Holocaust and Memory: The Experience of the Holocaust and Its Consequences: An Investigation Based on Personal Narratives, Barbara Engelking, ed. by Gunnar S. Paulsson (London: Leicester University Press in association with the European Jewish Publication Society, 2001), 348 pp., cloth $35.00, pbk. $19.95.
In his personal account of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Saul Friedländer notes "there are certain memories that cannot be shared, so great is the gap between the meaning they have for us and what others might see in them." 1 Holocaust and Memory is the result of Barbara Engelking's attempt to bridge this gap for herself and to "pass [her] inner knowledge" to the reader (p. 16). Her book deals with numerous key issues of Holocaust literature, focusing on the victims' experiences, but also analyzing the nature of memory and the long-lasting effects of the tragedy on the lives of survivors [End Page 163] and their children. The book not only raises some of the most important questions in the field, but also provides new material for answers.
Engelking opens the book by discussing her personal need to answer the questions, Why did the Holocaust happen? And how was it possible? (p. 13). These questions, however, do not guide her analysis, which is based on interviews with twenty-two Holocaust survivors and supported only by material from published memoirs and diaries, and by existing scholarship. Instead, her investigation focuses on the individual, subjective experiences of a specific group of Polish Jews under the Nazi occupation. The focus of the study is shaped by the identities of those whom Engelking interviews.
The twenty-two interviewees were Polish Jewish survivors who stayed in Poland after the war; the majority of them (eighteen) had university diplomas (p. 5). Although her subjects all chose various strategies to cope with life after the Holocaust, their identities seem to have been particularly affected by a complex and at times ambivalent relationship with Poland, Poles, and Polish culture. Engelking's book proves to be primarily a discourse on how these survivors made sense of their experiences during and after the war, rather than on broader issues of the Holocaust.
The first chapter, "The Ghetto, the 'Aryan Side,' Concentration Camps," focuses on the Jewish wartime experience in large urban centers, both in and out of the ghetto. Engelking considers the Warsaw ghetto to be the "model" for discussing everyday life and relations with the outside world (pp. 23, 86) but she also notes a very different, hermetically sealed type of ghetto—the type found in Lódz´ (pp. 37-39). 2 The chapter catalogs the dangers faced by the Jews on the "Aryan side" and looks at the threat of extortionists (szmalcowniks) and at the various strategies Jews employed to conceal their identities (pp. 50-54). The author focuses on the differences between the Polish and Jewish experiences of World War II both in objective terms, based on the "legal regulations resulting from decrees of the occupying power," and in subjective, experiential ones (pp. 21-22). For Poles, she concludes, the occupation was dyadic, involving Germans and Poles, and the fate of the Jews played a rather marginal role (pp. 23-24). Jews, in contrast, "could not manage without the Poles. They were condemned to suffer their neighbors' charity, pity, decency, hatred, contempt or greed. The relationship was therefore asymmetrical" (p. 24). Engelking pays less attention to the other locus indicated by the chapter's title: concentration camps. In fact, the death camps, where the majority of Polish Jews met their deaths, largely escape her analytical framework. Even in the subchapter devoted to the death camps, Engelking describes for the most part the experience of those selected for work (pp. 64-66). This is a result of the methodological guidelines of the project, which dictate a scrupulous reliance on survivor interviews.
The second chapter, "Daily Life in the Ghetto," explores everyday Jewish life in Poland under the Nazi occupation. 3 Engelking proposes fifteen categories as necessary and sufficient for the description of the ghetto experience. These include place, crowding, time, hunger, illness and death, adaptation, information, mood, work, study, social [End Page 164] and cultural life, and social gradations. All in all, Engelking is able "to present a picture of the everyday life of the ghetto in the form of a psycho-social map [that] illustrates various elements: both material living conditions and the psychological and spiritual conditions" (p. 84). She points to such details of daily experience in the ghetto as its shifting physical boundaries and the resulting constant sense of insecurity (pp. 86-90); disrupted patterns of behavior (she describes it as a "behavioral swamp," p.92); and lack of privacy and permanent overcrowding both in the streets and in people's homes (pp. 92-94). For Engelking, the experience of hunger was "the general experience in the ghetto [which] was felt, to a differing degree, by all the ghetto-dwellers" (p. 108). The author describes death as "one of the most generally familiar elements of everyday life in the ghetto, a significant point on its psycho-social map" (p. 119). Moreover, she describes dying as "a style of ghetto life ... a manifestation of the principle of choice.... In the totalitarian cultural oppression of the ghetto," Engelking points out, "choice of a lifestyle was nothing more than choice of a way of dying" (p. 120).
The third chapter, "Why Did It Happen?," analyzes the survivors' interpretations of their wartime experiences. Engelking seems to be particularly interested in the way the interviewees responded to the issue of alleged Jewish passivity in the face of imminent death (pp. 14, 236-41). The following chapter describes the psychological consequences of the Holocaust, both for the survivors and for their children. The author's analysis is based on three case studies of intergenerational communication of wartime experiences in Poland. 4 Engelking discusses strategies adopted by survivors to adjust to life in postwar Poland, in particular the issue of new surnames. 5
The last chapter, "The Legacy of the Holocaust," discusses the social and cultural legacy of the Holocaust in Poland. Engelking is particularly concerned with the problems connected with communicating Holocaust experiences to the survivors' children and to non-Jewish Poles. She also discusses the motivations of those who remained silent, including the desire to escape the trauma of remembering, a sense of guilt, a fear of not being understood, and an inability to forgive (pp. 308-14). Engelking focuses on Polish attempts to respond culturally to the Holocaust, and she concludes "Culture cannot record the Holocaust as part of its code: only the individual can do that.... [Although] the Poles, as the closest witnesses, have certain obligations, I still know that these events cannot be absorbed into Polish culture, and cannot be seen by Polish society as their own. There is however a movement in Polish culture which has tried to assimilate the experiences of the Holocaust" (p. 324).
Engelking pays less attention to one of the crucial questions raised by the book—the nature of memory in the context of her methodological concerns. She declares an empathetic, engaged relationship with her sources, the survivors, very much along the lines of the approach formulated by Jan T. Gross: "When considering survivors' testimonies, we would be well advised to change the starting premise in appraisal of their evidentiary contribution from a priori critical to in principle affirmative.... The greater the catastrophe the fewer the survivors. We must be capable of listening to lonely [End Page 165] voices reaching us from the abyss." 6 But while Gross articulates this attitude toward written sources and testimony gathered in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Engelking's analysis is based primarily on present-day oral testimony, which she uses to reconstruct individual experiences during the war. It would seem that she should take more explicit note of the problematic character of her sources in this respect.
To a large extent Engelking adopts a typology of preplanned stages of the Holocaust, following the research of Raul Hilberg. 7 She distinguishes stages of the development of the Nazi plan for the "Final Solution": identification, marking, and deprivation of rights; concentration and isolation; and extermination (p. 29). Reflecting on Nazi motivations for creating the ghettos, Engelking expresses an explicitly intentionalist approach (see p.82). However, she also admits that "at the beginning the Nazis did not have—apart from a general desire to destroy world Jewry—a precise picture of the 'final solution.' There was a great deal of improvisation in what they did, a great deal of trial and error" (pp. 83-84).
All in all, Engelking's book includes not only interesting scholarly
postulates but also a powerful historical narrative, one that includes
the experiences of Polish Jews while at the same time acknowledging the
difference between the fates of Poles and of Polish Jews. After World
War II, Polish discussion of and research on the Holocaust quickly
became marginalized.
8
Although Holocaust and Memory does not deal with the historical
narrative sensu stricto, it is nevertheless consistent with the
conclusion formulated by Gross: the Holocaust "was not confined to the
pitch dark interiors of gas chambers and covered vans. It took place
in full daylight and was witnessed by millions of Poles.... I submit
that the Holocaust of Polish Jews is a central feature of Polish
history of the Second World War, and that it cannot be excised for
some special treatment."
9
Holocaust and Memory not only provides compelling analysis
of everyday Jewish experiences under the Nazi occupation but also
successfully explores the consequences of the Holocaust for Polish
Jewish relations during and after the war.
Natalia Aleksiun
New York University
Notes
1. Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), p.85.
2. See Lucjan Dobroszycki, introduction to The Chronicle of the Lódz´ Ghetto, 1941-1944, ed. L. Dobroszycki, trans. Richard Louvie et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp.xxii-xxiii.
3. This seems to be an overall focus of the author's interest. See Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, Getto Warszawskie: Przewodnik po nieistnieja(ogonek)cym mies´cie (Warsaw: IFiS, 2001).
4. For a discussion of the experiences of the generation born in Poland after the war, see Malgorzata Melchior, Spoleczna toz(dot)samos´c´ jednostki (w s´wietle wywiadów z Polakami pochodzenia z(dot)ydowskiego urodzonymi w latach, 1944-1955) (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 1990).
5. See the excellent research on the topic by Irena Hurwic-Nowakowska, A Social Analysis of Postwar Polish Jewry, trans. Jerzy Michalowicz (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1986), pp.119-124. On the strategies of adaptation see Ewa Koz´min´ska-Frejlak, "Polen [End Page 166] als Heimat von Juden: Strategien des 'Heimischwerdens von Juden in Nachkriegspolen, 1944-1949," in Fritz Bauer Institute, Überlebt und unterwegs: Jüdische Displaced Persons im Nachkriegsdeutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1997), pp.71-107.
6. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp.139-140.
7. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), pp.53-62. Compare with more recent studies by Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933-1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), pp.62-262; and Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.28-56.
8. See Lucy Dawidowicz, "Appropriating the Holocaust: Polish Historical Revisionism," in The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp.88-124. For an account of the more recent Polish response to the Holocaust, see "My Brother's Keeper": Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. Antony Polonsky (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp.1-33.
9. Jan T. Gross, "A Tangled Web: Confronting Stereotypes Concerning Relations between Poles, Germans, Jews, and Communists," in The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, eds. István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp.91-92.
