The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

252 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
bearing witness to Nazi crimes, survivors of concentration camps invariably
‘have to refer to matters outside their own experience.’ […]
The practice of witnessing therefore required those taking on this
role to overcome the gulf that separates what they experienced and
what they were summoned to witness.’ (p. 30)
“Another route available to witnesses facing the predicament of
having to generate an account of events that they did not directly experience
is to produce claims that are congruent with already available
[alleged] knowledge. Aaron Beim and Gary Fine have suggested
that, by producing an account that corroborates rather than contradicts
existing historical claims, witnesses render their story more
credible and strengthen their status as a reliable witness. They do so
by confirming the audience’s expectation about what someone in
that position could and should have seen. Therefore, although testimonies
of survivors are predominantly based on personal experience,
and are framed as such (this after all is the source of their cultural
power), they will more often than not be embellished with ‘historical
claims consistent with institutionally legitimated information’
of the kind ‘found in textbooks or other cultural objects’. This is, for
instance, why testimonies of Auschwitz survivors recorded after
1993, when Schindler’s List was first shown, are more likely to contain
descriptions of events resembling the film’s famous shower scene
than those collected before that date. Or why, in the words of
Geoffrey Hartman, ‘every Auschwitz survivor seems to have gone
through a selection by Mengele, as if he had manned his post 24
hours a day.’” (pp. 30f.)
As I will show now in my summary of witness statement about the
“gas vans” in general, what Byford states about a “gas van” at Banjica
is basically true for all “gas van” claims. Except that for these we have a
few seemingly corroborating, yet on closer look very suspicious documents.
Regarding the alleged gassings of Jews in Serbia, the evidentiary
basis is actually very meager, as Walter Manoschek conceded (1995, p.
169, note 2):
“Only a few written documents exist about the gassing of the
Jews in Serbia. Of the Jewish inmates of the Semlin camp only
roughly half a dozen people survived, which by now have all died.
When describing the events, we essentially depend on the statements
of the perpetrators during trials – except for some extant reports and
interviews or letters of the survivors.”