A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (review)

150 SHOFAR Winter 1996 Vol. 14, No.2 happened in Germany could not happen here. But the insensitivity to American Jewish citizens is cause for reappraisal." Surely what happened in Germany was far more than insensitivity, far more than singling out a segment ofthe population and abandoning them. Definition was the first stage ofthe destructive process, according to Raoul Hilberg. It was followed by expropriation and concentration-apartheid and segregation to use American terms-circumstances designed to demonstrate that the Jews had no future in Germany or in Germanoccupied lands. But the Holocaust was about state-sponsored systematic murder and the apparatus of death-mobile killing units, concentration camps, and death camps. The Holocaust was about systematic slaughter, about ideological antisemitism that took a lethal course and victimized European Jewry while giving ultimate meaning to German society. What is the evidence for reappraisal? Antisemitism does not play a major role in American national myth. In fact, while Jews may be 2.7 percent of the population, they are 33% percent ofAmerican religious tradition, and racism rather than antisemitism is central to American national consciousness. Still, The Forgotten Victims is a serious effort to recover a story that must be told. It is an act of historic justice to those who were denied justice for so long-denied not by the enemy but by the government ofthe United States, the nation for which they risked their lives. They served in honor, they suffered with honor. Their service and suffering were not recognized until Bard did his work, which was an act of historic truthtelling and moral justice. Michael Berenbaum Director, U.S. Holocaust Research Institute Hymen Goldman Professor of Theology Georgetown University A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, by Yitzhak Zuckerman, translated and edited by Barbara Harshav. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 702 pp. $35.00. Nine ari a half hours into Claude lanzmann's epic documentary, Sboab, lanzmann asks a few questions of Yitzhak Zuckerman, better known as "Antek" and one of the then surviving leaders of the Jewish Book Reviews 151 Fighting Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto. His memorable response was: "If you could lick my heart, it would poison yo~." Here are Antek's very precise recollections ofnot only the Ghetto, but the various activities ofdifferent Zionist groups, very detailed recollections of many personalities who perished in the fighting, and an extensive account of the attempt to maintain some Jewish life in Poland after the war, ending in the Bricbab and Zuckerman's own aliyah. This is not an easy book to read, as the details are almost overwhelming. Zuckerman provided all the information found in this volume in a series of audio tapes in 1974, with the provision that the tapes would not be transcribed or published until after his death. Zuckerman died in 1981, and this volume has only recently arrived in English translation after the Israeli publication in 1991. The book provoked some public controversy in Israel among survivors. Many felt that Zuckerman gave inaccurate portrayals of the Labor Zionists, Left Poale Zion, Socialist Zionists, and Bundists. These memoirs are so broad in scope and so precise in detail that the book is difficult to review. However, in reading this work from cover to cover, one feels this work to be something different, as it is difficult to compare the mass of material that emanated from this "survivor" who remained outside the camps during the extent ofthe war and in a position to make decisions regarding Jewish defense. One also sees through Zuckerman's memory the vitality of pre-war Jewish political life, as vestiges of most parties continued in the Warsaw Ghetto: Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza'ir, Bundists, Left and Right Poale Zion, HeHachalutz Ha Tza'ir, Gordonia, Dror, BAHAD, the communists, and ultimately the Jewish Fighting Organization (Z.O.B.). This represents the history of a political life with so many varieties that even modern Israel fails to come close on the question of diversity and intensity, made more dramatic by the scope of the war and the destruction of the Holocaust; The hopelessness for Polish Jews set in most visibly after the British defeat at Dunkirk. .As...