Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations (review)

The number 2286 is tattooed on the left arm of Auschwitz survivor Helen Tichauer, who is now more than ninety years old. The number indicates that she arrived early at the camp—in fact in March 1942. After she suffered a back injury while engaged in forced labor, Tichauer’s own skill with numbers became her means of survival: she was discovered to be a skilled graphic artist with a gift for bureaucratic organization. In Slovakia before the war she had painted signs and license plates; now Tichauer painted red stripes on the back of prisoners’ clothing and black registration numbers on white strips of cloth attached to the colored triangles that identified prisoners by category.

Tichauer was born Helen Spitzer in Bratislava to a middle-class Jewish family in 1918. She attended synagogue only to say Kaddish for her mother, who died when Helen was eight years old. After her mother’s death the girl was raised by her maternal grandmother until her father remarried. She joined Hashomer Hatzair, a leftist Zionist group, and developed an enthusiasm for the mandolin, the instrument she later would play in the Auschwitz women’s orchestra. After training to be a commercial artist, Helen became the only female employee and the only Jew employed in a local German design firm. She was dismissed in 1939; in 1942, at the age of twenty-one, she was transported to Auschwitz together with two thousand other unmarried women.

Her youth, her arrival at a time when the women’s camp at Birkenau was still under construction, and, above all, her instinct for using her talents all worked to her advantage. Recognizing how greatly camp commanders relied on the skills of prisoners, “Zippi”—as she was known to friends in Auschwitz and after, as well as to historians—helped develop a filing system that tracked prisoners by country of origin, profession, work and barracks assignment, health status, and so on. Eventually she was entrusted with drawing up top-secret organizational diagrams that were used to report such information on a monthly basis to headquarters in Berlin.

Until she left the camp on January 17, 1945, ten days before liberation, Tichauer lived much of the time in comparative comfort. She worked mainly in the prisoner registry office, where she was instrumental, by her own account, in keeping records on the more than 100,000 women imprisoned at Birkenau and its subcamps. Because she enjoyed the privilege of collecting three rations—the standard camp ration, the camp office worker’s ration, and the orchestra member’s ration—she would say later, “I became a very rich girl.” Having endured the death march to Ravensbrück, she was liberated in the subcamp of Malchow on May 3, 1945. After a brief return to Bratislava, where she found that almost everyone in her family had been killed (probably in Majdanek), she made her way to the Feldafing Displaced Persons camp in the American Zone. There she met and married Erwin Tichauer, a fellow Auschwitz survivor from Berlin.

Tichauer was among the first survivors to relate her experiences to the American psychologist David Boder, who interviewed her in Feldafing in 1946. She has now, through a series of interviews stretching over more than a decade, permitted five eminent scholars of the Holocaust to tell her story from differing points of view: the role played by her technical skills in her survival (Konrad Kwiet); the ways in which those skills, and the complicity they entailed, became a way to nurture resistance (Nechama Tec); the conditions, as well as the subsequent misuse, of her early interview with David Boder (Jürgen Matthäus); her life in Feldafing and her conflicted memories of postwar Germany (Atina Grossman); and the survivor’s role in contemporary classroom teaching (Wendy Lower).

As a multi-faceted case study, Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor is at once an original addition to Holocaust historiography and a...