Bad Pole Holocaust Survivor Testimony Unreliable Wieviorka

The Era of the Witness, by Annette Wieviorka. 2006

Jewish Holocaust Testimonies Unreliable. They Should Be Subject to the Same Skeptical Vetting Process As Are All Other Testimonies

This French author, a Holocaust historian, surveys the history of Shoah-related memorial writing, beginning during WWII. This includes Jewish diarists and chroniclers. She then surveys the early postwar attempts of Jews to write down the events of the Shoah. From then, she moves on to the Eichmann trial, and numerous other events related to the publicizing of the Holocaust.

Author Wieviorka includes fascinating statistics in her book. For instance, in 1949, one third of Israel’s population consisted of Holocaust survivors–350,000 of them. (pp. 72-73). The HOLOCAUST series, televised in 1978, reached an audience of 120 million television viewers. (p. 98).

SHOULD HOLOCAUST-SURVIVOR TESTIMONIES BE PRIVILEGED? NO

Annette Wieviorka, the author, treats Holocaust-survivor accounts with some skepticism, (quote) Lucy Dawidowicz expressed an opinion shared by most of her colleagues: “The transcribed testimonies I have examined have been full of errors in dates, names of participants, and places, and there are evident misunderstandings of the events themselves.” Thus, for Dawidowicz, nothing can be salvaged from testimony, which is seen as incapable of reporting facts in a pure positivist mode and, above all, incapable of generating a historically accurate narrative. (unquote). (pp. xiii-xiv). [To see the original quote from Dawidowicz, and in more detail, please see: The Holocaust and the Historians.]

Evidently, the assessment of survivor testimonies by Dawidowicz, and even more that of Wieviorka, is diametrically opposite of that of the likes of Jan T. Gross and Jan Grabowski vel Abrahamer. The latter two seriously state that Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies should automatically be accepted as factual, as they are the voice of victims. [As if this fact automatically conferred reliability, or as if Poles under the Nazi occupation were not ALSO victims.] Clearly, historic objectivity requires that no one group’s testimonies should be privileged, or otherwise exempt from the normal processes of historical scrutiny.

For more on the lack of automatic credibility of Holocaust survivor testimonies, see my reviews of Christopher R. Browning COLLECTED MEMORIES, and Bettina Stangneth EICHMANN BEFORE JERUSALEM.

WHY JEWISH CHILDREN WERE ALSO SYSTEMATICALLY MURDERED

The Holocaust came about when Hitler took collective revenge on Europe’s Jews for “international Jewry starting another war”. Wieviorka cites a German-language source that quotes Heinrich Himmler (spoken October 6, 1943) for an additional reason that Jewish women and children were targeted for destruction, (quote) “I did not feel I had the right to exterminate the men–that is, to kill them or have them killed–while allowing their children to grow up and take revenge upon our children and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken of making this nation vanish from the face of the earth…” (unquote).(p. 2).