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Reviewed by:
  • Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol. 3, 1941–1942 by Jürgen Matthäus et al.
  • William W. Hagen
Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol. 3, 1941–1942, Jürgen Matthäus with Emil Kerenji, Jan Lambertz, and Leah Wolfson. Vol. 5 in series Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context (Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013), xxxi + 551 pp., hardcover $55.00, electronic version available.

“All philosophizing ends at the barbed-wire fence” (p. 230). So wrote Serbian Jewish prisoner Hilda Dajč in 1942 from Judenlager Semlin, where she was soon to be murdered. Her words help explain the paucity, in this thick documentary collection, of captive Jews’ interpretations of the Holocaust: cursory efforts at understanding are overwhelmed by descriptions of the “reality” that Dajč called “unsurpassable.” Her words challenge us to ponder deeply the explanatory vocabulary we employ in attempting to comprehend the tragedy. Since any discussion of the Holocaust’s [End Page 123] empirical realities requires a choice of interpretive concepts, it is inescapable that we should philosophize after the barbed wire.

This book’s numerous documents, some previously published but many translated from archival sources for the first time, include heart-stabbing expressions of pain, fear, despair, doomed hope, and innocent delusion. They flow mainly from Jewish sufferers’ pens, with none from the perpetrators’ bureaucracy. The voices are mostly Central or East European, but there are also gripping testimonies from southeastern Europe, the Netherlands, and France. Jewish political reports are few, confined mostly to those of individuals, among whom the Swiss-based German-born Zionist Richard Lichtheim alone distinguished himself for a realistic—if belated—grasp of the unfolding tragedy. The book also reprints the Polish Jewish Bund’s May 11, 1942 confirmation of comprehensive genocide, subsequently distributed to Western governments by the Polish government-in-exile (pp. 452–56). Otherwise, the political documents expose, though without recrimination, the self-delusion and sometimes self-serving attitudes of Jewish leaders in Allied lands, and of members of Judenräte and the Jewish Police in the ghettos.

This collection puts myriad significant documents into teachers’ and students’ hands. It abstains from interpretive readings, offering instead only the barest of historical contextualizations. It privileges the privately formulated testimony of individuals, especially those of Jewish youth, but also those of women generally. Few, though potent, are the records of religiously pious Jews. Barely discernible are the voices of the numerous and often influential “Jewish assimilators.” The authors find that, whether the Jewish voices are those of believers or non-believers, they testify to the “ubiquitous presence of Jewish thought” or to a “distinctly Jewish narrative”—that is, seemingly (for these ideational realms are not, unfortunately, further defined), to a specifically Jewish lexicon and historically evolved discourses (pp. 368, 391).

How does this book philosophize about the barbed wire? It juxtaposes our usual present-day understanding of German Judenpolitik, culminating in the death camps, to the perceptions of Jews who were trapped in the Nazi labyrinth, unable to comprehend the Holocaust’s full course. The authors hesitate, however, between an intentionalist/determinist interpretation of the unfolding mass murder and an emphasis (see pp. xix, xxv–xxvi, xxix) on its “randomness” and “unpredictability.” The awkwardly named structural/functionalist approach, which locates the roots of the spiraling violence in unforeseeable dilemmas and temptations that Nazi policy encountered during the war, makes no appearance in these pages—though it offers, in my view, the best of the presently influential interpretive frames. In the end, in the book’s final pages, Raul Hilberg’s view of the Holocaust as an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction powered by fascist ideology and bureaucratic dynamics prevails as the editors’ preferred conceptualization (pp. 459–60; see also pp. 4, 354). [End Page 124]

The authors’ hesitations in embracing the Hilbergian model arise from their fervent defense of victims against the charge that they ought to have foreseen the implacable doom facing them and reacted against it with physical force. “In light of the unevenness of the process of persecution and the unpredictability of its future trajectory,” they write, “it would be ahistorical to conclude that by 1941 to 1942 Jews...

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