Writing from Disaster: Two Autobiographies

Life, Nietzsche noted in The Use and Abuse of History, "is absolutely impossible without forgetting." An apparently contrary declaration appears at the entrance to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem: "Memory is Redemption." And yet, one can argue that both are true with respect to memories of horror. The right to amnesia is undeniable, if only for the sake of preserving some sense of humanity and sanity for the victim. At the same time, the right to testify—to record so that history is not rewritten, often in the hope that the same horrors are not repeated—is equally forceful.

"Who will witness for the witness?" asked the poet Paul Celan. The Holocaust holds no monopoly on human horror. But when Jesse Jackson, for example, says he is "tired of hearing about the Holocaust" (a comment for which he later apologized), and when there are still "historians" arguing that it never occurred or was greatly exaggerated, and when in the general populace there are some who view the catastrophe with scandalous and ignorant skepticism (Mel Gibson's father comes to mind), it is clear that, in the words of Lawrence Langer, "every future generation will have to be educated anew in how to face the historical period we call the Holocaust."¹ In this sense, the Holocaust is not to be relegated to that which must be told to future generations of Jews only, as if an addendum of horror to the Passover story. I take Langer's "every future generation" to mean just that.

Geoffrey Hartman notes that the Holocaust may be an event "that has ruptured our sense of what human nature is."² It is hardly surprising that some survivors choose to repress their experience, finding life without such forgetting impossible. And there are those, as we know, who, through the retelling of their experience, attempt a kind of healing, or unburdening, or registering of the events as they lived them. But, as Hartman also points out, "it is getting late."

Perhaps because it is getting "late" for the survivors, a large spate of Jewish memoirs from the Second World War, including the two under review here, have recently appeared. But I want to be careful here: several years ago I argued in one of my books that Paul Celan, though he had taken his life some twenty years after the end of the war, was nonetheless (for complicated reasons I won't go into here) a Holocaust victim. I was taken to task by a scholar of the Holocaust who wrote to me that Holocaust victims could only be defined as those who actually died in the camps. Accordingly, then, the two autobiographical memoirs that I will consider here are not strictly speaking written by Holocaust survivors. The first, Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth, is by the famous scholar of French literature Victor Brombert. His is the story of a Jewish refugee from occupied Nazi Paris. The second, by the German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, is his account of the Warsaw Ghetto, which he managed quite incredibly to survive. Given the conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, it seems to me to be permissible to call those few who escaped with their lives Holocaust survivors. Indeed, the cover of the Reich-Ranicki memoir cites the Times Literary Supplement's opinion of the book: ". . . an unforgettable piece of Holocaust literature." I bring up this problem of definition, not in order to quibble over lexical details, a tactic which would be at best inappropriate in this context. I bring it up as a mode of respect for those who did, in fact, survive the camps, so that their stories will be in no way belittled, cheapened, or otherwise lessened through neutralizing or dehistoricizing analogies. There can be no analogies for the Nazi death...