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| You are here: 2000 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Workshops on Remembrance and Representation / Workshop 5 on Remembrance, "Testimony in Remembrance" / Presentation by Mr. Arno Lustiger | |||||||||
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Participants Countries and organizations Conference documentation Conference programme 
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Report from Workshop 5 on Remembrance: "Testimony in Remembrance" Presentation by Mrs. Inge Deutschkron Presentation by Mrs. Hédi Fried Presentation by Mr. Arno Lustiger Presentation by Mr. Arno Lustiger Lustiger, Arno Presentation by Mr. Arno Lustiger I was prisoner in the following concentration camps: Sosnowitz, Annaberg, Ottmuth, Auschwitz-Blechhammer (Prisoner Nr A 5592), Groß Rosen, Buchenwald (Prisoner Nr. 124880) and Buchenwald-Langenstein. I survived the death march from Blechhammer to Groß Rosen in January 1945. The death march from Langenstein in April 1945 I survived only because I escaped on the fourth night, was caught and escaped again on the way to the execution site. Later I was found half dead by an American army tank patrol. After reconvalescence I served as as a uniformed army interpreter. The role of survivor There is no way to understand the holocaust in all it´s significance without the testimonies of the survivors. The files of the perpetrators have been processed and researched for decades ad nauseam, whereas the thousands of testimonies of the survivors and resistance fighters, filed away in the archives in Poland, Russia, Israel, France and in other countries are still waiting for serious research. As very many documentations and books, based solely on German documents, have been already published, it is about time to publish researched testimonies of the victims and survivors. Four fields of research should be tackled without delay and the results published as fast as possible: The resistance put up by the European Jews in whole occupied Europe.
Three examples should suffice to show the injustice and cruelty metet out to the victims of Nazi persecution, both, against the dead and survived, resistance fighters or non-combattants, by these self-appointed accusers. The history of the rescue attempts and it´s relative successes. A Black Book should be published about the failure of rescue plans and operations and acts by omission or commission of the officials and statesmen of the allied and neutral countries who did sabotage the rescue attempts, which if successful, could save thousands of Jews. The real behavior of the victims of the Nazi persecution instead of slanderous opinions not based on their testimonies. The insulting clichés about the behaviour of the doomed Jews of Europe which are marked by their alleged cowardliness, compliance, submission, collaboration and lack of passive or armed resistance, should be rectified and correced. Raul Hilberg writes in his monumental book: Cases of active resistance during the catasrophe from 1933 to 1945 were rare and without significance. Above all, when and wherever they occured, were these activities acts of last (never of the first) moment.In the closing remarks, his "ceterum censeo", he writes:For the first time the victims plunged themselves - caught in the strait-jacket of their history - psychically and physically into the catastrophe. The destruction of the Jews was therefore no mere accident. In her controversial book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" Hannah Arendt arrived at her conclusions without any resarch of her own; her judgement was solely based on Hilberg´s book. She claimed that through collaboration of their leaders the Jews themselves contributed to the their annihilation and that this collaboration diminished the differences between the murderers and their victims who went to their death passively, without offering any resistance. According to Bruno Bettelheim the doomed Jews were possessed by a death wish. He writes: So it happened as it must: those beholden to the death drive destroy also themselves... However, the behaviour of the Jews, who, without offering resistance, permitted themselves to be walked to the gas chambers, cannot be comprhended either without reference to the death tendencies that exist in us all. In his book "The Informed Heart" he writes: Millions of Jews of Europe who did not or could not escape in time or go underground as many thousands did, could at least have marched as free men against the SS, rather than to first grovel, then wait to be rounded up for their extermination, and finally walk themselves to the gas chambers. All three authors had the chance, denied to millions of Jews, to leave the German Reich for the safe haven of America without complying with the advice they had in store for others. The still missing response of the scientific community to this problem is a problem by itself. Through my books and publications about the Jewish resistance in all occupied Europe only a handful of writers, if any, dares today to repeat this merciless nonsense. Bibliography Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem, New York 1963 Bruno Bettelheim: The Informed Heart, London 1961 Bruno Bettelheim: Surviving the Holocaust, London 1986 Nathan Eck: Historical Research or Slander (on R. Hilberg´s book) Yad Vashem Studies VI, Jerusalem 1967 Israel Gutman: Jewish Resistance: Questions and Assesment, in: The Historiography of the Holocaust Period, Jerusalem 1988 Raul Hilberg: The Destruction of European Jewry, Chicago 1961 Arno Lustiger: Zum Kampf auf Leben und Tod! Vom Widerstand der Juden 1933-1945, Cologne 1994, Munich 1997 >> Back to top |
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