The Historiography of the Holocaust

494 Zoë Waxman
the survivors. In addition, seven were published in French, six in Hungarian
and five in English. 29 The fact that these books were published at all demonstrates
that there was a market for this type of literature in a variety of
languages, although it was very different from the huge market that exists
today. Survivors were also involved in the compilation of the Yizkor Bikher
(memorial books). Written in Hebrew, Yiddish or a mixture of the two
languages, they are dedicated to the memory of Jewish life that was destroyed.
The books (some 900 have been written) contain diaries and other literary
items dating from the Holocaust period and include articles by historians and
survivors on the histories of the vanished communities; details of pre-war
Jewish life; life in the ghettos, the uprisings and resistance; concentration
camps, labour camps and death camps; the attitudes of the local populations;
the plight of the survivors; and details regarding immigration to Israel. 30
However, the majority of testimonies – including diaries written during the
Holocaust – did not find publishers until the mid-1960s. Although Primo Levi’s
first book, Survival in Auschwitz, written just a few months after his return to
Italy (following a number of repatriation camps in the Soviet Union) found
a publisher in 1947, it did not attract interest until much later. He reflects:
The manuscript was turned down by a number of important publishers; it
was accepted in 1947 by a small publisher who printed only 2,500 copies
and then folded. So this first book of mine fell into oblivion for many years:
perhaps also because in all of Europe those were difficult times of mourning
and reconstruction and the public did not want to return in memory to the
painful years of the war that had just ended. 31
It was not only the lack of interest that made publishers reluctant to accept
survivors’ testimonies. Survivors had not realized that their very survival had
made them objects of suspicion and unease. Primo Levi was soon to discover
that people would ‘judge with facile hindsight, or...perhaps feel cruelly
repelled’ 32 by survivors’ accounts. With the exception of Survival in Auschwitz,
which did find a major publisher, 33 few memoirs were published during the
1950s. However, survivors did not abandon the commitment to bear witness.
Elie Wiesel, who was deported to Auschwitz as a teenager, points to the enormity
of the Nazi genocide as meaning that survivors have no choice but to tell
their stories: ‘I have written them in order to testify. My role is the role of the
witness.... Not to tell, or to tell another story, is...to commit perjury.’ 34
It was not until sometime between 1957 and 1959 that the English word
‘holocaust’ was used to describe the murder of European Jewry during the
Second World War 35 when English-speaking writers and historians began to
acknowledge that what had happened to the Jews needed to be understood as
a separate historical event. 36 However, as Peter Novick points out, it was not