The Historiography of the Holocaust

The Topography of Genocide 217
the landscape is also passive, mute and ambiguous. This is what causes the
tension with the documentary record.
Lanzmann captures that tension in his conversation with Raul Hilberg, the
doyen of Holocaust historians. 4 The conversation is centred on a German
document recording the transport of Jews to Treblinka. Lanzmann questions
Hilberg concerning what is special about this document. The question is an
attempt by Lanzmann to reconcile that tension of evidence in his own mind.
Lanzmann says: ‘Because I was in Treblinka, and have the two things together,
Treblinka and the document.’ In other words: ‘I have stood at the place of
death Treblinka in the present and now here is the document of the event
itself, which I can also touch’, and significantly he strikes the document as he
refers to it. Lanzmann struggles with us. But what is the connection?
Hilberg the historian sees no connection, no tension of evidence. Hilberg the
representative of historical science puts his faith in the document because, as
he says, when the survivors are dead that is all that will be left. That is what
makes it special. Lanzmann visually challenges the point of view that history is
simply the written record. He ends the interview with a view of the bucolic
landscape of Treblinka. The place is still there. There will still be a place called
Treblinka after all the survivors are dead.
The piece of paper Hilberg holds is not powerful enough for Lanzmann. The
immutable stones of the landscape and the names of places appear to hold
greater power. How often in Shoah does Lanzmann dwell on a place name sign
on a railway station board, at the foot of a roadside crucifix, on a street corner?
By so doing he transforms what we have come to see as exceptional and
unique into the ordinary landscape features they are. It is the interpretation
of these ordinary features of the landscape of the Holocaust that we seek to
do here.
This is not as easy as it might seem. The topography of the camp and the
landscape beyond the wire are often ignored by survivors in their accounts. It
is as if the terrifying ordeal they were experiencing meant that they became
self-absorbed. This may account for the fact that the old ramp at Auschwitz is
so overlooked in such narratives. Even Primo Levi who arrived there is perfunctory
in his description, yet it is here that the majority of captives sent to Auschwitz
arrived. 5 Granted it is a rather nondescript site and over time the pictures of
the new ramp in the Auschwitz Album have gained an iconic status in terms of
a landscape of arrival and selection. Even so, one might have expected more.
Equally surprising is that SS and camp personnel diaries and accounts again
write about minutiae: often in their case their diet, personal circumstances and
then their duties in the camp. But the landscapes of the camps and of the area –
in Auschwitz the land we know they rode across and the rivers they bathed in –
go for nothing. It is perhaps for these reasons that scholarly accounts of the camps
deal rather perfunctorily with descriptions of topography and landscape.