302
PARTISAN REVIEW
THE HOLOCAUST
IN
THE ACADEMY
UNANSWERED QUFSTIONS. NAZI GERMANY AND
THE GENOCIDE OF THE JEWS. Edited by Franc;ois Furet.
Schocken Books.
$24.95.
WHY DID THE HEAVENS NOT DARKEN? THE "FINAL
SOLUTION" IN HISTORY. By Arno Mayer.
Pantheon.
$27.95.
I thought
Shoah
was a thoughtful rendition of the Holocaust–
until a survivor ofAuschwitz told me that it didn't at all depict how awful it
really was. And I considered the scholarship on the Holocaust one of the
most serious and thoughtful enterprises - until reading these two books, one
after the other. For I was not aware to what extent the Holocaust has be–
come an academic subject, full of data, statistics and facts that, except in rare
instances, leave out the suffering of the men, women and children who died.
None of these numbers could recreate for me the dread of knowing, for ex–
ample, exactly what happened to all my grandparents, my father's brother,
my mother's sister, my cousin: were they shot in Riga, marched to
Auschwitz, put to work before being gassed?
Although such is the problem of all historical writing, brought on
by the need of turning corpses into statistics, I was put off by the emphasis
on and the disagreements over, for instance, the exact moment the "final so–
lution" was decided upon. I do not mean to imply that we ought not to know
whether, as Lucy Dawidowicz maintains, it was the culmination ofa grand
design foreshadowed in Hitler's
Mein Kampf,
or whether it was made by
Hitler himself, by Heidrich or Himmler, but that the centrality of such details
elevates the scholarship over the enormity of the occurrence. The somewhat
exaggerated objectivity became particularly apparent to me when reading
one of the more peripheral essays in Furet's volume, "Theological Interpre–
tations of the Holocaust" by Amos Finkelstein who quoted Primo Levi:
There comes to light the existence of two particularly well-differenti–
ated categories among men - the saved and the drowned. Other pairs
of opposites (the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the
cowards and the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are con–
siderably less distinct, they seem less essential, and above all they al–
low for more numerous and complex intermediary gradations.... In
the Lager things are different: here the struggle to survive is without
respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone.
