Rezension zu Opfer und Täter zugleich?
SHOFAR Vol. 22, Winter 2004
Rezension von Beate Meyer
When the Israeli-Swiss psychologist Revital Ludewig-Kedmi was
looking for first- and second-generation interviewees for her
dissertation on Jews who had been prisonerfunctionaries, a
colleague suspected she either had to be a very brave person or a
bad one. The present book is testimony to her courage; nothing, at
least in the text, gives the slightest indication of the
latter.
Yet this work is nonetheless a daunting challenge. It compels us to
read in harrowing detail about the depressing experiences of the
Jews who-voluntarily, under See »Dating the Shoah: In Your Blood
Shall You Live,« in Zev Garber, Shoah: The Paradigmatic Genocide
(Lanham, MD: University Press of Amrica, 1994), Pp. 67-78.
2Cited in Joseph B. Tyson, »Anti-Judaism and Biblical Authority:
The Case of Luke-Acts« (paper given at the second Remembering for
the Future conference, held in Berlin March 13-17, 1994) and quoted
from Ernst Christian Helmrich, The German Churches Under Hitler
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), p. 139. duress, or
by mere chance-accepted responsibilities and functions in Jews
Councils (Judenräte), ghettos, and concentration camps. The focus
here is more on the psychological wounds than the bodily
sufferings, those mental scars which continue to afflict even later
generations: the perversion of the personal and social morality of
the victims entrapped in a system of compulsion in which ultimately
the survival of each doomed individual demanded the life of
another.
From the perspective of many other ghetto or camp inmates, the
prisonerfunctionaries appeared to hold in their hands the power
over life and death. And in stark contrast with the masses of the
powerless, the Kapos and Judenrat members often were in fact in a
position to utilize a modicum of latitude, however miniscule, in
order to pass on some information or make a decision with potential
positive or negative consequences for their own family (and/or own
person) and the members of the Jewish community. That sliver of
borrowed power enabled those interviewed by the author to assist
some. Yet in so doing, they were always aiding the enemy and
abetting his ends. For Ludewig-Kedmi, both block chiefs in the
camps and Judenrat members in the ghettos who managed to survive
faced similar problems later on in coming to terms with their
experiences and actions: »At the heart of the moral dilemma was the
context of compulsion, in which to help one/'s own family, friends
or oneself meant at the same time possible hurt and injury for
others. It was a question weighing off assistance against potential
harm. For both groups, to disobey orders meant to put their own
lives at risk« (p. 29). The author believes there were no
demonstrable gender-specific differences in the strategies for
coping with their experiences developed by male and female
prisonerfunctionaries after liberation, a contention feminist
scholars would likely dismiss.
In the four families she chose as representative cases, devoting a
lengthy chapter to each, Ludewig-Kedmi interviewed one male and
three females in the first generation, along with two sons and two
daughters, as well as a few other family members. The
firstgeneration interviewees all lived in Israel after the war. For
many decades, Israeli society ostracized former
prisoner-functionaries for their specific persecution experiences,
even indicting them for their alleged crimes. The public image of
history was dominated by Zionist and partisan fighters; later
attention also turned to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. If
the interviewees wished to talk about their experiences beyond
their immediate family circle, they had to adapt them to social
expectations or be prepared for possible sanctions. Consequently,
the individual strategies which former functionaries employed to
try to reestablish a moral self-image are stamped not only by their
structures of personality before the persecution and their
experiences under German occupation, but they also bear the
decisive imprint of conditions prevailing after the liberation. In
the four exemplary cases, the author highlights differing
strategies for coping with their past utilized by her interviewees:
heroism, shame, family loyalty, and solidarity. She bolsters her
presentation by references to the methodology used, along with
charts and detailed excerpts from interviews. Ludewig-Kedmi
succeeds in providing the reader with a clearer picture of the
interdependencies between experiences, strategies for coping with
ones past, and intergenerational processes, packaging her insights
in a readily readable form. She builds on research by Gabriele
Rosenthal, Dan Bar-On and others, significantly expanding our
knowledge.
Yet a word of criticism is also in order: oral history that avoids
comparison of the interview scripts with the documentary source
materials frequently runs the risk of accepting the perspective
interviewees have or the explanations they give for events
incomprehensible to them. While the research literature or study of
the documentary sources can often explain the background to some
occurrence or correct the picture of a certain chain of events,
verbal dialogues generally cannot be subjected to any kind of
verification. That doesn/'t mean the dialogue actually took place
in this recounted way. Their narration shows how the interviewee
concentrates (and thus restructures) an event in its retelling. To
illustrate what I mean: in the present study, an interviewee
describes a confrontation with SS Dr. Mengele: during a selection,
she refused his orders to leave her family, whereupon Mengele
threatened her with his revolver, while assuring her that if she
left her family now, she would be allowed to see them later on (p.
132). This is a portion of the construction of the narrative that
can be explained (and well needs to be!). However, to conclude that
the dialogue actually did take place in this precise manner is
quite bold: it constitutes a departure from the solid ground of
scientific analysis, instead presenting as veridical the narrated
position of an interviewee. Such passages should, at the very
least, be marked in the authors text by use of the quotative
subjunctive mode of indirect speech, to underscore their »reported«
character. Similarly, repeatedly throughout the text, Ludewig-Kedmi
seems to adopt the perspective of her interviewees regarding »the
Germans,« who are always »the Nazis.« It is of course
understandable that Holocaust survivors experienced their
persecutors as a kind of threatening monolith. But if a scholar
reproduces this view, she closes the door on certain possibilities
for analyzing the relations between persecutors and their
victims-relations which could, even within this context of
compulsion, have had a partially differential configuration.