The Historiography of the Holocaust

250 Andrew Charlesworth
have the potential to make us confront what Lifton calls ‘the killer self’ that is
in all of us and not safely distance ourselves from perpetrators as monsters and
robots. 75
Notes
1 Such an inventory is provided in M. Gilbert, Macmillan Atlas of the Holocaust, 5th
edition (London: Macmillan, 2002). The topographies and landscapes of Holocaust
sites are ignored.
2 C. Lanzmann, Shoah (London: Academy Video 1986).
3 A talk he gave at Yad Vashem in July 1991. I have to thank Pamela Hope Levin for
this reference.
4 Lanzmann, interview with Hilberg in Shoah.
5 P. Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Abacus, 1991), p. 16. Characteristically, Hugo Gryn
has one of the best descriptions of the first view of Birkenau, but being on one of the
Hungarian transports in 1944 his train arrived along the new train spur and on to
the new ramp. Those prisoners were able later to orient themselves as the point of
arrival was within the camp and observed on later occasions. H. Gryn, Chasing Shadows
(London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 174.
6 A. Charlesworth and M. Addis, ‘Memorialisation and the Ecological Landscapes of
Holocaust Sites: the Cases of Auschwitz and Plaszow’, Landscape Research, 27 (2002),
229–51.
7 For understanding the discipline of such cartographic representations, see P. Gould,
‘A Note on Research into the Diffusion of Development’, Journal of Modern African
Studies, 2 (1964), 122–7.
8 A. Charlesworth, ‘Spielberg’s List: Schindler, Authentic History and the Lie of the
Landscape’, in Studying the Landscape, ed. I. Robertson and P. Richards (London:
Edward Arnold, 2003), pp. 93–107.
9 T. Keneally, Schindler’s Ark (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983), p. 178.
10 These different discourses on the Germans’ behaviour are discussed with relation to
the topography of the camps in A. Charlesworth, ‘A Foreign Field that is Forever
Spielberg’s’, Cultural Geographies (forthcoming).
11 A. Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary (London: Pimlico, 1991),
p. 508.
12 Lanzmann, Shoah, testimonies of Suchomel and Bomba.
13 Tory, Surviving the Holocaust.
14 Lanzmann, Shoah, scene outside the church at Chelmno where Polish Catholic
witnesses relate how the Jews imprisoned inside the church called on Jesus and
Mary.
15 M. Greenbaum, The Jews of Lithuania (Jerusalem: Gefen, 1995), pp. 308–9.
16 R. Reder, Belzec (Krakow: Fundacja Judaica/Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum,
1999), p. 142; M. Treganza (personal communication).
17 D. Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press,
1990), p. 78.
18 R. Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
(Oxford: Perseus Press, 2002), chapter 11.
19 T. Richmond, Konin (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 450–5.
20 F. Piper, Head of Department of Historical Research, Auschwitz-Birkenau State
Museum (personal communication).