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 15 August 2001
Facing up to the horrors of the Holocaust By Elizabeth
Barchas[*], PERHAPS nothing is more haunting than images from the Holocaust. There are the survivors -- starved, tortured, separated from family members, subjected to unimaginable cruelty. And then there are the unlucky ones, of whom nothing remains but the piles of gold teeth, hair, and shoes taken from them before they were forced into the gas chambers. Witness testimony and hundreds of books on the subject demand that those living today embrace the post-Holocaust mantra to ''never forget.'' Thus, when British author David Irving sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt for libel in England last year, the stakes extended beyond reestablishing Irving's reputation -- Lipstadt had called him a Holocaust denier in her book ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'' -- or monetary compensation. Because of the nature of English libel laws, which favor the person suing, the onus was on Lipstadt to prove the Holocaust actually happened. D.D. Guttenplan explores the events leading up to and through the courtroom proceedings in ''The Holocaust on Trial.'' His chronological account of what happened in court is seamlessly tied to an examination of history and the question of what can ever be known for certain. The strength of Guttenplan's book lies not in the answers he provides about the Holocaust -- if anything, one is left with a sense that a desire to know the full truth must be sacrificed for an understanding of the larger picture -- but in the questions he asks about it. When killing thousands of people in a gas chamber requires someone to build the chamber, someone to lead the victims to the room, someone to lock the door, and someone to drop in the poison pellet, which one of these people is the murderer? When the right to free speech enables a racist to denigrate the memory of 6 million people and incite others to violent action, should that right be protected? Alongside questions of where our knowledge of the past comes from and why we should care if someone wants to say the Holocaust never happened, Guttenplan presents what he calls the ''fundamental challenge.'' ''Who will write the history?'' he asks in his introduction. ''History, the cliche tells us, is written by the winners. Yet the Holocaust is a history without winners. The Allies may have defeated the Nazis, but they did not save the Jews.'' History cannot be escaped at any level; it plays a starring role in the courtroom despite pleas from Justice Charles Gray to keep the trial focused on the interpretation of documents. Yet to prove her innocence -- which she eventually does -- Lipstadt must demonstrate that, contrary to Irving's claim that ''more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz,'' the Nazis did indeed have a large-scale, systematic plan for annihilating the Jews by gassing them. The trial becomes necessarily focused on expert testimony, and Guttenplan successfully breaks down the complicated concepts in question while simultaneously dissecting the courtroom strategies of both parties and keeping the larger issue of why the Holocaust is important in the periphery. But the lack of survivor testimony creates an emotional distance for the reader, a fact Guttenplan acknowledges at the end of the book when he writes, ''Without human voices to put flesh to the facts, we have something that, while it might pass muster as history, can never tell the truth.'' The truth is something from which the living must not turn away. At one point in the trial, Irving suggests that gas chambers were actually intended to be air raid shelters. Defense lawyer Richard Rampton responds, ''Do you really see a whole lot of heavily armed soldiers running two and a half or three miles from the SS barracks to these cellars at the far end of the Birkenau camp?'' Yet is the alternative -- that these structures were killing machines designed for the mass murder of an entire race -- any easier to fathom? As Guttenplan notes, it is the truth, after all, that seems most fantastic and incomprehensible. This doesn't stop him from pursuing the truth in ''The
Holocaust on Trial.'' Although the book has elements of
courtroom drama and historical mystery, it is far from light
summer reading. But to understand the trial's impact -- on
our knowledge of the Holocaust, on whether Holocaust deniers
will be challenged, and on what we are allowed to say about
what happened -- it must be read. © Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
Website note: we are informed by a corerspondent that Elizabeth Barchas is in fact a 21 year-old senior at Emory University in Georgia, where prof. Deborah Lipstadt teaches. As she writes: "The truth is something from which the living must not turn away." | ||
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