The Historiography of the Holocaust

458 Florin Lobont
is ascribed to highly protective care for the Jews themselves. Thus Coja refers to
the ‘good living conditions’ enjoyed by the Jewish deportees in the Transnistrian
camps, whereas Paunescu writes (in his Totusi iubirea) that the deportations
aimed at saving Jews from famine. Similarly, in Slovakia, Vnuk described the
conditions in concentration camps as ‘excellent’, whereas in Hungary, Sándor
Püski went as far as to ‘demonstrate’ that Horthy involved his country in the
war in order to save its Jews. As Shafir suggests, this line of argument leads
insidiously to what he terms ‘comparative trivialization’: the transformation of
Jewish victims into regrettable but banal casualties produced – like all the other
casualties – by the war itself, the only real perpetrator. Thus, the singularity of the
Holocaust is ‘logically’ negated and can be overshadowed by other traumatic
events, primarily by the Gulag. 68
But even many mainstream intellectuals contributed, intentionally or not, to
the trivializing comparison between the Holocaust and the Gulag (at the expense
of the former), copiously exploited by ultranationalists and antisemites in their
rush for popularity and political power. ‘Cutting across any ethnic differences,’
Shafir writes, the intellectual disputes often
concentrate...on whether a genocide prompted by racism should be placed
in the same ontological category as crimes against humanity committed on
different ideological grounds. Was ‘racial struggle’...identical with ‘class
struggle’? The difference had important operational consequences, for,
under communism, collaborationism, indeed simple acquiescence – despicable
as they might have been – had in most cases assured physical survival, which
was hardly the case with the Holocaust victims. 69
Deflectio ad absurdum: Jews as Holocaust perpetrators
The last and most appalling form of deflective negationism is that which
accuses the Jews themselves of perpetrating the Holocaust. A notorious and
infamous case belonging to this genre is that of the late Croatian president
‘historian’, Franjo Tudjman. In his 1988 book Wasteland of Historical Truth, he
alleged that the Croats were not responsible for the atrocities committed in
Jasenovac concentration camp, where many thousands of Serbs, Jews and
Romanies died under the Ustaša regime. In his endeavour to whitewash the
memory of the pro-Nazi dictator Ante Pavelic, Tudjman argued that the
accusations levelled against the Croats were mystifications aimed at casting
historical guilt onto the entire Croat people. His claim was that these groundless
incriminations constituted a post-war settling of accounts and that the main
perpetrators at Jasenovac were in fact Jews, who managed to seize the leading
positions among the inmates’ hierarchy and took full advantage of the Ustaša’s
distrust of Serbs.