I’ve learned quite a bit about the Holocaust, between day school, university, and my own reading. So when I heard about a book called The Holocaust: An Unfinished Story, by Dan Stone, it piqued my curiosity – what could be unfinished in this story almost 80 years later? It turns out, quite a bit. Especially given what’s happening in the world around us, and with Yom HaShoah commemorated today, this is a book that’s important to read.
Before going into the details of the book, it’s worth making a note on style. Writing history that’s accessible and enjoyable (even for a history major like me) is an art, one which Dan Stone has in spades. The book was rigorous and detailed, yet also engaging and a smooth read. He did a great job of interspersing first person reports of people’s experiences within the larger descriptions of events, and, all too often as inevitably is the case with Holocaust writing, lists of numbers. Unusual for an historian, he makes his judgements explicit, and one sees his character and opinions come through. Frankly, I found this refreshing. His introduction went on a bit long, but that is only a small shortcoming in a long and well written book.
So, what makes the Holocaust an unfinished story? At its simplest, it’s about new research. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain a lot of new documentary and first person materials have surfaced, and given the multitude of languages in which they were written, it has taken some time to find, translate, and think through their consequences.
More interesting is the broader story Stone tells that is less well known or widely shared. We often think about the Holocaust as a Nazi evil, and it most certainly was. Yet in Stone’s re-framing it was more than a Nazi or German tragedy. It was a trans-continental massacre, perpetrated (and sometimes limited) by local peoples and governments, at times with more German involvement, and sometimes with none at all. Take the cases of Romania and Hungary. Romania had an anti-semitic government that, in the early days of the war, shot over 100,000 Jews in a province that had a history of anti-semitic legislation, but were more tolerated in a region that had been under Soviet rule where the Jews had civic equality, and were as such, more accepting of their local Jews as equal citizens. And following this, Romania protected the Jews in its core provinces (despite pressure from the Nazis), with the result that it had the most surviving Jews of any Axis country after the war. In contrast, Hungary, also an axis power, adopted many antisemitic laws, but limited killing Jews. It was only when Germany feared Hungary would turn to the Allies that they took over the country in 1944, and partnered with a puppet regime that helped the Nazis to deport and kill over 400,000 Jews in less than three months. Each country in Eastern Europe has a different story to tell, with different degrees of Nazi involvement and local response. That the Holocaust was a continental, and not only Nazi crime, with a lot of local variance, was a story that for me, at least, has not been fully told.
Stone covers other kinds of interesting ground. He does a deep conceptual analysis of Nazism as a mystical cult that saw the Jew – be she a Bolshevik, a capitalist, or a neighbour – as its enemy. He also spends time demonstrating that while the Nazi’s from the beginning saw the Jew as a threat to get rid of, their approach to mass murder was developmental – a process he traces in great detail. Each step made a further step possible, which only begs the question of what happens when we let evil fester. Other chapters on the process of killing Jews – from Einsatzgruppen to mobile killing vans, to the Heydirch camps (Treblinka, Sobibor), and finally to Auschwitz – contained a lot of new awareness for me. For example, the Einsatzgruppen were a very small number (a few thousand), but were supported in their killing by many locals (hundreds of thousands), particularly Ukranians. Or another example: up until when the Hungarian Jews were taken at the end of the war, Treblinka was where the largest number of Jews were killed. Auschwitz was a later developed death camp, and part of the reason it was more well known is because at the end of the war, Germans needed Jewish slave labourers, in contrast to Treblinka, where everyone was killed outright. The result was that of those who survived because they were needed for labour, many went through Auschwitz and its satellite camps, leading to the mistaken assumption that it was more central in the story of killing Jews than it actually appears to us based on the number of its survivors.
And since this review is already too long, I’ll simply mention that the last chapter discusses the way historical events like the Holocaust change in our collective memory, and how they are used (and misused) over time.
Just Because I Liked It:
Given the theme of the day and this review, I’m going to stick to one related recommendation.
Address Unknown, by Katherine Kressmann Taylor, is a short story published in 1938. It is a series of correspondence between two German friends and business partners, one Jewish and one not. The non-Jewish friend moves from the United States back to Germany in 1932, as Hitler is coming to power, and the correspondence tracks his change in response to Nazism over time. It’s a powerful story, with a shocking ending, and prescient given when it was written.