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Book Review:
Tim
Cole on Martin Gilbert
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Author: Tim
Cole
Department of Historical Studies,
University of Bristol
Sun, 4 July 1999
Martin Gilbert. Holocaust Journey. Travelling in
Search of the Past. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999. xvi + 480 pp. Photos, maps, bibliography,
and index. $16.95 (paper), ISBN 0-231-10965-2.
"Piotrkow is not the same place that it used to
be"
Holocaust Journey does not offer easy reading.
In it we join the historian Martin Gilbert, the
Holocaust survivor Ben Helfgott, eleven of
Gilbert's graduate students and a number of other fellow
travellers on a two-week trek through Central Europe in
the summer of 1996. Their journey from the Third Reich
landscape of Berlin, through the ghetto landscapes of
Theresienstadt, Cracow, Warsaw and Piotrkow and to the
camps of Auschwitz,
Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka and Chelmno, becomes
our journey. We become virtual fellow-travellers, who --
like Gilbert's students -- hear the readings chosen for
the sites which we pass through. It is these readings --
in the main from survivors' memoirs -- which provide the
link between the past and the present in these Holocaust
sites.
But the journey takes in more than simply these
infamous Holocaust sites. Along the way, Gilbert comments
on the many small towns and villages we pass. Each has
its own history of Jewish habitation as well as Jewish
destruction, which Gilbert briefly sketches out in short
diary entries. By writing in a diary format which gives
us not simply this journey broken down into days, but
quite literally into minutes, we get a strong sense of
the slow passing of time. The cumulative effect is a
harrowing narrative of relentless killing. The whole
journey is a seemingly never-ending story of destruction,
as community after community was destroyed in a few short
years in the early 1940s. And this is what makes this
narrative such a powerful one.
Rather than being arranged chronologically, the text
is arranged geographically. Thus whilst Gilbert does
begin self-consciously in Berlin -- he comments after
visiting Wan[n]see
that "we have seen where the paperwork was done and the
decisions made to murder millions of people; soon we will
see where so many of those people taken and killed" (p.
51) -- he does not opt for the classic chronological
approach which starts with the Nazi rise to power and
then moves on year-by-year to the end of the war, as he
did in his The Holocaust. The Jewish
Tragedy.[1] Rather, Gilbert
strays away from the confines of a strict chronological
approach to the Holocaust, by taking us on a Holocaust
Journey through real places, which stresses the
spatial rather than the temporal. Whilst the content in
terms of both the historical events described and the
readings chosen is fairly familiar material to the
historian of the Holocaust, the approach is not. In quite
consciously adopting the narrative form of a diary
description of a journey, Gilbert gives us a poignant
reminder of the sheer geographical scope of the
destruction.
As I read, I was reminded of The Valley of
Communities memorial at Yad Vashem. There, carved
into the rock, is a maze-like map of Europe complete with
the names of the Jewish communities devastated by the
Nazis. Gilbert's book is in some ways an equally powerful
-- indeed more powerful -- textual equivalent to this
map-like memorial. Whilst at Yad Vashem it only takes
five minutes or so to walk through this scaled-down maze
of Europe, Gilbert's journey took two weeks. Of course
the frightening reality is that even such a relatively
long journey with such a packed schedule, barely touches
the surface of Holocaust Europe. Gilbert could have
travelled further north or east to the destroyed
communities of the former Soviet Union. He could have
gone south into Hungary and Romania, or west into the
Netherlands and France. Such a trip would have taken
months rather than merely weeks. As one of the students
on the trip commented afterwards, 'when one spends hour
upon hour visiting Jewish community upon Jewish
community, and ends the day at the site of their mass
murder, one becomes deeply conscious of the scale of the
Shoah. And that was one road, to one camp, in one
country" (p. 400).
Unfortunately such reflection by Gilbert's students,
and Gilbert's own self-reflection on the journey, are
relatively rare. The text is dominated with what happened
in these places in the past, rather than giving us an
insight into the burden of visiting these places in the
present. The reflections of the students who made the
trip are gathered in a short epilogue, and there are
places in the text where Gilbert reflects upon the sheer
emotional implications of leading such a trip as this.
For example, he questions his plan to take the
Bratislava-Cracow express to Auschwitz, asking "was it
too much to have decided to make this journey by rail?"
(p. 119), and admits, "often I find the readings very
difficult. On three occasions today -- and two at Sobibor
two days ago, and one at Majdanek yesterday -- I was not
able to read out a piece I had chosen ... it seemed too
painful, too direct, too raw. I always apologised for not
being able to do so. The hardest thing to read about, or
to think about, is the children" (pp. 320-21). However
self-reflection on the problematic nature of teaching
about the Holocaust in general, and taking a group to the
sites of destruction in particular, is surprisingly
limited.[2]
Moreover, the focus upon what happened in these sites
of Holocaust history in the past means that what is
happening in these sites of Holocaust memory in the
present is largely ignored. There are places -- such as
at Wansee and Auschwitz -- where the politics of memory
are reflected upon, but on the whole this increasingly
important theme remains neglected. Thus for example, the
group's visit to the site where Hitler and Eva Braun's
bodies were burned -- "today it is a children's
playground . No plaque or memorial marks the spot: only,
ironically a dustbin" (p. 27) -- does lead to "a
discussion about whether it is right or wrong to have no
memorial here, and to have a children's playground on
this spot of hideous association" (p. 27). However, it is
a discussion which we are not privy to. Throughout,
Gilbert largely fails to explore the ways in which
societies choose both to remember and forget the past.
His is a book which is ultimately more interested in what
happened at these sites in the past -- given to us
through a series of historical narratives and survivors'
memoirs -- than what is happening (or not happening) in
these sites in the present. Whilst you get the sense in
reading, that this journey, or pilgrimage, was as much a
journey of Holocaust memory as it was a journey of
Holocaust history, the former aspect remains largely
implicit.
Saying that however, is not to detract from a book
which I intend to use as a central text with my
undergraduate and graduate students. Holocaust
Journey is a powerful reminder that the Holocaust
happened not simply over time, but also over space.
Reading Gilbert's journey, once more brought home
Milan Kundera's poignant reflection that Central
Europe lost "its soul after Auschwitz, which swept the
Jewish nation off its map".[3] As the survivor
Ben Helfgott reflects when walking through his former
home town, "Piotrkow is not the same place that it used
to be ... The Jews -- the ingredients -- have gone. The
yeast is not there" (pp. 360-61). What is true of
Piotrkow is true of the entire Central European landscape
which Gilbert expertly guides us through.
Notes:
- [1]. Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust.
The Jewish Tragedy (London: Williams Collins,
1986)
- [2]. Compare this with Andrew
Charlesworth's thoughtful reflections on leading
student trips to central Europe in Charlesworth,
Andrew. "Teaching the Holocaust through Landscape
Study: The Liverpool Experience", Immigrants and
Minorities 13, No. 1 (1994)
- [3]. Kundera, Milan. "The Tragedy of
Central Europe", The New York Review of Books
31, No. 7 (26 April 1984) p. 37.
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