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THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF THE HOLOCAUST
By Martin Gilbert

(April 27, 1990) - The Liberation of the camps not only taught the world about the Holocaust, it seemed to satisfy the world's need to know any more about it.

When, within hours of the liberation of Dachau, a non-Jewish American lieutenant, incensed by what he had seen as he entered the camp, set up a machine-gun and shot to death as many as 300 of the camp guards who had been lined up after identification, it seemed that justice had been done for all time.

Within a decade of the Holocaust, its history also seemed to have been written. Gerald Reitlinger's book, The Final Solution, first published in 1953, and Lord Russell of Liverpool's The Scourge of the Swastika, published a year later, told all that anybody could want to know - or so it seemed then - and in such stark detail that, for people of my age then - in their early teens - they were considered almost too vivid, almost pornographic.

Did anything remain still to be done, or still to be said, about the Holocaust? When the trial of Adolf Eichmann began here in Jerusalem in 1960, the progressive and respected British newspaper, The Manchester Guardian, expressed the view, in a leading editorial article, that the time had passed for such trials, that Israel was wrong to stir up the memories and hatreds of the past. Thirty years later, on March 19, the British Parliament voted to introduce legislation to prosecute any Nazi war criminals who might be living in Britain. Thus, the business many hoped was finished in 1960 is still on the agenda in 1990.

It was not only the immediate horror of the events which seemed to relegate them into limbo once the war was over. Political considerations were also strong. The Cold War had led the Western Allies to turn to Germany as a potential bulwark against the Soviets. That same summer of 1948, a British government department sent an instruction to all Commonwealth countries about the then ongoing search for Nazi war criminals in their midst: "In view of future political developments in Germany ... it is now necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible."

The past will not go away by government instruction. Indeed, in the past two years, the two principal countries to which that instruction was sent, Canada and Australia, have passed laws and instituted legal proceedings to search out war criminals and bring them to trial.

Tracking down the criminals is not the only unfinished business of the Holocaust. Many other aspects of those times are still with us today. For those whose nearest and dearest were murdered, the Holocaust can never become a part of history. Anyway, history has not spoken any final word on the Holocaust years.

UNTIL RECENTLY, the first and main records of the fate of the Jews in the Nazi era have been the Germans' own records. These documents, captured by the Allies in 1945 and used at the Nuremberg trials, after which thousands of them were published, became the basis of most published accounts in the following 30 years. These include Raul Hilberg's pioneering work of 1961, The Destruction of the European Jews.

Less frequently used in general histories until recently, have been the testimonies of survivors. Yet these, in their already published form, cover every period and region. Some of them have become classical texts in themselves, capable both of informing and of moving the reader to tears. Every memoir contains some episode that remains in the mind of the reader, such as the last words of Moshe Pozner of Wloclawek, recorded by the friend who was with him when he died: "I am tired. I cannot go on. One thing I demand of you; you have to make every effort to survive. To live. Guard yourself, as one has to guard every document - every piece of evidence - from this time of our universal destruction."

On the dedication page of her Holocaust Reader, Dr. Dawidowicz quoted from Zelig Kalmanovich, writing in the Vilna Ghetto on December 27, 1942: "History will cherish your memory, people of the ghetto. Your least expression will be studied, your struggle for human dignity will inspire poems ..."

Poems, songs, letters, diaries, photographs and films, all have their place in the memorials and museums now being created throughout the world. Despite fine intentions, the setting up of such memorials is fraught with the danger of controversy and ill-will. In Denver, when funds ran out, the local Ukrainian comunity contributed to the local Holocaust memorial; as a result it honours the memory of "Jews, Ukrainians and others."

Asked what he would have written, James Young, an American student of such memorials, suggested bitterly: "To the memory of the 33,000 Jews murdered at Babi Yar, and to the Ukrainians who killed them."

Sometimes, remembrance comes only as a part of the changing political climate. A month ago, thanks to the efforts of the Joint Distribution Committee, Yad Vashem's travelling exhibition of the Holocaust opened in Odessa - the first such exhibition there since the destruction of Odessa's Jews 49 years ago. That exhibition will now be shown in Odessa permanently.

The current revolutions in Eastern Europe are continually reminding us of the unfinished business of the Holocaust, and addressing themselves to it. This month, in a televized session of the East German parliament, Speaker Sabine Berman-Pohl declared, for the first time in the state's history: "East Germany's first freely elected parliament admits joint responsibility on behalf of the people for the humiliation, expulsion and murder of Jewish women, men and children. We feel sad and ashamed. We ask the Jews of the world to forgive us." East Germany will now revise its museums, including its concentration camp museums, to include the Jewish dimension. It is not the first former East Bloc country to do so.

Nine months ago, in July last year, the Czechoslovak government announced that it would restore the Holocaust memorial in Prague, on which were inscribed the names of 77,000 Jews from Bohemia and Moravia who were deported and murdered. The names had been removed during the Brezhnev era.

HITLER INTENDED to destroy Jewish life, as well as Jewish lives. The museums and memorials of today seek to ensure that Jews in future generations know not only about the destruction of the war years, but also about the vibrant Jewish life of the years, and generations, before the war - the life of more than 10,000 Jewish communities that were destroyed.

At the Simon Weisenthal Centre's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, for example, a special effort has been made to give the visitor not only the testimonies of survivors, but also a sense of Jewish life before the Holocaust. The same is true of the Holocaust Memorial being set up in Washington.

In order to make sure that, once the generation of survivors has passed, their story will nevertheless survive - and be available in the most powerful form possible - we need to continue publication of testimonies of those who witnessed the terrible events at first hand; and also the publication of testimony of life before the tragedy: of the rich world of Jewish creativity; the world of six million living, striving, hoping Jews. The scale of what remains to be done is formidable. Yad Vashem alone, which began recording testimonies in 1954, now has 30,000. Many hundreds of these, perhaps several thousand, merit publication. There are also many testimonies that have yet to be recorded. It is important that this task be pursued with vigour, while time remains.

One of the most important aspects of unfinished business is to find, publish and make known the voices of those who were murdered. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Hitler's victims made some sort of written record. These records range from substantial and widely read diaries - such as those of Anne Frank in Amsterdam, which was first published more than 25 years ago - to letters, postcards or scraps of paper, often thrown from deportation trains. Many collections of archive materials were made in the ghettos. Four years ago, Dr. Joseph Kermish of Yad Vashem published the most comprehensive volume so far of the material collected by Ringelblum and his circle in the Warsaw Ghetto. The diary of Avraham Tory, secretary of the Kovno Ghetto, is being published in English this month.

Sometimes by accident, but much more often by German design, the evidence set down by many of Hitler's victims has been destroyed for all time. Yet it was not in vain that the venerable Jewish historian, Simon Dubnov, is said to have cried out, as he was shot in Riga in December 1941: "Schreibt und farschreibt!" ("Write and record!") Many who had no knowledge of Dubnov's injunction instinctively followed its message. Less than a month after Dubnov was killed in Riga, a young Polish Jew, Yakov Grojanowski, escaped from the first of the Nazi death camps, Chelmno, in western Poland. As soon as he reached the comparative safety of Warsaw, he set out in diary form everything that he had seen and heard during two weeks of horrific work burying the corpses of those who had been murdered in gas vans.

GROJANOWSKI did not survive the war, but his diary did. I was so struck by the power of his testimony - written in Yiddish and preserved at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw - that I published it in full, in English, as a complete chapter of my history of the Holocaust.

At Birkenau itself, a powerful sense of the need to leave some record drove men in the very shadow of the crematoria chimneys to write down what they saw and heard, before they, too, were murdered. Among the 100 pages of notes which he managed to hide before his own death, Salmen Lewental recorded the words of a Jewish girl in the ante-room to the gas chamber: "I am still so young, I haven't really experienced anything in life. Why should death of this kind befall me? Why?"

We shall never know this girl's name. But because of Lewental's determination to keep a record, we hear her question echo through the ages.

Lewental also witnessed the revolt of his fellow Sonderkommando [special squads] in Birkenau, and recorded details of the revolt, which he then hid in a jar and buried in the soil near one of the crematoria. Lewental's jar was discovered in 1962. Once again, as with so many who had set down some record, it survived while they did not.

At least four members of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau managed to write down notes and hide them. One of them, Salmen Gradowski, dedicated his notes to the six members of his family, including his mother Sara and his wife Sonia, who were, he wrote, "burned alive at Birkenau." In a covering letter discovered after the war together with his notes, he wrote: "Dear finder, search everywhere, in every inch of soil. Tens of documents are buried under it, mine and those of other persons, which will throw light on everything that happened here."

Many of the records which tell the story of those who were murdered are still only available in archives, or in languages other than English. Even in English, they are not always readily or widely available. The English version of the Sonderkommando manuscripts, for example, exists only in a relatively limited edition published by the State Museum at Oswiecim [Auschwitz] 17 years ago, and very hard indeed to find today.

Such testimonies must be disseminated more widely, especially for students.

One continuing gap in published material is the crucially important eye-witness testimonies and documentation presented at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem 30 years ago. These covered every region and every aspect of the Holocaust. After 30 years, as part of the unfinished business of our past, the transcripts, together with 1,000 documents, have been prepared for publication in English, in 12 volumes. This formidable task was undertaken by Dr. Daniel Frankel of the Israeli State Archives, under the guidance of former archivist Dr. Abraham Alsberg, and with the textual scrutiny of Justice Moshe Landau.

All that is missing to ensure publication are the funds. Without the money, no timetable can be set.

Here in Jerusalem, the unfinished business of the Holocaust includes trying to record the names of all who perished. By the end of 1988, Yad Vashem had two million names in its Hall of Names. Last year it acquired a further 150,000. It is still four million names short.

What do names matter?

A whole world of pain was created from fading - and in places almost illegible - names, dates of birth, place of birth and day of deportation, by Serge Klarsfeld, in his Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1942-1944, which was published in England in 1983. I was so moved by this book that, basing myself on its diligently reconstructed lists, I was able to draw more than a dozen maps in my Atlas of the Holocaust.

Anyone who doubts that a list of names can make one cry should acquire Klarsfeld's book.