On the night of November 9-10, 1938 — when across the Reich hundreds of synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish-owned business looted, and more than 30,000 Jewish men sent to concentration camps, to say nothing of widespread harassment, bullying, and beatings — Rudolf Bing and his wife Gertrud were woken by a mob outside their building in Nuremberg. Bing called the police, who asked, “Are you Aryan?” When Bing said no, they hung up. The couple escaped their apartment on sheets tied together, spent the night in a shed, and later emigrated to Palestine, though not without having to give up their assets.
In the fall of 1941, Jews from the former Hapsburg and Russian territories Bukovina and Bessarabia were dumped by the Romanian government across the Dniester river in an area then known as Transnistria. They were forced to live in makeshift camps and ghettos, mostly open spaces near the river Bug, on the border with Ukraine. These sites offered little shelter; the authorities offered no food. The victims were huddled in temperatures that dipped to 40 below zero. Many lived in barns, even pigsties; tens of thousands died from hunger, cold, and disease. Having traded everything they had, including their clothes, to the locals for food, they were often reduced to wearing newspapers. In March 1943, one of those victims, 19-year old Mirjam Korber, lamented what had become of her and family in this strange place. In her diary she wrote, “For what sins this punishment? For what fault? The uncertainty with which we live is harsher than any death sentence.”
In the spring of 1943, Baruch Milch went into hiding with his wife, sister, brother-in-law, and their nine-year-old son in a bunker on a farm in rural eastern Galicia (now Ukraine). The boy, terrified by events — most of the region’s Jewish community, including Milch’s infant son, had been murdered in a recent mass shooting — was unable to stay quiet, and the farmer threatened to evict them. The next time the boy had a panic attack, his father grabbed him by the throat; as Milch recorded in notes kept at the time and revised into a memoir decades later, the man “wrapped a hand around his son’s tender neck as if to stifle his cries. Instead, the boy’s eyes rolled in his sockets, his tongue protruded, and he fell silent. His father knew exactly where to squeeze; he, like me, was a doctor.” The father covered his son’s face with a blanket and began to tear at his hair, mumbling that he had spared the boy more suffering: “At least I didn’t let him die at the hands of the murderers.” Milch recorded these experiences in a book appropriately titled Can Heaven be Void?
These are just three of the indelible stories offered by the British historian Dan Stone in his remarkable new book The Holocaust: An Unfinished History. Historians, Stone argues, are uniquely equipped to convey “the truly appalling nature of what happened.” Unlike many of his professional brethren, though, Stone acknowledges that to tell the story of an event as vast and consequential as the Holocaust, “history needs supplementing with fiction, film, testimony, theatre, poetry, art, performance, law, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, music.” Of these fields, Stone draws most profitably on testimony, thereby countering the tendency of historians to impose order on events that, especially for the victims, were experienced as chaotic. Stone aptly notes that victim testimonies “are explosive in their ability to render the scene.”
The individual explosions of Bing, Korber, Milch and dozens of others feature on almost every page of Stone’s history. He deftly toggles between those specifics and his own abstract claims. The latter center on what experts and non-experts alike get wrong about the Holocaust, which Stone groups into four categories. One, we think of the genocide of Europe’s Jews as efficient, industrial, factory-like, even clinical, when in fact it was low-tech, brutal, often haphazard, and usually enacted face-to-face. Two, we downplay the role of ideology, falsely advancing the idea that German atrocities were perpetrated largely in response to events on the ground, especially the vagaries of the military campaign; on the contrary, the Nazi worldview was shaped around race science that supported twin aims of defeating “the Jew” (conceived apocalyptically as metaphysical threat) and creating a racially pure community, meaning that the Holocaust was central to the war rather than a tragic incidental that has sometimes even been thought of as a distraction to the real German war aims of establishing an Empire in the East. Three, we devalue the importance of collaboration, neglecting the fatal concordance between the Nazi desire to rid the world of Jews and the ethno-nationalism of collaborative states and nationalist movements, which sought to make their populations ethnically homogenous. Fourth, we believe the Holocaust ended in May 1945, when in fact its afterlife plays out to this day; the years since the Holocaust are also part of its story.
In correcting these mistakes, Stone writes a new story of an event we think we already know. He would surely agree with the survivor Ruth Kluger, who wrote that to understand the event in its true complexity, we “would need to rearrange a lot of furniture in [our] inner museum of the Holocaust.” The weightiest pieces of that furniture, the ones hardest to shift across our mind’s rooms, concern ideology, collaboration, and liberation.
[Left: Warsaw Ghetto, 1943] For over 80 years people have asked why the Holocaust happened. It has sometimes been tempting to see the mass graves across Eastern Europe, the walled ghettos of Poland, the gas vans that murdered Jews in the Balkans and Poland, the gas chamber and crematoria system of the Operation Reinhard camps, or the nightmarish, disease-ridden labor camps in which prisoners, under atrocious conditions, made armaments, wove cloth, dug tunnels, cleared land, moved piles of rock to no apparent end — to see these sites and experiences of degradation, violence, and murder as the result of the claims penned by Hitler in Mein Kampf or of Nazi directive more generally. But that, Stone argues, confuses ideology with propaganda, overstates the clarity and power of decision making, turns the Nazis into evil masterminds. Recently, historians like David Cesarani and Christian Gerlach have stressed the ad hoc nature of Nazi policy, pointing to interagency squabbling, the reality of the need for manpower and material to further the war, and the unpredictable response of collaborators. Stone agrees — to a point. Emphasizing the role of contingency doesn’t explain why Jews were the ones targeted. (For Stone, Jews are the only victims of the Holocaust. He accepts that others, like Roma, the disabled, and LGBTQ people, especially German homosexual men, were persecuted by the regime, but, he argues, for different reasons, which cannot be understood when victim groups are collapsed. I take the point, but disagree with the approach; persecution was less differentiated than Stone suggests. The doctors who ran the state-sponsored euthanasia program were sent to run the gas chambers.) Reacting against the reaction, Stone offers a middle ground, “ideology in context,” concluding that the messy specifics of the Holocaust were indeed ad hoc but never accidental.
If we want to understand how the genocide became a continent-wide crime, we must understand how Nazi ideology encompassed the desires of its collaborators. For Stone, collaborators include not only nation states that wanted to kill Jews to create an ethnically homogenous population, but also ideologically aligned groups that felt their own nationalist aspirations could be furthered by allying with the Germans, as well as individuals who served German purposes, whether by signing up to join the Waffen-SS, working as camp guards, or betraying Jews in hiding. (Regarding these differences, Stone quotes a Polish journalist from the period: “For the Germans 300 Jews are 300 enemies of humanity; for the Lithuanians, they are 300 pairs of shoes, trousers, and the like.”) By focusing on the examples of Hungary and Romania, Stone shows how much freedom collaborationist states enjoyed. Consider the fact that at various times rulers such as Hungary’s Miklós Horthy and Romania’s Ion Antonescu stopped deportations. Their decisions might have been shaped by interactions with the Germans, either directly, as when the Nazis sent a team of bureaucrats under the leadership of Adolf Eichmann to oversee the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944, or indirectly, as when Antonescu halted deportations to Transnistria in 1942 because he had decided the Germans were going to lose the war (which is why, despite the horrific scale of the Holocaust in Romania, it had one of the largest intact Jewish communities in immediate postwar Europe). Stone shows that collaborators enjoyed more control than talk of “puppet states”; the Holocaust, he concludes, is best understood as “a series of interlocking local genocides carried out under the auspices of a grand project.” Sadly, local circumstances — the histories that shaped the social relationships operative in any given community — determined how victims were killed more than that they were killed. And yet the relative willingness or reluctance of locals to kill did have effects: where they didn’t cooperate, the Nazis usually yielded to temporary delays that lengthened and in some cases saved victims’ lives. As Stone concludes, “genocide is a societal endeavor” in which the local and the geopolitical intertwine to terrible effect. “Police and gendarmes were on the hunt, displaying inexhaustible levels of skill and energy”: what Françoise Frenkel, a Polish Jew who ran Berlin’s first French-language bookstore until she fled to France in 1939, said about her experience under Vichy rule could be said, Stone notes, everywhere across Europe.
Not much improved for victims when the war finally ended. Stone details the death marches of the winter of 1944-45, when camps in the east were emptied and prisoners force-marched in rags and wooden clogs through the snow for hundreds of miles, part of what he calls “a wider genocidal paroxysm that was undertaken by the camp guards with the widespread participation of the German population.” Stone reports the horror and disgust felt by Allied soldiers when they came upon what was left of the camp system. An American army reporter described the rooms of stacked corpses in Dachau “looking like some maniac’s woodpile”; Max Garcia, a Dutch survivor liberated from the camp at Ebensee, described the encounter between his fellows and the newly arrived soldiers as one of shock for both sides: “We seemed to be too much for them. These sunken faces and skeletal bodies. These stinking subhumans. Us.” And Stone depicts the Displaced Persons (DP) camps that sprung up after the war, often on the site of former concentration camps, as hives of activity in which survivors poured their energy into sports, theater, and politics, as well as taking the first steps of documenting the genocide (ignored by researchers for decades because the survivors mostly wrote in Yiddish); he also shows them to have been places of continued incarceration, however unintentional, filled with often lonely and isolated people, what Samuel Gringauz, a spokesman for the DPs at Landsberg, called sites of “a slow form of genocide.”
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[Left: Dan Stone] Of the many features to admire in Stone’s book — vivid use of testimony, clarity in challenging received wisdom, balance between scope and brevity — the one that most impressed me concerns the uses and abuses of Holocaust education. Stone argues forcefully that the aim of most Holocaust education fails to match the facts of the event it is meant to commemorate and draw lessons from. The Holocaust, he tartly notes, “is not a lesson about the dangers of bullying, nor even a tale of the dangers of hatred.” At every turn, Stone rejects psychological solutions, a challenge to every Sunday School or middle-school lesson plan on how to be an “upstander” rather than a bystander. He sympathizes with teachers, arguing that the tendency to respond to hatred with calls for more Holocaust education asks education “to do more than it can provide.” We need to reverse our terms: “if we want Holocaust education to prove effective, we have first to build a society that desires equality and tolerance, and in which the values promoted by Holocaust education chime with the values of society at large.” A tall order. Even Theodor Adorno, that dauntless philosopher of the lure and destruction of authoritarianism, himself no fan of psychological explanations, admitted in his essay “Education after Auschwitz” that he couldn’t imagine the overturning of fundamental economic and social structures that would be needed to definitively defeat our deep-seated attraction to fascism. He proposed instead that we develop ways to determine what personality types would be drawn to authoritarianism so that we might help those individuals reject their fatal attraction to bonds organized around hatred and violence.
As someone who regularly trains secondary-school educators to teach the Holocaust (which, in the US at least, increasing numbers are required to do by well-meaning but often poorly-conceived state mandates), I share Stone’s frustration of the narrow remit and flimsy framework of much contemporary Holocaust education. Yes, the Holocaust involved psychological and physical wounding of the sort evident on any school playground, but we can’t understand it by simply extrapolating that behavior. Nor can we explain it away as an act of madness that erupted in a single time and place. At his most despairing, Stone warns that the only thing the Holocaust teaches is that “deep passions that owe nothing to rational politics can move human beings to do terrible things,” going on to add, in his most hopeless statement, that the upshot is that the Holocaust can teach us nothing, “since nothing in the end can stop people from supporting these dark forces in times of crisis.” I agree that we must stop looking for moral uplift in the Holocaust—it’s disgusting. But I would insist that Holocaust education, especially when it is contextualized and juxtaposed to memory of other genocidal and traumatic events, has a role to play in giving us the tools to make a world in which people feel their choices are expanding rather than narrowing. Acknowledging the limits of education is a good start. But what comes next?
Presumably the lack of clear answers to that question explains the meaning of Stone’s subtitle. This is an “unfinished history” not only in the sense that no history of the event could be conclusive. But more significantly, it is unfinished in the sense that the event itself hasn’t ended. Stone reminds us that the DP camps organized by the allies to house the remnants of Europe’s Jewish community, adrift, angry, at a loss of where to go and how to be, lasted into the 1950s. Later, survivors were humiliated by invasive and uncooperative “restitution” processes. Trauma shaped victims’ lives indelibly if not irrevocably, leading some to inadvertently traumatize their descendants. Stone never flinches from these realities, all of which counter the widespread tendency to redeem the Holocaust as a crucible of suffering from which the world must learn. But Stone’s more radical claim is that the Holocaust is unfinished for everyone.
How that is the case is the substance of Stone’s magisterial final chapter on the history of Holocaust memory, which he organizes into two narratives. The first, the “‘progressive’” story (Stone puts the terms in quotation marks, a nod to the falsifications inherent to any reduction of a complex phenomenon), details the period from the end of the war to the end of the 1990s. According to this story, the memory of the Holocaust moved from an initial period of silence and shame to one of gradual opening (punctuated by the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials in the 1960s), to widespread acceptance in American and western European popular culture (Stone cites as landmark moments the 1970s miniseries The Holocaust, watched by 120 million Americans, and the release of Schindler’s List and the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993), until by the end of the 20th century it was known around the world as a byword for evil.
But the course of this story never did run smoothly. Stone calls the disturbances to its triumphalist tendencies “Bitburg history,” referring to President Reagan’s now-infamous 1985 visit a military cemetery in West Germany. The visit, designed to cement an important Cold War alliance, turned into a fiasco when it became known that the cemetery also held the remains of men who had been in the Waffen-SS. Bitburg history is still with us: think of the standing ovation given in September 2023 by Canadian politicians to 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, a former Ukrainian national who emigrated to Canada after the war. Hunka had been invited to parliament by the speaker of the House of Commons as a symbol of Ukraine’s resistance to authoritarianism past and present; no one seemed to know that Hunka had fought from 1943-45 in the Galicia Division, an infantry division of the SS comprised mostly of Ukrainian volunteers. In the aftermath of the incident, a Polish politician demanded Hunka’s extradition, and Russian President Putin cited it as support for his spurious claim that the current war of aggression in Ukraine was in fact a conflict aimed to “denazify” the country.
Against the backdrop of this kind of bad faith, Stone contends that the progressive story of Holocaust memory, though naïve and reductive, has its heart in the right place. The arc of the story bends “towards greater openness about the Holocaust and a gradual acceptance of its importance for Western self-identity.” Which is more than can be said for the story that has taken hold in the 21st century, which Stone names “Holocaust memory in the post-truth age.” This second narrative explains so many of the improbable, befuddling, and downright perverse uses to which the Holocaust has been put in recent years.
Across Europe, nations define themselves according to distorted versions of wartime events. It is now an offense to refer to the camps built on Polish soil by the Germans as “Polish death camps”; recent governments have presented Poles as mere victims of the Nazis, overstated the numbers of Poles who risked their lives to save Jews, and put scholars who challenge these claims on trial. Meanwhile Germany has made itself the international arbiter of Holocaust memory, condemning comparison between the actions of the Nazis to German colonial actions in present-day Namibia, adopting a definition of antisemitism that precludes any criticism of the actions of the Israeli state, and generally insisting, grotesquely, that as the primary perpetrators they know best how to best memorialize that past. Most consequentially, former Eastern Bloc countries struggle with their Holocaust complicity. In the 90s, these countries formed committees to study what had happened there during WWII, which mostly meant having suffered under the Germans, the Soviets, or both. But, as the commissions discovered, these countries also perpetrated their own crimes, joining their local versions of antisemitism to the Nazi project. That uncomfortable discovery led to a backlash that replaced complexity with a comforting narrative of victimhood and resentment in which fascist leaders are whitewashed as “heroes of the nation,” and the treatment of Jews is downplayed in favor of the country’s more general oppression under, say, Soviet rule.
At same time, antisemitism is often ignored among progressives when they list the forms of prejudice they oppose. The insistence on rights for minorities of all kinds sometimes excludes Jews, even as Jews remain the most prominent targets of acts of hate in the US. To bear witness to the complexity of that experience, we need to reject the distortions of both memorial narratives (keeping in mind that, as Stone argues, the second is more virulent than that first). We must accept that there are no consoling stories to tell about the Holocaust, whether of the triumph of the human spirit; of the insistence that “we,” (depending on the framing this means everyone, or Jews) will never let that happen (to us) again; or of projecting culpability on to some monstrous other who unequivocally bears no relation to us, real and genuine human beings. To do so we must listen to the victims, such as Abel Jacob Herzberg.
A jurist born in the Netherlands to immigrant parents from Lithuania who was interned in two camps in Holland before being deported to Bergen-Belsen in January 1944, Herzberg thrills Stone with his pitiless acuity. Observing after the war that his memory was beginning to fade, Herzberg responded reflectively rather than in alarm: “It is hardly surprising. It is not very agreeable to always think of atrocities and to talk about them constantly also has its objections. For it is not true that cruelty only repels. It also attracts. Cruelty is contagious. It is important therefore how one writes about the camps.” What Abel wanted to do for a world that, outside of Holland at least, seems to have ignored him, Stone tries to do for anyone who could stand to learn, clearly and unflinchingly, what the Holocaust was — and what it is today. Judging from that actions of everyone from well-intentioned teachers to misguided Canadian politicians to the bot accounts that spawn a million social media fights, that audience is, dispiritingly, larger than ever.
[Published by Mariner Books on January 23, 2024, 464 pages, $32.50 US hardcover]