Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation

2. History and the Disaster: The (Im)possibility of Writing the Shoah

2 History and the Disaster: The (Im)possibility of Writing the Shoah The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the 1'e17possibili~v ofexperienceit is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which does not mean that the disaster, as theforce ofwriting, is excludedfrom it, is beyond the pale ofwriting or extratextual. Blanchot, The Writing ofthe Disaster The disaster is related to fll1;getfulness-finz;retfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated-the immemorial perhaps. Blanchot, The Writing ofthe Disaster Ifyou were not there, you cannot imagine what it was like. ... I was not there. Raul Hilberg, "I Was Not There" On the afternoon of August 3, 1942, the liquidation of the ghetto in Warsaw had been under way for nearly two weeks. On July 19, Himmler had sent a directive to the head of the police forces in the Polish General Government that set the deportations in motion, but the policy of deportation and liquidation had been set six months earlier during the conference on the"Final Solution" held in Berlin in January 1942. For anyone in attendance either at that meeting or at a meeting one month earlier, all doubt as to just what the policy meant was dispelled by Hans Frank, the governor of the area. I want to say to you quite openly that we shall have to tlnish with the Jews one way or another. ... Certainly, a major migration is about to start. But what is to happen to the Jews? Do you think they will 23 24 Between Witness and TestimollY actually be resettled in the Ostland villages? We were told in Berlin: Why all this trouble? We can't use them in the Ostland either; liquidate them yourselves. (quoted in Hilberg, Destruction 308) With the killing centers already set up, the logistics of the deportations themselves were developed and by July 16, a local solution to the problem of transport had been found: a train would run daily between Warsaw and the center at Treblinka carrying no fewer than 5000 Jews from the ghetto. On July 20, the judenrat in the ghetto was presented with the order to prepare the population f(J[ resettlement, which would begin on the 22nd. All were to report voluntarily to the Umschlagplatz (the "gathering place"), with the exception of those registered for certain kinds of "valuable" work in industry, the ghetto bureaucracy, and those who were not fit for removal. Those in the ghetto were told that the deportations would total no more than about 60,000 people; no one could imagine that nearly ninety percent of the population of the ghetto-over 300,000 of the 380,000 Jews crammed into a corner of Warsaw-would be in Treblinka by the beginning of 1943. That afternoon, on the third of August, Abraham Lewin, who was born in Warsaw fifty years earlier, wrote in a diary that he had kept probably since the establishment of the ghetto in 1940. That diary along with several others written by members of the Oneg Shabbas organization (which was formed with the expressed purpose of recording "the martyrology of the Jews of Poland") was eventually buried in a milk can in a basement in the ghetto. Those accounts, along with the remembrances of those who survived the deportations and the camps, form the core of the historical record of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, which is itself the basis of the most comprehensive histories of the Holocaust (those written by Martin Gilbert, Lucy Dawidowicz, Raul Hilberg, and-most recently-Saul Friedlander). Those historical accounts, superimoposed upon one another, provide a broad account of the events that occurred during the days and weeks of the deportations from Warsaw: Hilberg's account relies primarily on documents retrieved from archives in Israel, Europe, the United States, documents that record the meticulous care with which the German government planned and executed the Final Solution. Gilbert and Dawidowicz tend to focus, in their accounts, upon the communities of individuals who lived in Warsaw during the concentration and the deportations, and upon the individual reactions by those Jewish eyewitnesses to the logistics of the roundups and their human consequences. Accounts written or told of the events occurring on the afternoon and evening of August 2 and the morning and afternoon of Au- HISTORY AND THE DISASTER 25 gust 3, 1942, are harrowing-of ruses...