David Prestidge

I.

Kitty La Perriere makes an astounding and insightful proposition in the February 1998 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. La Perriere, Czechoslovakian by birth, fortuitously found herself on vacation in Switzerland when Germany began its relentless sweep across the countryside of her homeland. A young girl when the war started, she never reclaimed her Czech citizenship. Like so many displaced Jews during those forfeited years, she survived the war only to find that her transplant to Switzerland was, in fact, a permanent uprooting. Communism filled the vacuum of power the retreating Germans left.

Statelessness. La Perriere wandered to America and there made her new home. This forced a reevaluation of her identity and, she says, contributed to the hybridization of her own, pre-war memories. "When we move from context to context in discontinuous ways," she writes, "and when no one is there to share our perceptions, our memory does strange things; we invalidate what we know. We forget. We reinterpret."

In the same way, Claude Lanzmann's The Shoah recognizes, all to well, the pitfalls of recall. When autobiography no longer credulously supports itself, history suffers and revisionists, who claim their own accounts to be no less implausible than the conventional version, gain an upper hand. The Shoah may be - as some people have described it - a documentary artfully practicing a pose of objective, disinterested impartiality. But the film is more than that - it is a documentary with the polemical intent of discrediting frightfully persistent assertions that the Holocaust never took place. While taking into account and admitting to La Perriere's contention that all experience filters through a subjective, and therefore, questionable source, the film establishes the veracity of variable human perception by drawing attention to parallelism in these reports.

Once that's accomplished the film concentrates on more important issues: the unique, emergent language that mediated the Nazi's systematic annihilation of European Jewry. That language terminated in a metaphor adopted by the Nazis and their victims - it is a metaphor of death.

II.

"It's a fact: we tend to forget, thank God, the bad times more easily than the good. The bad times are repressed."

"I'll help you remember."

        --Mr Lanzmann to Dr. Franz Grassler, Deputy to Dr. Auerswald, Nazi commissioner of the Warsaw ghettoo

H.H Price writes, in his epistemic treatise on the value of testimony, Belief (1969), that we gather most of what we know about the world not from first hand experience but from testimony. For the philosopher, this presents a problem. People might not be telling us the truth. Indeed, if one has a conspiracy theorist's turn of mind one might find precious little reason to believe anything one knows.

Price defends, before he categorically rejects, such wholesale skepticism. "In a civilized and literate society, the amount of testimony which any of us has been able to test and verify for himself is far too small to justify any inductive estimate of the overall reliability of testimony in general...Indeed, the habit of accepting testimony is so deep-rooted in all of us that we fail to realize how very limited the range of each person's first hand observation and memory is." But following this type of logic leads only to schizophrenia.

So Price champions a single, simple policy when it comes to estimating the value of testimony: "Conduct your thoughts and your actions as if what there is said to be (or to have been) there is (or was) more often than not." In other words, believe what you are told unless you have good reason not to.

There's a catch: "Our policy will work best," Price says, "in a community of honest and hardheaded empiricists who have a respect for facts and for one another. It must also be assumed, I think, that the majority of the persons from whom one receives testimony are sane or in their right minds, and are usually capable of distinguishing between hallucinations and normal perceptions."

When I watch The Shoah emotions from every quarter advance on me: anger, revulsion, pity, grief - outstanding, unmitigated grief. I think that, in some cases, those who want to dismiss the Holocaust are motivated by a genuine inability to believe that such a thing could happen. I think they want to believe that survivors of death camps cannot be trusted as empiricist, that, for whatever reason, they cannot distinguish between hallucination and perception and therefore their testimony cannot be trusted. To believe otherwise admits to a thoroughly depressing truth about the human condition.

More to the point, speakers in The Shoah, when asked about Hitler's "final solution", often run up against a wall. What Hitler did, they say, was unimaginable, beyond description, unspeakable. Human comprehension crumbles in the face of the Holocaust. How could one person formulate such a retrogressive (to say nothing of monstrously immoral) policy of annihilation? How could it be put into practice?

The Shoah answers these questions. But first it must convince us that, despite the horrific nature of the event, despite the impassive coarseness by which Hitler's Nazi party, from the bureaucratic elite to the SS's rank and file, liquidated entire villages with a seeming calm and mechanistic reserve, despite our unwillingness to trust the unbelievable, we must.

III.

La Perriere compares her own memories of the war and its aftermath to photographic artifacts that, with time, have dulled. "Negatives I might remember about that time or might have diligently reconstructed during conventional psychotherapy lose their definition in the surge of intense love and longing that any mention of those years produces in me." One cannot escape the inevitable degradation of the individual memory. So Lanzmann, with an assiduous attention to detail and similarity in a body of reports, of testimony, compels our confidence in the witnesses he chooses to showcase. We see this in the director's questions and witnesses replies:

Lanzmann: Your meeting with Carel - how long after your arrival did it happen?

Richard Glazar: It was...around twenty minutes after we reached Treblinka...

Talking to Franz Schomel, a former Nazi, about Treblinka, insisting on detail:

Lanzmann: Can you please describe, very precisely, your first impression of Treblinka. Very precisely. It's very important. What were the vans like?

Schomel: Like the ones that deliver cigarettes here. They were enclosed, with double leaf rear doors.

Lanzmann: What color?

Schomel: The color the Germans used-green, ordinary....

Talking to Franz Schalling, a concentration camp guard:

Lanzmann: Describe the gas vans. Were there many of these drivers? Were there two, three five ten? Did the driver sit in the cab of the van? Did he race the motor? Could you hear the sound of the motor? Was it a loud noise? ...

Talking to Jan Piwonski, Sobibor:

Piwonski: ...and here there was that silence, no work crews, a really total silence. Forty cars had arrived, and then...nothing. It was all very strange.

Lanzmann: Can he describe that silence?

Piwonski: It was silence...a standstill in the camp. You heard and saw nothing. Nothing moved.

We locate the film's salient message at the vertices of individual testimony. Where we find agreement, where we find precise, unrehearsed detail we will also find truth. Truth manifests as a consequence of the film's aesthetic structure. Redundancy in reports of brutality, murder, methodology yields confirmation, certainty. This is Lanzmann's primary intention: to produce an inviolable historiography that only the willfully delusional could rebuke.

IV.

And the key to the entire operation from the psychological standpoint was never to utter the words that would be appropriate to the action being taken. Say nothing; do these things; do not describe them. So therefore this "Nur fur den Dienstgebrauch" (Only for internal use).
       --Raul Hilberg

From the earliest recorded documents we learn that Nazi strategists and rhetoricians declared war not just on European Jewry but also their culture and language. The practice of cultural disentitlement, especially in regard to language, Kitty La Perriere notes, could well have superceded the importance of execution when it came to satisfying the conditions of Hitler's "final solution": "I met people in the early fifties who within a couple of years of arriving in America spoke their native language brokenly-and soon not at all. Today we recognize that in abandoning language we abandoned a whole way of knowing, a way of being, a part of who we once were."

Language takes center stage in any discussion of The Shoah; the spoken and written word emerges as the connecting ligature in the film and the book. Through parallel accounts, mediated by language, Lanzmann demonstrate the absolute inviolability of the Shoah as historical fact. This prefaces Lanzmann's secondary and related objective. People who abandon their native tongue, La Perriere tells us, risk losing a way of knowing. More frightening, I think, is what emerges to fill the void. In Nazi Germany what emerged was a language and metaphor of death. Those who would answer why or how the Holocaust progressed as it did, would do well to start here.

David Prestidge writes: I think Mauriac said, "If you want a man's autobiography, look at the books he has read." I would add: "If you want his biographical sketch, look at his coffee table." On mine: Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise opened to page 119 (underlined: "...and so from shock to shock you live/ A hollow, pale affirmative..."). Also The Errancy by Jorie Graham. Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing by Coser et al. A folded copy of The New York Times Sunday classifieds. Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations by Al Franken. Nabokov's Despair. A dog-eared first edition of Alison J. Smith: Collected Letters.