Michael E. Stevens - Remembering the Holocaust

For all its vaunted progress, the twentieth century has seen more than its share of horror and misery. Indeed, one of the darkest chapters in human history occurred during World War II: the murder of 6 million Jewstwo-thirds of Europe's Jewish populationby Nazi Germany in what has come to be known as the Holocaust. Contemplating such a number overwhelms the mind, yet to hear the stories of individual survivors may be even more harrowing, since they assign names and faces to what might otherwise be an abstract reckoning of inhumanity. Ironically, despite their graphic accounts of hardship and terror, the survivors stories are testaments to hope. By outliving Hitler and the Nazi death machine, the survivors conquered an ideology that sought to destroy an entire people simply because of their ethnic origins or religious creed.

This volume contains some of the recollections of Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Wisconsin immediately before or after World War II. As part of the Voices of the Wisconsin Past series, which presents first-person narratives about our common past from the vantage point of the participants, the texts emphasize the lives of ordinary citizens and offer accounts unmediated by the historian's narrative. They provide readers with a sense of the authentic voice of the participants in historic events. The accounts printed here are taken from a remarkable collection of interviews that resulted from the determined efforts of project staff at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin to ensure that the memories of the state's Holocaust survivors were not lost. The first interview, recorded in 1974 at the initiative of the daughter of a survivor living in the Green Bay area, became a heavily used collection at the Society and sparked fundraising efforts for a statewide project in the mid-1970s.

With funding from the Wisconsin Humanities Committee and numerous private donors, the Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust project began in late 1979. Sara Leuchter, Jean Loeb Lettofsky, and David Mandel served as the project's staff. Leuchter and Lettofsky recorded 160 hours of interviews with twenty-four survivors living in ten Wisconsincities. Since the completion of the project, their interviews have been available in the Society's archives on audiotape, and researchers have been aided in finding their way through the materials by a published guide (Sara Leuchter, ed., Guide to Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust: A Documentation Project of the Wisconsin Jewish Archives [Madison, 1983]). Although researchers could travel to the Society or one of its area research centers to hear the powerful testimonies recorded in the collection, the stories have not previously been available to a larger audience. By printing selections from the interviews, this volume presents multiple accounts of the Holocaust through the survivors eyes.

The number of Holocaust survivors who moved to Wisconsin is hard to determine. Some scholars estimate the total number of survivors who settled in the United States to be about 140,000. Milwaukee's and Madison's Jewish communities took the lead in state efforts to resettle survivors, although survivors couldand still canbe found in many other communities. The Milwaukee Jewish Family Services, an organization that handled the resettlement of refugees, reported that 150 European Jews came to Milwaukee in the 1930s and an additional 550 came between 1948 and 1950. Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky, who coordinated resettlement in Madison, recalled that twenty-four families came to that city in the postwar period. Thus, it seems reasonable to estimate that between 1,000 and 2,000 survivors came to Wisconsin.

The interviews that appear here have been selected to reflect a variety of Holocaust experiences. By their very nature, memoirs of Holocaust survivors, written or oral, are not representative in any statistical sense. They offer accounts of those who survived the war because of their youth, health, or luck. Furthermore, the interviews took place thirty-five years after the close of World War II, and the interviewees ranged in age at that time from forty-five to seventy-three. The narratives come from persons who were in their teens, twenties, or thirties during the war.

As a genre, oral history has a number of strengths and weaknesses. Because the interviews took place so many years after the described events, there is a danger of lost precision and detail, although many narrators offer remarkably full and minute accounts of events. Furthermore, such recollections normally do not have the narrative structure and clarity of form usually found in written works composed for publication. These shortcomings, however, are offset by the gain in emotional depth offered by first-person accounts. Furthermore, while some of the narrators have written and published their memoirs, many of the interviews here record the stories of individuals who because of their education or personal inclination are unlikely to write memoirs.

The horrors of Nazi concentration camps have been widely publicized in recent years through films, books, and photographs. As a result, there is a tendency to homogenize experiences and assume that all European Jews came from the same social and cultural backgrounds or experienced the Holocaust in the same manner. There also is the danger of remembering those who suffered primarily in their role as victims rather than as individuals with their own unique stories and richly varied cultures.

The selections in this volume have been chosen to counter these tendencies, and the accounts have been grouped by region of origin. The interviews illustrate the range of experiences of European Jews: in Holland, for example, Jews were integrated into the nation's educated professional classes, whereas in Poland and Lithuania there was a long tradition of anti-Semitism prior to the Nazi occupation. Likewise, the survivors of Auschwitz and Dachau tell very different stories from those who experienced the milder conditions of the camps in Italy. The narratives include recollections of the Jewish ghettos of Poland and Lithuania, life while hiding from the Nazis in attics and false closets in the Netherlands, and the comparatively peaceful childhood of an Austrian exile in Shanghai, China. The volume also includes accounts of survivors from Czechoslovakia and Romania who lived under Hungarian occupation as well as one from a Greek survivor. The interviews show the ways in which the war disrupted and forever changed the lives of the narrators. Yet despite their differences, these men and women tell stories of triumph because each survivor defeated the Nazi dream of annihilation.