The Historiography of the Holocaust

492 Zoë Waxman
a record of Jewish resistance. By leaving behind their testimony, Lewental and
Gradowksi, like the ghetto diarists, tried to find some meaning to their fate.
Gradowski writes: ‘Dear discoverer of these writings! I have a request of you:
this is the real reason I write, that my doomed life may attain some meaning,
that my hellish days and hopeless tomorrows may find a purpose in the
future.’ 24 Knowing that he could not wait until liberation to bear witness,
Gradowski buried his work before taking part in his final act of resistance: the
Sonderkommando revolt.
Like the workers of Oneg Shabbat, the Sonderkommando prisoners took pains
to bury their writings to ensure that they would not be lost. The testimonies
show both an awareness of the difficulty of recording lived experience and
simultaneously a concern to find the right way of doing so. While the rare
surviving testimony produced during the Holocaust is free from the additional
demands and organizing principles that are subsequently placed on and mediate
the testimony of survivors, it does not mean that those writing in the ghettos
and concentration camps were better able to write unmediated, objective
accounts.
It is likely that there were other prisoners who wrote testimonies that have
either been lost or destroyed. Those that did would not have been able to offer
as comprehensive accounts as Emanuel Ringelblum and members of Oneg
Shabbat were able to produce. In terms of concrete historical information, what
the testimony of a concentration camp witness can provide is extremely limited.
With the exception of those connected with the network of underground
resistance movements, they had far less access to information than was the
case for Ringelblum and his colleagues. Even if subjected to more than one
concentration camp, witnesses would still have experienced only small parts of
each one, and conditions within each camp were divergent and subject to
constant change. Furthermore, the specific nature of a particular work
kommando (labour detachment), or a prisoner’s position within the social hierarchy
of the camp, not only crucially affected a prisoner’s experiences, but also the
possibility to bear witness. Hence, the men of the Sonderkommando were aware
that they were in a unique position to witness the extent and nature of the
crimes of the SS.
The SS’s frequently repeated dictum, that no witnesses would survive to tell
the world about the suffering inflicted on the Jews, haunted many prisoners.
Szymon Laks recalls the words spoken by an SS officer in Auschwitz:
You see . . . according to the instructions of the Führer himself, not even one
Häftling [prisoner] should come out alive from any concentration camp. In
other words, there will be no one who can tell the world what has happened
here in the last few years. But even if such witnesses should be found – and
this is the essence of the brilliant plan of our Führer – NOBODY WILL