Family, Memory, and the Holocaust

Family, Memory, and the Holocaust

A defense of oral history

In March 1938, as the social and diplomatic foundations of Europe began to crumble, Adolf Hitler — Reich Chancellor and Führer — crossed Germany’s southern border into Austria. Marching through the streets of Vienna, the Nazi Wehrmacht imprinted their anti-Semitic vision on Austrian domestic policy, and Hitler triumphantly proclaimed, “I report to history that my homeland has joined the German Reich.” Austrian Jews subsequently faced widespread harassment, the arbitrary confiscation of property, and decreased civil liberties.

David Neubauer, a Hungarian Jew seeking vocational advancement in Vienna, feared for his future, and immediately began liquidating his possessions and stock in anticipation of emigration. “When I saw Hitler come in, I saw that there was no life there anymore for Jews. But my father-in-law said, ‘No, no, no! Stay here and work. It will pass.’” Neubauer, my great-grandfather, survived the Holocaust. Many of his relatives and friends did not.

Neubauer’s account, presented in the unpublished and translated oral testimony, Conversations with David Neubauer, offers one perspective on the experiences of European Jewry from the rise of National Socialism to the inception of the Second World War. Specifically, Neubauer describes how anti-Semitic policies transformed his business practices, tore asunder his familial bonds, and forced him to emigrate. George Mosse, another Holocaust survivor, describes his life in Nazi Germany in his autobiographical account, Confronting History. Privileged and affluent, Mosse reflects upon why many Jews viewed Hitler’s explicit threats — articulated repeatedly in Mein Kampf and numerous speeches — as ephemeral in nature, while others felt despair and saw only the certain “end of life.” Jackie Zucker’s oral history project, German-Jewish Migration to the Bay Area 1933-1945, offers yet other survivors’ perspectives of the Holocaust experience. The individuals Zucker interviewed reveal that not all Nazi officials sought the complete annihilation of European Jewry, as there were some who were partially sympathetic to Jewish interests and, consequently, aided them in various ways.

These three sources are examined together in order to explore how first-hand accounts, as tools of recording history, contribute to how the Holocaust is remembered. Although these sources all provide personal information, the assumptions underlying these approaches are different. Neubauer’s oral history is informally collected and uncorroborated, whereas Zucker and Mosse’s projects are organized around systemic and accepted rules of historiography. Any examination of personal testimonies would not be complete without critically evaluating the manner in which these individual recollections were collected and preserved. What are the strengths and weaknesses of oral history? How does the process by which testimony is collected affect the culture of memory? A review of each survivor’s tale examined here underscores how these verbal and written stories, despite their imperfections, contribute to a better understanding of the Holocaust, as they offer information that would be otherwise unavailable to the historian.

The memories of Holocaust survivors are heterogeneous. Though many testimonies are substantively alike, each is unique. Conversations with David Neubauer, Confronting History, and German-Jewish Migration to the Bay Area 1933-1945, the three accounts examined in this paper, all begin in a similar fashion: they open with intimate portrayals of life during the rise of National Socialism. Similarly, the testimonies end in much the same way, closing with reflections on the broader relationship between Judaism and the consequences of the Holocaust. Yet the “middle” sections of these personal accounts contain significant historical variation. Each survivor views anti-Semitism, pre-War economic conditions, emigration, the assimilation of European Jewry, the cultivation of relationship with members of the Nazi party, and friendships with non-Jews through a different lens. It is these varying perspectives that ultimately reveal the richness of oral history and its value to the general historical narrative of the Holocaust.

Oral histories provide a deeper and more individualized conception of the past, as they provide intimate information about the everyday details of the narrator’s life. These different but similar stories demonstrate the power of the testimonies of a few to illuminate the experience of the collective. A review of the personal stories explored in this paper makes it apparent that the experiences of some European Jews during the tumultuous period between 1933 and 1939 were largely a function of one’s economic standing; individual beliefs, behaviors, and reactions; and fortuitous circumstance and serendipity.

Oral History: Its Value and Uses

According to German historian Leopold von Ranke, the fundamental aim of history is to describe “how the past really was.” Due to technological advances, the tools and method employed to investigate history and better understand the past have evolved over time. For example, the tape recorder and word processor preserve and amplify the voices and stories of many more individuals. Not surprisingly, technology has also improved the volume and quality of historical records. Consequently, oral history, which records the experiences of the living, benefits in particular from these technological advances.

Oral history is a valuable method for understanding the past because testimonies reveal sentiments and observations of individuals who encountered an event first-hand. Historian Jerome R. Mintz argues that the introduction of this first-hand point of view into historical study “can evoke a change in perception” which expands the “dimension and scope” necessary to better understand the past. Take, for example, the highly descriptive testimony of Walter Burmeister, a Nazi official responsible for gassing Jews at the Chelmno extermination camp:

“As soon as the ramp had been erected in the castle, people started arriving in Kulmhof from Litzmannstadt in lorries…The people were told that they had to take a bath, that their clothes had to be disinfected and that they could hand in any valuable items beforehand to be registered…When they had undressed they were sent to the cellar of the castle and then along a passageway on to the ramp and from there into the gas-van. In the castle there were signs marked ‘to the baths.’ The gas vans were large vans, about 4-5 meters long, 2.2 meters wide and 2 meters high. The interior walls were lined with sheet metal. On the floor there was a wooden grille. The floor of the van had an opening which could be connected to the exhaust by means of a removable metal pipe. When the lorries were full of people the double doors at the back were closed and the exhaust connected to the interior of the van…The commando member detailed as driver would start the engine right away so that the people inside the lorry were suffocated by the exhaust gases. Once this had taken place, the union between the exhaust and the inside of the lorry was disconnected and the van was driven to the camp in the woods where the bodies were unloaded. In the early days they were initially buried in mass graves, later incinerated…I then drove the van back to the castle and parked it there. Here it would be cleaned of the excretions of the people that had died in it. Afterwards it would once again be used for gassing.”

Equally informative yet infinitely more moving is the account by Simon Srebnik, a survivor of the Chelmno camp:

“No one ever left here again. The gas vans came in here…There were two huge ovens and afterward the bodies were thrown into these ovens, and the flames reached to the sky. It was terrible. No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here. Impossible? And no one can understand it. Even I, here, now…I can’t believe I’m here. No, I just can’t believe it…When they burned two thousand people everyday, it was just…silent. No one shouted. Everyone went about his work. It was silent.”

Both testimonies provide first-hand views of a key aspect of the Holocaust: concentration camp extermination. Burmeister’s descriptive yet emotionally detached account of methodical mass killing enables the historian to vividly visualize the Chelmno execution practices. Srebnik’s viewpoint, on the other hand, is informative because it reflects raw human emotion and reveals how “individuality is found in feeling” and that in “the recesses of feeling, the darker blinder strata of character is where we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen.” Such intensity is absent from Burmeister’s account.

Srebnik, as one of Chelmno’s only two surviving percipient witnesses, contributes a unique vantage point of the physical and psychological conditions of the camp. His emotional account preserves an otherwise unrecorded history and, according to Historian Karl Plank, reminds future generations of the horror of the Holocaust: “what the green field would deny, the land remembers and, with Simon Srebnik, so do we.” If Srebnik’s account was unavailable and we only had that of Burmeister, the Chelmno concentration camp would undoubtedly be remembered in a more detached, mechanistic way.

The words used by an individual in the telling of the past reveal much about the speaker and the circumstances of his/her experiences, and enable us to better understand the narrator’s construction of the past. For example, the words Burmeister chooses are associated with the dominant Nazi mission, and are conditioned by his social and political status. Burmeister’s diction reveals a decisive nature not unlike the political and social entity to which he belonged: he made decisions and followed orders, all with the ultimate policy aim of exterminating Jews.

What does Burmeister think of the relationship between Jews and Nazi officials? Though his testimony is devoid of an explicit answer, his language allows for inferences. One can deduce, for example, that Burmeister views Jews and Nazi officials as distinct groups occupying isolated physical and psychological spheres. Jews and Nazi officials did not occupy the same spaces within the camp: “the erection of a “ramp,” “walls lined with sheet metal,” and extermination by poisonous gas all prevented physical closeness. Further, Burmeister refers to Jews as “they” and “the people”; the establishment of “otherness” is Burmeister’s attempt to dehumanize the entire group. The identification of these spheres is possible as a result of Burmeister’s rhetoric. Spoken words not only articulate memory, but also function to reveal much about the speaker; and in Burmeister’s summary, they reveal his social status and psychological alienation from Jews.

—

Oral history is not, however, without its deficiencies. Oral histories are, by their nature, predicated on one’s ability to remember the past. Although “memory configures and reconfigures people’s identities and enables us to understand the world we live in,” the passage of time lessens the validity of memory; memory becomes increasingly susceptible to bias and unintentional alteration, fabrication and forgetfulness. Therefore the question remains: can the human mind accurately reconstruct the past, years or even decades after an event? Chaime E., a participant in the Sobibor extermination camp uprising in Poland, asserts that neither specificity nor accuracy can be derived from testimonies of Holocaust survivors because it is often too psychologically taxing to recall or articulate the real events:

“If you take ten people [who] listen to the story and ask them to tell the story back, you would get ten different stories. Why? Because it is not — I’m not so strong in the language to explain it — but even the one which is strong in the language and knows the expressions and has the talent and everything, he still cannot tell the whole story. It is just impossible… because the feelings what are involved with this story, they are not the same…but you cannot tell how I felt when I found the clothes of my brother, for example [while sorting the garments of those who had just been gassed]. Now if you ask me what I was thinking about, I wasn’t thinking at all. I was horrified — things like that you know. But I can tell the story, and it sounds — well like another story. It is more about some feelings what you cannot bring out.”

The relationship between memory and history has been the subject of great debate. For Erica Carter and Ken Hirschkop, history typically “refers to a formalized recording of the past, and is seen to be more objective than memory.” Memory, the linchpin of oral history, refers to the ways in which “the past emerges, or is invoked, in many different forms.” Individual memories are necessary components of a full-fledged historical narrative; indeed, there “is no history without historical memory.” Amos Funkenstein asserts that “it is this dialectic of memory and history, self-identity and purposeful action…in which the word history has both a subjective and an objective meaning.” Yet the memories of Holocaust survivors, like those of survivors of any trauma, are vulnerable to alterations of factual accuracy; disassociation, fury, and persistent grief can all influence and warp recollections.

Psychiatrist Judith Herman claims that a common “response to atrocities is to banish them from the consciousness… certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter out loud,” and this is the case for many a Holocaust survivor upon whose testimony we rely. Frieda Aaron, a Polish born Jew who survived both the Warsaw ghetto and Maidanek concentration camp, concurs:

“…in the end, reality is a function of our thoughts, of memory, of who and where in history we are. Perhaps also, memory does not always remember the sharpness of certain details, for the edges have been dulled by time and pain. Memory is also selective, even if we do not summon specific events for scrutiny, even if recollections of experiences insinuate themselves assaulting sweet moments of life and ravaging their tranquillity. Yet, these very processes cause certain events to stand in sharp relief against the backdrop of fading details and the selective nature of memory. And then, remembrances require diverse kinds of understanding. Some are immediately accessible to consciousness and easily interpreted. Others cannot be fathomed at all.”

Other factors affect the validity of oral history, such as the mode of recording and the lack of factual verification. The way an event is depicted may be colored by the manner in which the personal testimony is collected; the relationship between interviewer and interviewee, the inclination of the interviewee to impose a narrative structure on events that may not be closely connected, and the potentially misleading questioning, can all alter, manipulate, and influence the content of a testimony.

Oral testimony concerns itself less with truth and more with how the past is recollected and transcribed. That being said, “at once all the claims made for oral history — accuracy, immediacy, reality — come under the most serious suspicion, and move straight away into the world of image, selective memory, later overlays and utter subjectivity.” The sources necessary to corroborate a historical memory are frequently absent: records disintegrate, witnesses perish, and materials disappear. This lack of concrete corroboratory evidence, along with the frailty of the human power of recall and the difficulty of accurately recalling traumatic events, lessen the reliability of oral history.

—

While these shortcomings may appear insurmountable, they are not unique to oral history, or to this particular method of historical inquiry. Other first-hand approaches to recording history, such as journal entries, letters, and memoirs, are susceptible to the same weaknesses as those of oral history. Written documents, just like the spoken word, reflect the author’s personal biases, and these views frequently obstruct clarity and color the recollection. “Every piece of evidence about the past,” Bill Thorpe rightly contends, “represents someone’s recollection of events refracted through certain perceptions which are imbricated with various ideologies, ‘world outlooks’, material and political pressures.”

Oral history enables historians to better conceptualize past events. Verbal testimony provides a broader, richer understanding of the past: “no written document can tell us more than what the author…thought happened, what he or she thought ought to happen or would happen, or perhaps only what he or she wanted others to think about the event in question.” It follows that in order to better understand the past, one must “empathize with it, get under its skin, as it were, to see the world through eyes of its actors.” Oral history provides such an opportunity; it preserves often unrecorded testimony, amplifies the voices of more individuals, and provides individualized understanding of events from the perspective of human agents, the primary movers and shakers of history.

The “history of the Holocaust cannot be limited only to a recounting of German policies, decisions, and measures,” argues Saul Friedländer, “it must include the reactions of the surrounding world and the attitudes of the victims.” Survivors can respond to follow-up questions, clarify misconceptions, or elaborate on specific areas of interest. Indeed, Dan Michman argues that the “description of the past has been a human endeavor since antiquity.” While oral history must be taken in conjunction with other forms of historical sources, it undoubtedly enriches the historical record by offering a more individualized perspective of the past.

The Autobiographical Text: Memory and Writing

In addition to oral history, the autobiographical text is another way to preserve memories, and allows an individual to record those events central to his/her own life. The autobiography is an effective method to understand history because it contains a coherent emplotment linking beginning, middle, and end within a specific framework of interpretation. According to Anna Reading, “there is now more than half a century of writing about the Holocaust, of which life-writing forms a substantial part.” There exist autobiographical perspectives by victims, survivors, bystanders, witnesses and rescuers of different religious and national identities. Life-writing acts as a medium for communicating the past, and mediates between the individual and the social or public domain. Nicola King contends that the autobiography is the point where individual memories are reworked in their broader cultural contexts.

In Confronting History, George Mosse writes that “no group of exiles in modern times has been as eager to communicate their experience as the refugees from Hitler’s Germany.” Through autobiographies, these exiles have sought to make sense of what seemed to them senseless, to justify themselves and their failure to prevent the German catastrophe. If one is inclined to believe that what man is only history tells, then it is tempting to put one’s own life in historical perspective.

The starting point is important in all of life, and Mosse’s own beginning was hardly typical or widely shared. Starting with his upbringing in Germany, first at home and then at a famous boarding school, Mosse experienced a significant degree of privilege. He was born into a very prominent and wealthy German Jewish family. His great-grandfather, Markus Mosse, had been a physician in the province of Posen. Markus’s son, Rudolf Mosse, moved to Berlin and founded in 1867 what became the greatest advertising agency in the country and later a media empire with the famous Berliner Tageblatt as its flagship. The Mosse family, like most other Jewish families, considered themselves German without giving it another thought.

Mosse spent a considerable part of his youth at a manor south of Berlin, or at his parents’ villa on the Maassenstrasse, situated in one of Berlin’s most elegant districts. He had part of the mansion all to himself, and was waited upon by various personal assistants, including cooks, butlers, and chambermaids. No sense of impeding doom marred his childhood. He witnessed the last years of the Weimar Republic as a spectator cushioned from the real world through an opulent lifestyle which served to effectively block out the realties of life. What other child, Mosse rhetorically asks, “had a car and driver of his own when not yet ten years of age and was driven to primary school when other children walked?”

Before entering grade school, Mosse already had a private tutor. Miss Squire, from Belfast, was hired so that he could learn English as well as French. Studying foreign languages was not regarded as a luxury. Together with knowledge of other Western European cultures, this education served as a necessary part of Bildung, which included not only the acquisition of knowledge and skills, but also the development of values, ethos, personality, authenticity, and humanity. When of age, Mosse was sent to Schloss Sale. Here he first remembers encountering religious prejudice. “Anti-Semitism was a constant presence in the German-patriotic atmosphere,” Mosse writes, as it “prevailed at the school, encouraged by the politics of the last years of the Weimar Republic.”

At the Hermannsberg those boys who were Jewish, and who in some way were thought to correspond to the normative Jewish stereotype, had a difficult time. “None of us at the Hermannsberg readily admitted to being Jews, with one exception, and that boy was bullied and even at one time daubed with yellow paint branding him as a coward.” Mosse recalls “seeing swastikas burning as fiery symbols on the hills surrounding the Hermannsberg, and the racist poison…had become so much a part of daily life that it penetrated the vocabulary of the boys and girls, aggravating the atmosphere of anti-Semitism.” An awareness of the so-called Jewish Problem was everywhere. Mosse asks, “Why should it have bypassed the school?” The girl to whom Mosse was closest at school told him to go back to Jerusalem.

The setting in which George Mosse was reared, rather than the family itself, exercised the most direct influences on his life. Nevertheless it was his family’s history which not only made the setting itself possible, but remained a constant if rather silent presence, even though Mosse admits he did not realize its full importance. The family’s deeds which affected his life, and indeed defined his place in German society, seemed to have been accomplished before his time.

George Mosse fled Germany in 1933. The swift passage of time was marked in his memory, above all, by political crises and upheavals, even before Adolf Hitler’s election to power. For Mosse, “the increasing power of the nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic political Right in the Weimar Republic, the growing insecurity of the Jews, and the economic dislocations, certainly left their mark.” Nevertheless, “the way in which we lost our publishing empire was difficult for me to grasp at first, and at the time I could not have cared less.”

Mosse never truly experienced the personal and mental deprivations of exile. On the contrary, exile energized him and challenged him as nothing had ever done before. Before emigration, “his existence had been secured, his future programmed, and he would eventually have entered the family firm and stayed there. As a result, he was a youth without direction, without much of a purpose in life.” Emigration was an experience in character building, and opened the doors for new experiences and educational opportunities.

—

Confronting History offers a particularly penetrating analysis of the past. Mosse’s description is influenced by his social status and reflects the often cataclysmic events of his time. Mosse, who eventually became an historian, ably places his story within an analytical framework that adds a unique dimension to his narrative. He is trained in going back in time to see how people living then understood their world now. This is important when evaluating the context — and content — of his work: Mosse examines his own past from the perspective of an academic, and probes his life with analytical skills noticeably absent in the reflections of many other Holocaust survivors.

Mosse’s life would have been quite different had circumstances allowed him to remain in Germany and continue to live a life of abundance. The gulf which divided Mosse from his own past was partially created by his assimilation into a new world, partially by the new way he looked at the world and his place in it, and partially by his immersion in the study of history. Mosse asserts that this outlook is difficult to put into words — “briefly, it meant seeing everything in perspective, ordering all phenomena according to their past and present effects.” This manner of thought does make a difference: “it gives the mind a certain stability, and it determined the nature of my confrontation with the present according to the experiences of the past.”

Mosse asserts that any autobiography must seem episodic because human memory is not a seamless web. In Mosse’s memoir, some of his life experiences loom large while others have been omitted. This is not necessarily problematic. Though Mosse inevitably leaves some information out, what he chooses to remember is as informative as what he forgets. Selective memory, too, serves a purpose, as it underscores what events Mosse found too horrendous to forget, and those which he found too painful to remember.

Mosse identifies unifying themes which run throughout his life. He includes in this list his status as an outsider, and as a Jew living in a decidedly hostile environment during his formative years. Yet he also states that as a youth he was a member of the economic elite. Affluence removed Mosse from the mundane and the menial. Paid servants performed his bidding, and largely prevented his direct entanglement with anti-Semitism. “As I look back on my life, I feel that the past has certainly formed me and provided me with many opportunities, although it has also presented me with many obstacles to overcome.” But my acceptance of myself was set within the constant awareness of a past which refused to go away, indeed I did not try to transform or overcome the vivid feeling that I was a survivor.”

Holocaust life-writing does share salient features with other autobiographical forms, although there are also crucial differences to which one must be attentive. The preservation of history through the written word is particularly significant for Jewish survivors, as part of their annihilation included the public burning of books by Jewish authors. For Holocaust survivors to write the story of their victimization, emigration, or endurance, they must bear a weightier burden in comparison with those who write conventional autobiographies. For the survivor, the written text yields more than a book; it is the indefinite preservation of a life.

Case Studies in Oral History

The autobiographical text transcends time, and ensures that the author’s story will remain within the socially inherited memory after the individual’s death. The Holocaust autobiography is also very much about death: within each story of a life survived there is the mute reminder of the millions of stories untold. The personal stories are unable to account for those abruptly ended lives which succumbed to disease, starvation, and murder before the story could be preserved through writing. Spoken testimony, like the autobiographical text, preserves stories, documents history, and enriches historical narratives by providing additional, individualized understandings of events. Jacques Le Goff correctly contends that “memory is the raw material of history. Whether mental, oral, or written, it is the living source from which historians draw.”

Oral history gives voice to those who are traditionally overlooked by history. Writing and speaking about experiences alter the context of perception, and change the way the past is understood. A written narrative is finished when we begin to read it, its opening, middle, and end already established in the pages of the book. Oral testimony, in contrast, steers a less certain course. Survivors can react. Their words are alive.

The oral history process is available to all who desire to engage it. Memory alone is the only prerequisite, as this particular method does not require editors or publishers, drafts or revisions, and, as a result, is accessible to more individuals. A more encompassing body of perspectives can be highly informative, as it expands for the historian the parameters by which to analyze the past. Memories are a form of social reproduction. All published autobiographical texts are written to be read. To some extent, oral history has an analogous aim: verbal testimony is collected to be heard. A published text, however, always has as its goal the largest audience (and by extension the greatest number of texts sold, editions translated, etc.). This is not necessarily true for oral history, which often seeks a more specific and smaller audience.

—

This section looks at how two oral histories are constructed and how they should be interpreted. The first oral history, German-Jewish Migration to the Bay Area, 1933-1945, was conducted in 1979 by Jackie Zucker. Her efforts as project director yield a professional and methodical project; she is deeply familiar with the secondary and primary sources relevant to the project, and carefully records and preserves the responses she elicits from her interviewees. She considers the ways individuals in different times and places remember the Holocaust, and she interviews a representative sample, including people of different ages, occupations, provincial origins, and those who emigrated from Europe to the United States in different years.

This oral history, comprised of four two-and-a-half hour sessions, is particularly insightful because it enhances our understanding of the relationships between Jews and Nazi officials. The survivors tell Zucker about life in pre-Hitler Germany and the terrible changes that led to the desperate circumstances and psychological pressures that they endured. In their discussion it is possible to catch glimpses of Jewish perceptions of National Socialism. Mr. E. remembers:

“The first boycott came against the Jews, Jewish businesses and Jewish factories, around 1933 and 1934, one of the foremen suddenly came into our office in SS uniform. I said, “Gerald, what happened to you?” “Oh, I have been an SS man for a long time,” he said, “I will take you home safely.” I said, “You are crazy, you cannot be seen with a Jew on the street.” “I want to take you home. You are one of ours and nothing should happen to you. I will take you home.” He wanted to see to it that I came home safely. To me it is proof that not entirely a hundred percent believed in Hitler’s propaganda, not did they believe that the Jews are “unglueck.” Even Gerald the SS man did not believe that Hitler would follow through with his threats and millions of others did not either.”

For Mr. E., unique access to Nazi officials helped assuage fears and mitigate the credibility of Nazism. Saul Friedländer argues that “very few German Jews sensed the implications of the Nazis…in terms of sheer long-range terror.” Certainly this is true for Mr. E., who believed Hitler represented an unpleasant episode which had to be accepted, but which would surely soon pass.

Zucker is not content taking Mr. E.’s explanation at face-value, and seeks to probe his testimony further. By asking a follow up question, Zucker elicits more information. Mr. E. then stated:

“We had clients who were high ranking Nazis, with three stars, four stars — what’s the difference? Three came back from Berlin in the beginning of 1938 and one was really very excited, he told us: ‘I risk my life when I tell you all this but I have spoken to this man in Berlin in a high office and they have told what they are preparing.’ The other also said, ‘We can only tell you to get out of here as soon as possible.’ ‘You risk your lives each day you stay longer.’”

Certainly the nature of advice that Mr. E. received transformed markedly with time. Whereas once even the “SS man did not believe that Hitler would follow through with his threats,” other Nazis later saw only despair for Jews. In both situations, the close proximity and dialogue with Nazi officials proved integral to Mr. E.’s perceptions of Nazism. Mrs. M. also recalls receiving special treatment from the Nazis. She remembered:

“…I was summoned home due to the Kristalnacht…the mob was walking the streets…I wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible…I walked with the mob until four or five the next morning. I saw the synagogues and the homes and the windows being smashed. Our home was not smashed because a dentist was very much interested in purchasing our home. Later on we found out that he was a very high-ranking SS man, and he protected our house with chalk marks. Which of course we couldn’t know. There were chalk marks on our windows and doors and our house was completely spared.”

The memories of these two Holocaust survivors are qualitatively dissimilar. Although both Mr. E. and Mrs. M. possess unique relationships with Nazi officials, they tell their stories differently. It is these varying perspectives and individualized conceptions of the past which reveal the richness of Zucker’s project, and, ultimately, a strength of oral history.

German-Jewish Migration to the Bay Area, 1933-1945, is, however, not without certain shortcomings, which inevitably alter the content of the memories Zucker is able to extract. For example, all of the project’s participants were interviewed simultaneously. Although this construct is not, in itself, without merit, it does however likely influence the memories — and types of stories — which are evoked. In other words, those who answered questions first, or spoke with the most enthusiasm or authority, held disproportionate sway in influencing the direction of the conversation.

A second problem arises from Zucker’s personal style. She treats the interviewees as damaged goods, repeatedly consoles the survivors, and occasionally belittles their memories. Zucker corrects statements she believes are false, and frequently interrupts the survivors as they recount their experiences. The types of questions Zucker asks are sometimes problematic. She occasionally makes elongated statements — containing value-laden language — that muddy the intent of her question. For example, Zucker asks:

“So during the period just prior to Hitler, unemployment ravaged post-war German and an overall tense, desperate atmosphere prevailed. The government was unstable, its power further eroded by spiraling inflation and an inability to obtain economic help from the Allies. Anti-Semitism was visible but as yet did not affect the German Jews’ way of life. When Hitler came to power he used the Jews as scapegoats. Didn’t the libelous newspaper articles, cartoons and radio denunciations warn you in the beginning?

At other times, Zucker asks leading questions. For instance, she asked Mr. E., “What kind of pressure was put on Germans to join the Nazi party?” Mr. E. replies:

“They would be blacklisted in business…They would be denied the ration cards for their raw materials, they wouldn’t get allotments to buy their cotton or silk or to buy other chemicals that were allotted for we were not in surplus in Germany. So they would suffer. Then another thing, they were under pressure, for there was a spy system.”

Zucker clearly suggests something indirectly by conveying information that might stimulate Mr. E.’s imagination. Her assumptive questioning presupposes information and subtly prompts Mr. E. to answer in a particular way. In other words, Zucker forces Mr. E. to think first, and possibly exclusively, about pressure, and not about other social conditions which influenced Germans to join the Nazi party.

If one compares this oral history project with Mosse’s autobiography, it becomes apparent that the way information is extracted greatly influences the context of perception. Mosse tells a story, and writes about what he wants. The participants in Zucker’s project respond and react to specific questions. The types of questions dictate what the survivors are allowed to speak about and to what lengths. For the survivors interviewed by Zucker, the motions of arms and hands, the brief sentences, with connectives often omitted, all conspire to tell a story that is not captured by spoken words.

—

Conversations with David Neubauer lacks the formal methodology apparent in German-Jewish Migration to the Bay Area, 1933-1945. Neubauer’s testimony was not gathered by a historian, and the project was completed for specific and intimate recipients: Neubauer’s family. As Neubauer’s testimony is intended for a limited audience, the interview process is conducted informally. No follow up questions are asked, and Neubauer is allowed to answer questions at his own pace, and in the manner he desires. The two family members who interviewed Neubauer, his son and daughter-in-law, do not visibly interrupt his narrative with questions, and they do not press him to remember and comment on topics Neubauer does not want to address.

These two interviewers are amateurs (in the best sense of the word), and are concerned with stories relevant to Neubauer’s particular genealogy. Consequently, Neubauer discusses at great length important family events (e.g., his marriage, his mother’s death, the birth of various children), familial emigration and relationships, and the annihilation of his relatives during the Holocaust. In addition to this information, the interviewers successfully prompt Neubauer to offer a first-hand account of the drastic changes Jews underwent in Vienna after the Anschluss. Neubauer uses his own story to illustrate the process experienced by many Jews; from identification with and allegiance to Austria followed by the subsequent decision to emigrate to Palestine.

—

In 1898 David Neubauer was born in Hungary. Twenty nine years later, in the autumn of 1927, he moved to Austria with his wife, Salomea Klarsfeld. Robert Wistrich writes that “at the end of the nineteenth century, Jews owned more than 50 percent of the major banks in Austria, and occupied nearly 80 percent of the key positions in the banking world.” Jews were also prominent among the great press tycoons. They owned, edited, and extensively contributed to most of the leading newspapers of Vienna.” Thus, Austria was a welcomed destination for Neubauer; he would not be just a Jew among Austrians. He would be a Jew in a heterogeneous society accustomed to Jewish influence in economics, politics, and culture.

The Neubauers lived in Seegasse, Vienna’s Ninth District, and enjoyed comfortable lodging. Their apartment included a “bedroom, children’s room, kitchen, hot water, and a bathtub.” Other Jewish families lived in their neighborhood. Amongst Jews, Neubauer “spoke Yiddish-Deutsch.” Though not fluent, Neubauer knew enough “German to communicate with non-Jews.” This played an important role in his ability to court business contacts beyond the Jewish community. Many Jewish families worked hard, and, like the Neubauers, earned substantial wages.

Neubauer observed Shabbat. On Saturday, he would regularly go with his Jewish neighbors to synagogue services in Grunethorgasse. From the Ninth District Neubuaer then went to the “Second District, to a Polish synagogue, and continued prayer.” Neubauer “did not have time to socialize” except after services. He obtained employment at the Klarsfeld clothing store, owned and operated by Salomea’s father, Herman. Neubauer organized merchandise, sold inventory, and performed actuarial duties. His efforts helped transform the business into a thriving venture.

Neubauer’s store was “initially on the second floor for the first three years” after his marriage. He needed to relocate, but “there were no stores available to move to.” Fortuitously, “there suddenly was an opening downstairs in a real store, after either a death or a bankruptcy.” Neubauer “grabbed it.” He visited the “city office for the administration of businesses to a get a permit,” and received “permission to move downstairs.” Though very “hard to get,” this change in venue altered Neubauer’s “way of selling,” and provided the business with more non-Jewish business partners and customers.

“Now that people could come in from the street…the store filled up.” Neubauer and his father-in-law were “reliable,” and Neubauer could “speak to every customer in his own language”: Yiddish, German, or Hungarian. He had an innate ability to “understand the customers,” and his business guile yielded profitable symbiotic relationships with a “Czech seamstress and wholesaler…and a German manufacturer.” Neubauer’s successful business relationships stemmed from his talents as a salesman and entrepreneur. He worked diligently, and his daily tasks, coupled with the desire to start a family, were the crux of his focus: “bread and butter” issues pertaining to income, taxes, and subsistence consumed Neubauer’s thoughts.

—

No amount of individual skill or entrepreneurial spirit could, however, completely insulate Neubauer from the changing political climate which swept across Austria in 1938. A few days after the Nazis arrived in Vienna, Adolf Eichmann, who had just been promoted to second lieutenant in the SS, prepared lists of employees of Jewish organizations who were to be arrested and have their possessions impounded. Such a policy had immediate and lasting consequences for Neubauer. At once, Neubauer was forced to release his Jewish workers. The three employees in his store, including “two brothers by the name of Erbsenthal, and one Müller, who was married and a very nice man,” were fired. Now Neubauer lacked the workers essential for the operation of his business.

After Kristallnacht, many people were arrested and sent to Dachau. Jewish synagogues were burnt. This pogrom was a final blow to Neubuaer’s economic opportunities. Now, the Nazis issued a ban on all Jewish business activity in the Reich. “The Nazis sent trucks around to empty the Jewish stores in Vienna. Our store had the shutters closed, and the manager of the building told them that I did not have any more merchandise.” This was not true. Though the “shutters were not open,” the store had not been liquidated. “I was lucky that I was a Hungarian citizen. I had no enemies, and many people liked me.”

Alas, not everyone liked Neubauer. In 1938, a former business partner began openly exploiting him. After the Anschluss, Neubauer was no longer afforded legal protections. He was confronted by Josef Huber, a wealthy man who had a large enterprise not far from Vienna. Huber, once the main source of Neubauer’s purchases, refused to recognize Jewish credit. “When Hitler came, I had about 200,000 shillings worth of paid stock lying at Huber’s store. He called me and said, ‘Mr. Neubauer, I will not give you the merchandise at the price you paid. You should pay me an additional 15,000-20,000 shillings.” Neubauer replied: “Mr. Huber, this is my merchandise.” Humber replied, “When Schuschnig was here, you were right. Now that our Hitler is here, you are wrong. With Hitler you have no rights.”

In this particular case, the loss of legal protections proved financially injurious to Neubauer. Yet Conversations with David Neubauer is filled with no other anecdotes about discrimination derived from racial prejudices. Rather, Neubauer spends much time reflecting on those relationships and fortuitous circumstances which enabled him to leave Austria. Neubuaer’s survival of the Holocaust, and indeed his very memories of events, was heavily influenced, not so much by the wrongs committed against him, but by the generosity and friendship of one Nazi official.

During the liquidation of his possessions, Neubauer went to obtain a sign reading “David Neubauer, Hungarian Citizen,” from the Hungarian Consulate. It was here, Neubauer recalled, that he first met “Dr. Strum,” a “heavy smoker and 28 years old.” Dr. Strum was “an SS man,” but “was very nice.” Neubauer charmed the young Nazi official, who immediately “liked Neubauer,” and the two became “good friends.”

Dr. Strum “arranged all kinds of things” for Neubauer, including the drastic reduction of his tax bill. Neubauer argues that the Income Tax Office was bent on “teaching the Jews a lesson,” by destroying them financially. This office demanded that Neubauer pay a “tax of 180,000 shillings.” The two friends “went to the Income Tax Office,” which was “full.” Dr. Strum had on the swastika, and declared, “I need a signature on this document, and the clerk obliged.” Later, the two men visited the Income Tax Office in Vienna’s Ninth District. Neubauer told Dr. Strum “to ask the clerk to sign a paper, and he did that too! Then they left, and Neuabuer “knew we were saved.” Dr. Strum helped him save 144,000 shillings in taxes. If “I had to pay that,” Neubauer remembers, “we could not have left.”

“When we finished the tax business,” Neubauer told Dr. Strum, “you worked so hard. I want to repay you.” Dr. Strum responded, “How much do you think I should charge you?” Eventually the two settled on a payment. Dr, Strum and Neubauer were both delighted, and Dr Strum, elated, “almost kissed” Neubauer. With the money Neubauer saved, he was able to purchase exit visas.

—

The obstacles Neubauer faced did not dissipate, however, with the acquisition of these visas. Neubauer still had to remove his family from the Continent. Neubauer first “took Salomea and the children and sent them to Hungary.” The family rented a room in Ujpest while biding time: Neubauer “did not have enough money for two affidavits to Palestine.” When Neubauer left Vienna, he gave his father-in-law a final 300 shillings. Neubauer was confident that he could arrange for his in-laws’ departure, but his father-in-law was hesitant. The Jewish Agency in Palestine said ‘Don’t worry. In two months Hitler will be finished.’”

Why did Neubauer flee to Palestine? “That was the only place we could go where we could take out our money.” Other opportunities existed, but none were as good. Neubauer “could have gone to France,” but he “knew they were preparing to go to war with Germany.” “England didn’t allow immigrants, and I wasn’t interested in going to Switzerland.” Neubauer considered the United States, but did not have time for an exit visa; after visiting the American Consulate, he was informed that as a Hungarian citizen he would “have to wait five years.” He also considered Canada, but ruled it out because there was no support infrastructure in place for Jewish emigrants. In Palestine, Neubauer knew people and “there were lots of people from Vienna.”

The decision to leave for Palestine proved easier than the process of actually getting there. Neubauer was already a man graced with fortune: his Hungarian citizenship and unique relationship with Dr. Strum were both strokes of good luck. Together, however, these events alone would not prove sufficient for Neubauer’s smooth departure, as Neubauer faced two further challenges.

Neubauer remembers that “there was no problem getting the tickets” from Budapest to Athens. However, while on the train, detectives approached Neubauer and questioned him about his belongings and luggage. One detective asked Neubauer, “What’s in here?” Neubauer remembers, “luckily for us, he pointed at the bag with all the food. I calmly replied: ‘Food.’” Yet “had he pointed at the other briefcase, I would have lost all the jewelry and it would have been left in Hungary.” Had Neubauer’s family jewelry been discovered, presumably he would not have been able to escape as financially solvent as he did.

The second hurdle Neubauer was forced to overcome occurred when police officials attempted to separate him from his family while they were on the train. Neubauer recalls that he was told to depart the train “between Hungary and Yugoslavia.” Neubauer refused. He desperately yelled “I have a certificate for Palestine. I’m here with my children. No, I ‘m not getting off the train!” He recalled that if “the police had taken me off the train, we’re lost. There was a war atmosphere.” At last, the police relented, and the train carried on with Neubauer and his family intact. Several days later the Neubauers arrived in Palestine.

Counterfactual speculation cannot help us learn about the actual events of the past, but can shed new light on them. Imagine that Neubauer had viewed Germany’s annexation of Austria much like his father-in-law had, who predicted that the unfavorable situation would pass. Or that Neubauer had not met Dr. Strum, held Hungarian citizenship, or saved thousands of shillings in taxes. Would exit paper work have been readily accessible or obtained? Would he have survived to share his memories?

—

From the personal stories Neubauer shares, it becomes apparent that his experiences were derived from both his social status and good fortune. Neubauer, unlike Mosse, is not an intellectual. He neither confronts history nor seeks to place his story within the broader currents of Holocaust historiography. His aims — and the goals of those interviewing him — are different. Unlike Mosse, Neubauer is a member of the working class: his experiences largely represent the everyday memories of an ordinary man. This fact, of course, does not diminish the value of his observations. Rather, his social status shapes the lens by which he viewed the world. Neubauer escaped Europe only as a result of immense individual efforts and fortuitous circumstance, as opposed to Mosse, who survived the Holocaust because of his family’s wealth and influential political and social connections. Though Mosse and Neubauer share much in common as Holocaust survivors, their memories are dissimilar. Consequently, their stories are different, and the way each describes the past — their words, their perceptions, their beliefs — is dissimilar, too.

Many of the situations which ensured Neubauer’s survival were based both on luck and on personal relationships. Such was the case for many other survivors. In Conversations with David Neubauer and German-Jewish Migration to the Bay Area, 1933-1945 the survivors attempt to rationalize and explain how and why they survived as a function of their own abilities and decisions. The accounts presented in these two oral histories do not take into consideration the role of either luck or chance in survival. This is a salient difference from Mosse’s testimony, which recognizes the limited role he played in his own survival.

For Mosse, the impact of his leaving Germany was not felt for a long time. Certainly this was not so for the individuals in German-Jewish Migration to the Bay Area, 1933-1945, or for Neubauer. For these individuals, whose lives were torn apart, the future was not secure: new languages had to be learned, friendships formed, cultures to assimilate within. For Mosse, emigration was not initially perceived as a necessary detriment, yet for many others it was an experience in survival, and the effects of emigration were profound and immediate. Neubauer, like the majority of all other émigrés, did not have a private language tutor or the support infrastructure of a wealthy family. For Mosse, leaving Germany merely represented a break from the past: the experiences and schools which awaited him, though different from those in Germany, shared many similar characteristics. For Neubauer, departing Austria represented a new beginning: he assumed a new surname and had to pursue a new livelihood.

But unlike Mosse’s path of emigration, the new beginning Neubauer experienced was saddled with substantial difficulties. To a large extent, Neubauer remained psychologically entrenched in the “old.” He struggled to learn Hebrew. He lamented his inability to open a successful business. He was not immediately satisfied with the educational options for his children. He felt pity for his brother, Oszkar, who survived several forced labor camps but later succumbed to cancer. Emigration ensured survival of the Holocaust. It did not, however, guarantee a prosperous, healthy lifestyle.

The two oral history projects differ in important respects. Zucker is a professional. Her project is conducted in English and the questions she asks are directly stated in the text. This is not so for Conversations with David Neubauer: the text is translated, and not a single question that Neubauer was asked is recorded in the transcript. This is significant as the reader can only guess what questions prompted his responses. The task of understanding how certain questions impacted his responses is made impossible by this omission. Additionally, Neubauer’s oral history was conducted in a mixture of Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. The subsequent translation was conducted by only one individual. Was that one individual able to competently and accurately capture the meaning and spirit of each word and story Neubauer shares? Despite their shortcomings, it is the varying perspectives presented in these two oral histories that ultimately reveal the richness of this method.

Conclusion

Though sixty years have passed, the Holocaust still casts its shadow over us as a constant reminder of the depths of man’s inhumanity. Millions of European Jews sought refuge from the onslaught of violence perpetrated by the Nazis. Of these, the majority found none. Those fortunate enough to have survived have stories to tell about their experiences. Each of the stories discussed in this paper adds special insight, both to how the Holocaust was experienced by the particular storyteller, and how the Holocaust will be remembered by future generations as a result of these personal narratives. Historical memory “excavates from the ruins of the past fragile shapes to augment understanding of those ruins.” Thus these accounts represent a direct connection to the past, and consequently yield a greater understanding of historical events.

Neubauer’s story was informally collected and recorded. Yet his narrative poignantly impresses upon the reader the trial and tribulations of a working-class Hungarian Jew living in Nazi-occupied Austria. Mosse’s account, written from the perspective of both an academic and a survivor, sheds light on a transformative Germany from the point of view of a privileged, Jewish youth. Zucker’s oral history project, conducted formally pursuant to the rules of oral historiography, illuminates the symbiotic relationships between some of the interviewees and Nazi officials.

The manner in which each of these sources was created affects the stories that are told, and thereby how the Holocaust is remembered. Neubauer’s story was recorded by and for his relatives. Consequently, his recollections are tailored to enrich a family’s record of its past. Mosse, in his autobiography, chooses memories that are conditioned by his historical perspective. As an authoritative voice, he describes those encounters which might be instructive to others. The manner in which Zucker elicits information from the survivors she interviewed greatly affected the recollections that they shared. Thus we are left with a particular group of stories which might not have been told in that vein otherwise.

These accounts are not without their imperfections. Undoubtedly, the passage of time affects one’s ability to accurately recall past events, and one may be unwittingly susceptible to fabrication, bias, and alteration. In particular, the trauma of the Holocaust may decidedly affect memory, as grief and fury understandably can warp a survivor’s recollection. Nonetheless, the testimony of the survivors, by allowing us to see the world through though their eyes, enables us to empathize with them. Each account, precisely because it is uniquely personal, provides details of the Holocaust experience that would be otherwise unavailable to historians. More broadly, the method of oral history enriches the historical record by offering a more individualized, intimate, and nuanced perspective of the past.

Works Cited and Consulted

Aschheim, Steven. Between Rationality and Irrationalism: George L. Mosse, the Holocaust and European Cultural History. Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, vol. 5. 1988.
Ashton, Paul. On the Record: A Practical Guide to Oral History. North Sydney Council. Australia. 1991.
Bendersky, Joseph. “A Concise History of Nazi Germany,” New York; Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2007.
Bennett, James. Human Values in Oral History. Oral History Review. Vol. 11. 1983.
Boyarin, Jonathan ed. Remapping Memory: The Politics of Time space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1994.
Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. London. Polity. 2001.
Dwork, Debórah. Robert Jan van Pelt. Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946. Norton and Co. New York. 2009.
Eckardt, Allice. Burning Memory: Times of Testing and Reckoning. Pergamon Press. New York. 1993.
Eisenberg, Azriel. Witness to the Holocaust. The Pilgrim Press. 1981.
Ernst Klee, W. Dressen, V. Riess. The Good Old Days. The Free Press, New York. 1988.
Friedländer, Saul, editor, et al. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Harvard University Press. Cambridge. 1992.
Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. New York. Harper Collins. 1997.
Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 2: The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945. New York. Harper Collins. 2007.
Fromm, Alfred. My Life in the Wine Business in Europe and the United States. Judah L. Magnes Memorial Museum. Interviews conducted and edited 1995.
Gold, Alison. Fiet’s Vase and Other Stories of Survival, Europe 1939-1945. Penguin. 2003.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1992.
Herf, Jeffrey. The Historian as Provocateur: George Mosse’s Accomplishment and Legacy. Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 29 (2001), pp. 7–26.
Klempner, Mark. The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage, The Pilgrim Press. 2006.
Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. Yale University Press. New Haven. 1991.
Lion, Margaret. Language Teacher. Judah L. Magnes Memorial Museum. Interviewed in 1984-1985 by Jane Burrows. Accessed 2009.
Maier, Charles. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1988.
Mann, Golo. Reminiscences and Reflections: A Youth in Germany. New York. 1990.
Michman, Dan. Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective. Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues. Vallentine Mitchell. London 2003.
Mosse, George. Confronting History. The University of Wisconsin Press. Madison. 2000.
Neubauer, David. Conversation with David Neubauer. Interviews conducted in Givataim, Israel. 1999-2000.
Reading, Anna. The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillian. New York. 2002.
Robets, J.M. A History of Europe. Helicon Publishing. New York. 1996.
Runyan, William. Psychoanalysis and History. The Annual of Psychoanalysis. Volume xxxi. 1998.
Thorpe, Bill. Review: Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal history by Anna Cole Victoria Haskins and Fiona Paisley eds [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network). July, 2006.
Tonkin, Elizabeth. Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge University Press. 1992.
Tortorice, John. “Bibliography of George L. Mosse.” German Politics and Society, vol. 18 (2000), pp. 58–92.
Vashem, Yad. Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe, 1933-1945. Ahva Cooperative Press. 1997.
Wistrich, Robert. The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Josef. Oxford. 1989.
Wolff, Herbert. Before America: Herbert Wolff’s Early Life Oversees: 1920-1947. Judah L. Magnes Memorial Museum. Accessed 2009.
Zucker, Jackie. German-Jewish Migration to the Bay Area, 1933-1945. Judah L. Magnes Memorial Museum. 1979. Accessed 2009.

The editing advice and scholarly contributions of Dr. Schüring, Lauren, Rachel, and Eliezer Naor enhanced my paper. The efforts of the Judah L. Magnes Museum and archivist and librarian Lara Michels, Ph.D, proved invaluable to my research. I am particularly indebted to those family members who interviewed David Neubauer, and, as a result, preserved the remarkable story of my great-grandfather for future generations.

Adam

Email me when Adam publishes or recommends stories