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227 History, Politics, and Memory 14 Realm of Memory 1 A great outpouring of retribution and revenge began while the prisoners were still in the camps. Isaiah Trunk has noted that hundreds of copies of a “blacklist” of perceived collaborators circulated at the time. It provided personal details and an account of the crimes committed by each suspect, along with a call for revenge. Cells of resistance movements and independent local organizations liquidated prisoners who collaborated with the Germans or other oppressors. On the eve of liberation and immediately thereafter, prisoners hunted down their nemeses among former camp officials, seeking an outlet for their pain and frustration. This was the background to the accounts of Eliezer being beaten at Buchenwald by a detachment of prisoners. Fearing that lynchings and other acts of vengeance would multiply, the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American Zone issued a memorandum declaring that collaborators should be punished only through proper and institutionalized procedures. They advocated a centralized, rapid, and thorough examination of suspected collaborators and, in cases where it was called for, punishment according to law (they did not specify which law). The urge to capture and punish collaborators was a way for liberated prisoners to cope with their trauma: During the war there was a sharp distinction between the German rulers and the Jews, who were condemned to pain and suffering. An elite sprang up, under different names. And under a variety of circumstances it more or less consciously placed itself in a preferential position between the two worlds. The world of the tormentors and the world of the victims. It is only natural that, following liberation , the Jewish world needs to demand that the role of these “notables” of the years of the catastrophe be investigated and that verdicts be reached as to whether they are fit to take a place in our society, or whether they are to be swept out of our camp.1 Friling - Jewish Kapo.indb 227 4/11/2014 2:49:06 PM 228 ||| A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz Trunk describes how “courts of honor” set up in the camps and the occupation zones dealt with this painful and complex task. The members of these panels took up each case on its merits, without judging anyone in advance. They did not absolve those who claimed that they had merely followed orders handed down by a higher authority. The fate of the accused would be determined by their actions. At least two witnesses were required for the courts to launch an investigation; the courts guaranteed that those accused could, on their own or via a surrogate, appeal the verdict if new evidence or witnesses came to light.2 But the mood at the time was such that victims wanted to find and punish their tormentors, and this could not but impinge on how these decisions were implemented. Given that parties and movements were also seeking to settle scores with each other, neither was it easy to keep proceedings free of politics. The Yishuv also grappled with the questions of how, given that it lacked any official police or judicial authority, to “institutionalize” the examination and judgment of those suspected of collaboration. Furthermore, like the rest of the world, it had no experience in, and no moral and legal categories and language for, considering and judging the actions of people who had participated in an unprecedented mass murder machine. The Yishuv had to decide what the relevant moral and legal proceedings were, and what institutions and procedures could best see that justice was done, while also providing the victims of the Holocaust with psychological balm for their still-open wounds. At the beginning of September 1945, right after his return from a visit to the dp camps and from the Zionist convention in London, one of the leaders of Mapai and a member of the Jewish Agency Executive, Eliyahu Dobkin, told his colleagues on the Histadrut’s Executive Committee: Here I wish to say some things that I am afraid to speak about, even here, but I am greatly troubled and somehow I have to share these things with my comrades . . . . It is something I would not believe had I not seen it with my own eyes. . . . Among the Jews who survived are . . . people that the surviving remnants view as criminals . . . [and] they treat them even worse than they do the Nazi Germans. . . . There are lynchings.3 In Munich he was told about hundreds of Jews who had...

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