History, Memory, and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities Saul Friedlander On July 9, 1942, Henry Montor, the President of the United Pales- tine Appeal, asked Richard Lichtheim, the representative of the Jewish Agency in Geneva, to send him a 1500-word article reviewing the posi- tion of the Jews in Europe. “I feel at present quite unable to write a ‘report’.” Lichtheim answered Montor on August 13, “a survey, some- thing cool and clear and reasonable. . . . So | wrote not a survey but something more personal, an article if you like, or an essay, not of 1500 words but of 4000, giving more of my own feelings than of the “facts.’. . .” Lichtheim ends his accompanying letter with “all good wishes for the New Year to you and the happier Jews of ‘God’s own country’.” Lichtheim’s essay, entitled “What is Happening to the Jews of Europe,” opens with the following two paragraphs: A letter has reached me from the United States, asking me ‘to review the position of the Jews in Europe.” This I cannot do because the Jews of Europe are today no more in a ‘position’ than the waters of a rapid rushing down into some canyon, or the dust of the desert lifted by a tomado and blown in all directions. 1 cannot even tell you how many Jews there are at present in this or that town, in this or that country, because at the very moment of writ- ing thousands of them are fleeing hither and thither, from Belgium and Holland to France (hoping to escape to Switzerland), from Ger- many ~ because deportation to Poland was imminent — to France and Belgium, where the same orders for deportation have just been issued, Trapped mice running in circles. They are fleeing from Slovakia to 3 Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved.4 History, Memory, and the Historian Hungary, from Croatia to Italy . .. At the same time, thousands are being shifted under Nazi supervision from the ghetto of Warsaw to forced-labor camps in the country further east, while other thousands just arrived from Germany or Austria are thrown into the ghettos of Riga or Lublin We do not know whether, when Lichtheim sent his “essay,” on August 13, 1942, he was privy to the information that five days earlier his Geneva colleague, Gerhard Riegner, had conveyed to the State Department and the Foreign Office. In fact, the plan for a general exter- mination of European Jewry that Riegner transmitted to London and Washington had already been implemented for months; by August 1942, close to a million and a half European Jews had been extermi- nated. Yet, even if Lichtheim’s description of “what was happening to the Jews of Europe” was factually false because it missed the defining aspect of these events, total physical extermination, it conveys in words not to be forgotten, something that defies direct expression: the sense of despair and doom of tens and tens of thousands of Jews fleeing “hither and thither” like “trapped mice running in circles,” as well as ~ unre~ ported by him, but sensed throughout his essay — the suffocating terror of the remaining millions. “I am bursting with facts,” Lichtheim went on, “but I cannot tell them in an article of a few thousand words. | would have to write for years and years... . That means I really cannot tell you what has happened and is happening to five million persecuted Jews in Hitler's Europe. Nobody will ever tell the story ~ a story of five million personal trage- dies every one of which would fill a volume.” As strange as Henry Montor’s demand for a 1500-word report on the situation of the Jews in Europe may appear to us today, it can, in a way, be considered as paradigmatic for most representations and commemora- tions of the Shoah; Lichtheim’s answer expresses an opposite mode of evocation. On the one hand, a report provides precise factual information offered within strict limits and usually around a central idea that gives it coherence; on the other, Lichtheim’s answer is an outburst of pain and despair that, in principle, rejects the possibility of order and coherence. Over the last decades, the memory of the Shoah has crystallized around these two poles. Whereas the first one means closure, the second Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved.Saul Friediinder = 5 indicates an open-ended process of remembrance. In other terms, the first is embodied in set rituals and in organized presentations ranging from textbooks to museums, from monuments to public commemora- tions. This public memory demands simplicity as well as clear interpre~ tation; its aim, unstated and maybe unperceived, is to domesticate incoherence, eliminate pain, and introduce a message of redemption. The second domain knows no rules. It disrupts any set rendition among those who imagine this past ~ the immense majority now ~ and those who still remember it. In the testimonies of those who remember, both expressions of the past resurface: the organized, oft-rehearsed narration on the one hand, the uncontrolled and chaotic emotion, on the other. In the long run, the memory of the Shoah will probably not escape com- plete ritualization. Yet, to this day at least, an open-ended representation of these events seems present in the Wester world and possibly beyond. More so, it appears to be growing as time goes by. After interpreting the paradoxical expansion of this memory and pointing to the complex inter- action between the memory of the Shoah and the writing of its history, I conclude by dwelling on the challenges and responsibilities incumbent upon the historian, In this domain there can be no credo, merely some reflections about compelling assignments and unresolved questions. The Expanding Memory of the Shoah The two decades following the war can be characterized as a period of virtual silence about the Shoah: The consensus was one of repression and oblivion. Adult contemporaries of Nazism still dominated the public scene. Even the survivors chose to remain silent, since very few people were interested in listening to them (even in Israel) and since, in any case, their own main goal was social integration and a return to normalcy. In the mid-1960s, a first wave of debates shook these defenses. The generation born during or toward the end of the war was moving into the limelight. Mainly in Europe, the students’ unrest of the late 1960s and its sequels called into question various aspects of contemporary culture as well as the lies and the obfuscation regarding the Nazi period. The major turmoil occurred in Germany, but the famous slo- gan of the French students, “We are all German Jews" [nous sommes tous des juifs allemands}, intended to protest against the expulsion of the Jewish student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, had more than one meaning. At the same time, in Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved.