assumed that children could not survive the camps. But we have taped members of two groups of children and several more individuals who passed while very young through Majdanek and Auschwitz, and, as a result, it s now possible to learn much about the experience of childhood in a concentration camp. Or the Nazis attempt to erase all traces of the massacres (which, of course, went undocumented) : we interviewed several people who had been forced to exhume and burn the corpses from the mass graves in the 9th Fort, Ponar, Babi-Yar, Kluga and elsewhere. Anyone studying questions of survival in the ghettos, will find new, detailed information in the testimonies we have collected, including one story which somehow becomes indelibly etched in the memory of all who hear it, of the surrealistic scenes in the streets of the Lodz ghetto after the mass deportation of children and babies for extermination : the remaining older ghetto residents who had no jobs, tried to fight hunger by filling the abandoned baby carriages with earth in which they planted vegetables ; then the old people went strolling in the sun, in order to germinate these improvised, mobile vegetable gardens. To the research on Jewish resistance, the testimonies we collected contribute, among other things, details of an attempt to poison all the S.S. staff in the Sobibor camp ; of two Jews who escaped from the Plaszow camp in 1943, reached Hungary and then, in early 1944, to Palestine ; and from the testimony of Mr. Gontzi, of which I will have to say more in a moment, one can learn a missing piece of information about how matches he had access to in the S.S. bacteriological laboratory in Auschwitz were passed, through a friend, to women working in the Union munitions factory, where, as already known, they were turned into explosives which were used to blow up the crematorium during the Sonderkommando revolt in We have testimonies on the issue of the Jewish police, for instance on Jewish policemen from various camps who, towards the end of the war, arrived at Buchenwald, and were killed by inmates, either in revenge for their conduct in the previous camps, or in an attempt by local strongmen to eliminate potential rivals. Even on extensively-studied issues such as the Warsaw ghetto, we still encounter surprises, for example the existence, up to October 1943, months after the suppression of the ghetto revolt, of a bunker beneath the ghetto ruins. We have interviewed two women, an Israeli and a Pole, who survived in that bunker. As I said, these are only some isolated instances. Our interviews are already being put to good use, as more and more studies 17

4 CAHIER INTERNATIONAL SUR LE TÉMOIGNAGE AUDIOVISUEL based on them are being written. A few recent examples : The Voice of Fiction and the Voice of History in Ida Fink s Writing is a work written by Hadas Steuer, studying under Dr. Sidra Ezrahi at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It is based mainly on an interview with the gifted writer, who is a Holocaust survivor, conducted for «Words & Images : The Jerusalem Literary Project» in cooperation with the Fortunoff Archive ; The interviewer, Ada Pagis, was guided by the project s literary editor, Eleonora Lev. Ms. Steuer examines Ms. Fink s entire spectrum, from the documentary to the imaginative, on the basis of this extended, intimate interview, carefully prepared down to the finest detail and closely monitored while in progress, which enabled the writer to speak of her experience in the Holocaust and its effect on her creative work as she had never spoken before. Revenge After the Holocaust, thesis written by Hava Zexer under the guidance of Dr. Dina Porat in Tel Aviv University s Faculty of History. Ms. Zexer had volunteered as interviewer on our project in Israel - the one conducted jointly by the Fortunoff Archive and the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her work is based to a large extent on a series of interviews held between , in which we videotaped the detailed testimonies of some 15 survivors who had taken part in organized activities designed to take revenge of the Germans. I was determined to collect as many testimonies as possible on this issue, as for many years there had been a policy of silence on it, including attempts to actively prevent its coming to public light. Based on these testimonies, the work describes the desire for revenge driving many of the survivors during and after the war, the various practical plans and organized activities to implement them, those few plans that were eventually carried out and the attitudes of members of the revenge organizations today : some of them are still frustrated over the failure of their plans, others think it s just as well. Levana Frenk s work on Jacques Weintraub was written as one of eleven chapters, each a biography of one of a key figure from among the members of the Jewish Youth Movements during the Holocaust. The book, Third Person Singular, edited by Dr. Avihu Ronen and Dr. Yehoiakin Kochavi has been published in Israel jointly by three research institutes, Moreshet, Lochamey Hagetaot and Yad Yaari. Ms. Frenk studied the story of Weintraub, leader of the Jewish underground in Nice, France, one of her most important sources being his widow, Leah Weintraub, who had been with him during the war and was interviewed in the Fortunoff Archive s joint documentation project with the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv. Ms. Frenk told me that without oral history her work would simply not have come into being, since Weintraub, in the nature of things, kept no records of his underground activities, indeed he did his utmost to cover his traces, concealed his identity by changing names etc. And he succeeded to the point where his story would have disappeared from History as though it had never happened. It was only on the basis of oral history that his persona could be reconstructed ; from this one point of origin it was possible to arrive at written sources to complete the story. Of course, oral tradition as an aid to collective memory has always existed, so there is also room for amateur oral history projects. For the witness, the mere chance to tell his or her story is without doubt important, and some significant historical information 18

5 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON THE AUDIO-VISUAL TESTIMONY has presumably been collected in such projects as well, even in those enjoying glittering Hollywood connections. Nevertheless, we regard providing the witness with an opportunity to tell his or her Holocaust story as only a starting point, an essential but definitely not sufficient condition for a successful interview. In order to make the most of this opportunity, both from the human aspect and for drawing the maximum research benefit - and I believe that there is no contradiction between the two - several additional conditions must be met : that the interviewer or interviewers (we prefer to have a team of two) are suitable, well trained people, possessing both background knowledge relevant to the fate of the witness and a good general familiarity with the Holocaust period as a whole ; that the testimony be unrestricted in time or number of sessions. It should preferably be taped in more than one meeting, even in several : when the witness knows he or she has all the time needed, the quality of the interview is vastly improved. that the taping is done in a suitable place, which should be comfortable for the witness, and preferably away from home and everyday affairs, not in the presence of family members, which may sometimes be inconvenient in this context. since there is a limited number of interviews we can tape, the choice of a specific testimony is made base on a well-defined research need in an attempt to cover new ground, or to fill in areas already partially research, to cross reference testimonies, to verify or disqualify previous information. It is not, of course, always possible to fully meet all of those criteria, and some compromise is sometimes unavoidable. The attempt to meet the conditions does, however, pay off, and the stricter we are the better interviews we obtain, with a corresponding richer contribution to Holocaust studies. I would like to conclude with one example where we insisted and, as a result, were able to obtain a rare, extremely valuable interview. One of the issues we have recently gone back to is Slovak Jews deported at the beginning of The importance of delving deeper into that episode rests in the fact that those people arrived in Auschwitz relatively early, and some stayed in the camp for quite long, up to three and a half years. Not only did they witness the camp s evolution, but, as «old timers» in Auschwitz, some attained positions from which they were able to become familiar with different aspects of its operation. One of them is Mr. Imre Gontzi, now living in Haifa. In a preliminary conversation with him I realized that this is certainly one case which demands some special effort. An important chapter in Mr. Gontzi s testimony concerns his work in the S.S. bacteriological laboratory in Auschwitz and other medical facilities in the camp ; in order to interview him in a meaningful way, especially given the fact that there are very few survivors, if at all, who had such a job, a very specific professional medical knowledge was required. Fortunately, I managed to recruit Prof. Shraga Segal, the Dean of Ben Gurion University s School of Medicine - whose medical speciality is bacteriology and immunology - as second volunteer interviewer alongside Anita Tarsi, my colleague in the Israeli project. The interview was videotaped in four meetings and lasted a total of 13 hours. This, incidentally, is not an unusual length for us ; we have some interviews of more than 20 or 30 hours. As a result, we are now in possession of a testimony of rare quality 19

6 CAHIER INTERNATIONAL SUR LE TÉMOIGNAGE AUDIOVISUEL on the S.S. bacteriological laboratory in Auschwitz, the medical experiments there - the witness himself was a victim of such an experiment - on murder by injections, on the use of human flesh from Jews murdered in Birkenau, for the preparation of culture media for bacteria etc. Looking back, it is hard to conceive of any serious collection of this testimony without the participation of Prof. Segal or a specialist of his stature, capable and worthy partner to the witness who knew the right questions to ask so he describes his recollections in the correct technical and medical terms. An interviewer who is not a professional in this particular field would have missed altogether - tragically - the wealth of details which help in lending Mr. Gontzi s testimony its extraordinary credibility. The use of precise terminology in the conversation between the witness and the specialist makes for a clarity which is sometimes even conveyed through certain gestures. For example, when describing his work the witness unintentionally gestured with his hands in a way customary in the laboratory procedure of preparing a culture medium for bacteria ; the interviewing physician noticed and noted this, and so Mr. Gontzi repeated the gesture ; the recorded exchange adds a whole dimension of powerful authenticity to the witness s testimony. Talking to Prof. Segal, the witness was able to go into details of laboratory tests and types of bacteria and diseases. We learned from him, for instance, that diplococcus bacteria of the genus microccocus cataralis very much resemble in shape the gonoccocus bacteria, which cause gonorhea. Here Mr. Gontzi testified to a small act of defiance and sabotage by the Jewish laboratory workers. When a throat swab from a hospitalized S.S. man would arrive at the laboratory, and it turned out that the infection was caused by a bacterium of the former variety, the laboratory staff would take advantage of the resemblance between the two bacteria and report that they had found the S.S. man s infection to be of the latter variety. This would cause the S.S. man in question to be taken off duty for the duration of treatment. A tiny, very human detail, ostensibly banal and insignificant, unless we recall that were Mr. Gontzi and his colleagues caught in the act, they would of course face certain death. The impossible everyday life in the death factory was also made up of such details. And from such a detail - and from many thousands of others which we are recording, some apparently banal, some dramatic - we get a more complete picture of human fate in the Holocaust. As the hero of one of Aharon Appelfeld s stories says, when asked to describe his ordeal : «I remember everything, it is only the details I have lost». Perhaps one of the most important achievements of oral history is the restoration of the details. 20