The Shadow of Death: The Holocaust in Lithuania

Foreword

Foreword 'lb say that our understanding ofthe Holocaust has undergone a drastic change in the half century since the Second World War may at first glance seem obvious. Does not the collective perception ofany historical event change with the passage oftime, as bits and pieces of information begin to accumulate, as documents and memories gradually sharpen our insight into what happened? Why then should not the picture ofthe destruction of European Jewry fifty years ago change as well? The process appears entirely natural and normal. There is more to it than that, however. The way in which we see the Holocaust has become transformed as the murderous act of genocide has gradually ceased to be living actuality and become historical memory. During the first decade or so after the war surprisingly little was written about its most horrifying consequences. It was almost as if the sheer cruelty of mass extermination was more than the outside observer could bear. Only the passage of time made it possible for us to look more closely at the catastrophe that befell the Jewish community. Only the growing distance between us and the victims of the Holocaust enabled us to examine and study their fate. Yet even after serious study of the destruction of European Jewry began, those who wrote about it generally maintained a certain detachment from the most tragic features of the genocide . They preferredto deal with its technical or administrative aspects, with the way it was planned and executed, with the chain ofcommand and the method ofenforcement, with bureaus and bureaucrats, organizations and organizers, with the ab- x Foreword stract problems ofmass extermination rather than its everyday realities. Thus Gerald Reitlinger's Final Solution, published in 1953, and even Raul Hilberg'sDestruction oftheEuropean Jews, which appeared in 1961, tended to obscure or dilute the private agony ofthe victims ofthe Holocaust with organizational detail and statistical exactness. They did not ignore the sufferings of millions of ordinary men and women facing destruction, but their emphasis was primarily on the big picture, on the broad effect. The impersonality of many of these early accounts of the Holocaust derived in part from the sources on which they relied. The victory of the Allies in 1945 meant that historians could examine the captured German documents regarding the planning and execution of the "final solution." They could trace the role of various groups and organizations-the SS, the SD, the Foreign Office, the Wehrmacht and the National Socialist Party-in carrying out the destruction oftheJewish population of Europe. Here was an unparalleled opportunity for scholarly research, and it is no wonder that so many writers rushed to the archives to examine what the architects ofgenocide had to say about their goals and plans. But this approach to the Holocaust also tended to attenuate or dilute its horror. The tragedy of countless innocent people being rounded up, deported, imprisoned , and executed was mitigated by the bureaucratic language ofthose who had condemned them to extermination. And this depersonalization of the Holocaust may in fact have been, consciously or unconsciously, a deliberate act. For a study ofthe documents left behind by the organizers of the annihilation ofEuropean Jewry provides the reader with a measure of protection from the realities of mass murder. They generally deal in technical, dispassionate language with the administrative minutiae of the "final solution." There are official requests for enough transportation to ship so many thousands ofmen, women, andchildren from the ghettos to the death camps. There are purchase orders for cement and steel to construct gas chambers and crematories. There are discussions about which poisonous chemicals are capable of killing the largest number of people in the shortest period of time. There Foreword xi are reports from units in the field about the "liquidation" of "communists, partisans, and Jews." There are statistics regarding the number of those condemned to what the documents euphemistically refer to as "night and mist." And all of this is expressed in the dry, impersonal language ofbureaucracy, as if describing some business deal or commercial transaction. The official tone of the records helps protect the reader from the stark horror of what they portray. Only after the Holocaust began to pale in collective memory did it become possible to face its hideousness as an everyday reality. By then the captured German documents had been examined and reexamined, studied and evaluated. There was nothing more to be squeezed out ofthem. And...