Witnessing the Witness of War Crimes, Mass Murder, and Genocide: From the 1920s to the Present 9783110771381, 9783110770896

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
The Witness to Genocide in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Primo Levi between the Editions
Inside and Outside the Courtroom: Witnessing the Massacres of Chinese in Japanese Occupied Malaya, Singapore, and Rabaul
Divided Memories? The Last Testimonies on Nazi Massacres in Italy
Identification and Make-Believe: The Fallacies of Prosthetic Memory
Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem: Defendant and Witness in the Glass Booth?
The Witness’s Brew. On Imposture and Impostor Hunting
Expanding Historical Empathy: How the Holocaust is Helping Chinese Remember Atrocities of the Mao Era
Witnesses, Silence and Mimicry in Elias Khoury’s “Children of the Ghetto”
No Judges, Only Witnesses: Witnessing Genocide in the Vietnam Tribunalʼs Courtroom Setting of 1966–1967
Not Typical but Typifying: Varlam Shalamov’s “A Piece of Meat”
Witnessing as Counter-Power: Testimony and Crimes against Humanity in the Argentinian Province of Jujuy
Index

Citation preview

Witnessing the Witness of War Crimes, Mass Murder, and Genocide

The Vidal Sassoon Studies in Antisemitism, Racism, and Prejudice

Edited by Manuela Consonni Editorial Manager Martina L. Weisz The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Volume 4

Witnessing the Witness of War Crimes, Mass Murder, and Genocide

From the 1920s to the Present Edited by Manuela Consonni and Philip Galland Nord

ISBN 978-3-11-077089-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-077138-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-077146-6 ISSN 2569-202X Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933709 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: getty images, 157431484, millerpd Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Manuela Consonni and Philip Nord Introduction 1 Carolyn J. Dean The Witness to Genocide in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Uri S. Cohen Primo Levi between the Editions

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Ran Shauli Inside and Outside the Courtroom: Witnessing the Massacres of Chinese in Japanese Occupied Malaya, Singapore, and Rabaul 49 Toni Rovatti Divided Memories? The Last Testimonies on Nazi Massacres in Italy Valentina Pisanty Identification and Make-Believe: The Fallacies of Prosthetic Memory Fabien Théofilakis Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem: Defendant and Witness in the Glass Booth? 129 Joan Ramon Resina The Witness’s Brew. On Imposture and Impostor Hunting

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Vera Schwarcz Expanding Historical Empathy: How the Holocaust is Helping Chinese Remember Atrocities of the Mao Era 181 Amos Goldberg Witnesses, Silence and Mimicry in Elias Khoury’s “Children of the Ghetto” 197

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Contents

Anna Pollmann No Judges, Only Witnesses: Witnessing Genocide in the Vietnam Tribunalʼs Courtroom Setting of 1966–1967 217 Leona Toker Not Typical but Typifying: Varlam Shalamov’s “A Piece of Meat”

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Martina Weisz Witnessing as Counter-Power: Testimony and Crimes against Humanity in the Argentinian Province of Jujuy 249 Index

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Introduction The Eumenides, the third part of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, preceded by Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers, is centered on the theme of justice. If the first two tragedies are dark and full of violence, in the Eumenides, the register changes. The cycle of revenge is interrupted thanks to the intervention of Athena – goddess of wisdom, born from the head of Zeus – who, to judge the case of Orestes, establishes a special court, which recalls the structure of the Areopagite council, the guardian of the laws in ancient Athens, composed of twelve citizens and said to be presided by Athena herself. A trial is held before that court, in which, from the very onset, the accused acknowledges the matricide of which he is accused. In the end, at the moment of decision, the votes are equally divided, and Orestes is acquitted, because Athena, in the final verdict, takes his side. The Erinyes react angrily to the sentence, threatening death and destruction, but Athena manages to calm them. She assures them they will be revered forever, persuading them in the process to take on a new identity, that of the Eumenides, deities of justice rather than of revenge. They then break into a song of blessing, in which they prophesy wealth, fertility and harmony for Athens, while Athena foresees a long period of justice lying ahead, guaranteed by the citizens’ fear of the now venerated goddesses. A procession of priestesses follows, led by Athena, which accompanies the Eumenides to their new home. Aeschylus’s Oresteia is a tragedy in which a trial for matricide concludes with the institution of a court, which in turn puts a stop to vengeful violence. The moment, as Giorgio Agamben interprets it (following Nicole Loraux), constitutes on the one hand “the evocation of the long chain of killings in the house of Atreus and, on the other, the commemoration of its overcoming through the foundation

Note: The editors would like to express a special thanks to Roger Griffin who provided indispensable help in preparing this manuscript for publication. Manuela Consonni, Pela and Adam Starkopf Chair in Holocaust Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt Scopus, The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Director, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Philip Nord, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, emeritus, and former Director, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-001

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of the Areopagus tribunal, which will end the family slaughter.”1 In the Eumenides, vengeance gives way to justice, thanks to the intervention of a goddess, Athena. She effects the transformation, not through an act of grace, but through the creation of a new order, based on debate and reflection, an order of the word or logos if you will. We learn from the tragedy that revenge, justice, and reconciliation are interwoven in human action and almost impossible to disentangle. In the Oresteia, the mutation of the Erinyes into the Eumenides or, in English, of the Furies into the Benevolent Ones, represents the triumph of justice over mindless vengeance. And yet, the plays do not let us forget just how close the recent past remains, with its repeating sequences of crime and retribution. Beneath the surface of judicial reconciliation lie raw emotions, furious ones. A close observer will spot the Furies’ faces peaking from behind the Eumenides’ robes. Justice’s triumph, as Aeschylus presents it, is a fragile accomplishment and the relapse into the violent ways of old a hovering possibility. The Oresteia reminds us that judicial procedures do not resolve all things, that deeper feelings of unresolved emotion persist, undigested. It also reminds us how difficult it is to judge crimes beyond measure, how hard it is to find the right standard of judgment and to maintain the proper balance between memory and oblivion. It has been said that ours is the “era of the witness”2 and that the Eichmann trial of 1961–1962, more than any other event, contributed to ushering it in. From

 In the first section of Stasis, subtitled Stasis, Agamben bases his theory upon Nicole Loraux’s article “La guerre dans la famille,” in which she argues against the classical theory that in the Greek city-state (polis), as in Greek tragedy (e.g., Aeschylus’ Oresteia), civil war (Greek: stasis) emerges from the schismatic infighting and family feuding within the Greek household (oikos) (e.g., the bitter family feud, within the House of Atreus, between Atreus and Thyestes, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Aegisthus, et al.), and is only subsequently sublimated, within the Greek polis, by the establishment of a sovereign rule of law (the foundation of the Athenian Areopagus), which brings the selfperpetuating cycle of familial violence to a stop. With and against Loraux, Agamben argues that there is really no distinction, in Greek political theory or Greek tragedy, between the civil war in the family (oikeios polemos) or in the polis (emphylios polemos), but, instead, there is a “zone of indifference,” which serves as “the threshold of politicization and depoliticization” in the Greek city-state (16). In this zone of indistinction, civil war is both sublimated and de-sublimated, in a constant state of frozen conflict which perpetually threatens to break out into outright civil war. Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (Homo Sacer II, 2) (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 8; 16.  Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin (Paris: Plon, 1998). The act of witnessing is the central theme of this volume. Among many works devoted to the topic, the editors would like to acknowledge in particular Thomas Trezise’s book: Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

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this perspective, what made witnessing potent in such a new way was the confrontation, however belated, with the destruction of European Jewry. Our volume will address the issue of witnessing from a different angle. If we take mass murder as a point of departure, the murder of Jews but of other groups as well, like the Armenians, then the act of witnessing turns out to have a longer pedigree, dating back to the decades between the two world wars. Carolyn Dean’s introductory essay discusses two trials, one that took place in 1921, a second that took place six years later. In the first, it was Soghomon Tehlirian who was in the dock. He had assassinated an Ottoman official in Berlin, Talaat Pasha, one of the architects of the Armenian genocide of 1915. The 1927 trial also involved an assassination, that of the former Ukrainian strongman, Symon Petliura, gunned down in Paris. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Petliura had led a nationalist band in Ukraine that squared off against the Bolsheviks, and in the midst of the fighting, Petliura’s men orchestrated murderous pogroms that took the lives of tens of thousands of Jews. Tehlirian’s assassin was an Armenian and Petliura’s, Sholom Schwartzbard, a Jew. In both trials, the defense presented the accused as righteous avengers, who were compelled to bring killers still at large to justice. And in both, the defense called eyewitnesses to testify to the helplessness of the victims – men, women, and children – and the brutality of their murderers. The strategy worked. Juries acquitted Tehlirian and Schwartzbard alike. Dean’s essay illustrates witnessing’s deep past. It also raises the issue of what makes witnessing persuasive. Defense counsel in the Tehlirian and Schwartzbard trials opted not to focus on the specificity of the victims, their Armenian and Jewish identities, but on their basic humanity. At the same time, the assassins were cast as agents of human conscience, answering the cry of those who had suffered and standing up for them in the name of elementary justice. These were accents that juries of the time were able to understand, a reminder, if reminder is needed, that witnesses do not speak into the void but have an audience and that, to get a hearing, they need to formulate what they have to say in a vocabulary and narrative form that resonates. Four of the essays in this volume tackle the issue of audience and audience expectation head on. It should perhaps come as no surprise that listening is an unstable phenomenon, that what people are prepared to hear and process changes depending on the historical moment. How often has it been remarked, for example, that Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo had trouble finding an audience at the time of its first publication in 1947? When it was republished in 1958, however, the book met with general acclaim. Uri Cohen’s essay supplies an explanation for this change in reception, homing in on Levi’s evolving understanding of his readership and what they were prepared to respond to. Postwar Italians, he came to grasp, wanted a story

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with action heroes, anti-fascists who refused to bend to the logic of the camps. In the interval between his book’s two editions, Levi made a handful of minor, yet significant additions to better address such expectations. The protagonist’s friendship with fellow Italian Alberto was highlighted and the character of Alberto himself presented as a figure of uplift who refused to cede an inch of his humanity. A German old-timer, Steinlauft, is retouched and made to teach Primo lessons on how to hold on to shreds of civilized decency amidst the camp squalor. All the while, however, Levi, the author, sticks to his position. There were no doubt men of valor in Auschwitz, but they did not survive, and in the end, what mattered most when it came to making it through was “outrageous fortune.” Levi’s 1958 text gave humanist readers more of what they wanted than did the first version, but Levi’s bleak message persisted. The camp world was an arbitrary and cruel one, and the most a lucky survivor like Levi could do was to tell the stories of his comrades, some of them finer men than the author, who perished. Ran Shauli’s essay also has a bleak story to tell. During the Second World War, Japanese troops massacred tens of thousands in the territories they had occupied. Some of the victims were westerners but many were also Chinese. At the war’s end, the British brought Japanese perpetrators to justice, convening trials for mass atrocity in Singapore and Malaysia. The Australians did the same for crimes committed in Rabaul, New Guinea. In both instances, however, it was western victims the prosecution wanted to know about most, and it was western witnesses who in most cases were called on to give testimony. Chinese suffering was glossed over, and when Chinese were invited to speak, they were listened to with an incredulous ear, their reliability as witnesses cast into doubt. In effect, imperial ways of thinking and the racist assumptions that went with them silenced Chinese voices. Chinese community activists tried to make themselves heard all the same, but they lacked the photographic evidence to back up their claims. They received no help from Chinese Nationalists or Chinese Communists, themselves too engaged in civil war to give much thought to the wartime victimization of the Chinese diaspora. Then came the onset of the Cold War. The British turned to fighting a Communist insurgency in Malaysia, an insurgency that recruited the bulk of its troops among ethnic Chinese. Japan, once an enemy, now came to be seen as a potential partner in the western effort to contain the Reds. And so, Chinese voices were silenced for a second time. Cold War imperatives, as had in preceding years an imperial mindset, made audiences for all intents and purposes deaf to the Chinese experience. But frames of reference change, and so too does the “period ear,” altering in the process what audiences are attuned to hearing. Toni Rovatti’s essay vividly illustrates this point. In 1943–1945, Italy was the scene of intense fighting. As Allied forces advanced up the peninsula, partisans, many of them Communists, rose in

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revolt against the German Occupier and Mussolini’s puppet regime, the Republic of Salò. The fascists in turn exacted ferocious reprisals, massacring the inhabitants of towns and villages accused of abetting the insurgency. In the immediate postwar years, the story of what had happened proved hard to tell. The emotions were raw and unprocessed, and in a Cold War context, when elements of the Italian population worried about communist influence, there was a tendency on the part of some to blame partisan militancy for provoking the violence. Interviews with survivors in recent decades, however, have produced a different kind of narrative. Today, when survivors recount what happened to them, they do so, not as first-time storytellers, but as experienced witnesses who have given testimony more than once, with the result that the heat of emotion, which so roiled their testimonies when they were young, has been tamped down with the passage of time. Yet, more than that, for present-day witnesses, the partisan Resistance is no longer a subject of ambivalence. Those who rose in revolt in the war’s final months were not communist provocateurs but unalloyed anti-fascists and, as such, deserving of the public’s sympathies. Rovatti provides two kinds of explanations for this narrative recalibration. In the 1990s, the Italian state began to take a more focused interest in the story of the nation’s wartime liberation, and the state’s involvement, as Rovatti sees it, promoted a codification of memory, an ironing out differences in pursuit of a consistent narrative. But essential to this enterprise, that which made it possible in the first place, was the ending of the Cold War. The key role of the Communists in the Resistance ceased to be a hot-button issue, and it became possible at long last to view the uprisings of 1943–1945 as an unambivalent expression of national sentiment. The historical conjuncture had changed, and witness testimony changed alongside (with a little help from the state). The issue of emotion lies at the heart of Valentina Pisanty’s contribution. Present-day custodians of memory worry that the enormity of the Holocaust, as the event recedes in time, has grown harder for audiences to understand (if they ever could understand it). And so, museologists have sought out ways to rekindle emotional connection with the terrible things that happened back then. One possibility is to confront museumgoers with a living survivor. However practiced a witness the survivor might be and however settled the narrative he or she has to tell, that story, as told by a flesh-and-blood human being, was still bound to have a powerful impact. But living witnesses are growing fewer and fewer. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has experimented with an alternative tactic, handing out cards to visitors imprinted with the names and stories of Holocaust victims, most of them children. Cardholders are in effect invited to identify with these unfortunates and, as the museum visit unfolds, to follow them down the path of persecution and perhaps annihilation (some of them do survive). This is a device to recover the immediacy of the Holocaust, to make it real and present. It

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is, in its way, a kind of witnessing, what Pisanty calls “secondary witnessing.” She is critical, however, of this approach. Yes, it endeavors to make of us, the audience, caring and feeling observers. As such, it fits comfortably into today’s emotional regime, which places such a high premium on empathy for the victim, whoever the victim might be. But what is needed, Pisanty counters, is not just empathy but also “critical thinking,” a sober understanding, that is, of the historical forces that make mass murder possible at all. The content and emotional valence of witness testimony are not fixed entities but evolve according to historical context. One thing, however, does not seem to change: witnesses to mass murder and the stories they tell have now become a permanent feature of our memory landscape. So much so, indeed, that we have arrived at some shared notion of what a good witness looks like. Yet, this routinization of the figure of the witness is full of pitfalls, as Fabien Théofilakis’ and Joan Ramon Resina’s essays show. Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of Hitler’s Final Solution, was captured by the Israeli secret service in 1960 and put on trial the following year. Eichmann appeared as a witness in his own case, and he put on quite a performance. A dissection of that performance is the subject of Théofilakis’ contribution. He shows how Eichmann played the part of the scrupulous witness. There were certain events, he expostulated, that he did not have a clear memory of, but wasn’t that natural given how much time had gone by? He did not deny that a terrible crime had taken place, but he had not seen the cruelty first-hand and for sure had never engaged in acts of violence himself. He was a mere bureaucrat, a cog in a machine that implicated him in the genocide of the Jews even though he was a man of high principle. Thus, as Eichmann trimmed and weaseled, he contrived to present an alternative narrative of Nazism. First-hour Nazis like himself, he insinuated, had been idealists, taken advantage of by a system that was steered off the rails during the war by rogue elements. The Nazi creed at its origins was by implication a good one, later deformed by others. That said, the creed remained redeemable, and Eichmann looked to German youth of today to reclaim their Nazi birthright. It all made for a sinister show, as Eichmann manipulated the protocols of witnessing in a (failed) attempt to subvert the judicial process and turn it into a platform, not for judging him, but for proselytizing Nazism to a future generation. Manipulating protocols is also the subject of Resina’s essay, though in his case, it is not a performance on the witness stand that is at issue but literary testimony. That of Binjamin Wilkomirski, first of all, who published Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood in 1995, which purported to tell the story of the author’s harrowing encounters with the Nazi camp system during the war. The book represented itself as a Holocaust memoir, but it was a fake, the fabrication of one Bruno Grosjean, also known as Bruno Dössekker. Resina’s next example of imposture is yet

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more complicated. Enric Marco was a Spaniard who performed work service in wartime Germany and, while there, had a run-in with the Gestapo. He translated that uninspiring experience into something more riveting to the postwar Spanish public, inventing a persona for himself as a Resistance hero and survivor of the German concentrationary universe, a man who remained loyal to the memory of fallen comrades. It is remarkable how far Marco got with these inventions, even receiving an invitation to address the Spanish parliament. He was exposed in 2005, but even outed as an impersonator, he continued to make the claim that the story he had told about himself, while not exact, contained a kernel of truth, for though he had not in fact experienced the camps, he had captured something of the truth of what they had been about. Last of all, Resina turns to the case of Javier Cercas, a manipulative and ambitious Spanish man of letters. Cercas wrote an exposé of Marco’s life titled The Impostor, which was published in 2014. Cercas deconstructed Marco’s lies, branching out from there to cast into doubt the overall usefulness of survivor testimony, thereby calling into question, if only by implication, the “historical memory movement” (Resina’s phrase) that had sprung up and grown so powerful in post-Franco Spain. But, of course, as Resina explains, such invitations to forgetfulness served Cercas’ interests all too well. He was the grandson of a Falangist official with a family past to hide. That memory movement had created a “slot” for witnesses to mass murder, a platform from which they might speak, but not every speaker was an honest one. Some were impostors; some were semi-deluded impersonators; and some told the truth, sort of, in a duplicitous way that covered up inconvenient facts. It took time for the Holocaust to win recognition as the nec plus ultra of genocidal murder, one altogether singular in its monstrousness. Yet, as it did, it took on paradigmatic status, as did in tandem the rites of Holocaust remembrance, including the practice of bearing witness. Victims of atrocity the world over have turned to these rites and practices, embracing and adapting them as models to express their own pain. Three essays in this volume deal with such borrowings, those of Vera Schwarcz, Amos Goldberg, and Anna Pollmann. The authors show how the act of bearing witness has been made to travel across cultures. In the event, however, translations of this kind are not always a simple matter. Sometimes they are, to be sure, as in the case of post-Tiananmen China, the subject of Vera Schwarcz’s contribution. China in the latter half of the twentieth century was the scene of one man-made disaster after another, from the Great Famine of 1958–1962, to the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976, to the massacre at Tiananmen Square itself in 1989. In the years since, the millions who died in these catastrophes have in good measure gone unmemorialized. The Communist Party has done what it can to encourage oblivion, to create a “Republic of Amnesia.” There are Chinese, however, who have visited Yad Vashem or had occasion to

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delve into archives of Holocaust testimony, and for many, these experiences have been devastating. They are reduced to tears, the Jewish dead calling to mind their own loved ones who have been swept away. This encounter, so powerful in its emotional impact, has led some to try to fight back against state-promoted forgetfulness, to remember the lives sacrificed, and to do so, using the same instruments – museums and testimonial archives – that Jews have devised to remember those millions murdered in the Holocaust. The story Goldberg has to tell, however, is not so straightforward. His subject is Elias Khoury, a Lebanese novelist who is completing a trilogy on the Palestinian Nakba. Two volumes have already appeared, in 2016 and 2019, and the third is on its way. Khoury, on Goldberg’s account, is cognizant of the paradigmatic power of the Holocaust and how, in a middle eastern context, the memory of Jewish suffering crowds out that of Palestinian loss. To create a space for the Palestinian voice to be heard, Khoury writes about the Nakba, employing metaphors and turns of phrase appropriated from the lexicon of Holocaust writing. The first volume of Khoury’s Nakba trilogy, after all, is titled My Name is Adam: The Children of the Ghetto. But, as Goldberg argues, Khoury’s ambition is not simply to pirate phrases from Jewish experience as a way of drawing attention to the Palestinian cause. He is not trying to steal the Jews’ thunder so to speak. Khoury in fact acknowledges what the Holocaust has meant to Jews. What he wants to suggest, pace Goldberg, is that the Nakba has meant something similar to Palestinians, and he does so not by beating the patriotic drum or blasting tales of Palestinian heroism but by telling stories of human frailty and pain, sometimes with a note of humor thrown in. The idea is not to trump Holocaust memory, but to show how the two memories – Jewish and Palestinian – parallel or double each other. That doubling might in fact, Goldberg hints, provide a basis for mutual understanding. Khoury thus takes a page from the book of Holocaust witnessing and rewrites it, such that it makes Palestinian loss visible, of course, but more than that: such that it illuminates the way to a different, less polarized, even “bi-national” (Goldberg’s phrase) future. But the model of Holocaust witnessing, if not rightly understood, can also obfuscate, and this is the point that Pollmann’s essay hammers home. She takes a close look at the workings of the Viet Nam War Tribunal convened in Stockholm in 1966–1967 (a session was also organized in Copenhagen). The conveners, men and women of the non-communist Left, wanted to lay bare the atrocities committed by the United States army in Indochina and to that end mounted a mock trial, calling witnesses to the stand – Vietnamese civilians and guerrilla fighters, disaffected G.I.’s, and even members of the tribunal itself – to expose American war crimes and the racist world view that animated them. What the organizers intended was a reprise, in an era of decolonization, of the Nuremberg trials of 1945–1946, which is why they put so much stock in eyewitness depositions. So far

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so good, but they got something wrong. They believed that Nuremberg had taken on the issue of the Holocaust and thus that their own tribunal, mutatis mutandis, was a species of Holocaust trial in its own right. The Eichmann trial, which went unreferenced at Stockholm, was indeed a Holocaust trial, but Nuremburg was not. The accused were not charged with the genocide of the Jews but with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Looked at in this light, the Viet Nam War Tribunal was a conceptual muddle that lumped into the same category Hitlerian aggression, the Holocaust, and the kinds of atrocity associated with counterinsurgency warfare. One of the leitmotifs of this volume is all the ways in which witnessing can go wrong. A devious witness like Eichmann can scheme to subvert the pursuit of justice. Impostors and impersonators, who know how to play with witness protocols, can pass themselves off as the real thing. “Secondary witnessing” plays on emotions when what counts most is a clear-eyed confrontation with the facts and how they came to be. And in Pollmann’s essay, witnesses in a mishmash of a trial find themselves implicated in a proceeding that purports to be about the Holocaust but is not really, obscuring the distinctiveness of the Holocaust in the process. There are times, however, when witnesses are heard to tell the truth and when what they have to say is powerful in its impact. As we have seen, audiences need to be in the right frame of mind to hear, but a portion of the witness’s power also comes from the way they speak, the story-telling conventions that they make us of, which impart to the facts they have to relate an authority that commands recognition, respect, even awe. Leona Toker’s essay on the literature of the Gulag bears out this observation. Soviet reading audiences were raised on the conventions of realist fiction. Survivors who wrote about their Gulag experience and wanted a hearing did well to play by realist rules, relating the facts in a modest, unadorned prose, in a key that the audience’s ear was familiar with, thereby enabling readers to get some sense of the daily challenges and humiliations of camp life. This is much how Alexander Solzhenitsyn proceeded in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). But other options were also experimented with, by Varlam Shalamov for example, who published in samizdat format. He did not write memoir-like stories but fiction. His stories had realist elements, enough so that he got listened to, but having captured the reader’s attention, Shalamov then veered in a different direction. In one story, he tells of a prisoner who fakes appendicitis to escape deportation to Kolyma, a frozen and pitiless work camp where he is bound to die. He undergoes a needless operation and, as he recuperates in hospital, finds himself beside a well-known serial killer who plots to murder our “hero.” Yet, the killer, by yet one more quirk of fate, is called away to fight another fight, and so the story’s protagonist lives another day. Shalamov’s play with realist conventions enables

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him to make an otherwise hard to communicate point about the fundamental arbitrariness and absurdity of life in the Gulag. The facts he conveys, as Toker characterizes them, are not typical, but “typifying.” On this reading, the supposition is not that Shalamov’s stories really took place but that they could have in a camp world whose crazed reality is difficult to convey by straight-up realist means. Martina Weisz’s essay is also about testimonial convention. Thirty-thousand people were “disappeared” during the 1976–1983 dictatorship of Rafael Videla in Argentina. The conventions Weisz writes of are in part, as in Toker’s essay, literary. It is not realist practices that engage Weisz’s attention, however, but the genre of testimonio. The genre, which involves the short-form, first-person telling of a significant life story, has deep roots in Argentine culture. It was adapted in the 1960s by insurgent groups, narrators not just speaking for themselves as individuals but in the name of this group or that, which had come to be swept up in the insurgency. Since 2012, Argentina has begun to investigate the crimes of the Videla era, conducting a series of trials and calling on survivors to bear witness. Weisz has followed the judicial proceedings in the province of Jujuy and takes note of how witnesses have adapted and updated the testimonio form yet once more, speaking still for a group, but that group now recast as the community of desaparecidos. Weisz, however, wants to make a further point. Witnesses give the disappeared a voice in the courtroom. But even more, they conjure them up, in such a way that the dead become a haunting, real presence. For, on Weisz’s understanding, it is not just literary conventions that witnesses mobilize but religious ones as well, above all those associated with the observance of All Saints’ Day. On that day, the living lay out food and drink for their ancestors, who are believed to return from the land of the dead for a visit. So too do witnesses in the Jujuy dock bring back the disappeared, summoning up the lost to give them life once again, so that they may console loved ones even as they point a finger of accusation at the criminals who murdered them. The Jujuy trials are not yet concluded, and Weisz, who lost a parent to the Videla dictatorship, writes of them, not just as an observer, but also as someone with a personal stake in the outcome. The scholars who have contributed to this volume are an interdisciplinary group, historians and literary critics in the main. It is little wonder then that the witnesses in such hands turn out to come in more than one variety. There is the classic witness, of course, the man or woman called on to testify in court. But there are other ways to give testimony, on the page, in memoirs, in stories drawn from life, indeed, in stories tout court. Museologists have in fact attempted to devise techniques to make witnesses of us all. In whatever form, witnessing is a complex phenomenon, a dynamic interplay between speaker and audience. Audiences are primed to hear, or not to hear, certain things, and that “ear” is itself subject to change. Some of the change is the simple consequence of time passing.

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Witnesses age and die; the stories they tell congeal into recurring narratives or fade away altogether. But historical context also matters, the waning of the Cold War, for example, or the autonomization of Holocaust memory, with the result that some kinds of stories lose purchase while it is the opposite for others. The Holocaust story itself has become, or became for a period, almost hegemonic, its practices and rites helping to pattern how victims of other crimes in other places remembered what happened to them. But witnesses – not just what they say but how they say it – also have a part to play in the ebb and flow of testimony. There are codes for witnessing and conventions for storytelling, and the witness who knows how to mobilize them can seize the public’s imagination. We have seen how these codes and conventions can be and have been manipulated, whether by design or not, to defeat the cause of truth. Fake witnesses have passed themselves off as real ones. Witnesses have delivered good-faith testimony but in judicial contexts that don’t value what they have to say or that end up muddying the distinctions between different forms of atrocity. Most sinister of all, bad-faith witnessing has been resorted to in order to hide or minimize mass murder. At the same time, however, when witnesses and historical moment intersect, when people are ready to listen and speakers talk to them in an idiom that resonates, witnessing can become powerful, breaking silences and even resurrecting the dead.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (Homo Sacer II, 2). Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

Carolyn J. Dean

The Witness to Genocide in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries When we read that the Assyrian or Babylonian Government “carried into captivity” such and such a broken people or tribe, we hardly seize the meaning of the statement. Even when we see the process portrayed with grim realism on the conqueror’s bas-reliefs, it does not penetrate our imagination to the quick. But now we know. It has happened in our world, and the Assyrians’ crime was not so fiendish as the Turks’. “Organized and effective massacre” – that is what such a deportation means, and that must always have been its implication. Arnold J. Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (1916)

When the British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote his condemnation of what was not yet called the Armenian genocide in 1916, he sought to define an ancient crime in new terms for which he struggled to find adequate words, employing “organized” and “effective” to compound the impact of “massacre.” Not quite thirty years later, the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the neologism genocide to name a crime – the slaughter of European Jews – that could not be reduced to mass murder. For Lemkin, the essence of genocide was a “systematic attack on a group of people and its cultural identity: [it was a crime] against difference itself.”1 Lemkin’s view was pared down in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: for political and legal reasons, the drafters defined the violation to encompass only the physical destruction of specific groups, emphasizing the planned and deliberate nature of the killing over its assault on cultural identity, as if literal and cultural annihilation were not related.2 It was not until the western reception of Holocaust victim testimony in the 1970s and 80s that public discourse defined genocide as radically transgressive and incommensurable, transforming the animus that motivated the killing and the unfathomable cultural and linguistic loss it engendered into a phenomenon whose meaning transcended physical destruction.

 Leora Bilsky and Rachel Klagsbrun, “The Return of Cultural Genocide?” The European Journal of International Law, 29 no. 2 (2018): 374.  “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Accessed 21 November 2021. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Con vention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20; Genocide.pdf. Bilsky and Klagsbrun, “The Return of Cultural Genocide,” 373–339. Carolyn J. Dean, Stille Professor of History and French, Yale University https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-002

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This essay addresses two episodes in the history of how genocide became the most radical moral transgression conceivable and on what terms it differed from other forms of mass violence, including war. It asks how, as this distinction became increasingly legible to a broader public, the Holocaust of European Jewry became the paradigm of genocidal murder. It thus analyzes a longer history not only of how mass murder was distinguished in public discourse from what Lemkin would eventually term genocide, but also how the meaning the western public attributed to genocide changed over time and defined which victims mattered and why. Scholars tell two different stories about the significance of this distinction between genocide and mass murder, both of which focus on the Holocaust: the first begins with victim testimony during the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and ends by reference to the outsize role played by victim trauma in contemporary political and social life – in the so-called sacralization of Holocaust survivors – and in genocide prosecution.3 It is recounted as the rise and fall of the Holocaust, from belated recognition in the 1960s to iconic status during the 1980s and fallen idol a decade later, when Holocaust memory was packaged, sold, and exported so widely for consumption that one scholar dubbed the period the “era of the witness.”4 Victims initially struggled for acknowledgment, but as their experience was belatedly recognized the Holocaust came to be viewed as a distinct, radical, and unprecedented form of collective violence. In the end, however, the narrative ends on a sour note: Holocaust memory was evacuated of substance and transformed into a secular religion. The second story is a political and legal history of how the Allied powers, fearful of legitimating violations of state sovereignty as well as legal claims against their leaders and empires, depoliticized genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention. They reduced its application to the intentional physical destruction of a racial, ethnic, or religious group motivated by its members’ identity, a definition that excluded murders of political opponents, expulsions, cultural destruction, and other politically motivated acts. The Allies differentiated such political acts, rationalized in the name of state security, from the Holocaust, using the language of “civilization” and violations of

 On victims and the International Criminal Court, see Eric Stover, The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in the Hague (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 2005); on the ubiquity of trauma, see Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).  Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). For a summary of this dense historiography, see Carolyn J. Dean, The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 14–21.

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“human conscience” to cast the event as the uniquely evil extermination of millions of innocents for no reason other than who they were. Victim groups, and Lemkin himself, supported the Great Powers as their best hope for a Jewish state in Palestine. They too proffered the uniqueness narrative, which remains pervasive and positions the Holocaust with and “above” genocide, as the paradigmatic “crime of crimes.”5 Both these narratives ultimately explain the cultural and political significance accorded to genocide over time by invoking the role of Holocaust memory and its effects on contemporary culture: one view contends that its global reception transformed a singular event into kitsch, and the other that its ostensible singularity blotted out the recognition of past and ongoing imperialist crimes as genocides. Both concur that the Holocaust has been dehistoricized: it has either been turned into an icon of evil that reduces its complexity and meaning or elevated into a paradigm of genocide for political reasons. I treat the Holocaust survivor as the crystallization of a “witness to genocide” with prior rhetorical incarnations in the long twentieth century. I analyze two European interwar (1919–1939) trials, using them as microcosms of historical and conceptual developments that were to become essential to making a distinction between the moral transgression of mass murder and that of genocide. Rather than use the Holocaust as a point of departure, I focus on how the symbolic power of the witness tracks the history of how Western Europeans constructed the cultural rather than legal meaning of mass violence, and how local terrorism against ethnic groups was first rendered distinct, albeit still within an older vocabulary of moral transgression, including allusions to barbarism and violations of “human conscience.” I make two arguments: that trial narratives both gave victims’ voices credibility and integrated them into broad normative moral communities; and that the

 A. Dirk Moses writes that the Holocaust “simultaneously stands above genocide while investing it with charged significance because of their sibling relationship.” Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2021), 482. I reiterate Moses’ highly developed account, but a large literature about the dubious privilege accorded the Holocaust preexisted his work, making similar claims in social and intellectual histories. See, among others, Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Joan Wallach Scott, On The Judgment of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). For a critique of Moses, see Omer Bartov, “Blind Spots of Genocide,” Journal of Modern European History, 19.4 (2021), 395–400 (part of a forum devoted to the book) and Saul Friedländer, “A Fundamental Crime,” K. Jews, Europe, and the Twenty-First Century. Accessed September 9, 2021. https://k-larevue.com/en/saul-friedlander-a-fundamental-crime/

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making of “moral witnesses” to genocide was part of a process of cultural redemption that managed audiences’ desire for moral absolution and cast victims as absolutely innocent.6 The Eichmann trial and its afterlife exemplified the most highly significant iteration of these phenomena in a new language. The meaning attributed to the Holocaust and the Holocaust survivor was not merely a political or legal process, but a complex cultural development that both reiterated Western hegemony and incorporated victims into a narrative that victims shaped but did not define. This cultural legacy demarcates the difference between the Holocaust and other genocides.7 I recount the trial, in 1921, of Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian avenger of what was not yet named the Armenian genocide, and, in 1927, of Scholem Schwarzbard, a Jewish avenger of the Ukrainian pogroms of 1918–19. Both were accused of murder, Tehlirian of assassinating an Ottoman official responsible for ordering the Armenian genocide, and Schwarzbard of shooting the alleged instigator of the Ukrainian pogroms. These were the first major trials in Western Europe featuring victims of interethnic violence and state-sponsored mass atrocities in central roles. They caught the young Lemkin’s attention and shaped his thinking about genocide. Hannah Arendt claimed that they illustrated the importance of an international criminal court.8 Lawyers used the trials to bring the Armenian genocide and the Ukrainian pogroms into Western public view even though the defendants were themselves accused of murder. Like the Eichmann trial forty years later, the proceedings spotlighted mass atrocities, used victim testimony in highly unusual if defensible ways, put victims center stage to teach the public about their plights, and provided multilingual forums for their revelations. Both defendants were acquitted after juries heard blood-curdling accounts of the Armenian massacres and the military invasions of Ukrainian villages. The verdicts decreed that the shooters had momentarily lost control of their free will, in both cases because the defense showcased the atrocities that had pushed each man to lose his composure rather than the murders they had committed. Lemkin mentioned both trials in the same breath, referring to the “absence,” as he put it, of “any law for the unification of moral standards in relation to the destruction of national, racial, and religious groups.”9 Lemkin believed that Tehlirian

 Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 163–168, uses the term “moral witness” to describe the Holocaust survivor.  I make this argument in Dean, The Moral Witness. Material for this essay is drawn from that book.  Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, ed. Donna-Lee Frieze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 21; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994), 266.  Lemkin, Totally Unofficial, 21.

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“had acted as the self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind,” but worried about the implications of extralegal vengeance. But he was so moved a few years later by Schwarzbard’s trial – by the “sufferings of hundreds of Jews displayed like an open wound before the world” – that his qualms about vigilante justice diminished, and he exclaimed that Schwarzbard’s crime was “beautiful.”10 Since each trial’s official purpose was not to seek justice for victims of pogroms or genocide, they do not overlap easily with the categories of international criminal law or with the history of human rights. Advocacy and political mobilization were important – Schwarzbard’s trial spurred Jewish organizations to defend him – but these were not the defendants’ original goals. Schwarzbard’s was a rogue assassination, and Tehlirian planned to flee the scene of the crime. He was not supposed to be caught. In the absence of an established legal category with which courts could prosecute state-directed mass murder, the proceedings provided a forum for publicizing atrocities in the defendants’ words, in court, and to the press. Victim testimony was central even though audiences were skeptical about it, partly because after the Great War they equated accounts of atrocity with state propaganda, and partly because they believed victims’ perspectives could not be sufficiently objective. By putting the Armenian genocide and the Jewish pogroms on trial, the lawyers hoped to prove that their clients had acted without premeditation, gripped by forces beyond their control. What victims could say in the courtroom and how they could say it defined experiences whose recounting strained the narrative coherence of established legal defenses. Although the proceedings invoked the norms associated with the rhetoric of Western civility and patriotic combat, they also shifted familiar ideas about human suffering and survival that were as important to the outcome of the proceedings as legal argument alone. Together with other trials, most importantly that of Adolf Eichmann, they form a genealogy of the contemporary moral witness.

The Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian In the midmorning of March 15, 1921, Soghomon Tehlirian shot Talaat Pasha in an affluent neighborhood in Berlin. Talaat, one of the men responsible for planning the 1915 Armenian genocide, had been among the highest-ranking officials at the Ottoman court and fled to Berlin to avoid trial by the Allies after the defeat of the

 Lemkin, Totally Unofficial, 20–21; also quoted in James Loeffler, “Becoming Cleopatra: The Forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin,” Journal of Genocide Research, 19 no. 3 (2017): 347–348.

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Ottoman Empire. He was targeted for assassination by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), an important Armenian political party whose leaders assigned the job to Tehlirian. As Talaat was out for his morning walk, Tehlirian shot him through the back of the head at close range and sought to escape, but bystanders cornered him and hailed the police. They arrested the Armenian assassin, who was brought to trial a few weeks later on charges of premeditated murder after a hasty preliminary investigation.11 During the investigative phase Tehlirian admitted he had killed Talaat but insisted that he had acted on his own. Worried about being condemned to death for a political murder, he played the role of an anguished and isolated man whose epileptic fits were brought on by his memories of the genocide in which his family had perished. Correspondence between the German foreign office and one of Tehlirian’s defense lawyers indicates that the Weimar government acted to limit, and in one case prohibited, the testimony of a diplomat at the trial in order not to expose the extent of German complicity in and knowledge of the Armenian genocide. As has now been amply documented, the Germans had acted as a counter-insurgency force in Anatolia, where the genocide took place.12 The foreign office may have hoped for a conviction in order not to alienate its former Turkish allies, but it was also concerned that the German Army should not be implicated in crimes against the Armenians. These government measures did not prevent the trial from becoming a cause célèbre but shortened Tehlirian’s time in the public eye and turned testimony away from the German Army’s misdeeds to the defendant’s distress over witnessing the murder of his mother and brothers and the kidnapping of one of his sisters. The trial lasted two days, from June 2 to June 3, 1921. Medical experts could not agree on whether Tehlirian was responsible for his act but agreed with one exception that his epilepsy might have compromised his free will. What never came out in the trial was that Tehlirian did not witness the genocide because he was in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) fighting with the Russian army. When he returned home, he found a brother alive and the town abandoned. At the trial he claimed that he had witnessed the murders.13 The prosecution also never brought out his involvement in any organized plot to pursue Talaat, who

 Armenian Political Trials Proceedings 1: The Case of Soghomon Tehlirian, trans. Vartkes Yeghiayan (Los Angeles: A.R.F. Varantian Gomideh, 1985). Original transcripts in Der Prozess Talaat Pascha (Stenographischer Bericht) (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschicte, 1921).  Wolfgang Gust, ed., The Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915–1916 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 91, 768–769.  The Case of Soghomon Tehlirian, 98–104. Page citations from this source are hereafter given parenthetically in the text.

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was the first of several Turkish nationalists to be assassinated in a series of murders the ARF dubbed “Operation Nemesis.”14 The trial, with its famous defense attorneys, became a media sensation. The judge’s opening interrogation revealed his sympathy for the defendant, whom he probed gently about his experiences. Tehliran recounted his story calmly and deliberately, beginning with the Ottoman order to leave his village in 1915, the robbery of their convoy by troops who stole their valuables – they had only been allowed to bring what they could carry – and then bursts of gunfire, at the sound of which a soldier dragged his sister away and his mother screamed, “May I go blind!” Tehlirian said he could no longer bear to think about their suffering: “I do not want to be reminded of that day. It is better for me to die than describe the events of that black day” (7). The judge urged him to try and recount what happened, and Tehlirian described the murder of his mother and brother and being surrounded by corpses. His entire extended family had almost all disappeared without a trace. In response to the judge’s query about why he had initially admitted to having killed Talaat, he replied, “When did I say that?” When pressed, he insisted that he had not planned to kill him and that “I do not consider myself guilty because my conscience was clear.” “I have killed a man, but I am not a murderer,” he stated, acknowledging that about two weeks before the murder, he kept “seeing the scenes of the massacres over and over. I saw my mother’s corpse. The corpse just stood up before me and told me ‘You know Talaat is here and yet you do not seem to be concerned. You are no longer my son’” (15). It was then that he decided to kill Talaat, but on further interrogation he claimed that he had made no such decision, did not know that Talaat was in Berlin, and appeared dazed and confused. The district attorney who prosecuted Tehlirian played it safe, referring to the massacres as “killings known to us all” and avoiding questions about Talaat’s relationship with the German Army (144). He echoed the testimony of General Otto Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission in the Ottoman Empire, who declared that the German Army was shocked by the massacres. The general had countered charges of German complicity by insisting that all the “officers up to the rank of general in the Eastern provinces were Turks,” and that most of the perpetrators were not of a “select class” of soldiers but “criminals or the perennially unemployed.” He added that the German government had protested Turkish violence against the Armenians (83–84). The prosecutor used von Liman’s testimony to deflect from Talaat’s responsibility by portraying the murderers as rogue troops

 Eric Bogosian, Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide (New York: Little, Brown, 2015).

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and the murders as an overheated but understandable response to Turkish fears of Armenian betrayal. The defense attorney Johannes Werthauer also negated the real ties between Talaat and Germany by calling to the stand a surviving Armenian bishop who thanked the Germans for saving him from the Turks. Testimonies came from a wide range of eminent doctors, academics, military men, and Armenian witnesses, who testified to their own experience with harrowing eyewitness reports. Christine Terzibashian from Anatolia described how wealthy Armenians were given advance notice that they were to leave their homes, while the poor were told to gather with little time to spare. Four groups of five-hundred families from her village were evacuated. As they filed out, they began to walk over corpses from other villages. At some point men were separated from the group, tied together, and thrown into the river while those who remained watched. The presiding judge asked, “How do you know that?” to which Terzibashian responded, “I saw it with my own eyes.” The judge then asked who was responsible, and Terzibashian accused Talaat Pasha, because the Turkish guards forced some of their victims to kneel and cry “Long live the pasha” (73). Once evidence of the atrocities had been established and confirmed by credible authorities, Tehlirian’s lawyers sought to exculpate their client. Werthauer, careful not to cast aspersions on a former German ally, acknowledged that Talaat may have been a “decent fellow,” but called him a member of a “militarist cabinet”: A militarist is a person opposed to justice. The militarist is not an individual who is a member of the military by calling. It is possible to be an officer or a soldier, wear a uniform, use weapons and, at the same time, not be a militarist. The officer or soldier himself can uphold the principles of right and justice and perform his duties as a member of the military at the same time. On the other hand, there are countless militarists who have never put on a uniform. They sit at a desk, write articles, and fiercely defend the flag of brute force (145).

The lawyer then strove to alter the image of Tehlirian from a murderer into a noble figure by making a dramatic distinction between humanitarian patriots and coldhearted “militarists.” The militarists “annihilated the Armenians”: they were not the Turkish people, they did not represent the Turkish people, they were not soldiers, and did not command a legitimate army. Here he made a crucial distinction between legitimate and illegitimate warriors, whether German or Turk. The militarists were “well-trained animals that will never be able to have human feelings,” and formed a distinctive new caste capable of deporting “a whole nation” (146). In contrast, Werthauer proclaimed, Tehlirian was like the Swiss patriot William Tell, who had killed a tyrant to save his people. “Of all the juries in the world, which one would have condemned Tell if he had shot his

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arrow at [the tyrant Albrecht] Gessler? Is there a more humanitarian act than that which has been described in this courtroom?” (148). The defense associated Tehlirian’s act with honor, displaced the German Army’s responsibility for murderous deeds onto Turks cast as “militarists” rather than soldiers, and realigned German loyalties from the Ottoman Empire to the murdered Armenian nation. But how did the court reconcile a compulsively committed, unintentional act with an honorable one? Though lawyers portrayed Tehlirian as a soldier, they insisted that his mind was gripped by revulsion against the memory of his unbearable submission to the militarists’ whims. The drive to honor the deaths of those with whom his life was once entwined compelled him against his will to murder. The lawyers transformed Tehlirian’s alleged loss of free will into the unrestrainable force of human conscience. This peculiar transfiguration of an assassin into a righteous avenger and a willful murder into an act of conscience succeeded. The prosecution failed to convict, and Tehlirian walked out of the courtroom a free man.

The Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard On May 25, 1926, in Paris, Samuel (Scholem) Schwarzbard, a Bessarabian Jewish watchmaker, committed a similar crime of vengeance. He had come to France in 1910 to escape political repression in Russia, fought in the Great War (1914–1918) on France’s side, won the Croix de Guerre in 1916, and acquired French nationality. He returned to Odessa in 1917 to fight with anarchist forces assisting the Bolsheviks to take over the city. After returning to Paris, Schwarzbard learned that Symon Petliura, former head of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic, had been living in Paris since 1924, where he was head of the Ukrainian government in exile and published a Ukrainian-language newspaper. Petliura had been the commander of the Ukrainian army and had allegedly organized the 1917 pogroms that took some fifty thousand Jewish lives. Schwarzbard trailed him, shooting him five times outside of a bistro in the rue Racine and a few more times after he was dead. When the police showed up, Schwarzbard declared that he had killed a “great butcher, a great assassin.”15 He was arrested and put on trial for eight days

 Testimony of Scholem Schwarzbard, October 18, 1927, Institute for Jewish Research, Center for Jewish History, New York (hereafter YIVO), formerly Elias Tcherikower Archives, now RG85, folder 486, fol. 39494. For selections of some testimonies and other documents related to the trial (in their original languages), see David Engel, The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard 1926–1927: A Selection of Documents (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016).

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from October 18 to October 26 1927, after a pre-trial investigation that lasted seventeen months. The Schwarzbard case drew many comparisons to that of Tehlirian. Schwarzbard’s defense attorney Henry Torrès argued that Talaat’s order to massacre Armenians was analogous to Petliura’s alleged instigation of pogroms against the Jews. He insisted that, like Tehlirian, acquitted by a “bourgeois jury in Berlin,” Schwarzbard must also be declared not guilty. He proclaimed that like Schwarzbard, Tehlirian had cried, “I am pleased to have done what I did! I avenged my people; I’ve killed an assassin!”16 Of course, Tehlirian had made no such declaration. In any case, audiences understood both trials to be about the inhumane treatment of a minority population with no recourse to the usual tribunals of justice. Schwarzbard’s trial highlighted in a public forum the routinized violence to which Ukrainian Jews had long been subjected. It also eventually revolved less around Schwarzbard’s deed than around the atrocities committed in pogroms and whether the hetman (military commander) Symon Petliura had really organized and sanctioned them. When the judge interrogated Schwarzbard at the beginning of the trial, the defendant was defiant and headstrong. Since the prosecution insisted that he was part of a Soviet conspiracy, the judge asked if he had really acted alone. He claimed that a gentile Russian acquaintance in Paris had overheard officers from the White Russian Army talking about their exploits in a hospital waiting room. One boasted that he had killed fifteen Jews in a single day. The acquaintance told Schwarzbard that he was so shaken by the terrible stories that he left without seeing the doctor. Schwarzbard told the judge, “You can imagine the state that I, too, was in. I was present at some pogroms; I saw atrocities committed and I forced myself to forget them. This Russian who came to tell me these things awakened in me all these memories, and that had a huge impact on me.”17 The judge, as was customary in order to establish the facts of the case, proceeded to describe how Schwarzbard located Petliura in Paris, and how he had killed him. He then asked the defendant why he believed that Petliura was responsible for the pogroms. Schwarzbard offered a short history lesson – Petliura took Ukraine by force against the Bolsheviks and his men massacred Jews. Calling Petliura’s men “true brutes,” he stated that they surprised people in their homes as they slept “because they knew that the Jewish population had no defense.” They “shamed women in front of their husbands, daughters in front of their fathers and their brothers. They burned and pillaged, they planned pogroms;

 Henry Torrès, Le procès des pogromes: Plaidoirie suivie des témoinages (Paris: Les Éditions de France, 1928), 340.  YIVO, RG85, folder 486, fols. 39482–83, October 18, 1927.

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pogroms are assassinations, pillage, and rape. Voilà the pogrom.” He added that Petliura’s soldiers had a slogan on their armbands and hats: “Kill the Jews and save Ukraine.”18 Other witness testimony bore out Schwarzbard’s claims, not only about the atrocities committed in pogroms, but also about Petliura’s responsibility. Among them, Elias Tcherikower, a pioneering Jewish historian from Kiev, had gathered documents and photographs of Ukrainian pogroms and brought them to Paris for the purpose of the trial. This collection of documents, published by the Comité des délégations juives, consisted of detailed accounts of pogroms from all over Ukraine.19 The prosecutor asked Tcherikower if Petliura was “at least partially” responsible for the pogroms. He responded that “no one in Ukraine” doubted his responsibility and recounted the Jewish community’s multiple pleas with Petliura to stop the pogroms. He claimed that “the assurances Petliura gave about his opposition to pogroms can be compared to calling the doctor after the sick person dies, or to calling the firemen after the fire has already been snuffed out.”20 Another eyewitness, Haya Greenberg, a medical student, testified about the brutal Proskurov pogrom of 1919. She said that she left her office one evening only to hear “savage cries” as Ukrainian soldiers approached the Jewish parts of the city. The next afternoon, she went to care for the wounded and found that there had been a massacre. The survivors had lost entire families, including young children, all murdered by soldiers wielding bayonets. A young woman of nineteen who witnessed her mother’s murder saw the Ukrainians throw themselves on her and cry, “This is for our father Petliura!”21 The prosecution called witnesses to prove that claims about Petliura’s responsibility were exaggerated or false. These were men who had served in the military with Petliura as well as civilians, most of whom testified to his great affection for the Jewish people. The prosecution set the stage by arguing that in Ukraine and Russia, pogroms were simply a fact of life and Jews were among their many victims. They underlined the chaos of the period, during which the Germans fought with Ukrainians against the Bolsheviks, and the Ukrainians were split into many groups, some of whom fought with Petliura for Ukrainian independence.

 YIVO, RG85, folder 487, fols. 39513, 39514, 39516, October 18, 1927.  Comité des Délégations Juives, Les pogromes en Ukraine sous les gouvernements ukrainiens (1917–1920) (Paris: n. p., 1927).  YIVO, RG85, folder 492, fols. 40461, 40462, 40468.  YIVO, RG85, folder 491, fols. 40342, 40343, October 24, 1927.

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In this environment, the prosecution witnesses claimed that the Bolsheviks engaged in pogroms, as did rogue elements of an otherwise honorable Ukrainian military. A Ukrainian ex-military man proclaimed that he had personally struggled both to prevent the “Jewish colonization” of Ukraine and to stop the Bolsheviks from creating a “Jewish Republic.” In one of the most dramatic moments of the trial, a Russian colonel denied Petliura’s responsibility for any massacres. He stated that he regarded the pogroms against Jews to be the work of “divinely inspired revenge.”22 Torrès made hay of these statements, skillfully weaving a narrative about the pogroms into his cross-examinations. He insisted that Petliura had only punished one of his officers a year and a half after the worst pogrom, undermining testimony that such measures demonstrated Petliura’s compassion for Jews. When asked if his witness Haya Greenberg had not simply relied on public rumors about who was responsible for the pogroms, Torrès argued that the violence was systemic and organized and reminded the court about Greenberg’s claim that Petliura’s soldiers cried, “This is for our dear father Petliura” (just as the Turkish police forced their victims to thank the pasha). His point was that even if Petliura did not participate in deadly pogroms, the murderers invoked his name and presumed his approbation. Torrès also put to rest any questions about Schwarzbard’s character by reference to his time as a French solider. As Tehlirian’s lawyers compared his gesture to Wilhelm Tell, Torrès claimed that Schwarzbard, after having fought for France, refused the passivity of his “ancestral race.”23 Though Schwarzbard was a vigilante, the assassination was treated as a crime of passion, the legal category usually used to acquit enraged husbands or wives who murdered their adulterous spouses. Since the murder could not be legally recognized as a courageous selfsacrifice, Torrès repurposed the crime of passion defense to account for the defendant’s uncontrollable response to memories that dredged up his personal suffering. By arguing that Schwarzbard’s compulsive quest for “self-esteem” was the act of a combatant fighting in the name of “humanity,” Torrès recast vigilantism as a quest for justice, transfiguring the murder of Petliura into a righteous act. The jury voted to acquit, and Schwarzbard walked out of the courtroom to much jubilation.

 YIVO, RG85, folder 488, fol. 39893, October 19, 1927; folder 489, fol. 39942, October 21, 1927.  Torrès, Le procès des pogromes, 337.

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Conclusion These two interwar trials did not develop new legal categories of crimes or secure rights for victims. They extended to the courtroom and popular press the “literature of denunciation” that drew public attention to mass atrocities, and which intensified after the Great War.24 The acquittals suggest that the courts were befuddled about how to hold the perpetrators of pogroms and mass murders accountable except by showing mercy to their victims. The defenses’ invocation of “humanity,” “humanitarianism,” “liberty, justice, courage, and the dignity of man” universalized their acts in the name of Western civilization. Unlike other political murders in the interwar period, which the Right rationalized in the name of patriotic duty and the Left in the name of social justice, the circumstances of these two trials generated moral pressure on the court to judge in favor of wounded witnesses whose acts lawyers claimed transcended debates of Right against Left. The trials defined perceptions of defendants’ innocence or guilt in the absence of a legal consensus about how to prosecute the massacres they had avenged. The defendants’ own communities mostly celebrated the verdicts, but the public acquittals were very controversial because the jury refused to condemn men who had taken the law into their own hands. The juries may have grudgingly admired or simply understood the men’s desire for vengeance. But the creative, pedantic, uncannily similar defense strategies redeemed Tehlirian and Schwarzbard’s crimes, justifying their acts by invoking the violence done to them and their families, and placing the violence to which they had been subjected center stage. By voting to acquit, juries declared that the assassins’ own suffering and its debilitating effects were an exculpatory factor in their crimes. Lawyers made the suffering witness on the stand central to the story, shifting the dismayed “civilized” spectator’s perspective to the testimony of the sufferer. Appeals to the suffering of humanity diminished the particularity of Armenians’ or Jews’ struggles rather than illuminated the plight of national minorities or, in the Armenian case, of German complicity. Indeed, it was only by portraying the defendants as patriotic heroes that the trials integrated them into the comity of civilized nations, guaranteed their redemption, and demonstrated the degree to which recognition of their suffering was dependent on the terms of its cultural legibility. Ultimately, the trials also told a story about violence onto which patriotic redemption was only awkwardly grafted and that could not be subsumed under a

 On the “literature of denunciation,” see Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

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recognizable grid of intelligibility. For the source of Tehlirian’s and Schwarzbard’s conscience, and hence their humanitarian wars on barbarism, did not originate in their courage, but in a trauma whose memory overtook all other reasons for living and compromised their judgment. Their enemies were not legitimate armies, but “militarists” whose killing was planned and deliberate and had no discernable strategic aim; they targeted minority religious and ethnic groups whom they deported or consigned to suffering and death. The brave combatant was now the survivor of an unspeakable war waged deliberately against helpless people who could not fight back and risked his life – the penalty for murder was death – to restore his people’s dignity. The conventional patriotic soldier makes a choice to die for his country. Life or death with honor is his redemption, or he goes to war to prove his mettle and too late realizes his complicity in its horrors. He narrates his experience as either thrilling self-discovery or tragic revelation. The righteous avenger instead suffers persecution as an insuperable wound he can no longer bear and goes to “war” to staunch the bleeding. He is a survivor not of war between nations but of national attacks on stateless groups. He is driven by suffering that caused so much disorientation that under certain circumstances he might not be in his right mind when he pulled the trigger. The lawyers had it both ways: they fused the traumatically wounded victim’s compulsion with the willful courage of the solider, transforming an unintentional, brutal act into an honorable one. As Lemkin wryly noted about Schwarzbard’s trial, unable to “punish a man who had avenged the death of hundreds of thousands of his innocent brethren, including his parents,” but also unable to “sanction the taking of the law in one’s own hands . . . ingenious legal minds found a compromise similar to that in the trial of Tehlirian: ‘The perpetrator is insane and must therefore go free.’”25 That was indeed what the lawyers accomplished. By integrating Tehlirian and Schwarzbard into the community of patriots, the trials redeemed their crimes and transformed their suffering into offenses that were more than the regrettable consequence of Turkish and Russian barbarism – they were planned, organized, politically motivated, and targeted ethnic minorities – without, however, providing a vocabulary to distinguish them clearly from war crimes or to discern the difference between the assaults on Jews and the singular extermination of Armenians. Some forty years later, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem demonstrated that the conditions of Nazi camps made any resistance at all a miracle and freed the survivors from shame by incorporating their suffering into a story of national

 Lemkin, Totally Unofficial, 21.

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redemption.26 It also cast the survivors as symbols of living death whose haunted presence embodied the transgressive violence perpetrated by genocidal regimes. The “witness to genocide” that emerged in the Jerusalem courtroom combined historical and conceptual developments of an earlier period into a coherent narrative through which the genocide of European Jewry emerged as a culturally intelligible experience for the first time in the West, one against which previous crimes were inevitably compared. The interwar trials I have discussed showcase these developments in process, which together formed the conditions for the cultural redemption and recognition of victims’ suffering – never on their own terms. They defined violence targeting religious and national minorities abstractly as a violation of “human conscience” in accord with a civilizational narrative of moral transgression. But the trials also illustrated other shifts that complicated this apolitical narrative of the civilized spectator’s dismay: they named and defined crimes against ethnic minorities not only as barbaric and regrettable, but also as particular kinds of systemic, politically and criminally motivated violations; they incorporated victims into the comity of so-called civilized nations, but in so doing also transformed their suffering into felt violations and victims into credible narrators of their own experiences. Third party witnesses were not the sole arbiters of events, as Toynbee had been of the Armenian genocide; the trials shifted the familiar narrative of patriotic redemption or tragic revelation that glorified combat or underscored its folly to another account of trauma and survival that emphasized victims’ unrelieved suffering; and they redeemed victims, making broken men whole by affirming the collective values of the community, giving voice to their suffering but also interpreting their experiences according to a familiar cultural script. That the trials were so stage-managed underscores how self-consciously lawyers, and Tehlirian himself, sought to conform to audience expectations. The concept of genocide emerged because unlike these or colonial crimes, the Holocaust forced the West to grapple with its own murderousness, which could not be fully rationalized even as it was cast as an aberration rather than a structural feature of modern nation-state development and identity.27 In this sense, the Holocaust of European Jewry later became paradigmatic and ultimately distinct from other genocides because of the prominence given to it in a geopolitical order dominated by Western nations. But like earlier Armenian and Jewish victims, the recognition of Jewish suffering depended on the redemptive narratives that made victims  It was preceded by other trials that I discuss in Dean, The Moral Witness. For a particularly detailed account, see Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, trans. Ora Cummings with David Herman (New York: Schocken Books, 2004).  Scott, On the Judgment of History, 2–21.

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credible witnesses, incorporating them into a narrative of heroism and survival rather than abjection and passivity: they became symbolic composites of darkness and hope, of homelessness and redemption, possessors of special knowledge – Primo Levi complained that the public assumed he had a “prophetic ability” – whose heroism was not bound to honor but to survival.28 Their suffering only became legible under certain conditions that victims shaped but again, did not define. This perspective focuses not on the paradigmatic status of the Holocaust as the teleological outcome either of the event’s singularity or of Western political power, but as a long figurative and political process though which through which Holocaust survivors became exemplary victims of radical moral transgression, purveyors of dark knowledge, and absolute innocents, a dubious privilege that is only now beginning to wane. As genocide became a permanent feature of the geopolitical landscape, another victim of genocide emerged alongside the Holocaust survivor, one who testifies to Western failure to prevent genocide rather than the shock of its occurence. This victim, in whose name we all “bear witness,” thus represents the normalization of genocide and its relocation in the Global South. Such victims are represented culturally as abstract embodiments of generic suffering; their suffering becomes an international cause to the degree that teams of expert human rights lawyers, NGOs, and medical specialists speak or “bear witness” on their behalf. The mobilization of genocide rhetoric is a haunting reminder not only of the West’s imaginative limits, but also of how victims are fashioned in keeping with political and social changes and bystander demands – for expiation, forgetting, and even remembering, as the welcome accorded victims of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine suggests. The refrain “Never Again” that greets every new episode of inhumanity is starting to ring as hollow as the clichés about the “hecatombs of 1914–1918” putting an end to international conflict that circulated after H. G. Wells had published a book in 1914 entitled The War that Will End War, a text which has tragically proved necessary to place in his genre of science fiction writings rather than in his prophetic ones.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 1994 [1963]. The Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915–1916. Edited by Wolfgang Gust. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014.

 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 86.

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Armenian Political Trials Proceedings 1: The Case of Soghomon Tehlirian. Translated by Vartkes Yeghiayan. Los Angeles: A.R.F. Varantian Gomideh, 1985. Bilsky, Leora and Rachel Klagsbrun. “The Return of Cultural Genocide?” The European Journal of International Law, 29 no. 2 (2018), 373–396. Bartov, Omer. “Blind Spots of Genocide,” Journal of Modern European History, 19.4 (2021), 395–400. Bogosian, Eric. Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide. New York: Little, Brown, 2015. Bryce, James and Arnold J. Toynbee. Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916. Cabanes, Bruno. The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Comité des Délégations Juives. Les pogromes en Ukraine sous les gouvernements ukrainiens (1917–1920). Paris: n.p., 1927. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Accessed 21 November, 2021. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_ Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of %20Genocide.pdf. Dean, Carolyn J. The Moral Witness: Trial and Testimony after Genocide. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Engel, David. The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard 1926–1927: A Selection of Documents. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016. Fassin, Didier and Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Translated by Rachel Gomme. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Friedländer, Saul. “A Fundamental Crime.” K. Jews, Europe, and the Twenty-First Century. Accessed September 9, 2021. https://k-larevue.com/en/saul-friedlander-a-fundamental-crime/ Lemkin, Raphael. Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin. Edited by Donna-Lee Frieze. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Loeffler, James. “Becoming Cleopatra: The Forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin,” Journal of Genocide Research, 19 no. 3 (2017). 340–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2017.1349645. Mamdani, Mahmood. Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Moses, Dirk. The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2021. Der Prozess Talaat Pascha (Stenographischer Bericht). Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 1921. Scott, Joan Wallach. On The Judgment of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Stover, Eric. The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in the Hague. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 2005. Torrès, Henry. Le procès des pogromes: Plaidoirie suivie des témoinages. Paris: Les Éditions de France, 1928. Wieviorka, Annette. The Era of the Witness. Translated by Jared Stark. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Yablonka, Hanna. The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann. Translated by Ora Cummings with David Herman. New York: Schocken Books, 2004.

Uri S. Cohen

Primo Levi between the Editions Primo Levi’s late reception is well-known; he inscribes it in the opening words of his first edition: “Hence, as an account of atrocities, this book of mine adds nothing to what readers throughout the world already know about the disturbing subject of the death camps.”1 This is an astounding assertion for 1947 and it points towards issues concerning the intelligibility of the text, raising doubts regarding how far its readership would understand what Levi had to say. We know that the immediate cultural environment of Primo Levi indeed did not demonstrate much interest or faith in his account. It was rejected by the publisher Einaudi, which seemed to be content with books like Uomini e no by Elio Vittorini as a discussion of the war that had just ended.2 Levi’s se – “if” – in the title of his most famous book, therefore, is genuine; he had doubts as to how his account would be received. Furthermore, Levi removes his story from the register of news, from anything that would have shock value. Indeed, Levi specifically warns the reader against expecting new historical revelations or anything of that sort: “It was not written in order to formulate new accusations; instead, it sets out to furnish documentation for a detached study of certain aspects of the human soul.”3 By orienting his account away from the disclosing of new facts and towards the contemplative and philosophical, Levi is already on the path to becoming an author, which is always a belated thing to be.4 By distancing himself from the need to deliver new revelations he opens his account up to interpretation. By being anchored in a time and a place it leads to a contemplation of what it means to be human, not only in that time and place. All this was not entirely evident in what can be called the silent period of Primo Levi, which in literary terms spans the years between the publication and failure of the first edition in 1947 and its successful republication in 1958 to critical and popular acclaim that made him into an Author in a public sense.  Marco Belpoliti (ed.), Primo Levi. Opere complete, Vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 2016), 5.  Elio Vittorini, Uomini e No (Milan: Bompiano, 1945).  Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 1, 5. All translations are based on the Norton edition with my own modifications. In this case Stuart Woolf renders “animo umano” as “human mind,” thereby omitting this rather significant reference to the humanistic tradition. See also the note by Alberto Cavaglion in his edition of SQU: Primo Levi, Se Questo è un Uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 2012), 153–154.  Arya Aryan, The Post-War Novel and the Death of the Author (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 1–45. Uri S. Cohen, Associate professor at Tel Aviv University, Israel https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-003

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The first decade after the war is a busy time in Levi’s life: he married, his children were born, and he changed jobs, settling at SIVA where he would stay for the rest of his working life. It is also a decade of silence for Levi in terms of what he published and said in public. This is not to say the camps or the war were not talked about, but what was said and the way it was said seemed to Levi be just that, forms of silence. Within the postwar culture in Italy, concentrated as it were around a triumphalist culture of resistance, Levi, as Ian Thomson has well noted, felt estranged. “After the publication of his novel and its disappointing reception, he wrote some stories which he summed up as ‘able but undistinguished’. But the creative daimon had left Levi now, and it would be another fifteen years before he produced an enduring work of literature.5 One way of challenging this widely accepted view would be by revaluating the works that were written and published and discovering that later works have origins in this time.6 This could very well be the case, as Levi is laying in some of these “minor” works the foundations for a truly revolutionary development of his speculative fiction.7 Among other achievements, these inspired Calvino to write the Cosmicomics and are an important breakthrough in the development of Levi’s poetics. In many ways this revision of Levi’s apparent fallow period has been carried out by several biographers, including the work of Carol Angier.8 Another way to see this period which I am suggesting here is to think of the decade in question as a crucial time in Levi’s work as an author, not because of how important he became later, but because of the work he did preparing the second editions for publication. It is the time in which Levi finds himself between the world and the camp, and it is the measuring of that distance in terms of his reconstruction of his experiences and the recovery of some degree of existential normality that is written into and recorded in the second edition in a way that turns it into the masterpiece we know. It is the time and work that transforms him into an author, moving the text further away from testimony and towards a complex work of art that is both testimony and reflection on the way this and other testimonies were received. It is a process not of exploring the false dichotomy between art and testimony, but rather one of seeking the wider if not universal meaning of that which he had experienced and of which he is telling.

 Ian Thomson, Primo Levi : A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 244.  Obviously, my reading of the changes differs from other vaguely optimistic readings, see: Jonathan Druker, “Primo Levi’s Editions of Se Questo è Un Uomo and the Evolution of Italian Holocaust Memory, 1947–1958,” Annali d’italianistica, 36 (2018): 375–394.  Francesco Cassata, Fantascienza? (Turin: Einaudi, 2016).  Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography (New York: Viking, 2002), 476–502.

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The return of Levi to public discourse in the mid-fifties coincides then with the work on preparing the second edition of Se questo è un uomo (from now on SQU). The few essays published during this time are closely related to the changes and alterations he made to the text, a procedure that is a major part of what turned the text into such a vortex of meaning, offering a stratified view of his experience in the camp and its reflection in the world, that a decade later seems to be closer to the contemporary reality than it seemed shortly after liberation. It is, in the end, what truly makes his reflection on the blackest of holes an endless opening, whose truth is poetic and independent of the facts, though never unrelated.9 In an editorial meeting on July 16, 1952, Paolo Boringhieri, the venerated science editor, brought up the idea of republishing the book. It seems that Giulio Einaudi himself was against it and Levi had to wait for a change of personnel for the republication to be approved. The issue was brought up again in 1955, the contract was signed on the 11th of July 1955 and the book was published only three years later in June 1958, the 20th anniversary of the racial laws in Italy, with great success.10 In close proximity, Levi resurfaces in 1953 with a review of a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, The Last Spark (Der Funke Leben), an action novel placed in the camps around the figure of a certain brave and rebellious 509.11 Levi admires Remarque as the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, and whose books for him “were terrible and serene testimonies: humanity as a whole seemed to come out of it wounded, pained, but morally safe.” Levi, a survivor of the camp, is troubled by the way the camp is represented by the well-meaning authors of postwar culture, perhaps also irked by the attempt itself, knowing first-hand how impossible it is for those on the outside to understand the Lager. The premise is already setting up the takedown: humanity after the camps is no longer morally safe and any narrative that tries to prove otherwise can only be false. It is in the end a literary argument: In a novel, things happen and in the Lager, typically and essentially, nothing happened. Therefore, a novel can only be unfaithful, even if built on plausible facts and motives . . . Did Men like this “509” exist in them? That is, men that though isolated in the progressive

 This is a major insight of Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz: l’archivio e il testimone: homo sacer 3 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998).  See the notes by Marco Belpoliti (ed.), Primo Levi. Opere Complete, Vol. 2, (Turin: Einaudi, 2016) 1476–1479.  This piece does not appear in the English version of the complete works, see: Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 2, 1287–1288. The novel in English: Erich Maria Remarque, Spark of Life (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1952).

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disintegration of their physical being were capable of conserving the “spark” alive and intact. We doubt it.12

This is a powerful observation, of course things happened, but they were not actions, facts, story plots, since nothing happens in the Lager that matters in the way facts and actions and plots matter in a novel. The point seems to be that the novel and its actions belong to a world sustained by a shared belief in human life as such, which is not at all the world of the camp.13 It is also not impossible that there were such men, as the penultimate chapter of If this is a man shows, but they were a miracle, an oddity that had no power on the mechanism of destruction, and hence doubtful and above all – meaningless. The so called “spark” refers to the title, but also to Levi’s own text and his description of the Muselmänner – the men in decay – and it is clear that his words return to him with a bitter taste: Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always the same, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to truly suffer.14

Remarque, well intentioned as he may be, cannot hope to fathom the condition of the Lager and the irrelevance of exceptional figures to life in it, unlike life on the outside where an argument can be made for the web of connections and events that make up a story. The literary idea of the Lager as a place where a novel can take place is thus precluded and inevitably false. Levi almost goes as far as to claim that no one retained the “spark,” already a dire reflection on his own experience. Levi proves to be also an acute observer and critic of the representation of the Lager in literature, already moving from telling his own story to considering the way these testimonies and stories are received and understood in postwar culture.15 The review reveals the unease Levi feels reading what a culture led by antifascists wants to hear about the camps. He is quick to point out that the very form of the Novel is more at fault then the authors, but the reason remains

 Primo Levi, Opere Completa, Vol. 2, 1287.  Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), 320.  Sharon B. Oster, “Impossible Holocaust Metaphors: The Muselmann,” Prooftexts, 34 no. 3 (2014): 302–348; Manuela Consonni, “Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, and the Body of the Muselmann,” Partial Answers, 7 no. 2 (2009): 243–259.  Much has been written about this issue and the lack of receptivity to Levi’s work in the dominant literary culture of the time centered around Einaudi: see Anna Baldini, “Primo Levi and the Italian Memory of the Shoah,” Quest CDEC Journal, 7 (July 2014). http://www.doi.org/10.48248/issn. 2037-741X/762.

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unclear.16 This in turn casts light on the revised form of Levi’s text, that indeed does not become more novelized. Rather it underlines the way his own contingent survival is part of a mechanism which it supports rather than defies. Nevertheless, the question for him is still one of action, and also of defiance. Levi had in mind a figure that defied the logic of the camp, his friend Alberto dalla Volta, against whom “the Weapons of the Night were blunted,” but this was not made clear in the first edition, and indeed as we shall see, his figure is one that undergoes the most significant revision in the development between the editions. Levi’s next publication is a comment on the ten-year anniversary of liberation. In Italian it is simply named Anniversary and it is a remarkable text both for its tone and the use of the occasion to reflect on the camp and the world. It was published in April 1955 just a short time before the final contract with Einaudi was signed, and therefore in plain view of the republication.17 The text is a survivor’s cry of anguish facing the silence of culture (not just in Italy but in Europe as a whole), and the impossibility to speak of its own blame for the camps and the atrocities of fascism: We must not forget, we must not be silent. If we are silent, who will speak? Certainly not the guilty and their accomplices. If our testimony is missing, in a not distant future the deeds of Nazi bestiality, because of their very enormity, will be relegated to legend. And so we must speak.

Levi proceeds to interrogate the silence of the survivors and finds the reason: It is shame. We are men, we belong to the same human family that our executioners belong to. Before the enormity of their crime, we feel that we, too, are citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, and cannot be exempted from the charge that an otherworldly judge, on the basis of our own testimony, would bring against all humanity.

The problem is that we are all guilty, the survivors are part of humanity that has done such things, and since moral compromise and corruption were the only way to survive in the camp, having survived is already proof of guilt:

 This is an early recognition of an issue that has not been accepted to this day in Israeli culture, which is in many ways based on the restoration of a morally comprehensible world through the creation of the state. It is small wonder that the most important book on the camps published at the same time as Levi’s SQU is Ka-Tsetnik’s Salamandra, a novelized and problematic account of the fate of Jews in the war and the camps. See my: “Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi, and the Muslims,” in Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik, edited by Annette F. Timm (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 152–165.  See: Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 2, “Nota ai testi,” 1476; E. Ruffini, Un lapsus di Primo Levi: il testimone e la ragazzina (Bergamo: Assessorato alla cultura, 2006).

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We are children of that Europe where Auschwitz is: we lived in the century in which science was bent, and gave birth to the racial laws and the gas chambers. Who can say for sure that he is immune to the infection?18

This is a noble view of the entire problem of complicity, though it risks confounding the kind of guilt the survivor carries, with the guilt of the perpetrators of which he is living proof. The perpetrators are all the more monstrous for having produced this inevitable compromise. It is a reflective moment as Levi realizes the ambiguity inherent to the being of the survivor in the world, that of simultaneously revealing and concealing the horror of the camps. Perhaps this is the reason he brings Jean Bruller, better known as Vercors, the famed author of the French resistance, into the discussion almost as an authority on the subject, or at least as a third-party witness.19 Vercors and his Weapons of the Night inform the additions that describe Alberto as the one against whom such nocturnal weapons are blunted. It is a discussion that continues all the way to the passage on the “Gray Zone” that finally undoes the possibility of writing about the camp as a moral theatre in which we make impartial judgements.20 The second edition begins a lifelong reflection on this proximity, on the impossibility of judgement, because we are not impartial, we are all survivors, or at least should assume its moral position.21 If Auschwitz is both human and of humanity, it is already that which could, but has not yet, swallowed us. Alberto’s defiance does not refute the camp; he only bears it without being dehumanized, as Levi appears to agree with Vercors: And other things remain to be said: harsh, painful things that, to those who have read The Weapons of the Night, will not sound new. It is vanity to call the death of the innumerable victims of the extermination camps glorious. It wasn’t glorious: it was a defenseless, naked death, ignominious and obscene. Nor is slavery honorable; there were some who were able to endure it unharmed, and they were an exception, to be considered with reverential amazement. But it is an essentially ignoble condition, a source of almost irresistible degradation and moral shipwreck.22

 Levi, Opera completa, Vol. 2, 1291–1293.  See: Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “The Witness in the Archive: Holocaust Studies/ Memory Studies,” Memory Studies, 2 no. 2 (2009): 151–170.  Uri S. Cohen, “Primo Levi e Vercors,” in Gianluca Cinelli and Robert S. C. Gordon (eds), Innesti (Vienna: Peter Lang, 2020), 255–272.  For a comparative discussion see: I. Milner, “The ‘Gray Zone’ Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe” in Ka. Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony, in “Jewish Social Studies,” 14 no. 2, (2008): 113–155.  Primo Levi, “Deportati. Anniversario,” in Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 2, 1291–1293. Originally published in Torino: rivista mensile municipal, 31 no. 4 (April 1955): 53–54.

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What one would already know by reading Les armes de la nuit are matters relating to the destruction of the soul, or the “spark.” Levi assumes the readers are familiar with the book and the celebrated edition of 1948 with Natalia Ginzburg’s 1945 translation of Le silence de la mer and Ginetta Varisco’s translation of The Weapons of the Night.23 Some irony is at work since it is inserted within a text raging against the silence by the author of a rather more subtle account of the camps, but Vercors is what Einaudi and the cultural elite thought best represented the camps. It is a version of the story they could bear, hear. Readers of Vercors, unlike those of Remarque, will know all there needs to be known about moral shipwreck and yet some unease remains. The Weapons of the Night tells the tragic tale of Pierre Cange, a French resistance hero and survivor of a Lager, through the eyes of a fellow partisan who remained free. The text tries in vain to connect a romantic tale to the story of return. The main part of the text consists of Pierre’s confession leading to his dramatic revelation that he had “lost the quality of man” by accepting to work in the Sonderkommando on pain of death. There is no chance Levi liked this text as he will later openly state, yet he bows down to this mediocrity. What is extremely troubling about Vercors’ book is its drama, fixating on the Sonderkommando as if it represented a dramatic choice, as if it inhered a form of moral compromise and corruption that all humanity that has not faced such choices stands above. Pierre behaves and talks more like a moody vampire out of The Twilight Saga then a survivor of a crime so enormous, one only has false words for it, words always intended to shield the majority from the horror and the blame. Levi breaks his silence to engage Vercors’ version, whose voice is the sound where Levi hears nothing, yet he does not necessarily disagree with the analysis. Indeed, he objected to Remarque’s text for a very similar reason. In the first text he published, the Auschwitz Report, written a short time after his release from the Lager, he repeats rumors about the Sonderkommando that spread between the survivors and made their way into many literatures:24 From their clothes emanated a nauseating smell; they were always dirty and they had an absolutely wild appearance, truly like savage animals. They were chosen from amongst the worst criminals sentenced for serious and bloody crimes.25

 Vercors, Le armi della notte, trans. from French by Ginetta Varisco; Vercors, Il silenzio del Mare, trans. from French by Natalia Ginzburg; Verso, Il cammino Verso la Stella, trans. from French by Adele Vaudagna Marchisio (Turin: Einaudi, 1948).  Oddly this is true also of Hebrew literature, focusing on survivors of the Sonderkommando as a paradigm. See: Ḥanokh Barṭov, The Brigade (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).  “Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del Campo di concentramento per Ebrei di Monowitz,” in Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 1, 1192.

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Already in 1947 Levi discards this notion, but even if few others knew he wrote this, he did, and this must be considered as Levi prepares the 1958 revised edition and Vercors enters the text. Since we know the contract for the Einaudi edition was signed around the same time Anniversary appeared, it would be reasonable to presume that it is also around the time that the following addition to Our Nights was written.26 In it, Alberto appears to be exactly the kind of exception to the rule of the Lager whom Levi did not deem worthy of discussion, and yet faced with Vercors version of survival in the camp, Levi finds it necessary to disprove the notion with the figure that was closest and dearest to him: Alberto is my best friend. He is only twenty-two, two years younger than me, but none of us Italians have shown a capacity for adaptation like his. Alberto entered the Lager head high, and lives in the Lager unscathed and uncorrupted. He understood, before any of us, that this life is war; he allowed himself no indulgences, he wasted no time complaining or feeling sorry for himself and others, but entered the battle from the outset. He is sustained by intelligence and intuition. He reasons correctly; often he does not even reason but is right just the same. He fights for his life but remains everybody’s friend. He “knows” whom to corrupt, whom to avoid, whose compassion to arouse, whom to resist. Yet (and it is for this virtue of his that his memory is still dear and close to me) he did not become corrupt himself. I always saw, and still see in him, the rare figure of the strong yet gentle man against whom the weapons of the night are blunted.27

From this touching text added to the 1958 edition it is clear that Alberto and their affective relationship enter the text precisely at this point because of Vercors. Alberto, who was always an important part of the text, now not only exposes the artificiality of Vercors’ narrative but also his thesis that everything must succumb to the logic of survival and nothing survives the Lager without becoming corrupt. In general, the affective side of the human experience and Jewish experience in the camps is largely unknown, locked in the unattainable past of what each individual suffered in their body and minds day by day, minute by minute, second by second, of which the empty, sanitized barracks of today’s camp museums can convey nothing. Most testimonies make present the loss, in some way but the texture of the emotional world before and in the concentratory universe is largely missing. This is a novelty of the second edition, as the relationship with Alberto is presented in terms of defiance, as stubborn resistance to the daily accumulation of moral degradation and physical suffering in the Lager calculated to use the instinctive will to survive until death. Levi, normally so reticent about his emotions

 There is some confusion regarding when it became certain, the issue had been on the Einaudi table since 1952.  Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 1, 180.

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is as close to speaking of love as he ever gets: I doubt he wrote of anyone more affectionately.28 Alberto and his relationship with Levi refute the strict logic of the camp, proving that one can fight for his life without losing the “quality of man.” Within the logic of survival, Levi, exiting the Ka-Be (the Krankenbau, or lazaret of Auschwitz) is a liability, a potential Muselmann, a nobody no one wants to work with, with no connections, no secret way of organizing anything useful. Landing in Alberto’s barracks, it was his friendship that literally saved him. Alberto brings precision to his story, and upon reflection Levi introduces the precise altruism displayed by Alberto as a force which defies the infinite gravity of survival. In a place where “each is the other’s enemy,” an affective bond transcends the blanket condemnation of Vercors that Levi expresses with a subtle tongue.29 Levi certainly does not learn anything new about the camp from Vercors. Yet faced with the weapons of the night, he rewrites his friendship with Alberto as a sliver of salvation. Alberto is a miracle, and though he is an exception, he disproves the idea that all survivors in the end are members of a metaphoric Sonderkommando surviving on the death of their comrades. Friendship defies the logic of survival: material assets are transferred because of an immaterial and essentially altruistic feeling. Yet this answer to Vercors does not satisfy Levi and he returns to this very passage in the chapter “Vanadium” of The Periodic Table. I have elsewhere argued that Vanadium is a crucial node in Levi’s storytelling. The element’s name Vandium Naptenat referring to both his fellow prisoner and companion Vanda Maestro and to his confrontation with a former manager of the lab where he worked as a slave.30 Levi had indeed been put in touch with such a Dr. Muller and the biographical background in the correspondence with a Dr. Mayer has been well-researched.31 Origins aside, the point of the chapter seems to be about love, Levi’s lost one for Vanda who faced a repentant Muller demanding something akin to love. Muller achieves this by finding in Levi’s SQU the transcendence of Judaism through the Christian virtue of “loving thy enemy.” Levi is appalled by this reading and the demand it raises and he is troubled by the consolation Muller finds in his text:

 I clearly do not believe that friendship and love are opposed in Levi’s world as Carol Angier claims in The double bond: Primo Levi, a biography (New York: Viking, 2002), 270.  This threw the Hebrew translator who renders the title Le armi della notte into the biblical sounding Kol ozmat hazadon – “the full capacity of evil.”  Uri S. Cohen, “Primo Levi’s Love,” in Sprachkunst, 46 no. 2 (2018): 171–188.  Marco Belpoliti, Primo Levi di fronte e di profilo (Milano: Guanda, 2015), 261–273; Martina Mengoni, Primo Levi e i tedeschi (Turin: Einaudi 2017).

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He attributed the facts of Auschwitz to Man, without differentiating; he deplored them, and found consolation in the thought of other men cited in my book, Alberto, Lorenzo, “against whom the weapons of darkness were blunted”: the phrase was mine, but repeated by him it sounded to me hypocritical and false.32

Muller, like the world now returned to “normality,” finds consolation in Levi’s story about the human miracles that befell him in the camp. Alberto, who in the 1958 edition is set against Vercors’ text, demonstrates that the moral defeat was not total. Now, in the hands of Muller, Vercors and Alberto are retold as Levi’s text, using Vercors’ title and by implication Le armi della notte, and Vercors and Levi cannot be told apart and both are entrapped in a testimony that “has no idea.” Where there was once silence and the voice of Vercors, now stands Levi incorporating Vercors, as his (their) words give consolation to a lesser henchman, certainly a perpetrator if the survivor is also collaborator. Irony is a fickle poetic structure and it is wholly lost on Muller who finds consolation in Alberto and Lorenzo, as a perpetrator rejoices in finding his crime incomplete. The words Levi used to defy Vercors’ and his own condemnation of humanity, and with irony absent, the text consoles those who should not be consoled. It is almost as if the survivor who bore witness, raging against silence, is now blocking the sight of the crimes by his very presence, his own testimony now “heard” coming between the editions, the camp and the world. As it oft happens, Levi’s reply to Vercors not only does not deny Vercors’ way of narrating the camp and survival in it as a morally observable universe. It actually corroborates its point of view – the same one consoling Muller. Levi actually makes a more subtle point in the penultimate chapter of SQU – “The Last One,” which remained unchanged in substance, though a marvelous addition details the kind of survival enterprises they had going till the end. It is the last chapter of life in the camp and it brings Alberto and Levi to the height of their powers as survivors, which are challenged by the hanging of a prisoner involved in sabotaging the Birkenau crematorium. Levi and Alberto are working in separate locations and only meet on the march back eagerly sharing their burgeoning survival enterprise. They are doing well, full of initiatives, code-named in the slang terms combinaja and protekzja. But this time the march ends at the gallows, with the cry of the hanged: Kameraden, ich bin der Letzte! – (Comrades! I am the Last One) Levi does not use this word, Kamaraden, to describe his fellow inmates, nor could he. He had already been burnt by trusting in camaraderie before, by the racial laws in 1938, and by a spy for the Nazi-Fascist authorities disguising himself as a comrade, and then upon entering the camp. Yet in front of the last man and  Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol.1, 1022.

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his cry it becomes clear to him that one can only be betrayed by camaraderie by first losing it. Faced with its possibility in the Lager he is forced to realize his own failure to resist brutalization: Alberto and I went back to the barrack, and we couldn’t look each other in the face. That man must have been made of another mettle than we are, if this condition, which has broken us, could not bend him. Because we, too, are broken, defeated: even if we have been able to adapt, even if we have at last learned how to find our food and to withstand the exhaustion and the cold, even if we return home. We have lifted the menaschka onto the bunk and divided it, we have satisfied the daily fury of hunger, and now we are oppressed by shame.33

For those familiar with Vercors’ work the first sentence could be a quote from Le armi della notte, giving new meaning to Levi in “Vanadium” finding Vercors in his own words. I believe he had not read it before writing SQU and having read it must have found some of his very own words and thoughts sounding so wrong. This line starting “because” which gives the reason they cannot face each other, expresses a particularly charged form of shame, since physically they are doing well, even prospering, and the recognition is a sign of a rupture, of that which cannot be fixed by returning to an earlier stage. Levi reached a bleak conclusion on his own and the almost conjugal bliss with Alberto is ruined. In terms of narrative form, it is the moment in a love plot when a couple realizes the emptiness on which their relationship is built. A short time after this Levi knowingly trades a stolen pipette for soup half uneaten in the infectious disease ward, which he realizes is quasi suicidal.34 Indeed, this is where the story of the camp ends and SQU moves to the closing Story of Ten Days, Levi’s Decameron. Levi begins with the night before the camp is evacuated, he is sick and weak and convinced he will not survive. Those leaving are in high spirits and a sort of giddiness takes over the camp: Levi knows he is condemned: And then finally Alberto came, defying the prohibition, to say goodbye to me from the window. We had been inseparable: we were “the two Italians” and most of the time our foreign comrades got our names mixed up. For six months we had shared a bunk and every scrap of food “organized” in excess of the ration; but he had had scarlet fever as a child and I had not been able to infect him. So he left and I remained. We said goodbye; it didn’t take many

 Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 1, 113–114 (1947); 258 (1958).  “Pipetta da Guerra,” Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 2, 1047–1050.

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words, we had already said everything countless times. We did not think we would be separated for very long. He, too, was cheerful and confident, like all those who were leaving.35

It is a heart-wrenching moment: those leaving full of hope and the condemned “utterly helpless and in the hands of fate” (totalmente inermie in mano alla sorte). They part without words, divided by a window and by fate. In terms of structure this is the afterword and they are words from a distance, trying to provide closure, giving form to what has already taken place. The language is close to that Levi uses for describing his farewell from Vanda upon arrival and it is spectacularly dry, devoid of pathos. Levi stops short of naming his sense of abandonment, but one can almost hear it confused with the knowledge of their ultimate destiny: All the healthy prisoners (except for a few prudent ones, who at the last moment undressed and hid in the hospital bunks) left on the night of January 18, 1945. They must have been about twenty thousand, coming from different camps. Practically every one of them died during the evacuation march: Alberto was among them. One day, perhaps, someone will write their story.36

There is no judgment here only profound sadness, but one cannot help but imagine what Levi must have thought he would have done in Alberto’s place. Almost as if Levi feels empty upon realizing that their friendship was a survival pact, a clever investment Alberto made in the seemingly inept Levi. Alberto would not be Alberto had he chosen a lesser survival route and remained with Levi whose survival seemed uncertain and without Alberto faced almost certain death. It must be a dark feeling to have survived and to know that had Alberto chosen friendship over survival, which obviously he would have found a way to do, he would have lived and thrived. That would have been something that blunted the “weapons of the night.” As it is their parting is not temporary and still the consolation Muller finds in Alberto is not a misunderstanding, as much as an expression of the impossibility to deny Vercors in his own terms. Levi is almost physically averse to the kind of liberty people like Vercors take in writing about the camp from the outside as if it were a moral theatre whose spectators are judges, not accomplices. Levi’s remarks also imply that Alberto’s story is at least in some sense incomplete. Vercors and Alberto have become intertwined in SQU and their story has two epilogues. A literary one in chapter “Cerium” of The Periodic Table and a reflective discursive one in The Drowned and the Saved. The figure of “Vercored” Alberto leads directly to the discovery or rather the formulation of the Gray Zone, the conceptual

 Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 1, 262.  Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 1, 262.

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breakthrough that finally undoes the very possibility of “novelizing” the camp. The literary poetic epilogue of Alberto’s story takes place in “Cerium” in which he is already free from the need to prove a moral point. It is a wonderful chapter, light and adventurous; it brings to life the rich and mutually beneficial collaboration between them, without trying to make a point that can’t be made. During one of the air raids Levi finds some cerium cylinders but he is skeptical of their value: Alberto reproached me. For him, giving up, pessimism, despair were abominable and culpable. He did not accept the concentration-camp universe, he rejected it with his instinct and his reason, he would not let himself be polluted. He was a man of strong goodwill, and had miraculously remained free, and his words and actions were free: he had not lowered his head, had not bowed his back. A gesture of his, a word, a laugh had liberating virtues, were a hole in the stiff fabric of the Lager, and all who came near him realized it, even those who didn’t understand his language. I believe that no one, in that place, was more loved than he.37

Alberto is not a different man in this story, his story is told differently and the reasoning behind it is careful, precise and does not involve Vercors. Alberto is still defiant, not because he is incorrupt, but because he remains free even when engaging in corruption. Levi and others found consolation in that freedom of his spirit even though it could not finally withstand the “weapons of the night.” Levi also realizes his own part in their relationship returning to his “talent” for friendship that is already what Alberto tries to teach him: We had to be more astute. This topic, the need to be astute, was not new between us. Alberto had often discussed it with me, and before him others in the free world, and still others repeated it to me later on, innumerable times, up until today, with modest results; indeed, with the paradoxical result of developing in me a dangerous tendency toward symbiosis with an authentically astute person, who would get (or consider that he had got) temporal or spiritual advantages from living with me. Alberto was an ideal symbiont, because he refrained from exercising his astuteness to my detriment.38

Alberto is the ideal partner for this symbiosis that allows Levi to become a valuable asset especially after he is moved to the lab and meets Lorenzo Perrone. The soup that Lorenzo brought together with the cerium that Levi stole gave them the ability to reach the end of the camp and its aftermath that Levi also rewrites: We worked for three nights; nothing happened, no one was aware of our activity, neither the covers nor the pallet caught fire, and in this way we won the bread that kept us alive until the Russians arrived, and took comfort in the trust and friendship that united us. What happened to me is written elsewhere. Alberto left on foot with the majority of the camp

 Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 1, 964.  Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 1, 965.

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when the front was near: the Germans made them walk for days and nights in the snow and cold, killing all who could not continue; Alberto did not return, and of him no trace remains; for some years after the war ended, someone from his town, half visionary and half swindler, lived by peddling to his mother, for a price, false consoling news.39

The literary epilogue is more detailed and even more intimate than before. Alberto receives closure and a story in which he is neither saint nor martyr or monster, but rather a unique person with an inner freedom that did not defy Auschwitz but was a consolation for the unfree. Levi – in a literary manner but also literally – is that man from Alberto’s other town: Auschwitz. An artist, he can also be half visionary half swindler, and at least some of his stories of Alberto felt like false consolations. As he comes to understand in later years, even his mere presence, like that of other survivors, is a form of false consolatory news. Indeed, even if it is not a polite topic, he also received money for these stories, not from Alberto’s mother surely, but in a way from a culture that was missing many of its sons and daughters. Alberto is a crucial addition to the second edition, positive but not outside the Gray Zone. In what follows I will closely examine two other figures Primo Levi developed and added to the second edition, the Austrian officer Steinlauf and Null Achtzehn that was already present in the first edition, but a passage Levi added highlights what happened between the editions. In “Initiation,” the only complete chapter added, Levi visits the fetid latrines and ponders the slogans in German recommending hygiene, signs that are the direct speech of nobody, of the camp. Levi is inclined to interpret them as another example of German humor, but Steinlauf, the Austrian veteran, teaches him a lesson: I have forgotten, and it grieves me, the plain outspoken words, the words of ex-sergeant Steinlauf of the Austro-Hungarian army. Iron Cross of the 14–18 war. It grieves me because it means that I have to translate his uncertain Italian and his measured discourse of a good soldier to my language of incredulous man. But this was the sense not forgotten then nor after: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to turn us into beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.40

Steinlauf delivers this speech as he is washing himself in the Auschwitz mode Levi finds useless. Hygiene is of the matter directly and indirectly, as Levi disguises the

 Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 1, 967.  Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 1, 165–166.

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central argument within the mimetic scene.41 In this book written by the survivor, Steinlauf, almost with his own voice, expounds the doctrine of survival, made worthwhile by the prospect of bearing witness. It is an argument against death, of resistance and defiance justified by the prospect of testimony. Steinlauf’s view of survival as negation of consent is the reason Levi cannot agree with him, since the radical realization woven into the second edition through this figure as well is that survival itself is consent, participation in the mechanism that drives the camp; that is the camp. Steinlauf presents an ethical argument of Kantian origins, negating consent by executing the orders as free will with testimony as justification. Levi does not declare his position, but the meaning of his inability to agree with Steinlauf, an intuitive insight he keeps referring to, becomes ever clearer in his later work. Testimony, as Levi reflects a decade later, is not the goal of survival but its justification, one bears it, but it justifies and redeems nothing: “Facing this complicated infernal world, my ideas are confused: is it really necessary to elaborate a system and put it into practice? Or would it not be better to acknowledge one’s lack of a system?” Levi is at loss, the need to testify, to tell the story began almost as a physical need, urgent like any other vital function.42 A decade later a machine of testimony to negate the system of annihilation did not seem right, nor does it today. The good soldier Steinlauf is the perfect witness, he has no doubts, he is literally the other side of the camp, but again Levi is incredulous, he suspects the easy justification of all that itself needs justifying. His growing suspicion is demonstrated in the next chapter “Ka-Be” when dealing with the figure of Null Achtzehn, his inept young workmate whose ineptitude causes the foot injury that lands him in the Ka-Be. The story of Null Achtzehn, a young Hungarian well on his way to becoming a Muselmann, is an important one. In a book mostly dedicated to the experience of survival, this episode is as close as Levi arrives to being a full witness. It is the portrait of one of the drowned at the moment in which fate separates them from the saved. Null Achtzehn is the cause of the injury, and in the second edition two sentences are added: Null Achtzehn is very young, which is a grave danger. Not only because it’s harder for boys than for men to withstand fatigue and fasting but, even more, because long training in the struggle of each against all is needed to survive here, training that young people rarely

 Uri S. Cohen, “Lagersprache: Primo Levi and the Language of Survival” ARCADE. Accessed October 18, 2021. http://arcade.stanford.edu/dibur/lagersprache-primo-levi-and-language-survival.  Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol. 2, 1272; “Se questo è un mondo,” L’Italia che scrive, Vol. 30, no.10, (October, 1947).

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have. Null Achtzehn is not even particularly weak, but all avoid working with him. He is indifferent to the point where he doesn’t bother to avoid labor or blows or to search for food. He carries out every order he is given, and it’s predictable that when they send him to his death he will go with the same total indifference. He doesn’t have even the rudimentary cunning of a draft horse, which stops pulling just before it reaches exhaustion; he pulls or carries or pushes as long as his strength allows, then gives way suddenly, without a word of warning, without lifting his sad, opaque eyes from the ground. He reminds me of the sled dogs in books by Jack London, who labor until their last breath and die on the track.43

It turns out Levi is a discerning editor, wisely leaving what already worked untouched, with Jack London’s Call of the Wild, a text whose importance has been noted in anchoring the figure.44 It has a place in the periodic system, competing for resonance with Dante and Homer. Levi is very much like Buck, a bourgeois dog hurled into survival, returning to a “state of nature,” for a reason he, unlike Steinlauf, cannot fathom. Null Achtzehn is an essential part of the narrative; Levi is only unlike him in luck and hindsight: But, since the rest of us try by every possible means to avoid excess effort, Null Achtzehn is the one who works more than anybody. Because of this, and because he is a dangerous companion, no one wants to work with him; and since, on the other hand, no one wants to work with me, because I am weak and clumsy, it often happens that we find ourselves paired.

The core of the narrative is already established in the first edition. What follows is richer and more precise, but also shows Levi conscious of the profound difference between narrating that difference and reflecting upon it in the following years. The seemingly innocuous addition puts it in a more universal frame, highlighting what age and life experience mean in the camp, but it also underlines Levi’s transformation, from a domestic dog to Buck of the wild and from a youth to a man. They are indeed distinguished by age and consciousness but most of all by luck. Null Achtzehn also presents a question about solidarity – Levi does not see him as an enemy, but neither as an ally: No, I honestly don’t feel that my companion of today, yoked with me under the same load, is either enemy or rival. He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything but that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number: as if everyone were aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man.45

 Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol.1, 167.  Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).  Belpoliti, Primo Levi, Vol.1, 167.

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Not an enemy, but without a story: his only story is the way he unwittingly diverts Levi’s fate as he causes an accident that almost crushes Levi’s foot. Here luck is essentially sfacciata fortuna [outrageous fortune], as Robert Gordon pointed out.46 The Ka-Be is a boon for Levi, giving him time to reflect and recover, and above all releasing him back into the barracks of Alberto dalla Volta who helps him become a consummate survivor. Levi’s addition is a reflection on the Muselmann and his own survival, but it is also a comment on the world he has returned to as a grown man, one that is not unlike the camp in its essential lesson of human enmity and solidarity. “Return” does not seem to have refuted, but rather reinforced that impression. Null Achtzehn recedes from view and is heard no more. There is little doubt to his fate. The encounter with Levi changed nothing for him and everything for Levi. It could have easily gone the other way. The addition tells of that distance from the other side. Instead of the survivor distancing himself from the Muselmann, the survivor leans closer, trying to listen, reaffirming as the added text does that there is no avoiding the struggle, something which the young have not yet gotten used to. This of course refers to the understanding that has matured in Levi. It also returns to the added emphasis on language and its importance. In ways Jonathan Druker and others have noticed, Levi is making thicker the social fabric of the camp by underlining that fitting in for survival is very much about communication more so than force, and that even in the camp, violence is social more than physical. Very simply, Levi undoes the impression that he somehow escaped these dynamics. Within the camp Levi is physically inept but mentally awake. Null Achtzehn is the opposite: he is physically intact but mentally has never awoken, which makes it almost inevitable he never will. If the Muselmänner have a story it is as lucky steppingstones on the road to survival. The period of apparent silence between the two editions of If this is a Man is a rich moment in the evolution of Levi’s thought, each addition proving to contain kernels of ideas and figures that he pursued, rethought and rewrote his entire life. Like sediment on a lakebed, the residue of the culture within which he wrote, the way it received the mala novella – the awful novel(ty) of the camp is written in the distance between the editions. Each change holding different ideas, traces moving in different directions. Rather than contradictions in a system they are periods in it, requiring us to participate in their becoming and unbecoming. The rest truly is silence.

 Robert Gordon, Outrageous Fortune: Luck and the Holocaust (Turin: Einaudi, 2017).

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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Quel che resta di Auschwitz: l’archivio e il testimone (Homo sacer 3). Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998. Angier, Carole. The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Bio48 graphy. New York: Viking, 2002. Aryan, Arya. The Post-War Novel and the Death of the Author. Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Baldini, Anna. “Primo Levi and the Italian Memory of the Shoah,” Quest CDEC Journal, 7 July, 2014. DOI: http://www.doi.org/10.48248/issn.2037-741X/762. Barṭov, Hanokh. The Brigade. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Belpoliti, Marco. Primo Levi di fronte e di profilo. Milano: Guanda, 2015. Mengoni, Martina. Primo Levi e i tedeschi Turin: Einaudi, 2017. Cassata, Francesco. Fantascienza? Turin: Einaudi, 2016. Cohen, Uri S. “Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi, and the Muslims.” In Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018: 152–165. Cohen, Uri S. “Lagersprache: Primo Levi and the Language of Survival,.” Dibur, 1 (Fall 2015): 67–73. Accessed October 18, 2021. http://arcade.stanford.edu/dibur/lagersprache-primo-levi-andlanguage-survival. Cohen, Uri S. “Primo Levi e Vercors.” In Innesti, edited by Gianluca Cinelli, and Robert S. C. Gordon, 255–272. Vienna: Peter Lang, 2020. Cohen, Uri S. “Primo Levi’s Love.” Sprachkunst, 46 no. 2 (2018): 171–188. Consonni, Manuela M. “Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, and the Body of the Muselmann.” Partial Answers, 7 no. 2 (2009): 243–259. Druker, Jonathan. “Primo Levi’s Editions of Se Questo è Un Uomo and the Evolution of Italian Holocaust Memory, 1947–1958”. Annali d’italianistica 36 (2018): 375–94. Gordon, Robert. Outrageous Fortune: Luck and the Holocaust. New York: CPL, 2017. Hirsch, Marianne and Spitzer, Leo. “The Witness in the Archive: Holocaust Studies/ Memory Studies.” Memory Studies, 2 no. 2 (2009): 151–70. Lang, Berel. Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Levi, Primo. “Deportati. Anniversario.” Torino: rivista mensile municipal, 31 no. 4 (April 1955): 53–54. Levi, Primo. Se Questo è Un Uomo. Turin: Einaudi, 2012. Levi, Primo. The Complete Works of Primo Levi. New York: Liveright, 2015. Levi, Primo. Primo Levi. Opere complete (2 vols.), edited by Marco Belpoliti. Turin: Einaudi, 2016. Mengoni, Martina. Primo Levi e i tedeschi. Turin: Einaudi, 2017. Milner, Iris. “The ‘Gray Zone’ Revisited: The Concentrationary Universe in Ka. Tzetnik’s Literary Testimony.” Jewish Social Studies, 14 no. 2 (2008): 113–155. Oster, Sharon. “Impossible Holocaust Metaphors: The Muselmann.” Prooftexts, 34 no. 3 (2014): 302–48. Remarque, Erich Maria Spark of Life. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1952. Ruffini, Elisabetta. Un lapsus di Primo Levi: il testimone e la ragazzina. Bergamo: Assessorato alla cultura di Bergamo, 2006. Thomson, Ian. Primo Levi: A Life. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. Vercors (Jean Marcel Bruller). Le armi della notte. Translation by Ginetta Varisco; Il silenzio del mare. Translation by Natalia Ginzburg; Il cammino verso la stella. Translation by Adele Vaudagna Marchisio. Turin: Einaudi, 1948. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkley: University of California Press, 2001. Vittorini, Elio. Uomini e No. Milano: Bompiani, 1945.

Ran Shauli

Inside and Outside the Courtroom: Witnessing the Massacres of Chinese in Japanese Occupied Malaya, Singapore, and Rabaul Tens of thousands of the Chinese living in the Malayan Peninsula and the Island of Singapore were massacred by the Japanese army during its occupation of these territories, between 1941 and 1945. The Chinese were at the time the largest ethnic group in Malaya1 and formed the majority in all its cities. The main purpose of the advancing Japanese in late 1941 and early 1942 was to consolidate their power by cowing the general populace into submission, so that a garrison smaller than the former British one would be able control this strategically and economically important country in an effective way. The Malayan Chinese, well organized in clan and surname associations (huiguan)2 and in political parties linked to China – mainly the Guomindang but also the Communist Party – were seen by the Japanese as the only potentially dangerous population in Malaya, especially in the light of their support of the resistance war in China since its beginning in 1937. The Malay and the Indian populations, on the other hand, were threatened and cajoled into cooperation with the new overlords. On the other, most remote corner of Japan’s southern Empire – New Guinea’s Rabaul, Chinese, both local and Mainlander who were forcibly exiled there over more than 5,000 kilometers from Canton and Shanghai to serve the Japanese army, were also killed but in different ways – summarily when no longer fit for work, or through neglect.  The historic name Malaya will be used here to refer to the Malaya Peninsula. The name Malaysia refers to the post-colonial state, which from 1963 included Singapore until it became independent in 1965; as well as the north Bornean states of Sabah and Sarawak, which are presently called East Malaysia.  Huiguans – clan, dialect or landsmen associations, were originally guildhalls established by regional organizations in different cities in China during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). They functioned as places where merchants and officials from the same locale or dialect group could obtain food, shelter, remittances, and other assistance while traveling away from home for business. In the Diaspora, and especially in Malaya and Singapore, huiguans formed a network which was instrumental in facilitating migration; sending monies earned abroad back to China; solving disputes; and maintaining solidarity through mutual assistance between their members. Ran Shauli, Lecturer at the Department of Asian Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Israel https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-004

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After Japan’s surrender in August 1945, the former colonial powers returned to their pre-war possessions: the British to Malaya and Singapore, and the Australians to New Guinea. One of their first actions was to set up tribunals in which to try Japanese war criminals. The focus of the present chapter is on the effects of the near absence of Chinese witnesses and recorded testimonies from these courts, on the waning of the memory of the mass of killings of diasporic Chinese, and on their eventual oblivion. The dearth of Chinese overseas on the witness stands is evident when we examine the overall picture of post-war justice in Asia. 5,7003 (or 5677)4 Japanese personnel were accused as lesser war criminals (B and C level) in 2,244 cases. These were adjudicated in 49 military courts all over Asia, under all the Allied powers5 in their respective areas of jurisdiction or occupation. 330 cases were decided by British tribunal in Asia authorized by the 1945 Royal Warrant to establish military courts to try and punish “violations of the laws and usages of war” committed in “any war that the British had been engaged in after 2 September 1939”6; and 194 cases were handled by the Australian authorities in Asia and the tropics.7 131 of the 330 British cases (around 40%) were conducted in Singapore from January 1946 to April 1948, with 1,100 men prosecuted for war crimes there. Altogether, 138 of the convicted were executed in Singapore’s Changi prison, and an additional 79 were executed in Malaya. Based on available court records, only 30 Singapore trials dealt with atrocities committed in Singapore, but only two trials – a tiny fraction of the overall – dealt with the mass killings of Chinese there. Among the 194 cases handled by Australian Authorities the rates were significantly higher, and 44 civilian cases tried in Rabaul pertained to Chinese. 23 of these cases concerned local Chinese, and the other 21 concerned Chi-

 Barak Kushner, Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2015), 7, 9.  Sandra Wilson, “After the Trials: Class B and C Japanese War Criminals and the Post-War World,” Japanese Studies, 31 no. 2 (2011): 142–143, quoted in Robert Cribb: “How Finished Business Became Unfinished: Legal, Moral and Political Dimensions of the Class ‘B’ and ‘C’ War Crimes Trials in Asia and the Pacific,” in The Pacific War Aftermaths, Remembrance and Culture, eds. Christina Twomey and Ernest Koh (New York: Routledge, 2014), 92.  Britain, USA, France, the Netherlands, the Philippines and Nationalist China.  Philip R. Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945–1951 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021), 97.  Kushner, Men to Devils, 7, 9.

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nese prisoners of war. 12 trials in which convictions were obtained related to cases against Chinese civilians.8 The reasons for the apparent differences between Australian and British justice systems in their attitude towards cases in which Chinese and other nonEuropeans were victims are not our main concern here. This chapter takes as its starting point the factual dearth of Chinese overseas testimonies in courts and concentrates on the effects of the small number of testimonies on individual and public memory. I will nevertheless briefly discuss in this chapter the motivations of the British to consolidate the support of Chinese subjects in Malaya and Singapore before the Malayan Emergency by holding few trials. I will also relate this to the Australian attempts to find legal ways to prosecute attacks on non-European civilians four years before the signing of the fourth Geneva Convention at the height of the “White Australia Policy” era. The aim is to understand the limited value attributed to eventual testimonies in courts. Following Halbwachs,9 I consider individual memory as contingent on collective memory. I will analyse the individual memory of traumatic events as dependent on a conducive environment and attentive ears, both because individuals need reaffirmation of the soundness of their memories, and because painful individual memory requires incentives to relive it. Such incentives could be in the form of social goods like recognition or sympathy, or more tangible goods like reparations. It is therefore important to examine the role of witnessing in courts of law not just as part of the judicial business, but also as an act in which the witness stand functions as a stage, and the people present at the court, including newspaper reporters, assume the role of an audience, which fully relates to and confronts the story of suffering in a way that could give it public acknowledgment and admission to recorded history and collective memory, thereby rescuing it from oblivion.

 Georgina Fitzpatrick, “The Trials in Rabaul,” in Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51, eds. Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2016), 518–9, 521; Geoffrey C. Gunn, “Remembering the Southeast Asian Chinese Massacres of 1941–45,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 37 no. 3 (2007): 281.  Maurice Halbwachs, who coined the term Collective Memory in the 1930s, saw individual memory as dependent of public memory, as the individual needs a social framework and public memory aids for retention, comparison and verification of personal memories. See Maurice Halbwachs, “Individual Consciousness and Collective Mind,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 6 (1939): 818. More recently, it has been argued that Memory Studies should adopt methodological approaches from communication studies and concentrate on the perception and reception of information. See Wolf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41 no. 2, (2002): 179–197.

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If there are not enough occasions like that, or if the words are spoken to deaf or indifferent ears, then the public memory needed to acknowledge the commission of atrocities can either not develop at all – or find other venues outside of the courtroom. We know from other cases, most notably the extensively studied 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, that witnessing can legitimize, trigger and enable the telling of suffering by survivors, even among their friends and family.10 And so, I argue that the overall relative lack of trials in which Chinese were victims and witnesses of acts of inhumanity, effectively made court testimony rare and irrelevant to the future construction of historical memory. Compounded by the disappointment of many among the Chinese with what they saw as excessively lenient verdicts in the few processes that did take place, the paucity of opportunities to testify and transform individual suffering into the official record of the past had two seemingly contradicting effects on the development of the public memory of the trauma. The first effect was the creation of independent committees which collected evidence and testimonies, published them as reports, tried to interest the courts in their contents, and organized demonstrations to protest against what they saw as inadequate justice. The second, opposite effect on the development of public memory among the Chinese was on individuals who were discouraged from “speaking out bitterness” (as the term Shouku implies in Chinese) even in private. Of these two developments, the second one eventually gained momentum and contributed to the consignment of the memory of the massacres into oblivion. Of course, the exclusion – partial or full – of Chinese massacres from the courts was not the only factor in this turn of events. The start of the Malayan Emergency in 1948; the turning of wartime Chinese guerrillas from friends to feared foes; the mass repatriation of Japanese war criminals in 1951; the exclusion of the sufferings and torments of exiled and overseas Chinese from the official historical narratives in both Mainland China and Taiwan, and the lack of sufficient corroborating photographic evidence that could be iconized, were all no less important in the process of forgetting. Yet, as I have made clear, this chapter concentrates on the lack of witness accounts of Japanese atrocities and its long-term consequences.

 For reviews of different perspectives of the Eichmann trial as watershed event and on its importance as a venue for witnessing see Hanna Yablonka, “The Eichmann Trial: Was It the Jewish Nuremberg?” Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review, 34 (2011): 307; Amit Pinchevski and Roy Brand. “Holocaust perversions: The Stalags pulp fiction and the Eichmann Trial,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 24, no. 5 (2007): 387–407; Judith Stern, “The Eichmann trial and its influence on psychiatry and psychology,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law, 1 no. 2 (2001).

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The Events of the Massacres I shall now start with a brief review of the mass killings of Chinese in The Malayan Peninsula, in Singapore, and in Rabaul, New Guinea. This overview relies on testimonies, but it should be stressed that these are mostly not testimonies that were given in courts, but ones collected by independent Chinese committees.

The Malayan Peninsula In late 1941 and in 1942, the Japanese Imperial Army had conquered Southeast Asia with a vow to liberate all Asian races from the yoke of European and American Imperialism. The propaganda fantasy of Pax Nipponica, a continent united under the principle of Hakkō ichiu (“eight straps [holding] one roof”), soon proved to be a Bellum Nipponicum. Racist Japanese wartime propaganda located the Chinese in this region in general and in Malaya in particular outside the shelter of this “roof,” depicting them as greedy, exploitative and treacherous collaborators with the European imperial forces.11 In contrast to colonial middlemen minorities elsewhere, the Chinese in the Malayan Peninsula and Singapore constituted the largest local ethnic group, forming a near or full majority in some of the important cities, and were a cohesive, though heterogenous group, well organized along political and dialect lines. The war against the Japanese conquest of China had further politicized them and enhanced their sense of China-centric nationalism. Between the outbreak of war in China in July 1937 and the surprise attack on Malaya in December 1941, Chinese overseas support for the embattled ancestral land was widespread, and included fundraising, the boycott of Japanese goods and the enlistment of thousands of volunteer truck drivers, mechanics and nurses

 A leaflet titled “Read This Alone and The War Could be Won” was distributed to soldiers upon the launch of the Malayan campaign in December 1941. It reads as follows: “[the Chinese] began to immigrate in large numbers [to the region], and gradually, rising from humble positions . . . they became men of wealth, and by deceiving the naturally lazy natives and colluding with the British, Americans, French and Dutch they increased their economic power . . . They contribute military funds to Chungking, but most of them are either led astray by Chungking propaganda or are forced by terrorists, whether they wish it or not, to make those contributions. We must offer to these people an opportunity for self-examination and guide them over to our side. Two points, however, should be noted: first, that these people . . . are steadily extorting money from the native population . . . and second, that for the most part they have no racial or national consciousness, and no enthusiasms outside the making of money.” Facsimile of the leaflet appears in Tsuji Masanobu and H. V. Howe, Japan’s Greatest Victory, Britain’s Worst Defeat (New York: Sarpedon, 1993), 243.

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who delivered supplies over the risky and steep “Burma Road” to Kunming, Yunnan. For these reasons, and because the Japanese held a relatively small garrison in Malaya, the massacres of Chinese were used not only as an instrument of revenge but also to launch a pre-emptive strike. The violence against the Chinese also served as a warning for the local Malay and Indian populations, which were for most part cajoled into collaboration, while the Chinese were singled out for killing. On December 7, 1941, simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops landed on the shores of southern Thailand and north-eastern Malaya. Within a hundred days of Blitzkrieg they managed to conquer Malaya and Singapore. In these ten weeks of military campaign there were no systematic mass murders of Malayan Chinese, as the latter, with the negligible exception of a few hundred volunteers who fought under a British officer in Singapore, offered no effective resistance and obviously posed no real threat to the advancing troops. Nevertheless, some sporadic killings that left more than fourteen hundred Chinese dead were already recorded during this period. One event, typical of this wave of killings, took place in Nibong Tebal – a town in Penang where half of the forty thousand residents were Chinese. Upon its takeover, said a witness,12 the sound of military trucks entering town after midnight sent people out to the streets. Those who stayed indoors were forcibly taken to the main square, where machine guns were stationed in four corners. Everyone present was ordered to squat in the dark. When the sun came out, the men were ordered to strip naked to their torso and were searched for tattoos, suggesting membership in illegal Chinese brotherhoods and Triads. Meanwhile, other soldiers combed the houses for more suspects, while local hooded Chinese and Malay informants identified victims from among the crowds. A Japanese officer drew a circle on the ground with his sword, pointed at some men, and ordered them to enter it. The victims that were held in the circle were killed at the docks two miles from town. The rest of the people in the square were allowed to return to their homes, only to find that some of them had already been looted. The capture of Singapore, the city with the largest Chinese population outside China, on February 15, 1942, marked the successful end of the Malayan Campaign. This date, the eve of the lunar year, signified the beginning of a second wave of

 This is part of a compilation of testimonies that were prepared by members of the China Relief Fund in Singapore in 1947, published and submitted to the British court in the case of Nishimura and others (see below), and was ignored by the judges. See Li Diemin (ed.) Dazhan Yu Nanqiao – Malaya zhibu [The Great War and the Chinese Overseas – Malaya Section], Singapore: Xin Nanyang Chubanshe [New South-Seas Publishing House], 1947), 106–108.

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massacres of Chinese in Malaya’s cities and towns which lasted until the Japanese Emperor’s Birthday (Tencho Setsu) at the end of April of that same year.13 On the occasion of this anniversary, the Chinese in several towns were gathered, warned against any expression of disloyalty, and threatened with further killings in case of failure to be loyal and obedient. They were then collectively pardoned for their alleged hostilities in the name of their new magnanimous sovereign. At this stage, the massacres had the obvious purpose of consolidating Japanese power by cowing the general populace into submission, so that a garrison smaller than the former British one would be able to control the country effectively. The Chinese, the largest and the most organized and politicized ethnic group in Malaya, whose leaders were involved in supporting the anti-Japanese war in China, served as a convenient target. It is estimated that no less than twenty thousand Chinese lost their lives in this wave of violence. The first wave of massacres was meant to prevent urban resistance – real or imagined – from developing, but rural and jungle areas were still perceived as harbingers of potential anti-Japanese activity. The next wave of massacres was meant to curb incipient Chinese resistance in these places. From August 1942 until October 1943, the Japanese military launched a campaign against the predominantly Chinese communist guerrilla – MPAJA (the Malayan People’s antiJapanese Army), also known as Bintang Tiga (“Three Stars”) for their emblem, which despite the real ethnic composition of the organization, symbolized the three main ethnic groups of Malaya – Chinese, Malays and Indians. It is estimated that thousands of rural Chinese were subjected to punitive and retaliatory massacres in these military actions against a popularly supported but highly ineffective militia. The third wave of massacres of Chinese started in April 1945 and coincided with the concluding phases of the War. At this stage, the Japanese were losing out in every frontier and their power in Malaya was waning. Old hatreds – ethnic, racial and religious – together with the emergence of a new Japanese-inspired Malay  The dates were not accidental, according to the testimony of Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, who masterminded the Malayan campaign and later made a career as a legitimate politician in postwar Japan: “[w]e had to exhaust every means in our power . . . to reduce this great fortress [Singapore] by 11 February, the anniversary of the coronation of the Emperor Jimmu Tenno” (Tsuji and Howe, Japan’s Greatest Victory, 174–175). After the war, the American occupation authorities in Japan abolished this day, that was deeply identified with the Emperor personality cult. Today it is celebrated as Culture Day (Bunka no hi). April the 29th was the Emperor’s Birthday (Tencho Setsu). This could be a convenient date to mark the end of the first wave of massacres. On this day, in some places, the Japanese gathered the Chinese, warned them to be loyal, threatened them with further massacres in case of failure, and “pardoned” suspects in the name of the Emperor.

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nationalism, created a very volatile situation. The violence started as a spate of localized clashes, feuds and pogroms involving both Malay and Chinese gangs, but racial tension soon spread all over Malaya. Most of the Chinese victims in wartime Malaya were killed in so-called cleanup operations (Shukusei in Japanese, usually rendered Sookching in Hakka Chinese), during the first months of the Japanese occupation. In these mopping-up killings, urban Chinese were rounded up and made to stand or walk for hours and days on mass identification parades past masked informers who picked out suspects. These people were promptly taken away to be shot or machine-gunned, and then they were buried or dumped at sea. All others were supposed to be stamped with the Chinese character for ‘checked’ on their bodies, faces or clothes and sent home. The criteria according to which victims were executed varied from one assembly point to another. In one place, people who wore glasses were victimized as suspected “dangerous intellectuals,” in another, tattooed people were taken away, in yet another place only speakers of Hainanese or Englisheducated Chinese were killed. Sometime the soldiers would arbitrarily kill every fifth or seventh man or pick those who “looked rich.”14 The pattern for the clean-up operations was established a few days after the takeover of Singapore, the city with the largest Chinese population outside of China. Colonel Tsuji Masanubu, the highest local authority, published a decree ordering all Chinese males to report in twelve designated assembly points sites around Singapore island. In some small places, the Japanese military preferred indiscriminate killing to identification parades. One example from the sultanate of Negri Sembilan is the town of Titi, where nearly fifteen hundred Chinese townsmen were slaughtered together with people from the nearby village of E-Lang-Lang. Other overwhelmingly Chinese settlements in the sultanate were nearly wiped out too. The massacre of March 18, 1942, in the village of Jeludong reveals a pattern familiar from other operations. A Japanese force of no more than one hundred soldiers ordered the residents to gather in the marketplace. There they were made to listen to an intimidating speech about cooperation and obedience. People coming

 The source for this information is from interviews taken by the Oral History department of the National Archives of Singapore. Accessed 20 September, 2021. https://www.nas.gov.sg/archive sonline/oral_history_interviews/. The interviews did not concentrate on the suffering of Chinese under the Japanese rule, or in killings, and the events are mentioned there just in passing. See Ho, Swee Hong, interview by Beng Luan Tan: “An Interview with Mr. Ho Swee Hong,” Singapore: Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore, (March 18, 1985); Ang, Seah San, interview by Lay Leng Low: “An Interview with Mr. Ang Seah San,” Singapore: Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore, (April 10, 1984).

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from the fields were also forced to join the crowd. At some point the soldiers started bayoneting and shooting everybody present. “Almost all the residents and visitors found in Jeludong were dead. Only a handful survived the bayoneting to tell the tale . . . at about 5 p.m., the Japanese set fire to the whole settlement . . .” Clean-up massacres were specifically targeted against Chinese city dwellers. Two thirds of Malaya’s Chinese, and four fifths of the general population lived outside of the cities, where Malaya’s riches of minerals and plantations were – but these could not be exploited and shipped to industrialized countries without control of the port cities in the western and southern part of the Malayan peninsula, where the Chinese were the predominant ethnic group.15 Clean-up operation also marked a change in the visibility of the murders. Before the conquest of Singapore, most of the victims of the massacres were from the rural parts of the country, away from the public eye. In the case of Singapore, a major city, the situation was of course different. However, after February 1942, most of them came from the cities, in which the Chinese were represented more than any other ethnic group. The completion of the Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies in May 1942 marked the end of the military phase of the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia. Killing of Chinese in this phase was meant not so much to terrorize and root out “unwanted elements” as to curb potential armed resistance to the Japanese presence. The main motivations for the killings in Malaya and Singapore were fear of perceived Chinese economic power in the country’s main cities, and guerrilla resistance in the Jungle fringe. The fact that a Japanese garrison significantly smaller than the former British one was stationed in the country enhanced this fear. Other aims of the massacres were to take revenge on the diasporic Chinese for support of the anti-Japanese war in China and to find an outlet for deepseated racist hatred for the Chinese as a so-called exploitative race.

Rabaul: New Britain Island, New Guinea The killings and deaths near Rabaul, New Britain, were different in nature, and resulted from deliberate enslavement and criminal negligence of people who

 In 1947 Chinese made up 62.4% (that is 811,520 people) of a general urban population of 1,301,376. Urban Chinese accounted for 31% of the 2,614,667 Chinese of Malaya (“Urban” settlements defined as cities and towns with population over 1,000 persons). Only 5,819,262 inhabitants of Malaya (22.3% of the general population) lived in urban settlements. In major cities like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Georgetown (Penang) and Malacca the Chinese were the majority. See Moroboë Vincenzo del Tufo, Malaya – A Report on the 1947 Census of Population. (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1949), 131, 172.

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were forced to work in extremely poor conditions. Thousands of kilometers away from the globally important city of Singapore, on the other side of the newly established Japanese Empire, Rabaul became another major strategic point from which aerial control over northeast Australia, and air and sea communications with Pearl Harbour, the Indonesian archipelago, and the Japanese home islands was expected to be achieved. Unlike the killings of Chinese in Malaya and Singapore, which were either “clean-ups” of suspected people or annihilations of whole communities, the murder of Chinese during the New Guinea campaign and in its aftermath was mostly brought about by enslavement, malnutrition, denial of shelter from heavy Allied aerial bombings, poor accommodation, exposure to diseases without sufficient food and medical treatment, and summary decapitations of the sick who were no longer fit to work. There were three groups of Chinese victims in Rabaul: a party of 2,880 civilians who were captured in Canton province (Guangdong) and arrived in Rabaul in September 1942; a group of about 1,500 Chinese – misnamed “volunteers” – conscript coolie laborers, who were caught by the Wang Jingwei puppet regime in the Shanghai area at the end of 1942, and arrived in Rabaul in January 1943; and the diasporic Chinese residents of the town, numbering around 2,000 people, who were incarcerated during the war. All were put under the command of Imamura Hitoshi, who headed the 8th Area Army stationed in Rabaul. The Cantonese group included about 50 boys under the age of thirteen. Around 1,800 of the 2,880 captives from this group, were subsequently assigned to the 8th Area Army supply depots under command of Hirota Akira in New Britain, New Guinea and Bougainville. Of these, 1,080 were said to have died during the war due to mistreatment and neglect. Most of the underaged boys died in the initial three months. Only eight survived.16 The captives from the Shanghai area were deported in compliance to an order issued from Tokyo to the Expeditionary Forces in China, commanding it to organize thirty “special duty” units consisting each of 60 Japanese soldiers and 720 inhabitants of the occupied territories. Lieutenant General Kanda Masatane, who was in charge of transferring the 6th Division to the South Pacific, received an order from his own commanders to take approximately 1,500 Chinese laborers to Rabaul on the same ship carrying the soldiers of 6th Division and deliver them to headquarters of 8th Area Army group there. Colonel Tomonari Toshi – whose unit was heading to Rabaul – carried out the order. Around 500 of the new arrivals from the Shanghai area, according to

 “Trials of Japanese War Criminals Reported by Australian Media (Chinese and English),” blog accessed 19 September 2021. https://blog.wenxuecity.com/blog/frontend.php?act=articlePrint& blogId=25083&date=201001&postId=1824

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survivors’ testimonies, were members of the Guomindang’s Chinese National Army, and the rest were guerrilla fighters, as well as ordinary Chinese civilians – all captured during the fights in China. The deportation to hard labour and death in the tropics was the punishment for survivors of the German-trained 88th Division of the Guomindang National Revolutionary Army for fighting a stubborn battle against the Japanese in Shanghai for several weeks. Communist guerrillas met the same fate for offering resistance in the city area.17 The diasporic Chinese communities in Rabaul had already offered to fight alongside the Australians in the event of a Japanese attack after the break of the Sino-Japanese war in China in July 1937, and long before the attacks on British Malaya and Hawaii. Initially, the local Australian authorities agreed that they could form an ambulance unit of about thirty members. The Chinese provided uniforms and equipment for their young men at their own expense; but the Australians were still “cautious about non-Australian citizens joining the defence force and Australian regulations required recruits to be ‘substantially of European origin or descent’.” This was in line with the restrictive and segregative laws which were targeted at the Chinese, in stark difference to the policies of the predecessor German authorities which had encouraged Chinese immigration to the colony.18  See Yuma Totani, “Crimes against Asians in Command Responsibility Trials,” in Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51, eds. Georgina Fitzpatrick, Timothy L.H. McCormack, and Narrelle Morris (Amsterdam: Brill Nijhoff, 2016), 3, 271; Yuma Totani, Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945–1952: Allied War Crimes Prosecutions. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 103. The fact that the Chinese soldiers were German trained might explain – if sheer racism is ruled out – that Australians refused to bury the GMD soldiers alongside their fallen soldiers. No tombstones were erected. “The patriotic Mr. Seeto who demonstrated loyalty to the Nationalist government until his death in 1973, never forgot the discriminatory practice against the Nationalist ‘war heroes’, but it is doubtful whether the Nationalist government cared anything about a few unknown soldiers lost in New Guinea. The surviving Chinese war prisoners were repatriated to China after the war.” According to the testimony of the president of the Guomindang of New Guinea in 1973, “several groups of Chinese Nationalist prisoners were brought to Rabaul during the war. Among them were Chinese war heroes of the [German trained, R.S.] 88th Division [of the Nationalist Army R.S.] who fought the first battle against the invading Japanese in Shanghai in August 1937. They received world-wide attention when eight hundred of them held a warehouse against the Japanese for one month, while the rest of the Nationalist Army withdrew from the city. They finally surrendered in November 1937. See David Y. H Wu, The Chinese in Papua New Guinea: 1880–1980 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1982), 76.  Peter Cahill, “Chinese in Rabaul – 1921 to 1942: Normal practices, or containing the yellow Peril?” Journal of Pacific History, 31 no. 1 (1996): 72, 84, 89. Hank Nelson, “The Chinese in Papua New Guinea,” State – Society – Governance – Papua New Guinea, Discussion Paper 2007/3, (Australian National University, 2007); David Y. H. Wu, “The Chinese in Papua New Guinea,” in eds. T. Wesley-Smith & E. A. Porter China in Oceania: Reshaping the Pacific? (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 2.

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Chinese wives, and children of Chinese residents in Australian New Guinea could apply for three-year, extendable, entry certificates. This anti-Chinese prejudice will eventually prevail in post-war courtrooms. After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the influx of people from China increased. Unfortunately, it turned out that even this remote place could not be a safe haven for them for long. On the eve of the Japanese conquest of New Guinea in the beginning of 1942 there were 2,061 permanent Chinese settlers in New Guinea, most of them concentrated in Rabaul. The Australian command failed to protect them in the face of the Japanese attacks. Separate air shelters were built for Europeans and Chinese, with different quality of protection and accommodation, and Chinese women and children were not evacuated in the compulsory evacuation of white non-males in December 1941. An officer of the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit openly admitted after the war that “nobody gave a hoot about the Chinese.” Air and maritime contact between Rabaul and Australia continued until mid-January 1942, but the vast majority of the Chinese who could not escape ended up in Japanese labour camps.19 As in Malaya and Singapore, the killings of Chinese in New Britain were systematic and not the result of poor discipline among the Japanese forces. Overseas Chinese in New Britain, like in most other diasporic communities, were politicized and organized. One of the openly admitted motivations for killing them, was to wreak vengeance for their active support of the anti-Japanese war in China.” It is estimated that around ten percent of the pre-war Chinese population in Rabaul perished during the war and the assets of the survivors were destroyed. After the Allied re-occupation, an internment camp with 850 (or 831, or 758 according to other sources) malnourished Chinese prisoners was discovered in the vicinity of town. Their very survival was attributed (rightly or not), to the fact that other Chinese ran the camp on behalf of the Japanese.20

 Cahill, “Chinese in Rabaul,” 88–89; Georgina Fitzpatrick, “Death Sentences, Japanese War Criminals and the Australian Military,’ in Fitzpatrick et al. Australia’s War Crimes, 508; Wu, The Chinese in Papua New Guinea, p. 3.  Wu, The Chinese in Papua New Guinea, 77; Nelson, “The Chinese in Papua New Guinea,” 3. Fitzpatrick, “Death Sentences,” 528, 532–3, 535. Chinese leaders were put in charge of hard labour camps, carrying orders for the Japanese with Chinese camp police and foremen. Some Chinese informants, who spent the war in the Chinese camp, even described some of the Japanese from the adjacent camp as pleasant. “The camp leader, Mr. Chan, revealed in an interview that towards the end of the war when the Japanese defeat was near, he worried about the fate of the Chinese. There was a rumour that the Japanese armed forces had dug a bug tunnel and planned to drive the Chinese in and kill them with poison gas should the Japanese be defeated.” he then approached “the most feared Japanese military police unit [Kenpeitai, R.S.], requesting to have the Chinese camp put under their control instead of the army. The Japanese military police was

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According to an uncorroborated report of the Nationalist Overseas Chinese Commission twenty percent of the Chinese population in the whole of New Guinea died during the war. A comparison of these percentages to the situation in other parts of the Japanese Empire reveals both their probability, and the appalling situation for the Chinese in New Britain: “a total of 38,935 Chinese were deported to the Japanese home islands, and 6,837 of them were dead by the end of the war (17.5 percent) . . . if evidence in the Rabaul trials is to be taken at face value, at least 1,457 out of 4,446 Chinese persons attached to the 8th Area Army were either confirmed or presumed dead by the end of the war (32.7 per cent).”21 One more heinous crime, tantamount to murder, is the sexual enslavement of ‘mixed race’ girls, daughters of Chinese fathers and local Tolai mothers, who were raised as part of the Rabaul Chinese community and were taken to be repeatedly raped as “comfort women” in brothels reserved for Japanese soldiers and officers. None of this was discussed in the post-war trials in Rabaul.22

Chinese Witnessing in the Courtrooms The following is an analysis of the ways in which testimonies regarding wartime massacre and murder of Chinese were largely ignored or excluded from courtrooms.

Post-war Courts in Malaya and Singapore As mentioned above, only two trials dealt with the mass killings of Chinese in Singapore. One was the trial of Takuma Nishimura and others, held on March and April 1947 with great publicity; and the other was the case of Mizuno Keiji as sole defendant, which was held on a much lower key, in March 1948. Yet another case, that of Sergeant Major Sugimoto Heikichi and two others, accused of beating to death a single Chinese victim in Singapore, was held in Singapore on 5–7 February 1946. Of the many incidents in which Malayan Chinese were mass murdered, only one was brought before a court of law. That was the case of Corporal Hamada

pleased with this request for tightened control, not realizing the Chinese needed it for their survival.” See Wu, The Chinese in Papua New Guinea 78–79.  Qiaowu Weiyuanhui, Huaqiao Jingji Nianjian Bianji Weiyuanhui [Chinese Overseas Affairs Committee, The Overseas Chinese Economic Yearbook] (Taipei, Republic of China (Official Press), 1958); Wu, The Chinese in Papua New Guinea, 80; Totani, Justice in Asia, 273–274.  Fitzpatrick, “Death Sentences,” 435.

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Kazumi, tried on 30–31 January, 1946, in Kuala Lumpur for the killing of six Chinese in the village of Kuala Kubu Lama, Selangor, in April 1944, for “suspected communist activities.” These massacres remained redacted from history as far as justice and public memory are concerned in the Chinese communities of Malaya and elsewhere.23 The one trial that was given much public attention was the Sookching trial of March-April 1947 (the abovementioned Takuma Nishimura and Others case), which took place in Singapore’s Victoria Memorial Hall. The case fitted the criteria set out by the Royal Warrant, even though the killings started after British capitulation, and fell under British legal jurisdiction. The ultimate blame for the Sookching was laid upon a person who could not have stood trial at this stage, though his ghost at times hovered over the courtroom. This was General Yamashita Tomoyuki who, it was determined, instructed the Singapore garrison and the Kenpetai – Military Police, to execute the purge. Yamashita turned out to be an ideal scapegoat for three reasons. First and foremost, he had already been executed by the Americans near Manila in February 1946 for war crimes committed in the Philippines. Secondly, he carried Command Responsibility, according to the precedent set by the United States Supreme Court in the case of his appeal, which was named after him, the Yamashita Standard; and finally, no written record of any command issued by him to kill Singaporean or Malayan Chinese was ever found.24 Indirect evidence of the involvement of Yamashita in the Singapore Sookching appeared only once during his trial in United States Military Commission in Manila, even though he was never tried for his part in this massacre. A citizen of Manila, by the name of Narciso Lapus, testified that while still a private in the army in the Philippines, he heard that Yamashita ordered the massacre in Singapore and feared that history would repeat itself there. Yamashita himself said the following in court: “Question: while you were in Manchuria following the Malayan campaign in ‘41–‘42, did your troops encounter any bandits or guerrillas  Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial, 97, 108. Paul Kratoska, The Japanese Occupation of Malaya – Social and Economic History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 312; Cheah, Wui Ling, “An Overview of the Singapore War Crimes Trials (1946–1948): Prosecuting Lower-Level Accused,” Singapore Law Review 34 (2016): 1–46. Accessed 18 September, 2021. http://singaporewarcrimes trials.com/case-summaries/detail/112: 8–14, 17–18, 20–21, 24–28 March 1947 and 2 April 1947; “Japanese War crimes in Malaya and Borneo.” Accessed 18 September, 2021, http://www.japanesewarcri mesmalayaborneo.com/wo-235821.html: WO 235/824.  See Gideon Boas and Lisa Lee, “Command Responsibility and Other Grounds of Criminal Responsibility,” in Fitzpatrick et al. Australia’s War Crimes; “Judgment of The Honorable Justice Pal, Member from India,” Tokyo Tribunal, 1083. Accessed 21 September, 2021. https://www.legaltools.org/doc/2a6ce2/pdf/

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there? Answer: After the Malayan campaign when I was an army commander, there was absolutely no contact; things were extremely quiet.” Three other massacres of Chinese in the Philippines under Yamashita’s command were, on the other hand, mentioned in the Manila court: on February 1945 in the city of San Pablo, Laguna Province, Luzon Island, and on Singalong Street, Manila as well as on Paco Church in the city, during the battle of Manila (10–11 February 1945).25 The Yamashita Standard, as it turned out, was used by the prosecution in Singapore to place the responsibility for the Singapore Sookching on the heads of the seven subordinate officers who actually sat on the accused bench without having to rely on full and comprehensive testimonies. The court recognized Lieutenant Colonel Oishi Masayuki, commander of the No. 2 kenpetai, as the officer in charge of the examination procedures; Major Onishi Satoro was identified as head of executions, notably the elimination of communists. Tsuji Masanobu – who masterminded the killings, but eventually evaded justice by joining the Guomindang’s intelligence service in China, before returning to Japan in 1948 and being elected as a member of the Diet, was mentioned in passing as responsible for purges in Malaya. In later years, suspicions regarding the lenient attitude towards him grew after his mysterious disappearance in Laos in 1961.26 The other officers charged were Lieutenant Generals Takuma Nishimura and Kawamura Saburo, Commander of the Singapore Garrison Army, Lieutenant Colonel Yokata Yoshitaka, and Major Jyo Tomotatsu. Kawamura and Oishi were sentenced to death, while the other five received life imprisonment after claiming that they were merely following orders.27 Widows and other relatives of 5,000 or more dead and missing men from the Singapore Sookching, as well as the Chinese press in Singapore, hoped that the court would exact retribution on the Japanese. A committee representing the bereaved families declared after the trial that it would not be satisfied, either with

 Wai Keng Kwok, Justice Done?: Criminal and Moral Responsibility Issues in the Chinese Massacres Trial, Singapore, 1947 (Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2001). Accessed 19 September, 2021. https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/508df9/pdf/ 5 November 1945, 1019–20. Yamashita testified in Manila on 25 November 1945: see (accessed 21 November 2021) https://www.legaltools.org/doc/f6762d/pdf/ 25 November 1945, 3565–6. Other cases of massacres of Chinese in the Philippines were mentioned in the Manila court. One is a massacre on February 1945 in the city of San Pablo, Laguna Province, Luzon Island.  Masanobu Tsuji, H. V. Howe, Margaret E. Lake, H. Gordon Bennett, Singapore: The Japanese Version (New York: St Martins’ Press, 1997); Masanobu Tsuji, Japan’s Greatest Victory, Britain’s Worst Defeat, trans. by Margaret E. Lake, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997).  Geoffrey C. Gunn, “Remembering the Southeast Asian Chinese Massacres of 1941–45,” Journal of contemporary Asia, 37 no. 3 (2007): 282. Kevin Blackburn, “The Collective Memory of the Sook Ching Massacre and the Creation of the Civilian War Memorial of Singapore,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 73, no. 2 (2000): 78.

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the weight given to testimonies, nor with the verdict. It demanded that all the Japanese responsible for the crimes should pay with their lives.28 The perceived failure to pay the “Blood Debt” owed by Japan led to mass demonstrations later in the early 1960s. Some attempts to locate mass graves had been already started by family members who were concerned with properly appeasing the vengeful spirits of the wronged dead; and Huiguans, and other community organizations, made every effort to collect information on massacres and missing persons for future judicial action.29 Interestingly, the only Chinese participant in this showcase trial of justice and demonstration of care for British imperial Chinese subjects was lawyer Richard Lim Chuan Ho, who served as a legal adviser to the Chinese Consul-General and the independent appeal committee for the Singapore Chinese massacred by the Japanese. Lim aided the prosecution on the trials. He later became a politician and a banker in Singapore. The recommendation of the United Nations War Crimes Commission to conduct the trials of war criminals in the countries where the crimes were committed suited the British by demonstrating the “equality and impartiality of British justice.”30 Yet, the Malay and the Indian communities lost interest in the trials very quickly, and only the Chinese took interest in cases that involved Kempeitai violence towards Chinese;31 and, as said, they were eventually dissatisfied with the outcome of trials.32

Killings of Malayan and Singaporean Chinese, Mentioned in the Tokyo Trials Unlike the trials of minor B and C class cases in various Asian towns and cities, the Tokyo Trials focused on A Class criminals; that is leaders accused with committing crimes against peace. Among lower-level defendants, a heavier weight was given to crimes against Allied POWs. Crimes against Chinese, both in China and in the diaspora were very rarely brought up in court. Still, there were few

 Blackburn, “The Collective Memory of the Sook Ching Massacre”: 75, 77.  The Singapore Chinese Massacred Appeal Committee has started its activities to locate graves in 1948, a year after the Trial of 1947. The abovementioned book, edited by Li Diemin, Dazhan Yu Nanqiao – Malaya zhibu, was published in an attempt to convince the committee of the importance of seeking evidence from witnesses from all over Malaya and Singapore.  Simon C. Smith, “Crimes and Punishment,” South East Asia Research, 5 no. 1, 41–56 (1997), 44.  Smith, “Crimes and Punishment,” 41, 43, 46.  Smith, “Crimes and Punishment,” 47–50.

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references by the accused themselves to the killings of Chinese in Malaya, Singapore and New Guinea, which will be mentioned below. Colonel Sugita Kazuji, former Intelligence staff officer of the 25th Army under General Yamashita, gave a testimony and signed an affidavit in the Tokyo Trials concerning the commands to kill Chinese, whom he kept calling “merchants” in court to express his loathing for them.33 Sugita, the only Japanese witness in Tokyo who was asked about the killings of Chinese in Malaya and Singapore, claimed that Yamashita ordered friendly behaviour towards all peoples of the region, but sentiments of the Japanese soldiers grew worse with increasing Japanese loses and the obstructions for their operations maintained by those “Chinese Merchants.”34 Sugita also headed a Japanese committee to investigate what was euphemistically called the “punishment” of Chinese residents in Singapore. It was set up by the vice Minister of War Wakamatsu Tadakzu, which retired 75 days after Japan’s surrender, with four other members – all Japanese officers who themselves served in Singapore during the war.35 Sugita claimed that even after the clean-up operations, Chinese communist guerrillas had continued to resist the Japanese in an organized manner.36 He was directly questioned about the massacres of the Chinese in Singapore, the number of victims and the reaction of the Japanese high command. Sugita testified that he “witnessed neither the actual mopping-up nor even a single corpse: ”I [Sugita, R.S.] have heard that there was some evidence that 5,000 Chinese were killed but Japanese officers told me that 6,000 was a much too large an estimate.”37 Sugita identified Yamashita as the man responsible for the killings, saying that on 17 February 1942 he issued an operational order “with the aim of mopping up the Chinese merchants of enemy character lurking in and around the city [of Singapore, R.S.], and intending to deal them a decisive blow.” The written command has supposedly disappeared.38 In another rare reference to the killings in Malaya, the diary of Kawamura Saburo, commander of the Singapore Garrison (the 9th Infantry Brigade), who was put on trial in Singapore, was read at the Tokyo Trials as a proof for his direct  R. John Pritchard and Sonia M. Zaide, The Tokyo war crimes trial: complete transcript of the proceedings (New York: Garland, 1981), 27, 399.  “Defence Document number 1921, Affidavit of Sugita Kazuji from 24 July 1947,” 2. Accessed 10 September, 2021. https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/1f84cd/pdf/  “Defence Document number 1921,” 5625–5627.  “Defence Document number 1921,” 411–412.  ibid.  “Defence Document number 1921,” 4; “The Military Commission Convened By The Commanding General. United Stotts Army Forces, Western Pacific.” Accessed 19 September 2021. https:// www.legal-tools.org/doc/1f84cd/pdf/

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responsibility for the massacre of at least 5,000 Chinese on the Island. The significance of this indirect testimony is that it shows that, at least in this case, command responsibility of the superiors, namely Yamashita, could not take away the burden of responsibility from all subordinates. The capture and killing of Chinese communist guerrillas by Kawamura’s men and officers was also mentioned in the Tokyo Trials. As mentioned above, Kawamura was hanged on 26 June 1947, in Changi Gaol, Singapore, after being tried by a British military court.39 Another voice heard in the Tokyo courtroom was that of British Colonel Cyril Hew Dalrymple Wild. Attached to ALFSEA (Allied Land Forces South-East Asia), Wild oversaw war crimes investigation in Malaya and Singapore after February 1946. He became the main witness to the killings of Chinese who gave testimony. Tellingly, the fact that his was a hearsay testimony was balanced by his position and his racial identity which seems to have made it admissible in court. In September 1946, Wild commented in court on passages that were read from Kawamura’s diary and testified that there were indeed Chinese communist guerrillas in Malaya, but the British army never commanded or directed those Chinese – communists or others – who acted against the Japanese in Singapore. This was obviously not true, as was publicly shown months earlier in January 1946, in a public ceremony on the front steps of Singapore City Hall. During this ceremony, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, in his capacity as Supreme Allied Commander – Southeast Asia Command, decorated the commanders of the mostly Chinese Communist Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army MPAJA, calling the guerrilleros “Comrades” in Chinese. Colonel Wild, however, ignored this and referred in his testimony to the Chinese battalion raised by his headquarters. Wild then admitted under questioning that volunteer armies consisting of Asians stayed behind Japanese lines, but only “as peaceful citizens,” after being disbanded and disarmed in fear of Japanese revenge. Wild also asserted that Malayan Chinese were not “given to disturbance,” meaning that they could not have caused any trouble. Again, the MPAJA attempts to sabotage Japanese communication lines might not have been very successful, but it could not be considered civilian or peaceful either.40 Wild thus rejected the insinuation that those “hundreds if not thousands” of Chinese who were shot on the beach in Singapore were killed as saboteurs collaborating with the British. The fact that Western POWs witnessed some of these shootings was mentioned to add credibility. Wild also was very doubtful whether  Pritchard and Zaide, The Tokyo war crimes trial, 5669–5675; 5679–5681; Fitzpatrick, “Death Sentences,” 326–370 (599 passim).  Spencer Chapman, The Jungle is Neutral (1949), [Reprint Singapore: Marshal Cavendish Editions, 2014]; Pritchard and Zaide, The Tokyo war crimes trial, 5636, 5830–5831.

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the mass execution of Chinese was due to the order of the commander-in-chief Yamashita, but he did not attempt to substantiate his claim, and the court asked him for no clarification. Even after the first wave of massacres, the Japanese feared that stay-behind Chinese guerrillas, would disperse in the Riau islands south of Singapore.41 Wild further referred to organized anti-Japanese resistance by the Chinese after the occupation, with Japanese tracking down “resisters” in various places in Malaya and killing them in the hundreds. He affirmed the existence of blacklists of “suspect” Chinese that were prepared in advance. These people and that villagers who harbored them were wiped out. Wild in his testimony estimated the number of Chinese victims to be from 30 to 150 thousand people and mentioned the torture of Chinese as well.42 Another important point in Wild’s testimony refers to the legal status of the Chinese in Singapore. He claimed accurately that the majority of Chinese in Singapore were British subjects by birth on the territory.43 150 to 300 wounded Australian and Indian soldiers were taken prisoner at Parit Sulong, Sultanate of Johor, Malaya, on 23 January 1942. Tens of them were cruelly murdered by the Japanese Imperial Guards Division under the command of the abovementioned Takuma Nishimura. Perhaps because Parit Sulong is only about 20 kilometers from Batu Pahat, the Tokyo Trials tribunal made a rare reference to the suffering of overseas Chinese civilians in the area, and mentioned the massacres in Batu Pahat, in doing so exceptionally relying on the testimony of a Chinese person: The witness [Chew Sway Leo, a local resident, R.S.] and nine other Chinese were beaten with rifle butts into unconsciousness at Batu Bahat [sic!] Police station in February 1942. On 1 March over 100 Chinese and European civilians were put in lorries and taken in batches of thirty-five into the jungle. They were machine-gunned and bayoneted. The witness waited until the Japanese had gone and then escaped.44

The willingness of Australia, a country which saw itself in 1945 as “a white, AngloSaxon enclave in a racially alien corner of the world”45 to engage as a colonial power in trials where the victims were Chinese nationals or Chinese overseas

 Pritchard and Zaide, The Tokyo war crimes trial, 5635, 5639, 5826–5827.  Pritchard and Zaide, The Tokyo war crimes trial, 5637–5638, 5643–5646, 5646, 5649.  In 1931 36% of the Chinese were locally born, in 1947 they were 60%. See Wei-Jun Jean Yeung and Shu Hu (eds.) Family and Population Changes in Singapore: A unique case in the global family change (London: Routledge, 2018), chapter 2; Pritchard and Zaide, The Tokyo war crimes trial, 5362.  “The sworn statement of Chew Sway Leok,” in Pritchard and Zaide, The Tokyo war crimes trial, 12958.  Dunne and Durham, The Prosecution of Crimes, 209.

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demands our attention because race and nationality were two factors which could give weight to witness testimonies in colonial settings. Most of the victims mentioned in the Rabaul trials were non-Caucasian, and the Chinese were an important subgroup among them.46 As mentioned earlier in this chapter, of 44 cases that were prosecuted, 21 concerned the ill-treatment of Chinese soldiers; and the other 23 cases concerned the ill-treatment of Chinese civilians.47 It has been noticed that, “[A]t a time when Australia restricted migration in accordance with the ‘White Australia’ policy, it is quite remarkable to discover the extent to which Australian investigators, prosecuting officers and courts pursued crimes against non-white victims . . . .with no apparent racially or ethnically based hierarchy among victims.”48 This egalitarian attitude was not self-evident to everyone, as the following exchange reveals. In an answer to the Australian Minister for Post-War Reconstruction who asked “why Australians should have been put in the position of having to try Japanese for offences against Chinese and Indian nationals,” the Department of External Affairs answered that “irrespective of the identity or race of the victims of the crime’, a war crime was “a crime against the international community . . . and punishment for such crimes [was] a matter which can properly be administered by a competent tribunal of any state.”49 This answer is telling, because it does not rely on the jurisdiction that Australia might have on subjects in territories under its administration, but relates to the universal principles of justice that apply equally to all human beings. The Department of the Army had a slightly narrower view, claiming that Australian justice should be administered “where the nationals of another country are resident in the territory of the Commonwealth, or if they are in that particular territory when the crime was committed’.” These efforts to hold an equal and “fair” trial (in the English meaning of the phrase) in such cases, and the attempts of the Australian courts to set precedents protecting the lives of civilians at war four years before the drafting of the Fourth Geneva Convention, are impressive by any measure. Acting under the 1945 War Crimes Act, these tribunals had to widen the definitions available to them by the

 There were 188 war crime trials in Rabaul, held between December 1945 and August 1947. At the end of the war there were 430 suspected Japanese war criminals. See Fitzpatrick, “The Trials in Rabaul,” 507, 514; Dunne and Durham, The Prosecution of Crimes, 209.  Fitzpatrick, “The Trials in Rabaul,” 518–9, 521; Geoffrey C. Gunn, “Remembering the Southeast Asian Chinese Massacres of 1941–45,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 37 no. 3 (2007), 281.  Dunne and Durham, The Prosecution of Crimes, 200, 211.  ibid.

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existing law so that it could include the civilian population in New Guinea and the Islands – most of which was naturally non-European.50 Yet another logic at the basis of the cases stemmed from the inability to properly put on trial the many war criminals that the war produced, with limited means, personnel, time and access to evidence; while avoiding a Versailles-like imposition of the guilt upon Japan as a nation,51 especially after Emperor Hirohito was left untouched. The Australian officers who sat as judges did their best to administer justice to non-White, non-Australians despite their lack of legal qualifications.52 In many cases, the panel of non-jurists sitting in court martial would be advised on matters of law by a judge-advocate, but the question of the court’s very authority to try non-Australians was never challenged during the proceedings.53 Perhaps in order to satisfy what was perceived as a radically different way of understanding justice on part of the Chinese, “two Chinese officers sat as Court members in a case where Japanese and Formosan personnel were accused of murdering Chinese prisoners of war: these two Court members had been themselves prisoners of war at this same camp at the same time as the murders.” Their names were Major Yau Tee Lang, and Captain Lee Chi Yung, “both prisoners of war captured when fighting with the Chinese National Army.” They had sat on the bench with the agreement of the Chinese authorities. Each one of them sat in 13 and 16 trials respectively. The Chinese, for their part, suspecting Australian bias in favour of the Japanese accused, objected to Australians being on defence teams and objected to the efforts made to challenge Chinese witnesses. They complained of being refused a vote on a sentence because of their prior knowledge of a particular case. It should be noted that despite the fact that both local Chinese communists, and communists from China were among the victims, they did not have any representation in the tribunals.54 The different views of fairness and justice – either perceived or real – have influenced the value given to testimonies of Chinese. For example: Major General [Kenneth William] Eather, responsible for locating suspect war criminals from among the captured Japanese troops under his control, contended that Chinese and British notions of justice diverged at this point. He reported that the Chinese could not ‘understand why, if three or more witnesses [gave] evidence that they actually saw a murder committed, an automatic punishment of death should not be inflicted’. In remarking on ‘the

 Dunne and Durham, The Prosecution of Crimes, 196, 198, 199.  Cribb, “How finished business became unfinished,” 92, 94–96.  Fitzpatrick et al. Australia’s War Crimes, 529, 507–567.  Michael Paes, “The Australian Military Courts under the War Crimes Act 1945 – Structure and Approach,” in Fitzpatrick et al. Australia’s War Crimes, 109. Fitzpatrick, “The Trials in Rabaul,” 529.  Fitzpatrick et al. Australia’s War Crimes, 530, 543.

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inability of the Oriental mind to grasp the elements of British justice’, Eather recommended that trials with Chinese victims should be tried in China, a recommendation not acted upon.55

Beyond the obvious cultural misunderstanding and its equally obvious background, we can look at this remark through the prism of the economy of memory. In other words, we could ask whether Chinese witnesses would bother to endure the trouble and pain of witnessing if it were – from their perspective – all in vain? An overtly prejudiced attitude to the nature and function of witnessing, when given by non-Europeans, could be found in a report from a trial held at Rabaul: “it is very difficult for the prosecution to get a consecutive story from native witnesses . . . natives are very like children. They have vivid imaginations, and their evidence must be very carefully scrutinized.”56 Elsewhere it is said that in some cases different court officials doubted the veracity of “unlearned coolie Chinese” and the reliability of testimonies by natives since they are allegedly – because of their race – prone to exaggeration and shortness of memory.57 Finally, a most crucial factor which affected the way in which witnessing was heard at court, is the simple fact that many times it was not heard at all: “in most instances, witnesses and victims did not give evidence in person, with only a written statement from an interview presented to the court.”58

Witnessing and Visualization: No Words, No Images The small number of opportunities to give testimonies in courts of law has helped to consign Chinese diasporic memory to semi-oblivion. At the same time, the lack of the visual evidence which is needed to make events memorable was also at work. Absent words were not substituted by images. On the face of it, considering the wealth of photographs taken by Japanese all over Asia during the war, there should have been no lack of photographic images of violence against Chinese from the Malayan campaign or, for that matter, from embattled Rabaul. Portable and affordable light weight cameras were already quite popular in 1941. Photographs of killings were already taken in 1937 by amateur soldier photographers in China, and sent home to Japan as mementos, just as

   

Fitzpatrick, “The Trials in Rabaul,” 529. Dunne and Durham, The Prosecution of Crimes, 209: cited from a report of a trial in Rabaul. Dunne and Durham, The Prosecution of Crimes, 213. Dunne and Durham, The Prosecution of Crimes, 202.

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happened later in Nazi occupied Poland. These photos had later an iconizing effect on the ways in which the Nanjing massacre was remembered. Although travel to the Japanese home islands from the “Southern Regions” of the empire was difficult after 1942 (as opposed to the situation in 1937 China), and soldiers could not carry photos home with them, cable and wireless connections with telephotography capabilities remained undisturbed throughout the war. It should be remembered, though, that in contrast to the situation in faraway Rabaul, Japanese news agencies and telecommunication companies maintained offices in Singapore, before and throughout the war. Even if telephotography was cumbersome, expensive, and subject to strict military censorship, there were still operating photo shops in major Malayan cities, where negative films could be developed and printed, or be hidden away – as indeed happened elsewhere. Yet, some rare photographic evidence from the southern part of wartime Japanese empire, on both the allied and Japanese sides, has survived.59 The explanations for it vary. First, realizing the negative impact of images of atrocities taken in China on the effort to win local hearts and minds and convince the international public opinion, Japanese authorities limited the use of cameras in the battlefield to officers and military photojournalists.60 In addition, the Army sanctioned the use of combat artists (Jugun Gaka) attached to field units, who later painted large scale heroic canvasses of the units they accompanied.61 Secondly, many of the photos of the Nanjing massacres were taken by Western witnesses, who carried both small and large cameras. They enjoyed a freedom of movement denied to the Chinese, whereas in Malaya and in Rabaul Europeans were put under arrest as soon as the Japanese won the battle.62 Thirdly, Japanese were willing to take pictures in Nanjing as they  Personal communication with Mark Frost, 5 December 2014.  Personal communication with Lee Pennington, 8 December 2014 confirmed that books published by major Japanese newspaper after 1941 contained no photos of atrocities committed in Southeast Asia. Personal communication with Barak Kushner, 22 November 2014 indicates that after the publishing of Robert Capa’s photographs of bombed Hankow (17 October 1938), and the –allegedly fake – photo of a baby on Shanghai railway section by H.S. Wong in the US, the Japanese government tried to improve its image and tightened control over whatever was published. From personal communication with Mark Frost, 5 December 2014, I learned that one piece of evidence survives of an incident in which film was confiscated from an American missionary in Nanjing on May 1938, as the Japanese thought he had taken pictures of their military trucks. See Zhang Kaiyuan, Eyewitnesses to Massacre: American Missionaries Bear Witness to Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 24.  Personal communication with Lee Pennington, 8 December 2014.  Timothy Brook, Documents on the Rape of Nanking (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 30: report of the confiscation of a 9 on 6 cm film plate from a German citizen in Nanjing on 17 December 1937. In Nanking, Magee, an American Missionary, used a 16 mm film camera to shoot the horrors. See Lu Suping, They were in Nanjing: the Nanjing Massacre witnessed by

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thought that its conquest would mark the end of their war in China.63 There was no such anticipation in Malaya. Finally, the dead – whether Japanese or not – were rarely shown in the context of the battlefield. Even the injured were only seen, in comparatively good shape –in home front medical settings.64 This taboo extended to most postwar publications, even those based on private material.

Conclusion As we have seen, the reasons for the partial exclusion, disparagement or ignoring of witnesses in post-war courtrooms have varied, as did the attitude towards Chinese victims. The significantly small number of trials of cases in which Chinese were victims, and the small number of occasions in which Chinese victims could speak out publicly as witnesses, had two effects on the development of memory. At the time when the processes took place, individuals and organizations like huiguans, established committees which collected testimonies and other evidence, thereby giving voice and purpose to victims and their families. Yet, in the long run – when it turned out that the punishment meted out was not sufficient from the point of view of the survivors, and that there was no interest in listening to stories of survivors in the courtrooms once the tide turned against the Chinese with the beginning of the Cold War, the Malayan Emergency, and the repatriation of war criminals back to Japan – the effect on the witnesses was chilling. They had every disincentive to remember their suffering – either privately or publicly. Even during and after the long process of decolonization, remembering did not pay in any of the post-colonial regimes in Malaysia, Singapore and Papua New Guinea. After the war ended in August 1945, Chinese and Malays had a series of inter-communal violent clashes throughout the Malayan Peninsula. In 1946, the American and British Nationals (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 116. John Rabe, a member of the German Nazi party took pictures and thereby saved the lives of many in Nanjing. Erwin Wickert, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1998). Many of the photographs of the events in Nanking were taken by John Magee, an American missionary. Others were taken by soldiers as souvenirs, by Japanese journalists and by other foreigners. See Yin Jijun, Shi Young, and Ron Dorfman, The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs (Chicago: Innovative Publishing Group, 1996).  Personal communication with Lee Pennington (8 December 2014).  Personal communication with Lee Pennington (8 December 2014). See also David C. Earhart, Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2015), 74: “The Japanese press printed several photographs of destruction . . . when Shanghai and Nanjing fell late in 1937, but refrained from publishing photographs of the dead, whether Chinese or Japanese.”

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Malays – who made up less than half the population in the country – were given political dominance through the Malayan Union. In 1948, the Malayan Emergency broke out in the form of an inter-ethnic war between Malays, under British command, and members of the predominantly Chinese Malayan Communist Party. In those years, when Chinese civilians were killed, incarcerated and uprooted in their hundreds of thousands, and starved and deprived of whatever civil rights they previously enjoyed, no talk of wartime Chinese grievances of victimhood was acceptable. This tension over inter-ethnic relations erupted twice in the 1960s, and the ban on communism has remained in Malaysia to this day. In Singapore, the city state which was practically ousted from the Federation of Malaysia in 1965 because of its Chinese majority, communism and communalism as potential sources of inter-ethnic tensions were equally feared. Throughout its independence years, Singapore refused to identify itself as a Chinese state, and so the history of wartime Chinese suffering was changed to become a fabricated history of collective Singaporean suffering. Papua New Guinea, which remained under Australian administration until the 1970s, and which is still dependent on this country today, has experienced waves of anti-Chinese hatred, which at least twice deteriorated into violence. For this reason, telling stories of wartime Chinese suffering here too remained unacceptable. China and Taiwan both had their own reasons to exclude Chinse diasporic memories from the collective memory of the war, and to redact testimonies of their suffering under the Japanese from their histories. Until the mid 1960s, and up to the 1980s, China looked at Japan as a potential economic partner, and depicted the Guomindang regime in Taiwan as its archenemy.65 Calculated leniency in trials of Japanese war criminals who committed massacres in Mainland China was used to show both the humanity and the superiority of the Chinese justice system.66 In Taiwan, the fact that Formosans served as soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army, especially as interpreters attached to Kenpeitai units which committed some of the mass murders of Chinese Overseas, was an incentive for everyone to keep silent. Other factors – the Japanese heritage of older generations, which was the result of years of Nipponization under Japanese colonial rule; fresher memories of the lethal violence used by Mainlander Guomindang Chinese to take over the Island; and the long years of state terror that followed – have also made witnessing of any trauma problematic.

 Yang, Daqing, “Convergence or divergence? Recent historical writings on the rape of Nanjing,” The American Historical Review, 104, no. 3 (1999): 842–865.  Takeshi, Ōsawa, “The People’s Republic of China’s ‘Lenient Treatment’ Policy towards Japanese War Criminals,” in K. Sellars (ed.) Trials for International Crimes in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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Below state level, in colonial and in post-colonial times alike, Huiguans were the most important institutions around which the lives of diasporic Chinese revolved and the main building blocks of what could be seen as a civil society. These associations, however, were all oriented towards China, so that telling of local memories rather than national ones was not welcome. For these reasons, in the lack of an opportunity to speak out bitterness (Shuoku) the generation of survivors saw virtue in internalizing pain – literally “eating bitterness” (Chiku). Finally, if we exclude the rare digging of mass graves, which was carried out intentionally in some places in Malaya on the initiative of local Chinese for mainly religious reasons, the lack of supporting evidence in the form of photographs was yet another disincentive for witnesses to talk – or remember, which is actually the same thing. To conclude our discussion in this chapter, we should try and see what these largely forgotten cases of mass killings of diasporic, exiled, and deported Chinese, can teach us about the nexus between the act of witnessing, and the fate of traumatic memory. First, it seems that Halbwachs’s theory of the dependence of individual memory on social frameworks is once again confirmed. Secondly, we see that when diasporic organizations gravitate too much towards a faraway nation state, little room is left for local diasporic narratives of suffering which are so common elsewhere. Thirdly, we may plausibly assume that postcolonial nations which maintain ethnic dominance find it hard to tolerate the existence of histories of victimhood which pertain to a particular ethnic group, especially when this group is not politically dominant. And lastly, as students of history, we could perhaps use these cases as a humbling reminder to the limitations of the discipline. A huge mass of human suffering is left out of our scope. No uncovering of facts could change this reality, without the willingness of individuals to speak out and remember – when encouraged by society.

Bibliography Ang, Seah San. Interview by Lay Leng Low. Singapore: Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore, 10 April, 1984. Accessed 20 September 2021. https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/ oral_history_interviews/ Blackburn, Kevin. “The Collective Memory of the Sook Ching Massacre and the Creation of the Civilian War Memorial of Singapore.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 73 no. 2 (2000): 71–90. Boas, Gideon and Lisa Lee. “Command Responsibility and Other Grounds of Criminal Responsibility.” In Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51, edited by Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris, 134–173. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2016.

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Brook, Timothy. Documents on the Rape of Nanking. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Cahill, Peter. “Chinese in Rabaul – 1921 to 1942: Normal practices, or containing the yellow Peril?” Journal of Pacific History, 31 no. 1 (1996): 72–91. Chapman, Spencer. The Jungle is Neutral (1949). Reprint – Singapore: Marshal Cavendish Editions, 2014. Cheah, Wui Ling and Ng Pei Yi. “Nishimura Takuma and Others, March and April 1947.” The Singapore War Crimes Trials Web Portal. Accessed 3 January 2021.http://singaporewarcrimestrials.com/ case-summaries/detail/112 Cheah, Wui Ling. “An Overview of the Singapore War Crimes Trials (1946–1948): Prosecuting Lower-Level Accused.” Singapore Law Review 34 (2016): 1–46. Cribb, Robert.”“How Finished Business Became Unfinished: Legal, Moral and Political Dimensions of the Class ‘B’ and ‘C’ War Crimes Trials in Asia and the Pacific.” In The Pacific War Aftermaths, Remembrance and Culture, edited by Christina Twomey and Ernest Koh. New York: Routledge, 2014. del Tufo, Moroboë Vincenzo. Malaya – A Report on the 1947 Census of Population. London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1949. Dunne, Bridget, and Helen Durham. “The Prosecution of Crimes against Civilians,” in Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51, edited by Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris, 196–235. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2016. Earhart, David C. Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media. Milton Park: Routledge, 2015. Fitzpatrick, Georgina. “Death Sentences, Japanese War Criminals and the Australian Military.” In Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51, edited by Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris, 326–370. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2016. Fitzpatrick, Georgina, “The Trials in Rabaul.” In Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51, edited by Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris, 507–567. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2016. Gunn, Geoffrey C. “Remembering the Southeast Asian Chinese Massacres of 1941–45.” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 37 no. 3 (2007): 273–291. Halbwachs, Maurice. “Individual Consciousness and Collective Mind.” American Journal of Sociology, 44 no. 6 (1939): 812–822. Ho, Swee Hong, interview by Beng Luan Tan. Singapore: Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore, 18 March, 1985. Accessed 20 September 2021. https://www.nas.gov.sg/archiveson line/oral_history_interviews/ International Tribunal for the Far East, “Defence Document number 1921, Affidavit of Sugita Kazuji from 24 July 1947” Legal Tools. Accessed 20 September 2021. https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/ 1f84cd/pdf/ Kansteiner, Wolf. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies” History and Theory, 41 no. 2 (2002): 179–197. Kratoska, Paul. The Japanese Occupation of Malaya – Social and Economic History. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997. Kushner, Barak. Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2015. Kwok, Wai Keng. Justice Done?: Criminal and Moral Responsibility Issues in the Chinese Massacres Trial, Singapore, 1947. New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2001. Li Diemin, ed. Dazhan Yu Nanqiao – Malaya zhibu [The Great War and the Chinese Overseas – Malaya Section]. Singapore: Xin Nanyang Chubanshe [New South-Seas Publishing house], 1947.

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Lu, Suping. They were in Nanjing: the Nanjing Massacre witnessed by American and British Nationals. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. Military Commission, convened by the Commanding General, United States Army Forces, Western Pacific. “United States of America vs. Tomoyuki Yamashita, 25 November 1945.” Legal Tools. Accessed 18 September 2021. https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/f6762d/pdf/. Nelson, Henk. “The Chinese in Papua New Guinea.” In China in Oceania: Reshaping the Pacific?, edited by Terence Wesley-Smith and Edgar A. Porter, 104–117. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Paes, Michael. “The Australian Military Courts under the War Crimes Act 1945 – Structure and Approach.” In Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51, edited by Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris, 103–132. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2016. Pal, Radhabinod. “Judgment of The Honorable Justice Pal, Member from India (Tokyo Tribunal).” Legal Tools. Accessed 23 September 2021. https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/2a6ce2/pdf/. Piccigallo, Philip R. The Japanese on Trial Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945–1951. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. Pinchevski, Amit and Roy Brand. “Holocaust perversions: The Stalags pulp fiction and the Eichmann Trial.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 24 no. 5 (2007): 387–407. Pritchard, John R. and Sonia M. Zaide. The Tokyo war crimes trial: complete transcript of the proceedings. New York: Garland, 1981. Qiaowu Weiyuanhui, Huaqiao Jingji Nianjian Bianji Weiyuanhui [Chinese Overseas Affairs Committee, The Overseas Chinese Economic Yearbook]. Taipei: Republic of China Official Press, 1958. Smith, Simon C. “Crimes and Punishment” South East Asia Research 5 no. 1 (1997): 41–56. Stern, Judith. “The Eichmann trial and its influence on psychiatry and psychology.” Theoretical Inquiries in Law, 1 no. 2 (2001): 393–428. Takeshi, Ōsawa. “The People’s Republic of China’s ‘Lenient Treatment’ Policy towards Japanese War Criminals.” In Trials for International Crimes in Asia, edited by Kirsten Sellars, 145–165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Tay, Frances. “WO 235/821: Sugimoto Heikichi and two Others, 5–7 Feb 1946” Japanese War Crimes in British Malaya and British Borneo 1941–1945. Accessed 3 January, 2021. https://www.japanesewar crimesmalayaborneo.com/wo-235821.html Tay, Frances. “WO 235/824: Hamada Kazumi, 30–31 Jan 1946” Japanese War Crimes in British Malaya and British Borneo 1941–1945. Accessed 3 January, 2021. http://www.japanesewarcrimesmalaya borneo.com/wo-235824.html. The Canberra Times, “Trial commences of Japanese commander, 20.3.1947; Jap Commander faces atrocity trial at Rabaul, 21.3.1947; Evidence against Japs for cruelty towards Chinese in Rabaul, 22.3.1947; Prosecution ended of Jap Commander, 25.3.1947; Hirota declares lies told by subordinates, 26.3.1947; Dramatic development in trial of Japanese general at Rabaul, 29.3.1947; Counsel claimed Hirota did his best as a man, 1.4.1947; Life imprisonment for Jap Commander, 24.4.1947” Trials of Japanese War Criminals Reported by Australian Media. Accessed 18 May, 2017. blog.wenxuecity.com/ blog/frontend.php?act=articlePrint&blogId=25083&date=201001&postId=1824 Totani, Yuma. “Crimes against Asians in Command Responsibility Trials.” In Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51, edited by Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris, 266–290. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2016. Totani, Yuma. Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945–1952: Allied War Crimes Prosecutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Tsuji, Masanobu. Japan’s Greatest Victory Britain’s Worst Defeat. Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2001. Tsuji, Masanobu. Singapore: The Japanese Version. New York: St Martins’ Press, 1997. Wickert, Erwin. The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1998.

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Wilson, Sandra. “After the Trials: Class B and C Japanese War Criminals and the Post-War World” Japanese Studies, 31 no. 2 (2011): 141–149. Wu, David Y. H. The Chinese in Papua New Guinea: 1880–1980. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1982. Yablonka, Hanna. “The Eichmann Trial: Was It the Jewish Nuremberg?” Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review, 34 (2011): 301–313. Yang, Daqing. “Convergence or divergence? Recent historical writings on the rape of Nanjing.” The American Historical Review, 104 no. 3 (1999): 842–865. Yin, Jijun, Shi Young, and Ron Dorfman. The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs. Chicago: Innovative Publishing Group, 1996. Zhang, Kaiyuan. Eyewitnesses to Massacre: American Missionaries Bear Witness to Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001. Zheng, Mu and Shu Hu. “Origin and Transition of Singapore Families.” In Family and Population Changes in Singapore: A unique case in the global family change, edited by Zheng Mu and Shu Hu, 27–52. London: Routledge, 2018.

Toni Rovatti

Divided Memories? The Last Testimonies on Nazi Massacres in Italy Direct engagement with the memory of protagonists in World War II carries great significance for the work of historians. One of the last opportunities to work directly with Italian victims and witnesses of Nazi violence was provided by the University of Padua’s interview project, carried out between 2019 and 2020. The resulting collection of interviews represents, therefore, a unique opportunity to use first-hand testimonies as a primary source to throw light directly on that wartime context.1 On the other hand, before beginning this oral history investigation, the Padova’s research team questioned the validity of a study focusing on a sample of (unfailingly) elderly interviewees, whose personal memories would have to reach back more than 80 years.2 Some might ask what meaning such research has when it is carried out at such a distant point in the future compared with the moment the facts occurred. Indeed, such a study relies on “late witnesses,” or those who in the final phase of their lives delve deep into distant memories to talk about lived experiences from an inevitably changed perspective. Such late witnesses produce pictures of past events which have blurred frames. Their reconstruction of dramatic and often traumatic happenings in a wartime context is particularly prone to be unreliable and, in some cases, the narrative’s internal structure is affected by hybridization with false or acquired memories derived from extraneous sources (documentaries, TV discussions, books, films etc.). That is, there are memory topoi that have become corrupted or redundant in the era of global communication and the official historicization of the past, and this has affected the national and international public sphere since the early 2000s. However, these testimonies can still prove illuminating, if not for the empirical reconstruction of facts, then for the changing perception of events in the delicate

 Research Project: “The Italian Victims of National Socialism. Survivors’ memoirs. Knowing, remembering, disseminating, Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies” (SPGI), University of Padua, 2019–2020. Accessed 9 September, 2021. https://memoriavittimenazis mofascismo.it/.  The oral memories are included in the project “The Italian Victims of National Socialism.” From here on, unless otherwise indicated, the quoted testimonies are part of this collection of interviews, which is accessible online. Toni Rovatti, Senior Assistant Professor, Department of History and Cultures, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, Italy https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-005

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dialectic between the definition of personal memory, the politics of memory,3 and the popularization of the historical narrative.4 It is this dialectic which has shaped the national memory in the Italian public sphere over the last 30 years. Indeed, from the Padova’s research project unwitting contaminations of individuals’ memories have emerged stemming from the dissonance between original accounts and subsequent reconstructions originating in different periods. They are insertions of second-hand knowledge into first-hand memory the results of which have been seen in interviews with survivors of the Nazi massacres who were involved in specific policies of memory since 1999.5 These insertions are errors, deformations, dramatizations, or narrative distortions; they may be (apparently) unintentional; they may be functional as adaptations of the individual’s experience to the canons of national memory by stressing particular elements or events transmitted in the public discourse as dominant structures. Naturally, this occurred in different periods, as the public eye shifted to highlight different things. Consider the voice of Enio Mancini, a 6-year-old survivor of the massacre of Sant’Anna di Stazzema. When, in 2019, he recalls encountering the American army units at the climax of the terror which began with the arrival of the Germans in the village on August 12, 1944, he seems to follow an almost identical plot line to the one found in Spike Lee’s 2008 film, which includes the same incident:6 Ritornati a fine settembre del 1944, io sono arrivato a Sant’Anna con una delegazione di soldati Alleati. [. . .] Fra questi c’era un soldato di colore [. . .] ho trovato questo uomo nero e mi sono spaventato da morire. Quest’uomo per fortuna aveva una cioccolata. Mi ha fatto assaggiare questo dolce e diventò mio amico.7

 On the complex relationship between subjective memories of war and the politics of memory in the Italian case, see Filippo Focardi, La Guerra della Memoria: la Resistenza nel Dibattito Politico Italiano dal 1945 a Oggi (Roma–Bari: Laterza, 2005); Filippo Focardi, Il Cattivo Tedesco e il Bravo Italiano: la Rimozione delle Colpe della Seconda Guerra Mondiale (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2013); Manuela Consonni, L’Eclisse dell’Antifascismo. Resistenza, Questione Ebraica e Cultura Politica in Italia dal 1943 al 1989 (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2015).  An indicator of increased public interest in historical narrative, which even in the Italian context reaches across boundaries within the scientific community, was the constitution in 2017 of the Italian Association of Public History – AIPH. Furthermore, the last five years have seen the establishment by Italian universities of multiple Masters degree programs dedicated to this specific branch of history. For a general overview, see: Paolo Bertella Farnetti, Lorenzo Bertucelli and Alfonso Botti ed., Public History: Discussioni e Pratiche (Milan–Udine: Mimesis, 2017).  Filippo Focardi, Nel Cantiere della Memoria. Fascismo, Resistenza, Shoah, Foibe (Rome: Viella, 2020), 235–258.  Miracle at St. Anna, directed by Spike Lee (United States 2008).  Interview with Enio Mancini (born 1938), conducted by Roberta Mira and Toni Rovatti, Valdicastello, Lucca, October 19, 2020.

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[Back at the end of September 1944, I arrived at Sant’Anna with a delegation of Allied soldiers. [. . .] Among them was a black soldier [. . .] I found this black man and I was scared to death. This man luckily had a chocolate. He let me taste this sweet and became my friend].

For the survivors of the massacres perpetuated against civilians during the German occupation of the Italian peninsula between 1943 and 1945, it is possible to identify redefinition processes taking place within individual and collective memory during distinct memory phases; they emerge as characteristic elements of narratives with a peculiar internal historicization.8 Perhaps this happens more easily with this group of survivors than it does for other categories of victims, since they were the protagonists of a memory that was not structured according to a precise political canon in the immediate post-war period. As far as this specific group of victims is concerned, the most recent research in oral history can be compared with a particularly productive season of previous studies, which almost 30 years ago – making extensive use of oral sources – had already focused on the gap between historical reconstruction and private voices, between national public perception and territorial memories. The accounts of the massacres collected in recent years are thus presented here as the final link of a long chain of research on the story and memory of Italian victims, a chain which was started in the mid-90s by the scientific community with its focus on the emblematic case of Civitella della Chiana.9 This season of studies was inaugurated by the conference In memory. Per una memoria europea dei crimini nazisti, with contributions from Italian and foreign historians, organized by Leonardo Paggi on June 22–24, 1994 in Arezzo, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civitella massacre.10 In the Italian context, this meeting represented one of the most important manifestations of a change in the historiographical paradigm of war violence, which was redirecting the general sensitivity of international studies at that historical turning point.11 In fact, the attention of historical research had suddenly shifted towards the subjective  See Caterina Di Pasquale, Il Ricordo Dopo l’Oblio. Sant’Anna di Stazzema, la Strage, la Memoria (Rome: Donzelli, 2010).  See Leonardo Paggi ed., Storia e Memoria di un Massacro Ordinario (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996); Giovanni Contini, La Memoria Divisa (Milan: Rizzoli, 1997).  Among them: Charles Maier, Michael Geyer, Eric Hobsbawm, Enzo Collotti, Maria Ferretti, Lutz Klinkhammer, Pieter Lagrou, Sarah Farmer, as well as Claudio Pavone, Pietro Clemente, Alessandro Portelli, Anna Bravo, Giovanni Contini and Leonardo Paggi himself, who carried out a collective investigation on the memory of the Civitella massacre, ahead of the conference. See Leonardo Paggi ed., La Memoria del Nazismo nell’Europa di Oggi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1997); Paggi, Storia e Memoria.  See Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Tzvetan Todorov, Une Tragédie Française: Été 1944. Scènes de Guerre Civile (Paris: Seuil, 1994); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker,

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dimension which included victims’ memory and points of view, thus enhancing aspects of social and cultural history. It came as a consequence of the caesura of 1989, of the collapse of bipolarity, of the decline of ideological perspectives marked by the eclipse of the USSR and the communist project. The paradigm shift was bolstered by the emotional impact of new scenes of conflict – and of atrocities – in Europe and elsewhere returning to the forefront in the 90s, from the war in the Gulf to the wars in the Balkans, whose images were broadcast non-stop by international television. The phase of radical political transition seen in the 1980s and 1990s stimulated about of interpretive dynamism on a transnational level and as a result, since the late 90s, studies of the Italian massacres have revealed two focal points. The first, on the one hand, is the system of orders issued by German high commands for the war on civilians – which formed the basis of counter-guerrilla policies, used in the Italian campaign against the partisan movement both by the SS and the Wehrmacht. Breaking with the simplistic interpretation of that system of orders, which saw massacres as being solely actions of reprisal, laid bare the autonomous genesis of a Nazi culture of war which was willing to strike the unarmed.12 The second focus is on the delicate theme of divided memories. Ossified memories of the martyred communities were apparently frozen in time by the incommensurability of the trauma they suffered. Although survivors were aware of Nazi soldiers’ proactive involvement as material executors (and that of their Fascist collaborators), they had defined a memory canon, a narrative structure, which was an alternative to the dominant public discourse, structuring strongly critical private memories, at times even being accusatory towards the partisan bands who were guilty – in their opinion – of having provoked the action of the German occupier.13 This shift in blame from the perpetrators to the supposed instigators of their actions, who were considered “morally responsible” for the massacres, had fueled a broad debate hegemonized by forms of public use of history during the transition from the First Republic to the Second Republic.14 It was centered on the reductionist

14–18. Retrouver la Guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); Luca Baldissara and Paolo Pezzino ed., Crimini e Memorie di Guerra (Naples: L’ancora del Mediterraneo, 2004).  Lutz Klinkhammer, Stragi Naziste in Italia. La Guerra contro i Civili (1943–44) (Rome: Donzelli, 1997); Michele Battini and Paolo Pezzino, Guerra ai Civili. Occupazione Tedesca e Politica del Massacro. Toscana 1944 (Venice: Marsilio, 1997).  See Contini, Memoria Divisa, 161–199.  Filippo Focardi, “Il passato conteso. Transizione politica e guerra della memoria in Italia dalla crisi della prima Repubblica ad oggi,” in L’Europa e le Sue memorie: Politiche e Culture del Ricordo Dopo il 1989, ed. Filippo Focardi and Bruno Groppo (Rome: Viella, 2013), 51–90.

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idea of a unambivalent, stable, and predetermined relationship between action and reaction at the origin of the massacre, which found its synthesis in the standard narrative of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre and the attack of via Rasella with its falsifying memories.15 However, the controversy in the public debate was accompanied by renewed analytical attention being given to the structuring of the martyred communities’ memories. Studies focused, in fact, on the specificity of the contexts of isolation, loneliness, and institutional abandonment which had in many cases characterized the elaboration of incommensurable violence in almost exclusively private forms, a trend which started from the very moment after the massacres and carrying on up to the 1990s.16 For instance, we can consider, the testimony of Gabriella Pierotti, who escaped the horror of the massacre of Sant’Anna when she was only 13 years old and, in the hours immediately following, sought help with her sister by knocking on the doors of nearby villages. Her words seem to foreshadow the solitude imposed by traumatic events still recalled vividly in all their raw brutality in 1999: Noi gli andavamo dietro, ma la gente ci mandava via. Dicevano: “Andate via, che se vengono i tedeschi ci ammazzano anche a noi.” Via, via . . . chissà se ci curavano. [. . .] Perché avevamo tutto il vestito imbrattato. Era un vestitino bianco fatto con dei pallini blu. Era rosso, un vestito tutto rosso, tutto il viso e le braccia. Eravamo state come infilate in una pozza di sangue.17 [We went after them, but people sent us away. They said: “Go away, because if the Germans come they’ll kill us too.” Go away, go away . . . I wonder if they paid any attention to us. [. . .] Because our clothes were all smeared. Mine was a little white dress with blue dots. [Then] It was red, a completely red dress, [my] whole face and arms. It was as if we had been plunged in a pool of blood].

Starting with an analytical comparison between the insights drawn from a longterm research framework and the most recent witness accounts of atrocities, this article’s aim is to offer some initial interpretative considerations on the evolution of the Italian memory canon of civilian massacres committed under the Salò Republic. It highlights some peculiar features of the recent interviews when seen

 Alessandro Portelli, L’Ordine È Già Stato Eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la Memoria (Rome: Donzelli, 1999). On the effects on the public debate of the trial of Erich Priebke and the acquittal for exceeding the period of limitation, issued by the Military Court of Rome on August 1, 1996, see Claudio Pavone, “Note sulla Resistenza armata, le rappresaglie naziste e alcuni attuali confusioni,” in Priebke e il Massacro delle Ardeatine (Roma: IRSIFAR, 1996), 39–60; Giovanni Contini, “L’ordine è già stato eseguito,” Quaderni storici, no. 103 (2000): 223–231; Paolo Pezzino, “Le Fosse Ardeatine: un luogo di memoria?,” Quaderni storici, no. 103 (2000): 232–250.  Leonardo Paggi, “Storia di una memoria antipartigiana,” in Paggi, Storia e Memoria, 46–84.  Interview with Gabriella Pierotti (born 1931), conducted by Toni Rovatti, Pietrasanta, Lucca, August 20, 1999, private archive.

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through analytical lenses derived from previous phases of research and it compares the same witnesses’ past narratives with current ones. Its goal is to highlight successive moments of memory definition over the last 30 years and consistent elements which are common to all the interviews which locate events in their unique historical time and place.

Perspectives The oral history research of the University of Padua (which brings together 24 interviews with survivors of massacres and two with relatives of victims), unlike previous studies on the memory of massacres, does not focus on single specific case studies. On the contrary, this study looks at testimonies from a wide geographical area going from areas covered by the Gustav Line to the northern Po Valley and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, while still including accounts of war experiences in the “traditional” territory of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines – the scene in the bloody summer of 1944 of the major massacres of Sant’Anna di Stazzema (Lucca) and Monte Sole (Bologna).18 In line with the direction which the most recent historiography has taken, this research has also shifted its attention to episodes that took place in apparently more marginal territories:19 in regions of the center-south (Campania, Abruzzo, Umbria), characterized by the German military presence around the defensive positions of the Gustav Line between October 1943 and May 1944, and therefore by an early spate of killings; and in regions of the north, such as Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia, an area of Nazi violence committed in the last days of the war in particular, during the military retreat that followed the breakthrough of the Po defensive line and the insurrection of April 25, 1945. A specific feature is common to all the collected voices, even if with different nuances, and that is the generational experience of the violence they were subjected to, which is reflected in the choral aspect taken on by the narrative. The memories of the direct witnesses of the massacres – born between 1925 and 1940 – evoke, in fact, a story marked by the witness’s age at the moment of the  The collection is made up of one or two interviews for each massacre, with the exception of specific in-depth studies with several voices regarding the two major massacres, symbols of German violence against civilians in Emilia and Tuscany, and on the massacre of the Niccioleta mine in the province of Pisa, already at the center of historiographic interest for the peculiarity of the Fascist presence. See Paolo Pezzino, Storie di Guerra Civile. L’Eccidio di Niccioleta (Bologna: il Mulino, 2001).  See Gianluca Fulvetti and Paolo Pezzino ed., Zone di Guerra e Geografie di Sangue. L’Atlante delle Stragi Naziste e Fasciste in Italia (1943–1945) (Bologna: il Mulino, 2017).

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trauma: a child’s or adolescent’s gaze, depending on the case, with significant differences based on a gap of even just a few years. Indeed, it is the period of childhood or early adolescence that represents the shared proscenium of these witnesses’ narration. They shared an important phase of life spent during the same conflict, but they give very different assessments of the same experience, sometimes even contrasting with one another. For some, this period was marked by glimpses of a world of extreme adventure provided by the war. For others, on the other hand, memories are hermetically sealed by feelings of fear and by the sensory memory of emotional and physical violence suffered or seen firsthand. Although it was the memory of the orphans (together with that of the widows) that attracted the attention of historians almost 30 years ago – “mi aveva colpito quanto la tragedia appartenesse ancora al presente dei figli delle vittime, i quali ne parlavano come se fosse appena accaduta” [I was struck by how much the tragedy still belonged to the present of the victims’ children, who spoke of it as if it had just happened] affirmed Contini in 199720 – the current narrations are tinged with different tones and they reveal new elements. On the whole, the recent interviews are characterized by an expression of pain which has apparently been dampened by time. In them, the reconstructions of the massacre, of the passages that record the violence in the single localities where it took place, become rapid and uniform, made dull by the rhythm of a narrative structure which by now has been thoroughly codified, and thus deprived of that element of instinctive drama that characterized the reliving of these memories in the 1990s. The memories of the older witnesses reveal them as being the bearers of a particular sense of existential dispiritment, marked by feelings of sadness and resignation, which derive from greater awareness of the events as they unfolded: “io non avevo nulla da perdere. [. . .] Il mio desiderio era morire subito” [I had nothing to lose. [. . .] My wish was to die immediately].21 These are, in fact, boys and girls who are forced by the massacre to leap ahead abruptly in their growing up, suddenly becoming adults after the massacre, in many cases finding themselves alone or at the head of what remained of their family nucleus. Ferruccio Laffi – together with his two brothers, the only ones to survive on September 30, 1944, in the locality of Colulla di Sotto (where they lost 14 family members) – is today the main voice of memory for the massacre of Monte Sole. He recounts how at the age of 16 he felt like a man, so as to give meaning and justification to his escape into the woods at the arrival of the German soldiers

 Contini, Memoria Divisa, 17.  Interview with Ferruccio Laffi (born 1928), conducted by Roberta Mira and Toni Rovatti, Monte Sole, Bologna, July 21, 2019.

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who massacred his family. (In fact, people thought the Germans were hunting precisely for adult men.) Having summarized in a few sentences the narration of the acts of savage violence committed on his family members, which he saw from a distance without fully understanding what was happening, it is only when he describes his return to the farm a few hours later that the story from his perspective really comes out in its entirety. In fact, his vivid, detailed description of the traumatic discovery of his murdered relatives’ bodies marks the beginning of an odyssey of flight and both physical and psychological disorientation which consumed the following months until the Liberation, leaving him scarred by an emotional fragility which has never fully healed: È fatica sai . . . stai via da casa, stai via due ore, trovi un macello lì . . . 18 persone trucidate, le galline che le beccano, i maiali [. . .] . . . E dopo non puoi far niente . . . e cosa fai? Dopo abbiamo preso dei lenzuoli e dei panni li abbiam coperti e poi è venuto sera . . . La casa grande bruciava da una parte e l’abbiamo spenta e poi dopo . . . E poi dopo andiamo a letto a piangere . . . Cosa vuoi fare? Niente.22 [It’s tough you know . . . you are out of the house, you are away for two hours, you come back to find a slaughterhouse . . . 18 people slaughtered, the chickens pecking at them, the pigs [eating the bodies] . . . And after that you cannot do anything . . . and what do you do? Afterwards we took sheets and cloths, we covered them [the bodies] and then evening came . . . The big house was burning on one side and we put it out, and then later . . . And then later we go to bed crying . . . What do you want to do? Nothing].

A reference to adolescence characterizes some testimonies. It is an age on the border between childhood and maturity, which thanks only to physical characteristics unique to some of the young men, allows some to escape the massacre and others not. The theme of adolescence comes out in the accounts of two other survivors, both “discarded” for their age in the German round-up of June 13, 1944, in Niccioleta, which precedes the massacre of Castelnuovo Val di Cecina. Bruno Travaglini tells why at 14 years old he was saved by the selection of able-bodied men for deportation to work camps which was carried out by German soldiers after the occupation of the village by the partisans and their subsequent escape when the Germans arrived. When Bruno tells his story, he pauses to emphasize: “io sembravo un bambino, portavo i pantaloni corti“ [I looked like a child, I wore short trousers].23 In contrast, Siliano Sozzi’s story highlights the dissonance of being in a child’s psychological state in an adult-sized body, a typical contrast for that age: “A me denudarono tutto per vedere se ero un bimbo o no . . . io mi

 Interview with Ferruccio Laffi, Monte Sole, Bologna, July 21, 2019.  Interview with Bruno Travaglini (born 1930), conducted by Roberta Mira and Simona Salustri, Siena, December 20, 2020.

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impaurii un modo . . . stavo sempre attaccato alla mia mamma” [They stripped me naked to see if I was a child or not . . . I got really scared . . . I was always attached to my mother].24 Bruno tries to escape from the sight of the mass graves of Castelnuovo, where his father’s body is buried after the massacre, but nevertheless he is the only one who stays by the side of his mother and his infant brother, then and in the following years. It is he – still shaken by the trauma and prone to an extreme emotionality with childish traits – who assumes the job of protecting the family, going so far as to be the one who accompanies and “welcomes back” (all alone, at 14 years old) the body of his father transferred by truck to Abbadia San Salvatore, his father’s birthplace: Allora fu deciso [. . .] che prima i morti fossero dissepolti e messi in casse [. . .]. Partii con le bare [. . .]. Ricordo che la mattina, nel mezzo della notte partimmo da Niccioleta [. . .] andammo fino al bivio di Pian de Mucini, dove il camion con le bare sarebbe transitato e avrebbero fatto salire me e un altro ragazzino [. . .]. Noi ci fecero salire dietro sul cassone [. . .] ci avevano lasciato un pezzetto di spazio fra le . . . non so se erano 20 bare. [. . .] nella cabina fu fatta salire una donna con un bambino in collo. Quando il camion partì, vidi la mamma che corse dietro al camion [. . .] e mi chiamava: “Bruno, Bruno.” Fino a che alla prima curva io non vidi più la mamma, lei non vide più me, è lì che scoppiai a piangere. Fino allora ero stato abbastanza coraggioso. [. . .] Quando il camion entrò nel greto del fiume, il cassone cominciò a traballare e queste casse cominciarono a spostarsi, a traballare . . . e da lì cominciò a uscire un odore tremendo. [. . .] Noi ragazzi eravamo bianchi come lenzuoli.25 [Then it was decided [. . .] that first the dead would be dug up and put in caskets [. . .]. I left with the coffins [. . .]. I remember that in the morning, in the middle of the night, we left Niccioleta [. . .] we went to the Pian de Mucini crossroads, where the truck with the coffins would pass, and they would pick me and another young boy up [. . .]. They put us in the back of the truck [. . .] they had left a little space between the [coffins] . . . I don’t know if there were 20 coffins. [. . .] a woman with a baby hanging on to her neck was brought into the cabin. When the truck drove off, I saw my mother running behind the truck [. . .] and calling me: “Bruno, Bruno.” Up to where at the first bend I could no longer see my mother and she could no longer see me, and that’s when I burst into tears. Until then I had been pretty brave. [. . .]

 Interview with Siliano Sozzi (born 1932 in Ribolla), conducted by Roberta Mira and Simona Salustri, Massa Marittima, Grosseto, December 10, 2020.  Interview with Bruno Travaglini, Siena, December 20, 2020.

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When the truck entered the riverbed, the back of the truck began to shake and the caskets began to move, to wobble . . . and from there a terrible smell began to come out. [. . .] We boys were white as sheets].

Travaglini’s story continues, recalling how he abandoned the truck, which took another route to deliver the bodies. After an adventurous journey, he got to Abbadia on foot, fearful of not being able to recognize the relative who, he recounts, he was expecting would come to pick him up: Vidi che lo zio assomigliava tutto alla mamma e così mi rinfrancai [. . .] Prima però che arrivasse la famiglia nel dicembre, arrivarono i tre fucilati, i tre morti [. . .]. Perciò sono stato io che ho accolto le salme del mio babbo e degli altri due. Naturalmente ad Abbadia fu preparata la camera ardente, fu fatto un grande funerale [. . .] però ero io l’unico, io e gli zii. [I saw that my uncle looked like my mother and so I was relieved [. . .].26 But before the family arrived in December, the three who had been shot, the three who had died, arrived [. . .]. So it was I who received the remains of my father and the other two. Of course, in Abbadia a burial chamber was prepared, a big funeral was held [. . .] but of my family I was the only one present, me and my uncles].

Even the memories of those who were children during the massacres show the peculiar nature of the emotions they felt. Apparently, they were more detached than those of adolescents or adults, and in some cases, they were even cold. It seems almost as if they were transfigured by inability to come to terms with death and by an instinctive form of psychological defense against the pervasiveness of violence and pain. In Caiazzo on October 8, 1943, Maria Antonietta Giorno (six years old) witnessed the killing of her aunt whom the German soldiers had tried to “take away” together with her sister, but her aunt had resisted. Maria Antonietta’s story, although it dwells on elements that underline the sacredness of death (such as the image of her aunt “dressed as a bride” before being buried), evokes in some detail the light-heartedness of the games which she and the other children were playing “in the bakery in Vicoletto delle Fornaci,” the place of the killing, while the adults were hiding.27 The perspective of childhood, reflected by a feeling that remained frozen at the moment of the trauma, comes up as a characterizing element also in the interview

 Interview with Bruno Travaglini, Siena, December 20, 2020.  Interview with Maria Antonietta Giorno (born 1937), conducted by Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, Federico Goddi, and Matteo Stefanori, Caiazzo, Caserta, July 9, 2020.

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of Adele Pardini (four years old). She witnessed the killing of her mother and her little, days-old sister in the Coletti locality in Sant’Anna di Stazzema, and was fortunately able to save herself from machine-gun fire. She remembers the main feeling of the days following the massacre as being a sense of envy felt because her mother had left her and “had gone away with [her newborn sister] Anna.”28 The peculiar perspective of a child who witnesses a massacres, as can be observed in the following testimonials, seems to be able to put up a self-protective barrier against complete awareness of the events, but only up to a pre-established limit beyond which memories of violence become vivid and sharp, even in those who were very young at the time. When violence barely touches them or it affects them indirectly through loved ones, the instinct of self-preservation seems to cloud the memory of the child witness. However, when the sensory memory (sounds, smells, tastes, tactile impressions) is more prominent, the physical suffering and the fear which was experienced at the time return to the foreground of the story. Consider the case of Franco Leone Lautizi (five years old), shot on September 29, 1944, by three bullets during the massacre of Monte Sole, along the path that leads from San Martino to the Quercia. Wounded, he remained on the ground for many, long hours, lying not far from the lifeless body of his grandmother and his wounded mother, simultaneously in agony and in labor, who died shortly at his side thereafter: Mia mamma c’aveva le doglie [. . .] ma nel rifugio non c’era la possibilità di partorire [. . .] così abbiamo fatto quei 300 metri verso casa, che sembravano infiniti [. . .]. Siamo arrivati nell’aia e [. . .] la casa già bruciava. Mia nonna ha fatto tanto da prendere un paio di lenzuoli e un asciugamano e poi uscire [. . .]. E abbiamo fatto in senso inverso la marcia, ma era un’agonia perché il bambino doveva uscire [. . .], siamo arrivati circa a metà strada, dal Poggio del Prete c’era una pattuglia di 7/8 tedeschi che ci hanno visto e hanno cominciato a mitragliarci. [. . .] abbiamo deciso di buttarci dietro un pagliaio: la nonna non ci è arrivata, perché è rimasta subito colpita in fronte [. . .] io mi sono preso tre pallottole [. . .] mia mamma si era presa proprio una pallottola nel ventre [. . .]. Urlava in un modo disperato, in un modo inumano, in un modo tremendo. E nello stesso tempo cercava di riparare a me coprendomi con il suo corpo. E ha urlato per un tempo indefinito, poi è deceduta. [. . .] non sapendo cosa fare, mi sono abbracciato a mia mamma lì morta e sono stato lì fino a notte buia.29 [My mother was in labor [. . .] but in the refuge there was no possibility of giving birth [. . .] so we walked those 300 meters towards home, which seemed endless [. . .]. We arrived at

 Interview with Adele Pardini (born 1940), conducted by Roberta Mira and Toni Rovatti, Pozzi di Serravezza, Lucca, October 20, 2019.  Interview with Franco Leone Lautizi (born 1939–died 2021), conducted by Roberta Mira, Toni Rovatti, and Simona Salustri, Rimini, November 13, 2020. See Franco Leone Lautizi, Ti Racconto Marzabotto. Storia di un Bambino Che È Sopravvissuto, ed. Daniele Susini (Milan: De Agostini, 2022).

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the farmyard and [. . .] the house was already burning. All my grandmother could do was to get a couple of sheets and a towel and then get out [. . .]. And we went in the opposite direction, but it was agony because the child had to come out [. . .], we arrived about halfway, but at Poggio del Prete there was a patrol of seven to eight Germans who saw us and began to machine-gun us. [. . .] we decided to throw ourselves behind a haystack: my grandmother couldn’t get there, because she was immediately hit in the forehead [. . .] I took three bullets [. . .] my mother had taken a bullet right in the belly [. . .]. She was screaming in a desperate way, in an inhuman way, in a terrible way. And at the same time, she was trying to shelter me by covering me with her body. And she screamed for ages, then she passed away. [. . .] not knowing what to do, I hugged my dead mom and stayed there until it dark].

The stories of parents and relatives of surviving children highlight and amplify the sharpness of the fear and violence they experienced. As if in a game of mirrors, the relatives supply material for the composition of memory, making it possible even for those who were too young to remember events directly, to become “bearers of memory.” This is the case for Anna Rosa Nannetti, who was born on August 1, 1943. On September 29, 1944 – when she was little more than one year old – she escaped death in the massacre of Monte Sole, in which her father died at Pioppe di Salvaro. After the trial held at the Military Court of La Spezia between 2006 and 2007, where she met many people from her childhood, Anna Rosa became the promoter of a collection of testimonies of the children involved in the massacre, later published as a book.30 Dario Venturini, too, who was seriously wounded at the age of six in the massacre of May 2, 1945, in Avasinis, in the province of Udine, fills out his story by inserting pieces of his own direct memory of the events into those acquired from the experience of his relatives: he remembers seeing his grandmother die before his eyes, “buttata sotto le mucche, che la calpestano” [thrown under the cows, who trampled her], while “per terra [c’era] un dito di sangue per i feriti . . . mi hanno raccontato i miei genitori” [there was a pool of blood on the ground from the wounded as deep as a finger, . . . my parents told me].31 It is the second generation to collect the memory of the Sant’Anna massacre for the stories of Iole Bottari and Graziano Lazzeri, whose accounts are passed like a baton from hand to hand, mother to child, through a process of emotional identification composed of words and silences, too. With intense devotion, the children

 Anna Rosa Nannetti, I Bambini del ‘44. La Vita Dopo gli Eccidi (San Lazzaro di Savena, Bologna: Gianni Marchesini editore, 2008). For a comparison with other types of testimonies released over time, see Luca Baldissara and Paolo Pezzino, Il Massacro. Guerra ai Civili a Monte Sole (Bologna: il Mulino, 2009).  Interview with Dario Venturini (born 1939), conducted by Irene Bolzon, Trasaghis, Udine, November 11, 2019.

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become interpreters of passed-down memory which preserves the horror of the violence suffered by their mothers when they themselves were children or adolescents. It is almost as if they wanted to protect their mothers from a temporal distance, enacting a sort of paradoxical role reversal. Iole accompanies the narration of her mother, Milena Bernabò, who fortunately remained alive at the age of 15, amidst the bodies of the dead and wounded at Vaccareccia; Iole pushes and supports her mother when she gets confused – “mamma, ti ricordi?” [Mom, do you remember?] – and finally becomes herself the voice of a story she has listened to many times over the years.32 While Graziano, son of Adele Pardini and Luciano Lazzeri (both survivors of the massacre, married in 1960), alternates his story with his mother’s tale. He grew up next to the silent pain of his parents – “di esplicito non c’è mai stato nulla” [there was never anything explicit]. For many years he remembers Sant’Anna as “the vacation village,” and the incursion of the massacre in his childhood is intertwined with a feeling of guilt aroused by his mother’s tears: La notte questi fantasmi passavano per casa [. . .]. Incubi e grida, così è entrata Sant’Anna nella mia vita. [. . .] Loro avevano questa ferita profonda da comunicare, le cose vane, leggere non le tolleravano. [. . .]. Io non sono pazzo, io ho solo fatto da madre a mia madre.33 [At night these ghosts walked through the house [. . .]. Nightmares and screams, that’s how Sant’Anna entered my life. [. . .] They had this deep wound to communicate, they couldn’t tolerate frivolous, light-hearted things. [. . .]. I am not crazy; I’ve just been a mother to my mother].

In addition to a generational uniformity, many of the testimonies collected between 2019 and 2020 highlight a common social dimension, which characterizes the national picture of the victim-witnesses of massacres and is more evident in the regions of central Italy (Emilia Romagna, Tuscany and Umbria). In fact, many of the interviewed survivors belong to a peasant world and are of humble origins, often characterized by a low level of schooling and by a life lived in poor material conditions, at least during the decade following the massacres. The witnesses repeatedly insert the experience of poverty within the narrative of the violence and trauma they suffered. From their point of view, poverty marks their lives after the war as a result of the massacres. Their perception of extreme poverty is reflected in their memory of hunger during the war and social marginalization in peacetime, but also by the stories of shrewdness, of knowing how to adapt, of emigration for work abroad. These are all experiences that identify a social group which was almost

 Interview with Iole Bottari (born 1953, daughter of Milena Bernabò), conducted by Roberta Mira and Toni Rovatti, Pietrasanta, Lucca, October 20, 2019.  Interview with Graziano Lazzeri (born 1961, son of Adele Pardini), conducted by Roberta Mira and Toni Rovatti, Pozzi di Serravezza, Lucca, October 20, 2019.

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completely lacking in resources and political representation, and which was unable to find – thanks also to unfamiliarity with the written word – autonomous ways to obtain institutional attention from the Italian Republic. It was a world of the countryside, composed of sharecroppers and small land holders, impoverished already at the end of the 1940s and condemned to dissolution between the mid-70s and the 1980s, whose protagonists are still yearning for public recognition. The context was a remote, rural one, marked by particularly harsh life experiences and by social and cultural fractures that had long been hidden, re-emerging after 1989 as an identity trait of the “tangled paths” of the memory of the martyred communities (of Civitella della Chiana, Sant’Anna, Guardistallo, Monte Sole, etc.). Geographical, social and cultural isolation are, in fact, among the constitutive elements of those anti-partisan divided memories which suddenly came out from the shadows in the second half of the 1990s, proving to be irreconcilable with celebratory narratives about the heroism of the Resistance.34 Claudio Pavone had already included the world of the countryside among the central themes for his historical look at the massacres: “Memoria individuale e memoria collettiva, pubblico e privato, contesto storico e radici antropologiche e culturali, religiosità cattolica e identità della sinistra, guerra fredda e mezzadria, politica e morte sono i fili del discorso” [Individual memory and collective memory, public and private, historical context and anthropological and cultural roots, Catholic religiosity and left-wing identity, Cold War and sharecropping, politics and death are the threads of discourse].35 It is an ancient, traditional world, the image of which today resurfaces even in new contexts of central-southern Italy. It can be seen in the story of Silvia Galasso, who reports the confidences shared by her mother-in-law on the massacre of Santa Cecilia di Francavilla al mare, in the province of Chieti. There, on December 30, 1943, the killing of a German soldier caused the rounding up and shooting of 20 civilians – including sharecroppers and evacuees – “buttati dentro una concimaia dietro casa. [. . .] e la famiglia [di Gattone, l’uomo ritenuto colpevole in paese di aver ucciso il tedesco] è dovuta scappare in Emilia Romagna per non essere linciati” [thrown into a manure pit behind the house. [. . .] and the family [of Gattone, the man considered guilty in the village of having killed the German] had to flee to Emilia Romagna to avoid being lynched].36 It also comes out in the words of Franco Lanzarini, evacuated from Bologna in July 1944 and relocated to the farm of the

 See Contini, Memoria Divisa, 258–260.  Claudio Pavone, “La violenza e le fratture della memoria,” in Paggi, Storia e Memoria, 15.  According to the witness, Gattone, the father of a girl who was said to have been molested by the German soldier, “cut his neck.” See interview with Silvia Galasso and Rocco Zuccarini (born 1936), conducted by Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi and Matteo Stefanori, Francavilla al mare, Chieti, July 24, 2019.

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landowner Zanini in Villa Serana, where on September 29, 1944, he was put against a wall several times along with 60 other people under machine gunfire by squads of German soldiers, who interrupted the action at the last minute, allowing him (seven years old) to escape the massacre of Monte Sole unharmed.37 A sharecropping farm is also the setting for Giuseppe Avorio’s account of the massacre of Niccone di Umbertide in the province of Perugia. Twelve civilians died there – killed by German hands, even though they were accompanied by Italians – and there, alongside the war motivations that drove the occupiers to action, tensions and class conflicts of a local matrix surfaced: Io avevo quattro anni e ricordo che poco prima che ci ammazzassero, ci aveva dato la marmellata. [. . .] Erano tedeschi, diciamo guidati da italiani [. . .] babbo ricordava bene che ha sentito parlare italiano e dopo abbiamo avuto la certezza che alcuni italiani che abbiamo conosciuto c’erano. Che addirittura, la mamma mia, un giorno li ha affrontati e non hanno negato. [. . .] A distanza di cento metri [vivevano] . . . [. . .]. Allora è stata una tragedia che si poteva evitare con niente [. . .]. [Il rapporto tra il proprietario e i tedeschi] c’è stato di sicuro . . . ce li ha mandati lui.38 [I was four years old, and I remember that just before they killed us, they had given us some jam. [. . .] They were Germans, let’s say led by Italians [. . .]. Dad remembered well that he heard Italian being spoken and afterwards we were sure that some Italians we met were there. Indeed, my mom one day confronted them, and they did not deny it. [. . .] A 100 meters way [they lived] . . . [. . .]. So, it was a tragedy that could be avoided so easily [. . .]. [The relationship between the owner and the Germans] certainly existed . . . he had sent them there].

The scant opportunities of the rural context of origin are underlined by the survivors’ rapid, sometimes immediate return to live in the same places or even in the same houses which were the scene of the massacre, where parents, children, sisters, wives lost their lives. Destroyed villages, crumbling houses and crumbling environments that incessantly summon up the horror of the violence suffered in those places and are at the same time an expression of material and emotional deprivation. This comes out clearly in the words of Enrico Pieri (12 years old), who survived the machine-gun fire at the Franchi di Sant’Anna (in which his mother and two sisters died) and who by September 1944 had already returned to live in the village, less than a month after the massacre occurred:

 Interview with Franco Lanzarini (born 1937), conducted by Roberta Mira and Toni Rovatti, Murazze, Bologna, August 5, 2020.  Interview with Giuseppe Avorio (born 1940), conducted by Federico Goddi and Matteo Stefanori, Niccone di Umbertide, Perugia, August 20, 2020.

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È difficile dirti come si viveva . . . eh insomma . . . i ragazzi hanno un senso di sopravvivenza . . . ma vivere a Sant’Anna dopo il 12 agosto era difficile . . . [. . .] poi ti immagini l’igiene . . . l’affetto . . . tutte cose che spariscono, che non ci sono. Vivi allo stato quasi delle bestie.39 [It’s hard to tell you how people lived . . . well . . . boys have a sense of survival . . . but living in Sant’Anna after August 12 was difficult . . . [. . .] then you imagine the hygiene . . . the affection . . . all things that vanish, that are not there. You live almost in the state of beasts].

Pieri’s testimony continues by retracing a childhood marked by continuous movement after the war, from requests for alms in neighboring towns, to hospitality in boarding schools and with relatives. It seems to prefigure a clear break with the familiar places of the massacre which he made in 1960, when – having reached adulthood – he chose to move to Switzerland, where he remained for 32 years before “setting foot” once more in Sant’Anna and publicly taking charge of the memory of the community in 1992.40

Changes and Turning Points Dissonances within memory take root over time. Interviews recorded over the last 30 years have allowed us to hear the voices of the same witnesses, who were interviewed several times in different historical periods. Through them, we have been able to focus on dissonances, where changes in the structure of the narrative or insertion of new elements highlight the different ways memory develops and stratifies. Like the veins in tree trunks, these changes mark the story’s successive restructuring, through which memories have gradually been composed. Mutations are the effects of new subjective perspectives at the level of the individual, but above all they are the effects of changes in the witnesses’ gaze that prove to be collective processes. Three elements intertwine to alter the narrative’s structure or even to introduce new components: individual memory development, memory policies, and reconfigurations of national memory.41 In these processes of memory re-elaboration, in fact, the personal dimension gets confused and overlaps with codified public narratives of massacres.42

 Interview with Enrico Pieri (born 1934), conducted by Roberta Mira and Toni Rovatti, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Lucca, October 19, 2019.  From 1992 to 2020 Enrico Pieri was President of the Association of the Martyrs of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, August 12, 1944.  For a general overview on memory policies of Italian Republic, see Focardi, Cantiere della Memoria, 37–191.  One might wonder whether among the changing perspectives of witnesses it is not worth considering the difference (or the complex relationship) between the unprocessed gaze of the person

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The themes that have most influenced the reworking of the memorial coordinates of the witnesses of the Nazi and Fascist massacres can almost always be traced back to the major changes in historiography and public memory that have marked the Italian national framework in the last 30 years. On the one hand, the institutional memory of the massacres has in fact gained specific attention within the trajectory of development of memory politics in this time frame. Between 1992 and 1993 the end of the First Republic, the rapid downsizing of historical parties of an antifascist matrix and the parallel consolidation of new right-wing parties43 provoked a ‘war of memory’ in the Italian public debate: a phase of radical political confrontation over the national history. The definition of a new shared memory on the Fascist regime and the war in Italy, capable of encompassing the experience of both anti-fascist partisans and young adherents to the Italian Social Republic, was claimed by right-wing parties.44 In this context of a violent attack on the memory of the Resistance, the Presidency of the Republic assumed an essential mediating function. Between 1992 and 1998 President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro stemmed the drifts of such pacified memory, which risked distorting the past by underestimating the authoritarian and violent character of the Fascist regime and the RSI. While, between 1999 and 2006, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi inaugurated an action of civil pedagogy, focused on recovering the memory of the Resistance in a patriotic sense, and on enhancing its heritage of shared values as the basis of national identity. His memory policy also aimed to bring to light pages of history that have remained in the shadows, including massacres against civilians, which until 1994 were hidden by the military judiciary and left on the margins of national public debate due to the complexity of the anti-partisan memories of martyred communities.45 In the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s the duty of remembrance became one of the essential elements of institutional memory

originally witnessing an event and its transformation into testimony by bearing witness to preserve an event from oblivion or denial, as in the case of testimonies of the Shoah. However, the voices of survivors of massacres, although at the center of memory policies in Italy, have never acquired, at least at the public level, an educational or civil pedagogical value as experiences of violence suffered.  Lega Nord, Forza Italia and Alleanza Nazionale (heir to the Italian Social Movement, a historical neo-fascist party).  This position was to develop in the first decade of the 2000s through attempts to interfere in school policies and in toponymy, and through the introduction of specific memorial commemorative days, such as the Day of Remembrance, established in 2004 in memory of the foibe and the Italian exiles from the Istrian-Dalmatian territories.  Filippo Focardi, “Il Presidente Carlo Azeglio Ciampi e la sfida del patriottismo repubblicano. La memoria come strumento di pedagogia nazionale,” in Focardi, Nel cantiere della memoria, 235–258; Luca Baldissara, “Semplificare il passato per appianare il presente. Del Quirinale come

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policies, as evidenced by the repeated official visits to the sites of the massacres: including, the joint visit of President Ciampi and German President Johannes Rau to Monte Sole on April 17, 2002, and that of President Giorgio Napolitano and German President Joachim Gauck to Sant’Anna di Stazzema on March 24, 2013. On the other hand, in the same years, historical studies on World War II in Italy were greatly transformed and enriched. In 1991, Claudio Pavone’s extraordinary reconstruction of the 1943–1945 period offered new interpretation of the concept of civil war, restoring depth and complexity to the aspirations, goals and imaginaries of the conflict’s protagonists, but clearly distinguishing the different nature and forms of partisan violence and the violence of Republican Fascism.46 Indeed, his interpretive gaze has become the starting point for an intense season of research, that looks at the massacres of civilians as an experience of the Italian population in the context of both occupation and internal conflict. Since the late 1990s, studies have also focused on the role of Republican Fascism, offering new analyses and interpretations of its administrative and repressive policies and progressively devoting more and more attention to the Republic of Salò’s collaborative relationship with Nazi occupiers and to the direct responsibility of Italians in wartime violence and massacres.47 In the era of global communication, the public narratives of massacres thus have become diffuse. At the same time, and not by chance, oral history research has analyzed, with increasing frequency, the intrinsic power of attraction exerted by stereotypes which seem to be dominant in every day more impoverished, uniform, canonized structure of public debate. Today, often “il racconto [dei fatti] è costruito sulla base di come altri ce l’hanno raccontato” [the account given [of facts] is based on how others have told them to us], and “questi racconti sono esperienza; sempre più, insomma, abbiamo memoria di memorie, e di memorie costruite apposta perché riempissero la nostra memoria” [these accounts are lived as experiences; increasingly, in short, we have memory of memories, and

luogo di elaborazione di un senso comune storico per l’Italia del XXI secolo,” Qualestoria, no. 2 (2021): 89–116.  Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), 413–514.  On the violence of Republican Fascism, see at least: Luigi Ganapini, La Repubblica delle Camicie Nere (Milan: Garzanti, 1999); Dianella Gagliani, Brigate Nere. Mussolini e la Militarizzazione del Partito Fascista Repubblicano (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999); Toni Rovatti, Leoni Vegetariani. La Violenza Fascista Durante la RSI. 1943–1945 (Bologna: Clueb, 2011). For a general historiographical overview of the Italian Social Republic, see Toni Rovatti “Linee di ricerca sulla Repubblica sociale italiana,” Studi Storici, 1 (2014): 287–299.

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memories constructed on purpose so that they fill our memory], suggests Alessandro Portelli in 2014.48 This perspective has motivated the research group of the University of Padua to continue investigating the accounts of massacre victims for whom a historicization of memory is possible thanks to the richness of oral history research promoted in the 1990s and 2000s. Furthermore, the work has been organized on two parallel fronts: to carry out interviews in the current time, and to search for recordings of memories made during previous projects, with the goal of collecting voices of the same testimonies in a different age. What potential does this approach to analysis have? We can get a first glimpse of it by comparing massacre narratives: those collected in 2019 and 2020, and those coming from interviews carried out between 1993 and 2011, by both public institutions and by individual researchers, with the goal of preserving the memory of affected communities.49 Comparative analysis can point to potential distortions and opacity which frequently characterize the accounts of witnesses who are interviewed in the current communication context and who are far advanced in their years. For some outstanding witnesses who were already almost adult at the time of the massacre, and who thus were asked to construct their memory immediately following it with greater awareness, continuity in the organization of a narrative of emotions appears to be the dominant characteristic of their account. This is the case of Milena Bernabò, a survivor of the Sant’Anna massacre and decorated with the Gold Medal for Civil Service in 2005. Her recent story recalls, in terms of plot and intensity, her written memory from the early 1970s: E vennero su in questo posto, questa stalla, e cominciarono a girare e guardavano. Poi cominciarono con la mitraglia . . . O Dio la gente, la gente cominciò a urlare, O Dio, O Dio . . . Perché avevino aperto la porta e la mitraglia era proprio sulla porta della stalla [. . .] eravamo tanti [. . .]. E a un certo punto la gente cominciò a urlare, chi poteva scappare, scappò fuori [. . .]. E poi, a un certo punto vennero laddentro, cominciarono a sparare a destra e a sinistra [. . .]. Dopo sortirono di lì, e ci buttarono il fuoco.50

 Silvia Salvatici, “‘Memoria e globalizzazione’: i percorsi della storia orale. Dialogo con Alessandro Portelli,” Studi culturali, 2 (2014): 386.  Among them: the collection of the Archival Superintendence of Tuscany, including video interviews on the massacre of Civitella della Chiana conducted by Giovanni Contini between 1993 and 2000; the private collection of audio interviews on the massacre of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, conducted by Toni Rovatti between 1999 and 2000; the collection of the Fondazione Scuola di Pace di Monte Sole (Marzabotto), including video and audio interviews on the massacre of Monte Sole conducted under the direction of Elena Monicelli between 2006 and 2011.  Interview with Milena Bernabò (born 1928), conducted by Roberta Mira and Toni Rovatti, Pietrasanta, Lucca, October 20, 2019.

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[And they came up to this place, this barn, and they started turning and looking. Then they started with the machine gun . . . O God, the people, the people began to scream: O God, O God . . . Because they had opened the door and the machine gun was set up right at the door of the barn [. . .] we were many [. . .]. And at certain point, people began to scream, those who could run away ran out [. . .]. And then, at a certain moment they came inside, they started to shoot left and right [. . .]. Then they came out of there and opened fire on us]. Ci costringono a entrare in un’altra stalla [. . .]. Qualcuno dice di sentire caricare le armi, altri dicono di restare calmi, ma è impossibile restare calmi in queste condizioni. Si apre la porta e dal didentro si vede il varco di luce esterna che inquadra una mitragliatrice puntata contro di noi. [. . .] Un tedesco entra nella stalla e viene fino in fondo. Si accerta che nella mangiatoia non ci sia qualcuno nascosto. [. . .] Guardo i volti delle persone vicine, sconvolte, vedo occhi stralunati, lacrime, prostrazioni, odo preghiere. [. . .] la mitragliatrice comincia a sparare sul folto dei prigionieri. [. . .] È un finimondo allucinante, indescrivibile. La confusione e la drammaticità sono al massimo. Spari, grida, pianti, nomi invocati si mescolano al fumo e alle fiamme.51 [They force us into another barn [. . .]. Someone says they hear the guns being loaded, others say to stay calm, but it is impossible to stay calm in these conditions. The door opens and from inside we can see the passage of light outside, that frames a machine gun directed against us. [. . .] A German comes into the barn and goes all the way down. He makes sure that there is no one hiding in the manger. [. . .] I look at the faces of the people nearby, shocked, I see bewildered eyes, tears, I hear prostrations, prayers. [. . .] The machine gun begins to fire on all the prisoners. [. . .] It’s an apocalyptic scene, terrifying, indescribable. The confusion and drama reach their climax. Gunshots, screams, cries and invoked names mixed with smoke and flames].

Discrepancies between accounts made in different historical periods are more evident among children’s testimonies. This is especially true with the youngest witnesses; they are often custodians of fragmentary memories which are sensory- or image-based. These fragments mark the starting point of a “long memory,” as Leonardo Paggi defined it in 1993,52 and the dissonances among the accounts of different seasons appear more evident. For example, the relevance of figures who were overshadowed during the interviews of the 1990s emerges. Having overcome the dichotomy of the polarized accounts of the Cold War and of a historical phase in which the Italian public debate was hegemonized by attacks on the memory of the Resistance, in more recent accounts the presence of the partisans

 Written testimony of Milena Bernabò. See Orazio Barbieri, I Sopravvissuti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972), 65.  This is how, in 1993, Leonardo Paggi defined the structure of his memory, which had taken shape starting from the massacre of Civitella, where he lost his father and grandfather when he was three years old. See interview with Leonardo Paggi, conducted by Giovanni Contini, July 20, 1993, Archival Superintendence of the Region of Tuscany collection.

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seems to return to the scene of the massacres in a less univocal form. It seems to escape being characterized by an explicit political prejudice (as it had been 30 years before). No longer conditioned by a priori negative evaluations, the memory of the Resistance acquires greater substance within the recent accounts and gains apparent new legitimacy through multiple images that humanize the physiognomies of its protagonists, giving them familiar and diverse traits, which are more or less positive depending on the context. So in the accounts we encounter partisans who come down to make bread in the village the day before the massacre;53 partisans who help the wounded, treat them, transport them to the hospital immediately after the events;54 partisans “mangiasalsicce” [eating sausages], who sleep in the stables;55 “poveracci” [poor people],56 armed only with rusty machine guns and a few cartridges;57 partisans “che prendevano la roba al padrone” [who take stuff off the master]58 and partisans who, after having disarmed the barracks,59 have a party;60 partisans who are “doppiogiochisti” [double agents], accused again of having caused the German reprisal;61 but also, partisans who are looked upon as heroes: Questi ragazzi erano sul [Monte] Gabberi [sopra Sant’Anna], intorno, venivano, raccontavano . . . ed io, [che ero] bambino . . . certo, raccontavano questi giovani e mi sembravano eroi. [. . .] raccontavano siamo andati lì, abbiamo fatto questo . . . l’avventura . . . Sembravano fiabe [le cose che raccontavano].62 [These guys were on [Mount] Gabberi [above Sant’Anna], around there, they would come, they would tell stories . . . and I, [who was] a child . . . sure, these young men would tell stories and they looked like heroes to me. [. . .] they said we went there, we did this . . . the adventure . . . [the stories they were telling] seemed to be like fairy tales].

 Interview with Enrico Pieri, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, October 19, 2019.  Interview with Milena Bernabò, Pietrasanta, October 20, 2019.  Interview with Pietro Cucchiarini, conducted by Federico Goddi and Matteo Stefanori, Collecroce di Nocera Umbra, Perugia, August 21, 2020.  Interview with Maria Orfei (born 1925), conducted by Federico Goddi and Matteo Stefanori, Collecroce di Nocera Umbra, Perugia, August 21, 2020.  Interview with Antonio Bernardini (born 1926), conducted by Roberta Mira and Simona Salustri, Bologna, September 21, 2020.  Interview with Ferruccio Laffi, Monte Sole, July 21, 2019.  Interview with Mario Fatarella (born 1925), conducted by Roberta Mira and Simona Salustri, Follonica, Grosseto, December 18, 2020.  Interview with Bruno Travaglini, Siena, December 20, 2020.  Interview with Claudio Del Pozzo (born 1938), conducted by Irene Bolzon, Asolo, Treviso, August 21, 2019.  Interview with Enio Mancini, Valdicastello, October 19, 2020.

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Quel mattino tantissime persone sono passate [da Pedescala] con un fucile in mano [. . .] ma [le armi] non erano tante [. . .]. Saranno state 10–12 persone, che avranno avuto un moschetto [. . .]. C’era una mitraglietta, solo quella, che [. . .] s’era inceppata [. . .]. Partigiani? Non puoi dire partigiani, ragazzi pieni di animosità, che poi si erano trovati ad avere in mano un fucile e sparano.63 [That morning many people passed by [Pedescala] with a rifle in their hands [. . .] but there were not so many [weapons] [. . .]. There must have been 10–12 people who had an old gun [. . .]. There was a machine gun, just the one, that [. . .] had jammed [. . .]. Partisans? You can’t say partisans, guys full of animosity, who then found themselves holding a rifle and shooting]. Tanti partigiani e tanti fascisti accaniti in un paesino [Niccioleta] di 800, 1.000 persone. [Dopo l’occupazione partigiana del paese] Si aveva paura che andassero ad avvisare le autorità della RSI, come poi fecero.64 [So many partisans and so many hardline Fascists in a small town [Niccioleta] of 800, 1,000 people. [After the partisan occupation of the village] People were afraid that they [the Fascists] would go and alert the authorities of the RSI, which is exactly what they later did].

On the other hand, in the stories, the figures of the local Fascists take on more concreteness. They were the authors of the first armed clashes with the partisans, or, alongside the German executors, they participated in punitive actions as collaborators, or they were even explicitly recognized by the population as instigators of the Nazi violence against civilians. The images of the Fascists reported in recent accounts are not only the result of the acquisition of new historical materials65 – the reference to the presence of Italians on the scene of the massacres, although underestimated, had been identified as a recurring element in the narratives of the survivors already in the 1990s66 – but rather they are the reflection of new public attention focused on Fascist participation in atrocities and firsthand accounts of it as a significant element in the testimonies: Sono venuti i tedeschi [a Collecroce], hanno buttato giù le porte e tre ne hanno ammazzati [. . .] perché sospettavano erano le spie [. . .]. Anche i fascisti di mezzo . . . io li capivo [li sentivo parlare italiano], mica ero scema.67

 Interview with Claudio Del Pozzo, Asolo, August 21, 2019.  Interview with Siliano Sozzi, Massa Marittima, December 10, 2020.  Data from the Atlas of Nazi and Fascist massacres in Italy. Accessed 10 October, 2021. http:// www.straginazifasciste.it. Data reflect a presence of Italian fascists or soldiers in 1/3 of the massacre episodes. See Toni Rovatti, “La violenza dei fascisti repubblicani. Fra collaborazionismo e guerra civile,” in Fulvetti and Pezzino, Zone di Guerra, 145–168.  For example, on the Fascist role in the massacre of Civitella della Chiana, see Contini, Memoria Divisa, 212–218.  Interview with Maria Orfei, Collecroce di Nocera Umbra, August 21, 2020.

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[The Germans came [to Collecroce], they knocked down the doors and killed three of them [. . .] because they suspected them of being spies [. . .]. There were also Fascists in the middle . . . I understood them [I could hear them speaking Italian], I wasn’t stupid]. Poi sono venuti i fascisti da Nocera per bruciare il paese. “Fermi. Qua è tutta gente per bene, non c’è bisogno” [hanno detto i tedeschi].68 [Then the Fascists came from Nocera to burn the town. [And the Germans said:] “Stop. Here are all good people, there is no need”]. I fascisti del luogo sono stati processati insieme ad altri italiani che sono stati riconosciuti [nella strage di Niccioleta], ma è stato condannato solo un milite fascista perché nel moschetto aveva scritto il suo nome e il paesano che teneva sotto tiro ha letto il nome e poi è riuscito a scappare.69 [The local Fascists were tried together with other Italians who were recognized [in the Niccioleta massacre], but only one Fascist soldier was convicted because he had written his name on his musket, and the villager he was holding at gunpoint read his name and then managed to escape]. Però questo penso: che una parte della responsabilità della strage di Sant’Anna, il 50% sia d’iniziativa italiana . . . che hanno istigato a venire . . . non saranno stati decisivi . . . ma che hanno confluito per fare questa strage sono stati il 50% la gente del posto. Non di Sant’Anna, ma della Versilia sì.70 [But this is what I think: that part of the responsibility for the massacre of Sant’Anna, 50%, is of Italian initiative . . . that they instigated [the Germans] to come . . . they may not have been decisive . . . but among those who came together to make this massacre 50% were local people. Not from Sant’Anna, but from Versilia].

Only the memory of the massacre of Monte Sole presents a development that moves in the opposite direction. Until a decade ago, survivors’ memories showed sporadic traces of the Fascist presence during the armed action.71 However, following the codification of the memory offered by the trial held at the Military Court of La Spezia in 2007, survivors’ memories seem to have become definitively blurred on this aspect. This trial definitively disavowed the role, albeit a minor one, of the authorities of the Italian Social Republic, which was, still an issue in

 Interview with Pietro Cucchiarini, Collecroce di Nocera Umbra, August 21, 2020.  Interview with Bruno Travaglini, Siena, December 20, 2020. References to the trials of collaborators involved in the massacres are also present in the testimony of Claudio del Pozzo.  Interview with Enrico Pieri, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, October 19, 2019.  See, for example, interview with Ferruccio Laffi, Marzabotto, March 16, 2006, Fondazione Scuola di Pace di Monte Sole collection.

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the trial against Major Walter Reder and debated at the Military Court of Bologna in 1951. The public narration of the massacre of Marzabotto-Monte Sole, the largest Nazi massacre in Western Europe, as early as 1949 was a unique case in its becoming a (national and international) symbol of the martyrdom of partisans and civilians engaged together in the struggle for liberation. That is, it differed from other massacres in the special characteristics of memory it demonstrates even immediately after the war. Not even during the 1990s had this massacre let established tropes of anti-partisan memory emerged at the public level to distort the record.72 Generally speaking, major transformations in memory structure occur when some narrative elements shift into the background while new elements emerge. Such changes correspond to turning points which we see being identified introspectively by the protagonists themselves in their testimonies. In fact, in their narratives on life after the massacre, the survivors themselves propose moments of caesura, highlighted as turning points in their memory, which mark out in the post-war period phases in which the attitude of silence prevails and phases in which the need and desire to tell their experience comes to the fore. Turns of memory, alternations between different forms of storytelling, between silence and words, that are historicized and located in time accurately by witnesses.73 For the most part, they are linked to key events in the political development of the history of Italian Republic and post-war Europe. Enio Mancini, for example, traces the transformation of his memory and his choice to speak out publicly to the early 70s, when the constitution of the Tuscany region changed the territorial politics of memory. It was at that point that the massacre of Sant’Anna receives increased local attention and is integrated within the territorial canon for celebration of the Resistance. Like Mancini, Bruno Travaglini – survivor of another Tuscan massacre by Nazi-Fascists, this time of 83 miners in the village of Niccioleta – situates the first caesura in his memory in the same historical moment: Per venti, trent’anni non se ne parla, non parla niente nessuno, nessuno dice niente [. . .]. Intorno agli anni Settanta si comincia a fare commemorazioni pubbliche a Niccioleta e Castelnuovo [. . .]. All’inizio silenzio assoluto [. . .]. Io non volevo parlarne, neanche con gli amici. Le parole me le toglievano di bocca [. . .].

 Except for the memoirs by don Dario Zanini and Lucia Sabbioni. See don Dario Zanini, Marzabotto e Dintorni. 1944 (Bologna: Ponte Nuovo editrice, 1996); Lucia Sabbioni, Marzabotto, Diario del Perdono e della Rabbia, pref. by don Dario Zanini (Molinella–Bologna: Lupo edizioni, 2006).  See, for example, interview with Enio Mancini, Valdicastello, October 19, 2020; Enrico Pieri, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, October 19, 2019; and Ferruccio Laffi, Monte Sole, July 21, 2019.

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Tutto questo silenzio, né la televisione ne ha mai parlato. Nel 1997–1998 di tutto questo silenzio volevo fare qualcosa. Volevo fare qualcosa, anche perché in Italia stava rinascendo qualcosa [il testimone fa riferimento a nuove accuse ai partigiani e voci a difesa del fascismo dopo la fine della prima Repubblica] e allora, quasi con rabbia, in tre mesi ho scritto un libro che si intitola Un luogo, un tempo . . . anzi Un tempo, un luogo.74 [For 20–30 years no one talks about it, no one talks about anything, no one says anything [. . .]. Around the 1970s, public commemorations began to take place in Niccioleta and Castelnuovo [. . .]. At the beginning, absolute silence [. . .]. I didn’t want to talk about it, not even with my friends. They took the words out of my mouth [. . .]. All this silence, and even television never wanted to talk about it. In 1997–1998 I wanted to do something about all this silence. I wanted to do something, also because in Italy something was being reborn [the witness refers to new accusations against partisans and voices defending Fascism after the end of the First Republic] and so, almost angrily, in three months I wrote a book entitled Un luogo, un tempo . . . or better, Un tempo, un luogo].

During the interview-meeting with Dario Venturini, an intermediary75 recalled the same period as being the beginning of the “reconstruction of the story” of the massacre of Avasinis, linking it to the experience of the earthquake that devastated Friuli in 1976. That shocking experience renewed the trauma and again called the population of small mountain communities to extreme forms of solidarity for survival.76 Instead, the account of Venturini – who was an emigrant in Germany from after the war to 2012 – jumps ahead and finds a memory caesura in more recent years: Ultimamente ricordo di più . . . non so perché [. . .] forse perché si diventa piano piano come i bambini . . . si torna indietro. [. . .] Più divento vecchio e peggio è. E più si rinnova nella mia testa. [. . .] Anche noi in famiglia non si parlava mai, era stata una cosa brutta ma non si parlava mai. [. . .] si cerca di dimenticare ma non è possibile [. . .] siamo persone semplici, non facciamo tante storie. [. . .] Ho conosciuto anche un amico mio in Germania del Kossovo, hanno avuto problemi là anche loro. [. . .] ne ho sentite molto da loro [. . .] ho sentito alla televisione. [Ma] Quei tempi poveri là erano i più bei tempi che ho vissuto nella mia vita. [. . .] uno aiutava l’altro. La povertà unisce.77

 Interview with Bruno Travaglini, Siena, December 20, 2020. See Bruno Travaglini, Un Luogo, un Tempo, pref. by Pietro Scoppola (Florence: Il Ponte, 2003).  Ivo Dal Negro, representative of the National Association of Italian Partisans (Anpi) of Udine.  About the link between memories of war and memories of earthquakes, see Gabriella Gribaudi, La Memoria, i Traumi, la Storia: la Guerra e le Catastrofi nel Novecento (Rome: Viella, 2020).  Interview with Dario Venturini, Trasaghis, November 11, 2019.

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[Lately I remember more . . . I do not know why [. . .] maybe because you slowly become like children . . . you go back. [. . .] The older I get, the worse it is. And [the pain] is renewed more in my head. [. . .] Even we in the family never talked about [the massacre], it was a bad thing, but we never talked. [. . .] we try to forget but it’s not possible [. . .] we are simple people: we do not make much of a fuss. [. . .] I also met a friend of mine in Germany from Kosovo, they had problems there too. [. . .] I heard a lot from them [. . .] I heard on television. [But] Those poor times there were the best times I have experienced in my life. [. . .] we all helped each other. Poverty unites].

For Enrico Pieri, the turning point in his memory is marked by the period between the end of the 1980s and the mid-1990s, between the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Balkan wars. At that time, the traditional commemorative canon weakened, and a public memory primarily codified from a political point of view with anti-fascism at the center and influenced by the Cold War’s radical contrasts faded away: La guerra fredda ha pesato molto su Sant’Anna. Qui la colpa la davano ai partigiani, se non c’erano i partigiani, non sarebbero venuti i tedeschi. Ma, se non c’era la guerra, non sarebbero venuti neppure i partigiani.78 [The Cold War weighed heavily on Sant’Anna. Here they blamed the partisans; if there were no partisans, the Germans would not have come. But, if there was no war, the partisans would not have come either].

A memory which is critical of the armed Resistance and is affected by the complicated political balance in areas close to the eastern Italian border in the immediate post-war period, is evoked as a “piloted feeling” also by Claudio Del Pozzo’s account of the Pedescala massacre (province of Vicenza): “Subito dopo l’eccidio la colpa era dei fascisti, dei nazisti . . . ma è durata credo non più di due o tre mesi . . . poi, improvvisamente, è stata colpa dei partigiani.” [Immediately after the massacre the blame was on the Fascists, on the Nazis . . . but I think it lasted no more than two or three months . . . then, suddenly, it was the fault of the partisans].79 In contrast, Ferruccio Laffi sees the discovery of the famous Armadio della vergogna [Cupboard of Shame] as being a key element in the change of memory of Monte Sole’s martyred community. It is a judicial archive containing investigation files on Nazi and Fascist massacres and violence (organized by Allied and

 Interview with Enrico Pieri, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, October 19, 2019.  Interview with Claudio Del Pozzo, Asolo, August 21, 2019.

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Italian investigators in the first months of the post-war period to put the perpetrators to trial) illegally archived in 1960 and rediscovery only in 1994 during an investigation into the trial of Eric Priebke, captain of the SS accused of the Roman massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine.80 The 1994 discovery allowed judges to reopen an important season of late criminal trials related to the Nazi massacres in Italy, that were tried by the Military Courts of Rome, Naples, Turin, La Spezia, Padua and Verona between 1997 and 2014.81 In fact, there are many survivors who, albeit in different historical periods, have pointed to the judicial definition of the violence suffered as a juncture in their personal memories. This happens even more often when the reconstruction of events defined in the courtroom through the words of direct witnesses and the configuration of massacres in specific cases of crime has been carried out as recently as the 2000s:82 A me ha fatto piacere quando è venuto fuori quell’armadio della vergogna di Giustolisi.83 Mi ha fatto piacere che finalmente si ricominciasse a parlare . . . perché io anche a Pedescala ho sempre rimproverato . . . anche a mia cugina, che è morta qualche anno fa: “tu non hai raccontato niente ai tuoi nipoti. Tu non puoi non raccontare nulla [. . .]. Non puoi non dire nulla.” [. . .] io insisto su queste cose, perché nel tempo si è persa la memoria. Non è tanto l’eccidio in sé per sé, è quanto la guerra che è successa . . . [. . .] le leggi razziali, il diverso. [. . .] L’errore anche in questi anni in Italia è di non aver saputo ascoltare.84 [I was pleased when Giustolisi’s book about the cupboard of shame came out. I was pleased that we finally started talking again . . . because even when I was in Pedescala I always scolded . . . even my cousin, who died a few years ago: “you have not told your grandchildren anything. You can’t not tell them anything [. . .]. You can’t not say anything.” [. . .] I insist on these things, because over time the memory has been lost. It is not so much the massacre itself, as the war that happened . . . [. . .] the racial laws, [the fear of] the other. [. . .] The error in these years in Italy is not to have known how to listen].

Already in 1997, Giovanni Contini observed: “Questo ricordo che continua a evolvere per decenni ci racconta molto del primo mezzo secolo di storia repubblicana, di come sia concretamente successo che piccoli universi locali, mai fino a allora realmente entrati nel circuito politico nazionale, fossero inglobati nei due schieramenti  See Wladimiro Settimelli, “Memoria lacrime e rabbia nell’aula del Tribunale,” in Priebke e il Massacro delle Ardeatine (Rome: IRSIFAR, 1996), 7–35; John Foot, “Via Rasella, 1944: Memory, Truth and History,” The Historical Journal, 43 (2000): 1180–1181; John Foot, The Archipelago. Italy since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 571–582.  Marco De Paolis, “La punizione dei crimini di guerra in Italia,” in Silvia Buzzelli et al., La Ricostruzione Giudiziale dei Crimini Nazifascisti in Italia (Turin: Giappichelli, 2012), 63–139.  See Andrea Speranzoni, “Il testimone della disumanizzazione nei processi italiani per crimini di guerra,” in Buzzelli et al., Ricostruzione giudiziale, 159–206.  Franco Giustolisi, L’Armadio della vergogna (Rome: Nutrimenti, 2004).  Interview with Claudio Del Pozzo, Asolo, August 21, 2019.

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politici che si sono contrapposti, con alterne vicende, fino alla fine degli anni Ottanta” [This memory, which continues to evolve over decades, tells us a lot about the first half-century of the history of the Republic, about how it actually happened that small local universes, which until then had never really entered the national political circuit, were incorporated into the two political alliances that opposed each other, through various sequences of events, until the end of the 1980s].85 Recent narratives of the massacres go further and talk about the phase following 1989. In the last 30 years, new elements seem to have been added to the accounts and reflected and recomposed on a particularly porous surface of memory. Among these new aspects we can find: the decisive impact of the new acquisitions and publications in historical studies on the intertwining of collaborationism with the fascist war against civilians in a wider territorial context;86 the pervasive stories of massacres, conveyed since 1999 by institutional memory policies as symbols the Italian people’s innocence;87 and the distorting effects of undue mirroring between historical and judicial truth as a legacy of the late trial season.88 Moreover, it is interesting to note, that among the major massacres of civilians at the center of criminal trials in recent years, the one whose memory is least discussed in public debate seems to be the massacre of Vinca (on which even the research of Padua offers no entry). Its dominant element is represented by a surplus of fratricidal violence and the specific brutality of the Fascist behavior of the Black Brigade Apuania fighters, something that had already come out in accounts from the early 1950s.89

 Contini, Memoria Divisa, 260.  On this aspect, see Toni Rovatti, Leoni Vegetariani, 122–148.  See Focardi, “Il Presidente Carlo Azeglio Ciampi,” 250–255; Baldissara, “Semplificare il passato per appianare il presente,” 92–97, 103–105, 109.  For example, on the interplay between judicial truth and historical reconstruction, see Paolo Pezzino, Sant’Anna di Stazzema. Storia di una strage (Bologna: il Mulino, 2008).  See Episodio di Vinca Fivizzano, August 14–27, 1944, in Atlas of Nazi and Fascist Massacres in Italy. Accessed 23 October, 2021. http://www.straginazifasciste.it/wp-content/uploads/schede/ VINCA%20FIVIZZANO%2024-27.08.1944.pdf; Sentence against Bordigoni Fernando +63, Court of Assizes of Perugia, March 21, 1951, in Giovanni Cipollini, Operazione contro i Ribelli. I Crimini della XVI SS Panzer Grenadier Division nel Settore Occidentale della Linea Gotica, Estate 1944 (Viareggio: Mauro Baroni editore, 1996), 274–322. See also the documentary by Nils Olger, suggestively screened in Marzabotto on the occasion of the commemorations of the massacre of Monte Sole on October 3, 2020, which recounts the director’s research path in the footsteps of his grandfather, an SS soldier employed in Vinca: Eine eiserne Kassette, directed by Nils Olger (Austria 2018). On the specific characteristics of violent Fascist behavior in the massacres, see Rovatti, Leoni Vegetariani, 145–148.

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Conclusion The assumption that there was a memory turning point in the 1990s is an idea which has become a stereotype by now and has been widely popularized by global communication. So, is it legitimate to assume that it is also an artificial graft on memory? Is this caesura then an element which has been imported from the outside by the survivors themselves, in an attempt to insert their memory (rather than their history) into a renewed national and European celebratory canon? Or, on the contrary, is this break in memory autonomously born of the survivors’ own intimate, deep awareness of mutations occurring in their own subjective memory? In both cases (at least in the most self-aware testimonies), as an element of memory organization, priority is assigned to giving private and public meaning to one’s own tragedy in the current European political and cultural context, poised between past and present. This produces the unintentional, but tangible effect of encouraging the formation of consistent memories, which acquire a character of intrinsic narrative linearity aimed explicitly at grounding individual experiences in a general historical framework which is shared and reassuring. Today’s memories of the massacres are less and less in touch with that emotional, pervasive, and uncontrolled dimension of the trauma experienced, which is naturally hostile to being circumscribed in the narrow space of homogeneous and artificially imposed rational schemes. However, in the 1990s, just this emotional dimension seemed to be a promising challenge for some historical observers. Far from any rhetorical-celebratory image of the conflict, the subjective humanity of the survivors appeared to be able to impose itself forcefully through this communicative register and to overcome the resistance of interlocutors, whose greatly different age puts them at a distance. In fact, it provoked unconventional short circuits of deep identification and understanding with them, even on the most contradictory and controversial aspects (such as the anti-partisan memory of the martyred communities). Perhaps too naively, given the reticence still evident today in institutional memory policies about the war crimes committed by Italians in colonial territories, zones of occupation and on home soil, as well as Fascist responsibility for anti-Semitic policies, for a short time historians were under the illusion that this narrative register could also become a key to investigating also the subjectivity of Italian war criminals.90 Compared to other national contexts, research on the

 On the potential richness, even in this perspective, of research on the memories of massacres in Italy, see Pavone, “Violenza e fratture della memoria,” in Paggi, Storia e Memoria, 18–23.

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perpetrators – their histories and personal perspectives on the context of war, violence and massacres – appears in fact inhibited, not only by the lack of direct and second- or third-generation witnesses, but by the weak willingness to ask questions about national responsibilities and family pasts, which seems to still characterize contemporary Italian civil society. A self-critical inability certainly fostered by an institutional memory incapable “di ‘fare i conti’ sistematicamente con il passato fascista, di portare davvero dentro la storia d’Italia, anche di quella repubblicana, la storia del fascismo” [of systematically ‘coming to terms’ with its own fascist past, of really bringing into the history of Italy, even of Italian Republic the history of Fascism].91 Within a framework of increasing dialectic and mirroring between personal and public memories, the radical questioning of the past that had opened up after 1989 in Italy – offering in the 1990s exhilarating prospects for research even in oral history – seems to have lost momentum, lucidity and originality during the 2000s, dulling and dumbing down narratives which have become increasingly subject to an invisible script of historical common sense.

Bibliography Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, and Annette Becker. 14–18. Retrouver la Guerre. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Baldissara, Luca, and Paolo Pezzino, ed. Crimini e Memorie di Guerra. Naples: L’ancora del Mediterraneo, 2004. Baldissara, Luca, and Paolo Pezzino. Il Massacro. Guerra ai Civili a Monte Sole. Bologna: il Mulino, 2009. Baldissara, Luca. “Semplificare il passato per appianare il presente. Del Quirinale come luogo di elaborazione di un senso comune storico per l’Italia del XXI secolo.” Qualestoria, 2 (2021): 89–116. Barbieri, Orazio. I Sopravvissuti. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972. Battini, Michele, and Paolo Pezzino. Guerra ai Civili. Occupazione Tedesca e Politica del Massacro. Toscana 1944. Venice: Marsilio, 1997. Bertella Farnetti, Paolo, Lorenzo Bertucelli, and Alfonso Botti, ed. Public History: Discussioni e Pratiche. Milan–Udine: Mimesis, 2017. Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Cipollini, Giovanni. Operazione contro i Ribelli. I Crimini della XVI SS Panzer Grenadier Division nel Settore Occidentale della Linea Gotica, Estate 1944. Viareggio: Mauro Baroni editore, 1996.

Regarding subjectivity and memories of Nazi massacre perpetrators in Italy, the analysis of which appear now more advanced in German studies (Täterforschung), see Carlo Gentile, I Crimini di Guerra Tedeschi in Italia. 1943–1945 (Turin: Einaudi, 2015), 281–301, 323–330.  Baldissara, “Semplificare il passato per appianare il presente,” 115.

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Consonni, Manuela. L’Eclisse dell’Antifascismo. Resistenza, Questione Ebraica e Cultura Politica in Italia dal 1943 al 1989. Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2015. Contini, Giovanni. La Memoria Divisa. Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Contini, Giovanni. “L’ordine è già stato eseguito.” Quaderni storici, 103 (2000): 223–231. De Paolis, Marco. “La punizione dei crimini di guerra in Italia.” In La Ricostruzione Giudiziale dei Crimini Nazifascisti in Italia, edited by Silvia Buzzelli, Marco De Paolis, and Andrea Speranzoni, 63–139. Turin: Giappichelli, 2012. Di Pasquale, Caterina. Il Ricordo Dopo l’Oblio. Sant’Anna di Stazzema, la Strage, la Memoria. Rome: Donzelli, 2010. Focardi, Filippo. La Guerra della Memoria: la Resistenza nel Dibattito Politico Italiano dal 1945 a Oggi. Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2005. Focardi, Filippo. “Il passato conteso. Transizione politica e guerra della memoria in Italia dalla crisi della prima Repubblica ad oggi.” In L’Europa e le Sue Memorie: Politiche e Culture del Ricordo Dopo il 1989, edited by Filippo Focardi and Bruno Groppo, 51–90. Rome: Viella, 2013. Focardi, Filippo. Il Cattivo Tedesco e il Bravo Italiano: la Rimozione delle Colpe della Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2013. Focardi, Filippo. Nel Cantiere della Memoria. Fascismo, Resistenza, Shoah, Foibe. Rome: Viella, 2020. Focardi, Filippo. “Il Presidente Carlo Azeglio Ciampi e la sfida del patriottismo repubblicano. La memoria come strumento di pedagogia nazionale.” In Nel Cantiere della Memoria. Fascismo, Resistenza, Shoah, Foibe, 235–258. Rome: Viella, 2020. Foot, John. “Via Rasella, 1944: Memory, Truth and History.” The Historical Journal, 43 (2000): 1173–1181. Foot, John. The Archipelago. Italy since 1945. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Fulvetti, Gianluca, and Paolo Pezzino, ed. Zone di Guerra e Geografie di Sangue. L’Atlante delle Stragi Naziste e Fasciste in Italia (1943–1945). Bologna: il Mulino, 2017. Gagliani, Dianella. Brigate Nere. Mussolini e la Militarizzazione del Partito Fascista Repubblicano. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. Ganapini, Luigi. La Repubblica delle Camicie Nere. Milan: Garzanti, 1999. Gentile, Carlo. I Crimini di Guerra Tedeschi in Italia. 1943–1945. Turin: Einaudi, 2015. Originally published as Wehrmacht und Waffen–SS im Partisanenkrieg: Italien 1943–1945. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Shöningh, 2012. Giustolisi, Franco. L’Armadio della vergogna. Rome: Nutrimenti, 2004. Gribaudi, Gabriella. La Memoria, i Traumi, la Storia: la Guerra e le Catastrofi nel Novecento. Rome: Viella, 2020. Klinkhammer, Lutz. Stragi Naziste in Italia. La Guerra contro i Civili (1943–44), Rome: Donzelli, 1997. Lautizi, Franco Leone. Ti Racconto Marzabotto. Storia di un Bambino Che È Sopravvissuto. Edited by Daniele Susini. Milan: De Agostini, 2022. Nannetti, Anna Rosa. I Bambini del ’44. La Vita Dopo gli Eccidi. San Lazzaro di Savena, Bologna: Gianni Marchesini editore, 2008. Paggi, Leonardo, ed. Storia e Memoria di un Massacro Ordinario. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996. Paggi, Leonardo. “Storia di una memoria antipartigiana.” In Storia e Memoria di un Massacro Ordinario, edited by Leonardo Paggi, 46–84. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996. Paggi, Leonardo, ed. La Memoria del Nazismo nell’Europa di Oggi. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1997. Pavone, Claudio. “Note sulla Resistenza armata, le rappresaglie naziste e alcune attuali confusioni.” In Priebke e il Massacro delle Ardeatine, 39–60. Rome: IRSIFAR, 1996. Pavone, Claudio. “La violenza e le fratture della memoria.” In Storia e Memoria di un Massacro Ordinario, edited by Leonardo Paggi, 15–23. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996. Pezzino, Paolo. “Le Fosse Ardeatine: un luogo di memoria?.” Quaderni storici, 103 (2000): 232–250.

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Pezzino, Paolo. Storie di Guerra Civile. L’Eccidio di Niccioleta. Bologna: il Mulino, 2001. Pezzino, Paolo. Sant’Anna di Stazzema. Storia di una strage. Bologna: il Mulino, 2008. Portelli, Alessandro. L’Ordine È Già Stato Eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la Memoria. Rome: Donzelli, 1999. Rovatti, Toni. Leoni Vegetariani. La Violenza Fascista Durante la RSI. 1943–1945. Bologna: Clueb, 2011. Rovatti, Toni. “Linee di ricerca sulla Repubblica sociale italiana.” Studi Storici, 1 (2014): 287–299. Rovatti, Toni. “La violenza dei fascisti repubblicani. Fra collaborazionismo e guerra civile.” In Zone di Guerra e Geografie di Sangue. L’Atlante delle Stragi Naziste e Fasciste in Italia (1943–1945), edited by Gianluca Fulvetti, and Paolo Pezzino, 145–168. Bologna: il Mulino, 2017. Sabbioni, Lucia. Marzabotto, Diario del Perdono e della Rabbia. Prefaced by don Dario Zanini. Molinella, Bologna: Lupo edizioni, 2006. Salvatici, Silvia. “‘Memoria e globalizzazione’: i percorsi della storia orale. Dialogo con Alessandro Portelli.” Studi culturali, 2 (2014): 379–392. Settimelli, Wladimiro. “Memoria lacrime e rabbia nell’aula del Tribunale.” In Priebke e il Massacro delle Ardeatine, 7–35. Rome: IRSIFAR, 1996. Speranzoni, Andrea. “Il testimone della disumanizzazione nei processi italiani per crimini di guerra.” In La Ricostruzione Giudiziale dei Crimini Nazifascisti in Italia, edited by Silvia Buzzelli, Marco De Paolis, and Andrea Speranzoni, 159–206. Turin: Giappichelli, 2012. Todorov, Tzvetan. Une Tragédie Française: Été 1944. Scènes de Guerre Civile. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Travaglini, Bruno. Un Luogo, un Tempo. Preface by Pietro Scoppola. Florence: Il Ponte, 2003. Zanini, don Dario. Marzabotto e Dintorni. 1944. Bologna: Ponte Nuovo editrice, 1996.

Valentina Pisanty

Identification and Make-Believe: The Fallacies of Prosthetic Memory Avatars At the entrance to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, inaugurated in 1993, visitors are provided with an identification card that tells the story of one of six hundred deportees, mostly chosen from among those who were children in 1933. The purpose of the device is “to establish an immediate bond with a person and a place,”1 promoting identification with the victims that visitors take as their avatars. In the original electronic format, the card updated itself from room to room: the first dedicated to life before the Holocaust, the second to discrimination and persecution (1933–39), the third to war and deportations and the fourth to the immediate postwar period. Today it has taken on the rather more sober form of a four-page booklet to read as you walk through the sections of the exhibition. But the rules of the game remain unchanged: for the duration of the visit, visitors are encouraged to identify with the experiences of – let’s say – Zelda Piekarska, born in Sosnowiec (Poland) in 1927, daughter of the owner of a chocolate factory, excellent tap dancer, separated from her family at sixteen and deported to a German labor camp. Only on the last page do visitors find out whether their alter ego has survived the war: the odds are roughly one in two. The anguish of the real protagonists who did not know what would become of them is reproduced – albeit in homeopathic doses – in the fruition of the narrative. Similar devices are found in many other museums and trauma sites that are increasingly striving to invent new interactive techniques with which to absorb visitors into the heart of the stories they display. Since 1993, the Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles has combined the personalizing expedient of identification cards with multimedia installations and Disneyland-style dioramas aimed at evoking topical events of World War II: Kristallnacht, the invasion of Poland, the Wannsee conference, the riots in the ghettos, the arrival in Auschwitz, and finally

 Andrea Liss, Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 24. Valentina Pisanty, Associate Professor in Semiotics, Department of Letters, Philosophy, Communication, University of Bergamo, Italy https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-006

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the gas chambers.2 The House of Terror in Budapest (2002) offers a visual, olfactory and acoustic experience of the underground cells in which prisoners of the Nazis and Soviets were tortured.3 Through a sort of son et lumière device, the Catania Landing Museum (2002) invites visitors to “experience firsthand the strong emotions” of the citizens who were bombed by the American air force during Liberation. On a more artistic level, Alejandro Inarritu’s immersive installation, Carne y Arena, uses virtual reality technology to allow visitors to “go through a direct experience walking in the immigrants’ feet, under their skin, and into their hearts”.4 And so on. In fact, and luckily for us, most of us will never find out what Mexican refugees go through during their journey across the border or how Italians felt under Allied bombs, let alone tortured Hungarians and interned Jews. If anything, we may get a very rough and textually mediated idea of it, through witness accounts, photographs, media footage and historical reconstructions onto which we project our insufficient shreds of first-hand experience. Indeed, it is on such projections that the act of reading any narrative text is based. It is not essential to have heard the whistle of the bullets to ideally share the state of mind of soldiers in the trenches, or at least to fantasize about being in their shoes. But no matter how we sympathize with the characters inscribed in the narrative text, we never forget that we are not really them. Without going into the complex mechanisms of identification, the point is that museums and trauma sites promise something more than the emotions one normally feels when reading a book or watching a particularly engaging play or film. The stakes are higher. The goal is to produce in visitors phenomenologically equivalent experiences to the immediate perceptions of those who were there. In Patrizia Violi’s words, “lights, sounds, noises, smells, temperature, represent so many elements of bodily, sensorial and proprioceptive involvement that goes beyond empathy; the entire body is stimulated in such a way as to experience something that resembles the original experience of the past. This is genuine sensory and corporeal identification with the victims.”5

 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 306–308.  Patrizia Violi, Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Space, History (Bern: Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2017), 136–137.  Artist’s statement, “Virtually present, Physically invisible.” Accessed 21 September, 2021. https:// carne-y-arena.com  Violi, Landscapes, 137.

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Like soundtracks in films or flashes of light in the theatre, special effects in museums provide surrogate stimuli aimed at eliciting knee-jerk responses in their recipients. According to Umberto Eco, “we have to do with surrogate stimuli in all those cases in which the same receptors react as they would in the presence of the real stimulus, just as birds respond to decoy whistles or as a sound effects expert in the radio or the cinema supplies us (through the use of strange instruments) with the same acoustic sensations we would experience on hearing the gallop of a horse or the roar of a racing car.”6 The artifice is obviously there, but it is meant to make people react to it as if it were the real thing. “Whenever I hear Wagner, I get the urge to invade Poland,” Woody Allen once quipped. Trauma museums seem to take the joke seriously. The stage effects aim at neutralizing the level of representation in order to re-present the experience-in-itself, that is, to activate in the visitors the same neural circuits, the same sensations, emotions, etc., that real individuals are supposed to have felt at the time of events. Only in this way, the creators say, can one truly access a profound understanding of what has been, and prepare oneself to act accordingly.

Secondary Witnessing One of the most questionable aspects of contemporary Memory culture is the tendency to consider witness accounts as if they drew directly on the substrate of events they speak of, without fractures or intermediate elaboration. This is revealed with some embarrassment (in private conversations) by many historians who, often finding themselves speaking alongside witnesses during official commemorations, feel unable to publicly correct any factual errors presumably caused by lapses of memory, false recollections, cultural interferences, and so on. There would be nothing strange about this per se – that is how human memory works – were it not for the widespread tendency to favor the viewpoint of those who “were there” over the position of those who have reconstructed the dynamics of the events based on an examination of documentary evidence (including testimony). With very few exceptions, the witnesses themselves are careful to avoid claiming this kind of privilege. They usually take pains to emphasize the subjectivity, and therefore the partiality and potential fallibility of their own reminiscences. “Most witnesses, for the defense or the prosecution, are dead by now, and those who remain, and who still (overcoming their remorse, or respectively their wounds) consent to testify, have memories that are ever hazier and more stylized,  Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & co., 1999), 354.

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while they are often unknowingly influenced by information learned later from their reading or hearing other people’s stories,” Primo Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved.7 Yet institutional/popular culture has turned Holocaust survivors into fetishes. On the one hand chosen as incontrovertible sources of historical knowledge (only witnesses know how things really went), on the other as peerless models of practical reason (only they know what must be done so that what happened to them will not happen to anyone else), in many contemporary discourses witness accounts take on quasi oracular connotations. The internet is crowded with inspirational stories about how Holocaust deportees survived the war, as well as other comparatively less traumatic circumstances (hence the recent abundance of interviews with Holocaust survivors about their lockdown experiences),8 as if survival were a meritorious feat from which future generations ought to draw life-changing lessons. “Listening to the testimony of survivors instils a message of hope and encouragement never to surrender in life and is a very useful lesson for all those young people who today lose heart at the first failure, who give up in the face of the first difficulty,” Italian psycho-sexologist Bianca Fracas wrote in an article of January 27, 2017.9 And this is only one example out of thousands of others. Thus framed, witnesses are not treated as people who, having found themselves “there,” amid events, retrieve the fallible traces of their personal recollections to produce selective accounts of their traumatic experience for the use of those who were not there and who, precisely because they were not there, interpret Holocaust testimony with the same mix of credulity and scepticism with which they would interpret any other product of human discourse. Instead, survivors tend to be considered as fragments of the events themselves, catapulted into the present without perceptual filters or discursive mediations. Hence the anxious question of what will become of us after the death of the last witnesses, as if historiography had not always coped even centuries after the death of the last living witness.

 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 10.  Some examples: “The Holocaust Stole My Youth. Covid-19 Is Stealing My Last Years,” New York Times, January 3, 2021; Caryn Lieberman, “‘It’s not as bad’: Holocaust survivor compares the pandemic lockdown to one that was far worse,” Global News, January 27, 2021; “Holocaust Survivors Share 15 Life Lessons We Can Apply To COVID-19.” Accessed 12 September, 2021. https://holocaust survivorcare.jewishfederations.org/, April 7, 2021.  Bianca Fracas, “Giornata per la Memoria 2017. Per Non Dimenticare.” Accessed 15 September 2021, amando.it/salute/psicologia/giornata-della-memoria-per-nondimenticare.html.

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Rather than acquiring indirect knowledge about the Holocaust by means of the more scientific methods of historical inquiry, the addressees of witness accounts strive to become secondary witnesses, traumatized by proxy, according to the common belief that only the subjective, phenomenological awareness of painful experiences guarantees a true understanding of the events that caused them. Through the survivors’ physical presence, those who were not there are expected to annul the distance between past and present and be thrown, teleported so to speak, into the heart of the events. Secondary witnesses in turn draw legitimacy from a kind of osmotic contact with those who were there. Many contemporary commemorative rituals prove how physical participation is often understood as the main, if not the only, form of possible knowledge of events whose memory otherwise risks fading into indifference over time. A sort of experiential relay that is sometimes thematized with regard to pilgrimages to Auschwitz, especially when these involve uncomfortable transfers by train (instead of by plane) to mimetically retrace the steps of the deportees, reaching the destination only after physically trying journeys, and therefore feeling more sensitive towards the suffering of those who did not arrive at Auschwitz by choice.10 Other identification techniques involve the inscription of bodies: in recent years, for example, the fashion has spread among young Israelis to have the camp serial number of ex-deportees (often grandparents or elderly relatives) tattooed on their forearms, to perpetuate trauma as a legacy to be passed on to subsequent generations.11 And it is precisely the will to occupy the enunciative position of the victims that informs a multitude of contemporary commemorative practices, from first person slogans (“Je suis . . .”) to the display of the Star of David or other symbols of stigma, up to a 2017 Italian project dedicated to the memory of Nedo Fiano that invites participants to read aloud fragments of the ex-deportee’s autobiography, as if “they had experienced them on their skin and as if they were their own memories.”12

 For the profound reasons that explain why non-witnesses seek out surrogates of the “Holocaust experience” in the literary, artistic, and cinema products that portray the emotional and sensory experience of the camps from the survivors’ point of view, see Weissman, Phantasies of Witnessing. Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).  “Proudly Bearing Elders’ Scars, Their Skin Says ‘Never Forget’,” New York Times, September 30, 2012. Accessed 18, September 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/world/middleeast/ with-tattoos-young-israelis-bear-holocaust-scars-of-relatives.html.  “‘Forgetting Auschwitz, remembering Auschwitz’: Nedo Fiano protagonista di un progetto sulla memoria di Havas Milan, Cdec e Figli della Shoah.” Accessed 13 September, 2021. https:// www.mosaico-cem.it/attualita-e-news/italia/forgetting-auschwitz-remembering-auschwitz-nedofiano-protagonista-un-progetto-sulla-memoria-havas-milan-cdec-figli-della-shoah/, 2017.

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In a previous study13 I argued against the current rhetoric of witness testimony on the grounds that there is no proof of the fact that massive exposure to survivors’ accounts is in itself (a) the most effective way of understanding the complex dynamics of victimization and (b) a successful antidote against current forms of racism and antisemitism. In fact, the years since the end of the Cold War have witnessed a conspicuous rise of xenophobic and populist far-right leaders and movements despite the centrality of the Holocaust in memory culture, at least in the Global North: ultranationalist leaders in government, parades of fascist symbols, physical as well as symbolic forms of violence, authoritarian tendencies that not only invest the traditional niches of the extreme right but also assert themselves in mainstream politics . . . All these phenomena go hand in hand with the expansion and consolidation of victim-centered memory culture and its identification techniques. I am certainly not arguing that the growth of the xenophobic right is attributable to the politics of memory. The causes are far more complex, multilayered and structural: economic crisis, unemployment, migration flows, poverty, disintermediation, crisis of politics, internet, social anxieties and frustrations, and the ability of hate contractors to divert the awareness of the excluded and oppressed on imaginary enemies . . . There is no direct cause-and-effect nexus between memory culture and the rise of the xenophobic right, in the same linear way as one might say that a virus is the cause of a disease or that the increase in the price of bread is the cause of a popular uprising. My argument, however, is that there is an indirect link between the two phenomena. Or rather, a dense network of interconnections, mostly invisible to the naked eye. Regardless of the intentions of their promoters, the current policies and rhetoric of memory operate in the same cultural climate, and they move in the same discursive field in which ultranationalist policies and rhetoric proliferate, even if from opposite positions. The primacy attributed to “natural” emotions over culturally acquired interpretative habits is part of an involuntary drift of progressive policies towards rightwing rhetoric.14 In the light of all this, this paper will challenge a deeply-rooted assumption of witness memory culture: the widespread belief that – despite the dogma according to which the Holocaust experience can/must never be represented through words and images – traumatic memories of deportation may be (and must be)  Valentina Pisanty, The Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Right (New York: Primo Levi Editions, 2021).  On the de-politicizing effects of the disproportionate power attributed to emotions in determining what is true and what is false in public discourse, see Anne-Cécile Robert, La stratégie de l’émotion (Paris: Lettres Libres, 2018).

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transplanted into the minds of non-witnesses, in a bid to turn them into secondary witnesses and (therefore?) into sensitive and responsible citizens.

Prosthetic Memories The main theories discussed between the end of the nineties and the early 2000s in the context of the then nascent Memory Studies are based on similar premises. It is no coincidence that both the museums of trauma and Memory Studies were established in that period. Those were the years in which, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and as the countries of the former communist bloc entered the sphere of influence of NATO, the top-down project of a “cosmopolitan” memory of the Holocaust was making its way in the Global North: a memory sufficiently de-territorialized to bring together the scattered pieces of a Europe in search of identity around a victimcentered narrative with which anyone could identify. The reasoning was simple – too simple. Given that, as psychologists and social scientists have highlighted, identity is a narrative construct; and given that so called national identities are also the result of planned processes of storytelling that strategically select, form, and recombine local memories, why not act in concert to “break the container” of national memories and use the substantial tools of global communication to disseminate a narrative general and inclusive enough to combine the worthiest parts of a Europe in search of an identity? A Europe as the paladin of human rights that, along the lines of the American dream, would be multi-ethnic, tolerant and welcoming, even though perhaps a little self-righteous, as dreamed of by Jurgen Habermas, Ulrich Beck, Timothy Garton Ash, and numerous other frequenters of the progressive think tanks of the 1990s and 2000s. In the original intentions of its promoters, the memory of the Jewish genocide was to create a deep emotional bond between communities whose histories may have been very diverse in the past, but who – by virtue of their common implication in the disasters of the twentieth century – were engaged in a twofold pledge, Never Forget, Never Again, that would forever grant rights and protection not only to Jews, but to all minorities throughout the civilized world. The Holocaust narrative was to be adapted to a variety of different national contexts, and then extended to other traumatic memories, starting with those of Soviet oppression, still fresh in the living memories of Eastern European citizens. By filling the ideological void left by the crisis of the great revolutionary utopias of the twentieth century, the memory of the victims/survivors of totalitarian regimes was thus granted the role of hegemonic narrative, perfectly compatible with the compromise between

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liberal economic policies and the protection of civil rights prefigured by the theorists of so-called Third Way. The unifying sentiment which was supposed to ferry Europe – led by the United States – towards a post-ideological era was empathy. Like resilience today and meritocracy in the last decade, empathy is a watchword of the nineties. Those were also the years in which Giacomo Rizzolatti’s and Vittorio Gallese’s groundbreaking research on mirror neurons was extended to just about every domain of ethics, politics, art and religion. For example, Vilyanur Ramachandran15 considered the concept of empathy as the evolutionary key capable of explaining why humans have created a fully developed culture and therefore deciphering in one swoop all the enigmas over which philosophy and social sciences have been racking their brains for centuries, from the origin of language to the semiotics of interpersonal communication, from politics to humour, from aesthetic sensitivity to religious belief. Continuously evoked in political, journalistic and academic discourse to denote the human capacity to put oneself in other people’s shoes, to understand their psychic states, to share their deepest feelings even without recourse to verbal communication,16 empathy thus framed was understood as an innate endowment that humans could, nonetheless, enhance with appropriate techniques. This view was also shared by Alison Landsberg17 who, in introducing the concept of “prosthetic memory,” observed how “technologies of memory [have] exponentially increased the opportunities for such empathic understandings.” According to Landsberg, interactive cinema, television and museums may intensify the ability to assimilate stories as if they were autobiographical recollections. Knowledge is embodied: not only in the sense that, years later, we may still remember how we physically felt on the evening we saw a movie or read a book; but above all, Landsberg suggests, in the sense that we ought to remember how the characters themselves (those who populate the stories) actually felt, regardless of the textual filters that were employed to make us sympathize/empathize with their conditions and predicaments. Identifying and activating the circuits that reproduce the experience of the original witnesses is the goal of prosthetic experiences. Once reached, the narrative procedures must be disposed of, just as the contrast fluid used in endoscopic analyses serves exclusively to make visible the parts of the organism that are medically relevant. The procedures must be put aside to let the emotional and cognitive effects radiate freely through the mind and body of the spectators, restructuring

 Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).  Jennifer L. Dunn, The Politics of Empathy: Social Movements and Victim Repertoires, Sociological Focus, 37 no. 3 (2004).  Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory Culture,” in Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

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their personality and ideological orientations. And although empathy should not be confused with sympathy – which for Landsberg coincides with the absolute emotional identification in the experiences of others, whereas empathy is supposed to involve an “intellectual coming-to-terms with the other’s circumstances,”18 the best comparison that comes to her mind to illustrate her theoretical proposal is Total Recall (1990). Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, Paul Verhoeven’s film stages a narrative universe in which ultra-immersive technologies can graft false memories into people’s minds. The protagonist moves between two worlds, the real one and that of his false memories, to the point of losing the distinction, that is, of consciously choosing to adopt his prosthetic identity (ethically preferable to the original one), while suspecting at the back of his mind that that choice too may be part of the implanted memory.19 Of course, Total Recall falls fully within the category of narrative dystopias, given that the technology it speaks of is presented as a hyperbolic brainwashing device, possibly a veiled metaphor for the American cultural industry. But what prevents us – asks Landsberg – from taking Dick’s and Verhoeven’s cue in order to graft into the spectators’ autobiographical memories prosthetic memories that, conversely, are ethically useful for a progressive agenda? Prosthetic memories may be used for good purposes as well as bad ones. They may be wisely adjusted to produce “counter-hegemonic public spheres,” as shown by certain films that induce viewers to adopt the perspective of minorities to which they do not belong, assimilate their traumatic pasts and thereby “facilitate the experience of empathy.” The purpose of this graft is therefore ethical: “Because prosthetic memories enable individuals to have a personal connection to an event they did not live through, to see through another’s eyes, they have the capacity to make possible alliances across racial, class and other chasms of difference. As Total Recall demonstrates, the political potential of prosthetic memory lies in its capacity to enable ethical thinking.”20 What is truly problematic in this statement is not so much the will to manipulate minds through ideologically oriented narratives: people have always done this, and it would be naïve to complain about the fact that cultural products are often ideologically slanted. Rather, what is problematic is the ambition to act directly on neural circuits, making the audience lose track of the cultural work that was necessary to produce those effects, and moreover claiming that the illusionistic practice of make-believe is meant to “promote ethical thinking”  Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 147.  Casper Tybjerg, “Refusing the Reality Pill: A Film Studies Perspective on Prosthetic Memory,” Kosmorama 262, 2016.  Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 156.

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in the manipulated subjects.21 How can it be ethical to mesmerize an audience with sensory illusions and planned misperceptions? And what does this naturalizing strategy tell us about the ambiguities of memory culture? In defining prosthetic memories, Landsberg emphasizes that they are not authentic or natural, but on the contrary, they derive from the interaction of subjects/consumers with mediated representations, be they museum installations, films, or products of more advanced communication technologies. In short, they are artificially generated, synthetic memories, which however are incorporated or worn like an artificial limb, to the point of innervating themselves in the circuits of their carriers, who amalgamate them with their own first-hand reminiscences, thus merging them with their autobiographical memory. The operation is successful if the initial artifice is at least partly forgotten, naturalized, just as a trompe l’oeil can be said to be successful when it is capable of deceiving the observers’ senses (despite their awareness that the image is not real). Except that in the case of a trompe l’oeil, aesthetic pleasure passes through the acknowledgment of the deception one has been put through (“isn’t that clever?”), whilst for prosthetic memories it is essential that the deception is not perceived as such. A possible objection to my criticism of Landsberg’s theory is that the author does not actually mean to assert that it is possible (or even desirable) to graft other people’s memories onto their own, as the reference to Total Recall indeed would suggest. However, I think that the most interesting (and therefore debatable) aspect of her theory lies precisely in that bold claim. A watered-down version of prosthetic memories (memoires we feel affectively, but which we recognize to occupy a different status from those we’ve lived) would not be distinguishable from whatever happens when any averagely sensitive interpreter reads a compelling narrative or witness account, or watches a poignant movie, and “feels” for its protagonists: but then I don’t see the need to introduce a new concept to define the common experience of narrative identification, however realistic and indexically founded it may be. In line with Landsberg’s proposal (or at least with my interpretation of its basic assumptions), the various immersive techniques used by trauma museums serve precisely to naturalize the artifice, creating the illusion of being there, in the represented places, at the time of the events and in the position of the protagonists, usually one of the victims. The pedagogy (orthopedics?) of prosthetic identification depends on this: the idea that only those who have lived or relived the

 According to Delgado and Stefancic, “the [empathic] fallacy consists of believing that we can enlarge our sympathies through linguistic means alone. By exposing ourselves to ennobling narratives, we can broaden our experience, deepen our empathy, and achieve new levels of identification with other people.” Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, ‘Do Judges Cry?’ An Essay on Empathy and Fellow-Feeling,” Case Western Reserve Law Review, 70 no. 1 (2019).

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sensible experiences of the victims can develop the prescribed ethical posture, based on a feeling of generalized empathy towards all minorities persecuted in any time or place. Let’s leave aside the obvious objection that the real victims of violence may not necessarily develop empathy towards all other past and present victims, and it is by no means clear how first-hand victimization makes people more responsible and understanding towards others, or how identification with a particular victim should necessarily lead to a greater sensitivity towards victims in general. Even if it were possible to defeat the irreversibility of time through the immersive technologies we have been discussing so far, what collective benefit would arrive from cloning deeply distressing experiences? What, in other words, ensures that emotional identification with past victims automatically brings with it a burst of ethical maturity and political awareness, capable of guaranteeing the indefectible passage from Never Forget to Never Again? As a matter of fact, there is much evidence suggesting that being subjected to vicarious traumas, as in the case of the children of Holocaust survivors, is a particularly distressing condition that exposes secondary witnesses to uncontrollable disturbances, feelings of inadequacy and a sense of looming catastrophe. Why, then, should vicarious traumas be considered as a desirable outcome of any ethically oriented commemorative practice? Isn’t it our common responsibility to help truly traumatized people regain faith in humanity, rather than (pretend to) re-live their devastating experiences and be content with this all-too-easy form of belated symbolic compensation? And how can the burden of secondary witnessing ensure that future generations will take it upon themselves to fight for the rights of all stigmatized minorities?

There Is No Alternative Upstream of all this, the point is that prosthetic memories stifle agency. Rather than promote an active participation in the events they portray, they freeze the addressees’ stances into a fixed, prescribed posture. This, too, is an upshot of the naturalizing devices. A trompe l’oeil, as well as any other surrogate stimulus (from special effects in the cinema to the attractions in a theme park), works only under certain conditions, rigorously prepared by the author of the text. If you get too close to the image painted on the wall, or if you look at it from a different angle, you immediately grasp its illusory nature. Likewise, if you look at the attractions of a theme park from a different perspective than the predetermined one, you only see scaffolding and gears. Surrogate stimuli only work if we position ourselves exactly where we are told to stay, unlike what happens in ordinary

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perception, which allows us to see different things from different angles, depending on where we put ourselves. The focus is rigidly determined, and always coincides with the Surrogator’s perspective. This is why, according to Umberto Eco, “the surrogate stimulus prevents me from seeing (or hearing) from the point of view of my subjectivity, understood as my corporality; it gives me only one profile of the perceived object, not the multiplicity of profiles that ordinary perception would give me.”22 The same happens with prosthetic memories. Visitors who identify themselves (or think they identify themselves) with the victims’ experiences, retrace the existential stages of victimhood according to the indications set by the museum curators. They cannot interrogate events from different angles to seek new interpretative glimpses, as they would if they studied them through documentary traces. Nor can they dig into their own memory to bring out repressed data that would allow them to re-frame past experiences, as they would do if they recalled their personal memories. Everything there is to “relive” is there, formatted in the only way possible. And although the prosthetic experience may include narrative disjunctions that simulate the doubts and decision-making processes of real subjects (having reached a certain point of the path, one may be faced with a choice between A, B and C), those nodes are nonetheless part of the generative project of the text, just as in an interactive video game you can decide to shoot zombies or run away from them, but not invite them out to dinner or ask them for directions. We are at the opposite end of what the twentieth century has accustomed us to consider as the specific feature of criticism as an instrument of social change: the ability to put a cultural object at a distance in order to become aware of its arbitrariness and deconstruct its rhetoric, rather than accept it unconsciously as if it expressed an obvious and inevitable logic. Discourses are ideological when they hide the partiality of their premises, whereas critical thinking is what brings that partiality back to light, to show that there are (or could have been) alternatives to the apparent linearity of history. Challenging the naturalizing illusion of dominant narratives is precisely the function of critical thinking: looking for contradictions, problematizing what usually passes as obvious, formulating counterintuitive hypotheses (and then of course verifying them, or discarding them if they cannot be proved). Perhaps what seemed natural at first is not really all that obvious, and it’s supposed obviousness is symptomatic of an ideology that does not acknowledge its arbitrary (i.e., cultural, unnatural) status. My argument is

 Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 112–113.

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that there cannot be an ethical stance without this kind of critical awareness: indeed, for any form of ethical thinking to take root, one must be able see the possible alternatives to the current status quo, which also means emancipating oneself not so much from the power of the dominant narratives (one may decide to embrace them after all, albeit in full conscience), but from their mystifying rhetoric. Bertolt Brecht’s famous criticism of traditional, passivizing and consoling dramatic theatre is perfectly adaptable to the deconstruction of prosthetic memory and its naturalistic assumptions. “Attempt at hypnosis . . . aimed at producing undignified intoxication and murkiness,” he wrote,23 arguing against the “culinary” techniques that encourage spectators to accept the plot as the unalterable development of a particular experience passed off as universal. According to Roland Barthes, this was also the essence of bourgeois mythology: by concealing its rhetorical devices, the symbolic message is “naturalized, [and the semantic artifice is] made innocent”24 for it to produce the expected automatisms without any interference whatsoever. Likewise, prosthetic memories are supposed to hide their arbitrary nature, and numb the audience’s capacity to make their own choices between the various options that are virtually possible within a certain historical and discursive context. With the aggravating circumstance that, in the case of prosthetic memories, the naturalization of the artifice is not simply aimed at producing spectacular catharses, but it is cloaked in allegedly ethical purposes diametrically opposed to the effects it actually pursues. The culinary culture against which Brecht and Barthes wrote did not pretend to criticize dominant ideologies but limited itself to naturalizing its assumptions in the name of show business, consumerist culture, traditional family values, bourgeois common sense, and so on. In today’s discourses on memory, instead, the concept of critical/ethical thinking is itself naturalized, flattened on the notion of empathy. The mythology of prosthetic memory is therefore doubly deceptive because not only does it hide the arbitrariness of its construction but claims to do so in the name of critical thinking. If – as Landsberg states, and as trauma museums implicitly suggest – natural human empathy is a sufficient tool to produce “counter-hegemonic public spheres,” then the meta-reflexive position that ought to be the prerogative of ethical (i.e., critical) thinking is surreptitiously occupied, and is in fact defused, by the mythological device that ought to constitute its object.

 Bertolt Brecht Scritti teatrali (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), 31 – my translation from the Italian.  Roland Barthes L’ovvio e l’ottuso (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), 35 – my translation from the Italian.

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Unrealized Possibilities The naturalization of rhetorical devices also concerns the relationship with time. Those who find themselves amid an event cannot know how that event will eventually turn out. Seen from the present, the future is indeterminate: all outcomes are virtually possible, and a preponderant part of any present condition – including our own, here and now – concerns precisely the multiple feelings that accompany the uncertainty of possible futures. What should I do now? Can we make it out of this situation? What will become of us? Etcetera. If, on the other hand, one looks at the same events from the other side of the timeline, once some of those virtual possibilities have unfurled (while the others have been discarded), they acquire a sense of inevitability that is typical of the products of memory, especially when such reminiscences are formatted as closed narrative texts that establish causal links, logical sequences, connections, motivations, and so on. Not only has the past already happened, and could not be undone even by divine decree, but also the way of telling it has settled in orderly structures, so that “if we film a scene, we make it scroll backwards, it will appear evident that Sam couldn’t not play As Time Goes By again, Blücher could only precede Ney on the fields of Waterloo and, for the same reason, we couldn’t not do whatever it is we did.”25 What were once “bundles of unrealized possibilities,” as Juri Lotman26 put it, are retrospectively selected as the irreversible outcomes of a tight chain of events. Once formatted the story tends to remove or conceal all the “bifurcation points” in which individual or collective choices were responsible for the historical trajectories that were actually set but could have just as easily gone in other directions. To which of the two temporal orientations may we compare the posture of the prosthetized subject? On the one hand, the simulated proxy experience stages the uncertainty of the present with respect to all possible futures. Visitors who “identify” with Zelda Piekarska are not supposed to know whether in the end she managed to survive (luckily, she did, and immigrated to the United States in 1949). Indeed, without that initial lack of knowledge, it would be more difficult to “empathize” with anyone, except perhaps Cassandra or Calchas, doomed to see future scenarios that are inaccessible to the rest of humanity. Hence the museum device of asking visitors to leaf through the victims’ identification cards little by little, as they proceed along the itinerary, to avoid spoilers. The narration is synchronous with the vicarious experience of the represented events, as in interior monologues where the story is told in the present tense and is thus contemporary

 Maurizio Ferraris, Documanità: filosofia del mondo nuovo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2021), 222.  Juri Lotman, Culture, Memory and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

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with the action performed, in a bid to foster the illusion of participating in the Erlebnisse of the real protagonists. On the other hand, however, visitors know perfectly well that the story has already been written – just skip to the last page if you can’t wait to find out – and nothing could ever change it. Though presented as if past events were happening there and then, their narration lacks the openness of any authentic present. Try as they may, visitors cannot really feel like Zelda Piekarska waiting to know where the convoys will take her because they know that the answer is already there. Present-tense narration neutralizes all agency, as when we witness the faux pas made by film characters without having the faculty to correct their course of action. Whatever the fate of Zelda Piekarska, it does not depend on the actions of those who are pretending to be her. If the future is already past, all that can be done is to run towards an already fulfilled prophecy, as in the parable of death in Samarra. One could object that for the deportees of Nazi roundups absence of agency was constitutive of their condition as victims (victims are by definition those who don’t get to choose), and therefore there would be nothing wrong in reproducing such powerlessness, at an enunciative level, in the passivity of visitors who are not entitled to interfere with facts that have already happened. But let’s not forget that the stated purpose of museum strategies is the promotion of ethical thinking. If Never Again means anything at all, it implies the empowerment to produce change. Far from restating the Thatcherian motto, the whole purpose of historical studies – especially when they serve progressive agendas – is to analyse the role played by all those who produced social changes through an immense amount of micro- and macro-decisions, most of which they were probably unaware of. I am not just referring to the direct decision-makers (the “Perpetrators”) who deliberately planned and brought about the mass of events that we refer to as the Holocaust – or other episodes of social violence – but also to the multitude of minor actors who, in some measure, and with varying degrees of responsibility, were involved in carrying out those crimes: some through direct action, others through a more roundabout route; some by exploiting their fellows’ weakness, others by siding with the strongest owing to an infallible survival instinct; some galvanized by racist propaganda, others by single-mindedly pursuing their own selfish interests while their neighbors were denied the right to exist.27 Supposing that the

 Implication – as defined by Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2019) – is an effective way of approaching the kind of enlarged agency that we participate in as historically determined human subjects.

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purpose of memory culture really were to disseminate awareness on how racism operates and how to fight its expansion, then one of its major tasks would be to shed light on the role of individual and collective subjects in realising some of the virtual possibilities that are the stuff of history, while discarding the rest. “The freedom of thought or the freedom of will represents the possibility of choosing a path,” in Lotman’s words.28 Focalizing events through the victims’ perspective does not contribute to this outcome. Precisely because they were deprived of the right to choose their own destiny, victims are not the ideal focusers to promote a collective assumption of responsibility towards past and present violence.29 Ethically speaking, it makes no sense to identify with the only individuals who played no active role in processes that led to the European catastrophe of World War II. The fact that the victims’ impotence is reaffirmed in the museum’s discursive strategies – and particularly through the equivocal use of a historic present that pretends to be past and of a past event that pretends to be eternally present – only makes things worse. Visitors are supplied with surrogate experiences that freeze them in the posture of those who cannot help but recognize their own powerlessness in the face of an already written fate. Who benefits from the passivity surcharge injected by museums and trauma sites into the millions of visitors who pay the ticket each year to identify with the victims of the worst kinds of violence? The first explanation is all too obvious. It benefits the museums themselves, interested – like every tourist site – in attracting customers with the promise of intense emotional experiences that are, moreover, charged with positive ethical values, while they are described as painful fulfillments of a duty of memory that replaces other, more active forms of political commitment. But that’s not all. The fatalistic posture prescribed to secondary witnesses is functional to the consecration of an alleged European-American identity, based on the Never Again pledge that, since the nineties, liberal democracies have adopted as their totem or flag.30 Tragic as it may be, the memory of twentiethcentury violence – subsumed under the general category of crimes committed by totalitarian regimes – celebrates by contrast the triumph of liberalism, understood

 Lotman, Culture, Memory and History, 192.  Daniele Giglioli, Critica della vittima. Un esperimento con l’etica (Milan: Nottetempo, 2014).  “The equation between socialist ideas, communism and totalitarianism – and therefore the delegitimization of socialism – is a hegemonic practice in Europe and in the West in general [. . .] which seeks to establish ever more firmly the indisputable primacy of liberalism as the only path not contingent in a teleological philosophy of history,” Berthold Molden, “Mnemonic Hegemony? The Power Relations of Contemporary European Memory,” in EUtROPEs: the Paradox of European Empire, John W. Boyer – Berthold Molden (eds.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 109.

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as the outcome of those terrible events, light at the end of the tunnel and, while we are at it, the End of History (meaning that “There Is No Alternative” to liberal democracies). Far from promoting critical awareness, helping understand how racist prevarication works, fostering political agency, and countering the slide from “never again” to “it’s happening here,” victim-centered rhetoric based on an illusory identification with those who “were there” ends up consolidating the unquestionable supremacy of whoever happens to control the hegemonic narrative. Such an instrument of consensus is more suited to an authoritarian regime than to a democratic project: it is no surprise that the surging right-wing parties have appropriated and adapted it to their own purposes.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. L’obvie et l’obtuse. Essais Critiques III. Paris: Seuil, 1982; Italian edition: L’ovvio e l’ottuso. Translation by various authors. Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Brecht, Bertolt. Schriften zum Theater. Über eine nicht-aristotelische Dramatik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1957. Italian edition: Scritti teatrali. Translated by Emilio Castellani, Roberto Fertonani and Roberta Mertens. Turin: Einaudi, 1962. Delgado, Richard and Stefanic, Jean. “Do Judges Cry? An Essay on Empathy and Fellow-Feeling.” Case Western Reserve Law Review, 70 no. 1 (2019). Dunn, Jennifer L. “The Politics of Empathy: Social Movements and Victim Repertoires.” Sociological Focus, 37 no. 3 (2004). Eco, Umberto. Kant e l’ornitorinco. Milan: Bompiani, 1997. English edition: Kant and the Platypus. Translated by Alistair McEwen. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & co., 1999. Ferraris, Maurizio. Documanità: filosofia del mondo nuovo. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2021. Giglioli, Daniele. Critica della vittima. Un esperimento con l’etica. Milan: Nottetempo, 2014. Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory Culture.” In Memory and Popular Film, edited by Paul Grainge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Levi, Primo I sommersi e i salvati. Turin: Einaudi, 1986. English edition: The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Summit Books, 1988. Liss, Andrea. Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Lotman, Juri. Culture, Memory and History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Molden, Berthold. “Mnemonic Hegemony? The Power Relations of Contemporary European Memory.” In EUtROPEs: the Paradox of European Empire, edited by John W. Boyer and Berthold Molden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pisanty, Valentina. I guardiani della memoria e il ritorno delle destre xenofobe. Milan: Bompiani, 2020. English edition: The Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Right. Translated by Alastair McEwen. New York: Primo Levi Editions, 2021. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. The Tell-Tale Brain. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. Robert, Anne-Cécile. La stratégie de l’émotion. Paris: Lettres Libres, 2018.

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Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2019. Tybjerg, Caspar. “Refusing the Reality Pill: A Film Studies Perspective on Prosthetic Memory.” Kosmorama 262 (2016). Violi, Patrizia. Paesaggi della memoria. Il trauma, lo spazio, la storia. Milan: Bompiani, 2014. English edition: Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Space, History. Translated by Alastair McEwen. Bern: Peter Lang, 2017. Weissman, Gary. Phantasies of Witnessing. Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Fabien Théofilakis

Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem: Defendant and Witness in the Glass Booth? On June 20, 1961, as authorized by Israeli law, Adolf Eichmann was called to the stand as a witness.1 He was asked to take an oath before God to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This oath is common in trials in which an accused, in judicial terms, becomes a witness for his own case, guided by his counsel, cross-examined by the prosecution, and questioned by the judges. Yet, in Jerusalem, nothing that took place was typical since neither the defendant nor the trial could be considered ordinary. At Beit Ha’am (the People’s House, designed to be a performance hall) where the trial took place, the president of the court Landau announced that Adolf Eichmann would not take the witness stand, but rather testify from within a glass booth “in order to further ensure the personal safety of the accused.”2 Adolf Eichmann as witness, therefore, would not occupy the same space as the witnesses called by the prosecution that had followed one after another since the trial began a month and a half earlier. In addition, Adolf Eichmann refused to take his oath on the Bible, claiming that he was not “bound to any confession,” but simply “gottgläubig,”3 as can be seen from the trial footage taken by Leo Hurwitz. By

 Robert Popper points out that the legal possibility for an accused to testify in a criminal case only dates back to the 19th century due to fears of perjury. See Robert Popper, “History and Development of the Accused’s Right to Testify,” Law Quarterly, 4 (1962): 454–471. I would like to thank Deborah Barton for her incredible proofreading and her always valuable comments, as well as Roger Griffin for his review and expertise.  The Eichmann Trial (TET), Session 75. Accessed December 20, 2021. http://www.nizkor.com/ hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/  TET, session 7. For a Nazi revival of the term, see Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, “Gottgläubig,” Vokubular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin-New York: de Guyter, 2007 (1st edit.: 1997), 281–283. See also Manfred Gallus, Gläubige Zeiten. Religiosität im Dritten Reich (Freiburg-Basel-Vienna: Herder, 2021), 65–70. The Leo Hurwitz footage is available, session by session, online from the archives of the Yad Vashem Center in Jerusalem (https://www.youtube.com/@EichmannTrialEN) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington DC (https://collections. ushmm.org/search/?utf8=✓&f%5Bf_audiovisual%5D%5B%5D=historic_film&q=eichmann+&search_ field=all_fields). Fabien Théofilakis, Assistant Professor, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-007

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using a term from Viktor Klemperer’s Lingua Tertii Imperi – the way the National Socialists used language as an element of ideological indoctrination4 – in the Israeli court to justify his refusal to swear on the Bible, Adolf Eichmann as a witness introduced Nazism not (only) as a past to be judged, but as a present that would support his defense strategy.5 His testimony is part of a back and forth between the past and the present that questioned the link that he maintains in 1961 with the past for which he was now on trial: what was Adolf Eichmann testifying to? The challenges that accompanied Eichmann’s status as both accused and witness also raise important questions, beyond judicial categorization. Could Eichmann, as a criminal, become a witness for justice? Or, would he simply be a witness of history? Eichmann’s trial, also raises the question of how, and under what conditions, a Nazi Täter (perpetrator) could act as a witness to Nazi crimes. Indeed, if Adolf Eichmann testified as a judicial witness, did he fulfil the conditions of impartiality towards the victims and the accused? Was he present at any sites where the crimes took place, and could he act as a reliable eyewitness? How did he remember or misremember such events, and could he be considered “credible” through the performative commitment to tell the truth under oath?6 Such questions also connect to his ability or inability to act as a historical witness. How was Eichmann, based on his account and alongside the 1,600 documents and over a hundred witnesses for the prosecution, “the missing link between the site

 Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006). (1st English edit.: 1957; original edit.: 1947).  Alon Confino has shown to what extent the holocaust of the Torah scrolls practiced by the Nazis during “Kristallnacht” in 1938 was a revolutionary political act. See “Introduction,” A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 1–24. Swearing on the Bible would, for the former SS officer, be tantamount to acknowledging the failure of the project at the heart of Nazism, to create a world without Jews.  To take up the criteria proposed by Aleida Assmann, “Vier Grundtypen von Zeugenschaft,” [Four Types of Witnessing] in Zeugen und Zeugnisse. Bildungsprojekte zur NS-Zwangsarbeit mit Jugendlichen, ed. Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft” (Berlin: Ulrike Petzold, 2008; 1st edition: 2007), 14. Other criteria could be discussed such as those of verification, concordance and confirmation used by Sigrid Weigel, “Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft, Klage und Anklage. Die Geste des Bezeugens in der Differenz von identity politics, juristischem und historiographischem Diskurs,” in Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft. Jahrbuch des Einstein Forums 1999 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2000), 127, or the three functions identified by Liora Bilsky – introducing incriminating information through eyewitnesses, providing historical context, and highlighting aspects that could not have been determined from the documents alone –, “Liora Bilksy, “The Eichmann Trial: Towards a Jurisprudence of Victims as Eyewitnesses to Genocide,” in Rebecca Witmann (ed.) The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 104–122.

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of a catastrophe and those, who, distant in time and space, had no idea what had taken place”?7 This question becomes even more important if one considers the concept of a moral witness, introduced by the philosopher Avishai Margalit and clarified by Aleida Assman.8 Adolf Eichmann was, after all, not a victim of Nazi anti-Jewish violence, but one of its agents. Unlike the survivors who testified on behalf of those murdered, and, who were therefore, forever silenced, the accused did not testify because he experienced violence himself. In this way, he did not represent the status of victim and witness, which, before the court, constituted the conditions necessary to share a truthful depiction of events. However, if we consider the concept of a “moral community,” which renders a victim’s experience universal, and transforms each member of this community into holders of a memory, approaching Eichmann’s testimony from his self-positioning as a “moral witness” invites us to consider to whom Adolf Eichmann was speaking to during his defense as holders of the memory of his version of the Nazi past.9 It also begs the question what values he intended to defend, and to what extent he considered himself a victim. To understand Eichmann’s intentions throughout his testimony in the glass booth– from his judicial deposition to his attempt at universalization – means one must consider the Nazi “Weltanschauung” and how Adolf Eichmann viewed himself as an accused National Socialist. To understand Eichmann’s testimony in Jerusalem, this article is based on a range of sources that together demonstrate his verbosity: the session minutes and their filming by Leo Hurwitz make it possible to approach the performative act of testimony as much in its physical expression as in its verbal texture and meaning. But the accused also produced a huge corpus, both in court and in his cell, in the context of the preliminary investigation and then for his lawyer and posterity, through two versions of his memoirs. These writings, which sometimes open up a more intimate psychological and moral space, allow us insight into the nature of Adolf Eichmann’s testimony and his intentions.10

 Assmann, “Vier Grundtypen von Zeugenschaft,” 17. She includes in this category not only the survivors (“Überlebende”) but also the Still-living (“Noch-Lebende”) and mentions photo reporters and journalists as examples of historical witnesses.  Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Carolyn J. Dean, The Moral Witness. Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).  Assmann, “Vier Grundtypen von Zeugenschaft,” 21.  These corpora have been worked on using keywords characterizing each of the dimensions of testimony discussed here, for example oath, witness, testify, memory, remember, etc.

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This paper is a modest reflection on questions, which are at once epistemological, judicial, historiographical and even civic, based on the case of an unusual witness and defendant, Adolf Eichmann, and his testimony in Jerusalem. Three modalities of the production of testimony on the Holocaust are simultaneously studied, considering i) Adolf Eichmann as a contemporary witness based on his ways of speaking and acting, ii) Adolf Eichmann as a witness for the future, according to the finality he confers on his word, and finally iii) Adolf Eichmann as a witness of the past, specifically his narrative of the origins of the Second World War and the Shoah.

Adolf Eichmann as Contemporary Witness When Adolf Eichmann was sworn in at the trial’s 75th session on June 20th, he had to date only stated his identity and given the same cryptic answer to the fifteen counts of the indictment: “Nicht schuldig im Sinne der Anklage” (not guilty in the sense of the accusation). At the same time, during the initial sessions, he was able understand the role that the prosecution attributed to him and to grasp the effect of the testimony of the prosecution witnesses who gave voice to the victims. Faced with these accusations and charges, how did Adolf Eichmann position himself as a judicial witness? Israeli law offered three possibilities: to make an unsworn statement, to make a statement after the swearing the oath of truth or to remain silent. Adolf Eichmann chose to take an oath before the court in an effort to establish the credibility of his testimony. Each of the 31 sessions during which the accused testified – between June 20 and July 25 – opened with the president reminding Adolf Eichmann that he would “continue his testimony” always under oath, while his lawyer, Robert Servatius, used the expression “Herr Zeuge” (“Witness”) to address him. The lawyer took the floor and inserted the “examination of the accused as a witness”11 explicitly into a strategy based on his client’s experience: “On the strength of these documents, the Accused when examined as a witness, will give an account of his position and his activities” based on “documents produced by the prosecution itself.” Once the oath is taken, did the accused-witness respect the pact of truth? Adolf Eichmann used this oath and his change in status from accused to witness to reinforce the notion that he spoke only the truth and to strengthen his defense. In at least eight sessions, he invoked this oath, notably to justify the impossibility of  TET, session 75.

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clarifying his share of responsibility since that would mean leaving the realm of truth and entering into hypothesis. Under oath – the accused-witness argued – the deposition did not tolerate any half-truths. Faced with Prosecutor General Hausner, who pressed him to find out which books had been quoted during the discussions conducted by Wilhelm Sassen in Argentina in 1957,12 Adolf Eichmann invoked his status as witness: “I am under oath and I cannot simply chatter away, and simply say something which I do not know with full certainty,” before adding “I have to stand by what I said. I don’t know this. I cannot just stand here and tell stories.”13 The oath allowed Adolf Eichmann to give the impression that he stuck to the truth during his testimony. Another example: Returning to his reaction to the sight of murdered Jews and his repeated requests to be relieved of his duties, Adolf Eichmann concluded: I have never before made this point as precisely as this, because it might all too easily have given the impression that I wanted to put myself in a better light and somehow influence the outcome of a judgment. That is far from me, and is not my intention; my intention is to tell the truth, and then it can be decided what should be done.14

Eichmann’s testimony is thus presented as the opposite of conventional speech, intended to give voice to what the court was supposed to want to hear. Rather, he presented it as a painful soul-searching exercise. In this way, it seemed as if Adolf Eichmann was echoing the difficult testimony of certain prosecution witnesses. In response to the prosecutor’s questioning about the marginalia he scribbled a book read in 1955, The Last Days of the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Eichmann offered an astonishing parallel that placed the deposition on the side of self-examination. Stressing that the author, the object of his vindictiveness, had in fact broken his oath of loyalty to Hitler during the war, he went on to refer to his oath before the court: In exactly the same way, I maintain the attitude that I have taken an oath here to tell the truth, and I take great care, and every evening I examine myself: Have I told the truth, or have I told just one untruth? In exactly the same way, at that time, I maintained the point of view that an oath is an oath.15

Behind this apparent continuity from his involvement in one regime to the next – from the one who committed crimes to the one who now judged them – Adolf

 In 1957, in Buenos Aires, Adolf Eichmann was invited to participate in a discussion circle of former Nazis, led by Wilhelm Sassen. His interventions were to result in a book. On this episode, see Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem. The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, trans. Ruth Martin (New York: Knopf, 2014).  TET, session 91.  TET, session 95.  TET, session 96.

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Eichmann attempted give the impression that he was judging himself, that he was indeed introspective.16 In this perspective, the traces of what transforms the words of the accused into testimony can undoubtedly appear as a challenge to the court. They can also be read as Adolf Eichmann’s refusal to confess, which would be equivalent to recognizing his culpability in the eyes of the law. The discourse on (pseudo) truth reveals that, underneath the posture of witness, Adolf Eichmann is a defendant fighting for his legacy. On two occasions, he invoked his status as a witness under oath to better emphasize his evolution since his statements made during the preliminary investigation in 1960. This was important, because Adolf Eichmann felt that he had revealed too much during that investigation that now could be used against him. When Hausner wanted to know why the IVB4 service – of which Adolf Eichmann was part as the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) – had organized a meeting, in March 1942, Adolf Eichmann replied: “If I hypothesize about something today, this is something I can do if I am being interrogated, but if I am making a statement under oath here, there is no point in my hypothesizing. I would simply like to refer to the files and to what is in there, and what can be seen from that.”17 Hausner concluded, before moving on to the next document, “Very well, that will do, I accept that.” Such exchanges can be seen as signs that Adolf Eichmann was learning to use his role as witness to help him in his role as accused and to bolster his defense. Eichmann’s status as witness also serves to emphasize that he was confessing, as long as was in accordance with the truth, his or her contribution to the development of the truth. In his view, his sworn statement thus served to reinforce the validity of what he said. Acknowledging the central role of his service in the organization of the deportations of Jews, the accused-witness nevertheless intended to clarify: (. . .) I should also like to say here that I cannot think of – nor am I thinking of denying today – something which at that time I was obliged to do in accordance with the oath of loyalty I had taken – today, when I am under another oath. I must admit that, and I must stand by that. But it must be understood – and I would ask for this understanding – that, on the other hand, I can only take upon myself what actually happened and not what people think that I must in any case have done.18

 Michel Foucault, Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice. Cours de Louvain, 1981 (Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2012).  TET, session 102.  TET, session 96.

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In this self-referential speech, in which the accused allegedly could not lie, everything stated under oath was therefore true. The status of witness thus offered Adolf Eichmann a supposed credibility that he sought to use in the service of his version of the facts and the Nazi past during his testimony. In contrast to the prosecution’s witnesses who exhibited much emotion during their testimony, Adolf Eichmann intended to confine himself to the facts, reinforcing his position as an outside observer while excluding any emotion – subjective, and therefore biased – to the point that he ended up arousing the ire of President Landau, who insisted “once and for all, that such general remarks do not add anything. Once or twice they are all right, but we are hearing that all the time.”19 He was still surprised, six sessions later, that the accused “still does not grasp the purpose of the crossexamination”20 . . . unless he did not want to understand. Adolf Eichmann tried to avoid saying anything that would remind the court that he was not only a witness but in fact the defendant. Eichmann, who knew that his life – and his place in history – were at stake, integrated his status of witness into his defense as the accused. In doing so he established a certain relationship between past and present.

The Oath Taken in Jerusalem As Adolf Eichmann himself mentioned, the oath that he took in Jerusalem, rendering him both the accused and a witness, was not the first that he had taken. In his mind, it echoed other oaths he had sworn during the “Third Reich,” which established him as a Nazi and a member of the SS.21 This supposed parallel raises the question of the value of oaths. How did the oaths that Adolf Eichmann took, represent the Nazi “Weltanschauung”? What values were attached? What loyalty did these oaths demand? When Adolf Eichmann testified before the court that he “did not wish to give the impression of still being a National Socialist today”,22 he had to resolve the incompatibility of the two oaths, otherwise his credibility would be damaged. The fact that Adolf Eichmann swore an oath to tell the truth in Jerusalem invites us to consider whether he viewed this as an exit from the oaths he swore under the Nazi regime. Or, did he do so because he hoped that it would

 TET, session 97.  TET, session 106.  Vanessa Conze, “Ich schwöre Treue . . .”: der politische Eid in Deutschland zwischen Kaiserreich und Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020).  TET, session 95.

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appear that way. So, who was testifying in the glass booth? Was it an Adolf Eichmann that remained a committed SS officer? An Adolf Eichmann ready to admit to Nazi crimes and his own responsibility? Or, an Adolf Eichmann who sought to appear as a reformed Nazi? And how could the court tell the difference? As Adolf Eichmann reminded the public prosecutor during the first crossexamination session, as a Nazi, he “took the oath several times.” As a member of the SS Battalion, he took his first oath after the death of Marshal Hindenburg in 1934.23 This was to pledge allegiance to the Führer, the Reichskanzler and the Vaterland. He swore a second oath in October of that same year when he joined the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS in Berlin. This time, he had to swear an oath of service, committing himself to secrecy about the actions of the SS. During his interrogation by Judge Halevi, he specified that he had sworn loyalty to the Führer and, in so doing – within the SS – to the Reichsführer-SS, Himmler.24 He was formally released from this obligation – he told the court – only after Hitler’s death on April 30, 1945. Nevertheless, during the notes he wrote during his trial (to aid in his own defense) he moved the date forward to May 8, 1945, which reflected a commitment to the entire regime. However, in one session during his trial, he stated that his ideological and practical withdrawal from his loyalty to National Socialism was a much longer process from which he barely emerged in 1961. As a committed Nazi, he had lived this oath which demanded values and ways of acting based on a relationship to authority that insisted on absolute obedience and the dissolution of the inner self. “This fidelity,” he replied to Hausner, who asked him about his relationship with Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, “does not relate to our relationship to each other, but this fidelity relates to the oath, to the superiors, and to the leadership.”25 Adolf Eichmann therefore considered the oath as “one of the highest moral obligations,” making all those who broke it “scoundrels.”26 The accused, who swore to tell the truth in Jerusalem, had 13 years of practice that guided his past actions and motivated his current defense: “It may well be true that I said that I had to carry out orders in accordance with my oath of loyalty; it may well be that I said that I had blinkers on, I could not look to the left or to the right and I had to carry out the orders I received unthinkingly (. . .).”27 Paradoxically, if the Nazi oath, reflecting his deep imbibing of Nazi values, can contribute to the qualification of Adolf Eichmann as a historical witness, does it not taint his quality as a judicial witness?

    

TET, session 88. TET, session 106. TET, session 95. TET, session 106. TET, session 94.

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First of all, there is the compulsive recourse to oaths was a legacy of Nazism and also a strategic defense. Faced with a document that is too accusatory – such as the order from the RFSS to strip Jewish corpses of their gold teeth and cut off women’s hair, an order that he is said to have passed on – Adolf Eichmann cried out to the police officer questioning him: “This is incredible, Herr Hauptmann, it’s, it’s becoming monstrous. I have to resort for the second time to the only possibility left to me, the defense, which is the oath. I swear: it didn’t happen like that.”28 Such a temporal continuity questions the sincerity of the person who took the oath in Jerusalem. Then there are the formulas that the accused invoked about his actions under the Nazi oaths. From the beginning of his trial, Adolf Eichmann developed, first in his notes, then in his response to one of the three judges, and finally in the second version of his memoirs that he wrote while awaiting the verdict, a classic interpretation of the two bodies,29 which distinguishes between public action and the conscience of the agent:30 the action of his public being would respect his oath but would not reflect his inner self. Thus, on April 17, 1961, on the subject of the Jewish civilians he had deported in Europe he noted, out of session: “I have stubbornly done my duty. I did it faithfully to the oath. But in my person I therefore switched off, without heart, because they were civilians (. . .).”31 Pushed by Judge Halevi to acknowledge that in some cases he was able to “easily (. . .) turn two blind eyes” and spare Jews, the accused came to admit – in order not to admit having violated his oath – “a split state, a form of splitting, where one fled from one side to the other, and vice versa.”32 The explanation is formalized for history in the version of the memoirs intended for publication: acknowledging that, until Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945, he was one of those who, “outwardly,” remained faithful to their oath, avoiding everything that could put them in conflict with their duty. At the same time, his “inner attitude, however, led to a kind of split personality; a condition that was a hindrance. A condition that had to kill all momentum and élan. A condition from which the individual suffered more than he ever wanted to admit

 Israeli State Archives (ISA), Jerusalem, 3024 / 5, preliminary inquiry, band No. 9, 388/26.  According to Kantorowicz’s interpretation which distinguishes between the body natural – the mortal individual – and the body politic which embodies the community of action; Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) and Pierre Bourdieu, “La délégation et le fétichisme politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 52–53 (June 1984): 49–55.  See Pierre Bourdieu, Sur l’État. Cours au Collège de France, 1989–1992 (Paris: Seuil, 2012).  Bundesarchiv – Koblenz (BArch-K), ALLPROZ 6/163, 50 recto, April 17, 1961.  TET, session 106.

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or admitted. In Eichmann’s depiction, he numbed himself, through ‘duty’ and ‘oath’; and ‘loyalty’ and ‘honor’.”33 That stance clearly threatened the sincerity of the oath he took before the court and consequently the weakened Eichmann’s status as a judicial witness. He had proclaimed in one of his notes written in February 1961 that in Jerusalem he felt free because he considered that he was “neither bound by an oath nor subject to orders.”34 He confided to the police officer conducting the preliminary investigation (as well as to his notes) that he would never again take an oath. This leads one to wonder why he agreed to do so four months later: “Today, today, no one would make me, no judge would make me take a witness oath, for example. I refuse to do it. I refuse for moral reasons. Because I have had the experience of how, if you keep to the oath, then one day you have to draw the consequences.”35 Seeking to underline how much he had changed, Adolf Eichmann undermined the very conditions of his judicial word. When answering a question posed by the interrogating officer, Adolf Eichmann underlined his opposition to taking any further oaths because he attributed them to the cynical games states play to use “the sacredness of the oath” in order to commit widespread “murder, death and destruction” by getting people to join “awarding ethical value ratings for heroism, sacrifice, obedience and discipline.”36 In concluding that “the oath would be a coercion; an obligation to become a fence-sitter for the state if necessary,” Adolf Eichmann nevertheless exited the role of the judicial witness to adopt the role of moral witness.

A Witness with a Faulty Memory Adolf Eichmann’s status as a witness also depends on the reliability of his memory of the past. Unlike victims who testify, the accused/witness was subject to a particular tension in this regard: if he remembered too well, he risked being attacked by the prosecution; conversely, if his testimony was too incomplete, he weakened his status and risked, through his silences, implicating himself. For Eichmann, too, memory – this recalling of the past in the present – became an issue during his Jerusalem trial. The lexical field of memory thus runs through his entire testimony. This is undoubtedly due to the nature of the exercise; it is

   

ISA, “Götzen,” 194/AE 132. BArch-K, ALLPROZ 6/163, 193, April 22, 1961. ISA, preliminary investigation, band 52, September 14, 1960. 2528/21. ISA, “Götzen,” 553/AE 189.

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also due to the fact that Adolf Eichmann made this effort explicit and sought to display his goodwill by employing phrases such as “as far as I remember,” as in the anaphora “I believe I remember” that he used during session 78 to answer questions about a massacre in Riga in November 1941.37 Adolf Eichmann attempted to utilize the temporal distance from this past event as a strategy to display his alleged honesty and to make him appear to be a witness who was concerned only with telling the truth. Throughout his statements, he multiplied the expressions of the passage of time. He justified the use of a work by the historian Poliakov to draw up an organigram “then in order to corroborate my own knowledge, which had been affected by a 16-year interruption;”38 unable to give the exact dates of the Madagascar plan, he advanced: “In any case, after twenty years I am unable to give any clear-cut, precise information about this particular letter; but I have tried to clarify things as best I could”39 and wondered, during the discussion of a letter criticizing the Central Office for Emigration in Vienna: “Who can remember such details after twenty-four years? This I do not know.”40 The play of time on memory thus provides the accused – acting as a witness – with more room to undermine the prosecution’s argument concerning his personal responsibility. The staging of such a selective memory allowed Adolf Eichmann to better emphasize that he was no longer the same man he had once been. Before answering the “very difficult” question about his “sense of guilt,” Adolf Eichmann told his lawyer: “In my case today, some sixteen to twenty-four years have elapsed since the events, and a great deal that was true then ceased to be true quite a long time ago.”41 If it was so difficult for him to remember the details – of some of them at least– it is, in subtext, because the world in which these events made sense had disappeared. We are not very far from a Halbwachsian conception of collective memory that would inform individual memory and nourish the questioning of the category of the witness Eichmann.42 As Eichmann’s case shows, the passage of time that erases or distorts memory can be used as a strategy to delegitimize a document that is too damming or to free oneself from a responsibility that is too heavy to bear. When Judge Raveh questioned Adolf Eichmann about his follow-up to a request in January 1945 to set up a refuge for Jewish children and elderly people in Slovakia under the protection of the Red Cross, he responded with his usual justification of obedience to

     

TET, session 78. TET, session 81. TET, session 92. TET, session 90. TET, session 88. Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) and On collective memory (1950).

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orders received, before concluding, based on the document produced by the prosecution: “(. . .) I can well imagine that the instructions I received said ‘no action to be taken’; that is what today I would imagine to have been the case.”43 Conversely, the fact that he did not remember a fact that his memory should have preserved would be proof that it did not exist, such as the sterilization instructions for the Jews of Wartheland: “Had I received the communication and actually held it in my hands, I am quite sure that, despite the twenty years which have intervened, I would have remembered it, because of its drastic contents. I can, therefore, state quite truthfully that I did not receive this communication.”44 In the end, this use of memory would mark, from the point of view of the accused, an impasse in his testimony as a witness. He rejected the public prosecutor’s notion of an omniscient and omnipotent Adolf Eichmann with regard to Nazi anti-Jewish policy and practice. When questioned by Hausner about his involvement in the transmission of directives related to the Warsaw Ghetto, Adolf Eichmann highlighted what he viewed as a contradiction between the duty of veracity imposed by his status as a witness and the passage of time: “I believe that it is not humanly possible, after so many years and after so much has become vague, and after so many other impressions, to give precise testimony about such a vast subject, as a witness, from the witness box – on oath here.”45 Adolf Eichmann presented the war as a thing of the past. This raised the underlying question of the authenticity of other witnesses who remembered too well. These two relationships to memory and to how Adolf Eichmann could, as both accused and witness, contribute to testimony about the Shoah lead one to reflect on the very production of testimony and its conditions of possibility: without betraying or rejecting the past, how does one determine if memory is deficient? Eichmann’s answers to his counsel, the public prosecutor and the judges in some ways respond to this challenge. Eichmann, for instance, discussed the impossibility for his current self in 1961 to answer questions through the eyes of this former self, the Nazi officer, underlining the extent to which the witness is a social being whose memory is shaped by the times. As a witness, he repeatedly argued that, with the years, he mixed up chronology and no longer distinguished exactly what he experienced under Nazism from what he has learned since its fall. When asked about the Jews sent from Auschwitz to Strasbourg to provide skeletons to the anatomical institute in 1943, he justified the fact that he only remembered one encounter: “I do not even

 TET, session 84.  TET, session 78.  TET, session 99.

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know if I am imagining this as I have already heard it so often, or I have been told this so often, that I am no longer capable of distinguishing between what happened and what I have been told”46 – sufficiently, however, to conclude that he had nothing to do with this case . . . He put his finger on one of the main difficulties of this trial, which took place 28 years after Hitler came to power and 19 years after the first gassings at Auschwitz: What, in the depositions, was the proper ocular memory of the events and what was memory by integration of later and unlived elements? On his involvement in the arrest of one Dean Grueber, Adolf Eichmann pointed to the confusion between the two in order to brush it off: “But I would definitely have heard about it, and in the course of the years I mixed it up, and imagined I myself was involved”.47 When the public prosecutor asked him how many times he had been to France, it was impossible to say, he replied: because I am someone who is supposed to make a statement about something after twenty years, and whose brain has in the interim absorbed many thousands of other impressions and cannot remember details. I did not sit down and recapitulate every single official journey immediately after 1945. Even then it would probably not have been possible, in 1945, even if I had started to do so.48

To the prosecutor’s unrealistic expectations of accuracy, Adolf Eichmann snidely countered his inability to “reconstruct my actions”49 due to the weight of years and the interpenetration of outside knowledge. But does this not undermine his status as a judicial witness? Faced with such a malleability of memory that weakens his status as a witness, Adolf Eichmann explained his strategy of filling in the gaps that he claims to have put in place since his arrival in Israel in May 1960: the reading of historical works and the study of documents presented by the prosecution. This intellectual activity did not only serve to “reinforce” his memory but helped him to “picture to myself the whole affair,” as he said for the organization of the deportations from Hungary in 1944.50 Regarding his various trips to the killing centers – a central point for the prosecution as well as for history – he explained the evolution of his account between the preliminary investigation and his deposition in court, always in search of the truth, he specified:

    

TET, session 101. TET, session 107. TET, session 97. TET, session 80. TET, session 83.

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However, when I was able to study the literature, I found that I had got the timing wrong. I also got the timing wrong in other matters – the years got mixed up with me – so I have taken the literature (. . .), and carried out comparative studies. And, on the basis of the literature available to me, I have drawn up a chronological table, and on the basis of this chronology I have tried to the best of my knowledge and belief to insert these official journeys as accurately as possible.51

In so doing, Adolf Eichmann as witness formulated a holistic narrative in which he was no longer the central agent but an indexical one, whose testimony no longer sought to account for the power of his commitment to Nazism at the time, but to propose a linear narrative rationality that met the supposed contemporary expectations of those who were not part of the system.52 The judicial witness thus became a historical witness. Of course, Eichmann, acting as a witness, wanted to withdraw many of the statements he made to the police officer during his hearing: It is not only this which I must withdraw – he regrets about his participation in a meeting defining the anti-Jewish policy in Poland. (. . .) after studying the documents, I realized that my assumptions were quite often wide off the mark and both, to my disadvantage and to the contrary, also to my advantage. It is only the wealth of documents which has improved my recollection, so that today I am more or less able to make an approximately correct statement about those instances which I do not directly recall or remember.53

This explains the centrality of the study of documents in Adolf Eichmann’s defense strategy, whereas he only marginally integrated the testimony of the prosecution witnesses, most of which did not concern him directly. In the end, he stated: According to the truth, I must say that I am unable to remember. I could . . . more or less try to reconstruct how things were. But before an impression arises of my trying to evade this question of what I did or did not know, I should like to state perfectly frankly that I would rather take upon myself as a fact that I knew, rather than give rise to any doubts, since I have stated so much of my own free will of what I saw and what I knew, that I would also shoulder this as well without further ado. It is simply that I cannot remember precisely – and that is a fact.54

In his conception of testifying for history, which assigns to the witness the position of observer rather than actor, Adolf Eichmann bypassed the facts of which he was accused and targeted an audience other than the court.

 TET, session 87.  This is one of the limitations of the perpetrator’s testimony – its unreliability – pointed out by Thomas Richmond, “The Perpetrators’ Testimonies in Shoah,” The Journal of Holocaust Education, 5 no 1 (Summer 1996): 65.  TET, session 91.  TET, session 95.

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The reactions of both the prosecutor and the judges underlined the extent to which such considerations were rejected as being outside the scope of what was expected of a court witness. In this respect, they can be perceived as a strategy of refusal of the Israeli judicial authorities by a defendant who aims at another horizon of expectation at the price of a diversion of his status of judicial witness. The exchanges with the public prosecutor during the often tense cross-examination are also revealed in the nature of Eichmann’s speech. Hausner increasingly interrupted Adolf Eichmann to ask him to stop referring to the documents. He sought to appeal solely to Eichmann’s memory, to what he had experienced and done, reminding him of the rule of deposition: “In your evidence here it is not the documents which are the main issue, but what you remember.”55 The prosecutor cut Adolf Eichmann off when he was about to answer “according to [his] feeling” and reminded him that he had to answer “according to the truth.”56 He replied that he was “unable to remember” according to such a rule. Before concluding: “But if I can be of assistance, well then, I am prepared to take this matter upon myself in any case as one who knew about it.” Hausner replied: “Look, this is a very serious matter, and you are not being asked to make a concession, but to tell the truth.” The president of the court also had little patience for Eichmann’s arguments. “We are not now talking about your conscience, he repeated, referring to the role of one of his subordinates in the delivery of Zyklon B to Auschwitz. You are being asked to make an effort to remember (. . .).” Rather than constantly seeking to “give the impression” or to “wish to hear speculations,”57 he demanded that Adolf Eichmann fulfil his duty as a witness: to tell the truth, which implies answering yes or no to the questions. Eichmann, however, seemed incapable of doing so. One must ask whether Adolf Eichmann did not remember because he did not know – what he claimed – or because he did not want to know. This confrontation led the court to block the accused’s attempt to transform himself into a historical witness who would no longer speak about his role, but about the general context of the Holocaust by delivering an analysis of the documents presented. Notwithstanding the difference in status with the prosecution’s witnesses, Eichmann’s statements raise the question of the judicial quality of the depositions produced and invite consideration of the passage of time on the formulation of the victims’ depositions as well, and even on their reception by the court and the public.

 TET, session 103.  TET, session 95.  TET, sessions 98 and 104 respectively.

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Immediate Sensory Presence: Where Did Adolf Eichmann Testify From? The witness – whatever his status – is always a witness to something, which implies determining his position, in time and space, in relation to the event to which he is speaking. The quality – for justice as well as for history – of a witness’s testimony depends on this proximity to the scene(s) of the crime or – to use Aleida Assmann’s terms – on his “immediate sensory perception of the scene of the violence.”58 This concept also applies to Eichmann, but he was also confronted with a tension that the other witnesses in Jerusalem were not, since it stemmed from the charges against him and from the type of crime committed: What kind of violence was Adolf Eichmann specifically a sensory witness to? After all, he was accused of mass crimes, collective crimes, bureaucratic crimes which, in the name of a State policy, involve services, administrations, and ultimately, entire sections of German society, as the mention “in concert with other persons” in 11 of the 15 charges reminds us. Faced with such a broad accusation, Adolf Eichmann chose to answer this question by dissociating his activity as head of the service that was responsible from the violence in the East and for the physical destruction of the Jewish population. As head of the Central Office for Emigration, successively in Vienna, Prague and Berlin, then as Referent of the IVB4 within the RHSA, he would have tried to promote what he called the “territorial solution of the Jewish question,” i.e. “to put soil under the feet” of the Jews, and finally, from the autumn of 1941 onwards, he was in charge of deporting the Jews to the killing centers. In court, Adolf Eichmann portrayed himself as a “bureaucrat” who had to solve technical questions – the organization of administrative procedures for emigration from the Reich, then that of the convoys, and finally that of the “march on foot” from Hungary in October 1944 – always according to the orders received. From this perspective, not only did the accused not kill, but he very rarely witnessed any violence. At the same time, all his efforts within the Nazi apparatus would have been directed towards another Jewish policy, as he summarized to Judge Halevy, who was inquiring about his state of mind during the war: “Finally, I wish to state that I myself already at that time did not consider this violent solution to be justified: already then I considered this to be a monstrous deed, where I regrettably, bound as I was by my oath of loyalty, had in my sector to deal with matters relating to transport aspects (. . .).”59

 Assmann, “Vier Grundtypen von Zeugenschaft,” 14.  TET, session 95.

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At the same time, if we read Eichmann’s deposition, focusing on the passages in which he says he was in “direct contact with the extermination of the Jews”,60 he simply appears as a witness, a passive bystander whose presence does not seem to have any influence on the action reported. Invited by his lawyer to detail his journeys to the East, Adolf Eichmann listed the places, dates, and circumstances that led him to witness various events between the end of the summer of 1941 and the summer of 1942: Lublin, at the request of the Chief of Security Police and Security Service, Heydrich, where he “saw” Globocnik’s experiments in gassing Jews with submarine engines in a hermetically sealed room; Kulmhof/Chelmo, in Warthegau, sent by Müller to “observe” gassing in the camp; Minsk, where the same chief then asked him to report on mass executions; and finally Auschwitz, where he reported on gassing and cremation on a gridiron. In each of these situations, which made him a direct witness to the first phases of genocide perpetrated by the Nazi regime, Adolf Eichmann mentioned the physical shock he felt. For instance, he described how in Lublin he saw for the first time a “fountain of blood” gushing out of a pit where Jews had just been executed.61 Presenting himself as “not the right man for these things,”62 he stated that he had asked again and again to be assigned to other missions. Through his testimonies, Adolf Eichmann established the image of a Nazi who did not support physical violence, just as he did not support a “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” by extermination. He was not afraid to adopt the persona of someone who has seen the death of others without participating in it.63 However, is his testimony worth “less to tell us what happened than what it felt like to be in the center of those events” as it is for the victims because he “provide[d] very personal views from within?”64 In contrast, when the public prosecutor asked him about the purpose of his numerous trips across Europe in the course of his duties, Adolf Eichmann said

 TET, session 87.  TET, session 87. The same reactions can be found among other Nazis, from Himmler to Suchomel in Treblinka. See Richmond, “The Perpetrators’ Testimonies,” 75.  TET, session 87. Reaction to be compared to the one he describes having had at the (first) sight of the mutilated dead bodies of Germans when his knees trembled (94) before, in both cases, he got used to it.  It would provide an answer to the aporia raised by Sybille Krämer and Sigrid Weigel, “Introduction: Converging the Yet-Separate Theoretical Discourses of Testimony Studies,” in Testimony/ Bearing Witness. Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture, ed. Sybille Krämer and Sigrid Weigel (London – New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), xvii.  Aleida Assmann, “History, Memory, and the Genre of Memory,” Poetics today. International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication, 27 no. 2 (Summer 2006): 263.

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that he had not witnessed any violence: Yes, he did visit France, Holland, Belgium and Slovakia,65 but he did not visit the camps at Drancy, Vught and Westerborg.66 In Hungary, he never visited neither camps nor ghettos,67 since the guarding of the convoys and the organization of the death marches were entirely taken care of by the Hungarian gendarmerie.68 Although he confirmed his visit to “concentration camps” (sic) – he mentioned Majdanek, after speaking about his five or six visits to Chelmno and Auschwitz; he said he could not remember Treblinka and gave no response about Sobibor69 – he did not do so to discuss the killing of the Jews he deported there. “ ‘Show’ is not the right word – Adolf Eichmann said to the prosecutor who asked him about the meaning of his visit to the commander of the Hoess place –; he told me about it, and I saw part of it, that is, how the bodies were burned. That I did see.”70 Unrelated to these operations, busy in his office in Berlin, Adolf Eichmann did not – could not – have seen “(. . .) neither murders nor tortures. At that time, I did not have any knowledge at all that such things were happening, and at this moment I cannot even say whether this had actually occurred at that time. At the time I was there, not only did I not see such things, I did not even hear anything.”71 The same narrative about the absence of violence is evident in his testimony about the projects for which he was responsible: during his two trips to Nisko to create “a Jewish state” in the Radom district, he allegedly contested the terrible conditions of travel as well as the living conditions, claiming that the aim was to offer the deportees better living conditions.72 He did not visit Theresienstadt, the so-called model ghetto constructed on Heydrich’s orders, which was in fact a concentration camp.73 As for the case, reported by one witness named Gordon, of a Jew beaten to death in his villa in Budapest, where he was employed, Adolf Eichmann categorically rejected as impossible: “On this question I can only say that I have never killed a human being, I have never slain a human being, and I have never struck a human being.”74 Nor has he ever heard or seen anything.75

 TET, session 97.  TET, session 100, in France and the Netherlands respectively. He visited Warsaw twice, but after the ghetto uprising, the ruins of which he “saw,” session 99.  TET, session 103.  TET, session 104.  TET, session 99.  TET, session 99.  TET, session 91.  TET, session 92.  TET, session 82.  TET, session 87.  TET, session 104.

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By making the sensory experience of genocidal violence a criterion for distinguishing between the status of a witness – who would be passive, and therefore not responsible – and that of an actor, who would refuse to employ, or at least to advocate violence, Adolf Eichmann used the judicial framework to lay the foundations for an alternative narrative of the Shoah and, consequently, of Nazism. He made his distinction between an “original” form of Nazism, which avoided arbitrary and physical violence– and to which adherence would be to his credit – and a rogue Nazism which, from 1941 onwards, committed “one of the most heinous crimes in the history of mankind.”76 Adolf Eichmann also used the specificity of mass and collective crimes, which no longer made it possible to easily distinguish between the witness and the actor, so much so that responsibilities were shared, precisely to use one to legitimize the other, as he theorized in the first pages of the second version of his memoirs: Because I saw hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of the extermination, because I was harnessed as one of the many horses in the trap [surely trap not strap] and, according to the will and orders of the coachmen, could break out neither to the left nor to the right, I feel called and have the desire to tell and give an account here of what happened. It is certainly a sad résumé when I have to state that I am in a position to encompass and overlook the immense volume of organizational preconditions alone that made the events possible. I knew most of the actors who will go down in history one way or another, I spoke with some of them and I am able to judge them approximately.77

Therefore, the only senses – and emotions – to be evoked by Adolf Eichmann were those related to violence in murderous situations. In Eichmann’s bureaucratic work for the supposed good of the Jews, reason prevails over emotion, paradoxically prohibiting any empathy. His persistence in maintaining this dissociation certainly had a judicial significance – to diminish his responsibility – but also a historical one: to play the perfect bureaucrat who did not act out of antisemitism.78 The fact that Hannah Arendt modelled her Schreibtischtäter – desk murderer – so well on the accused in a suit and tie, behind his files and pens, shows that he may not have failed completely.79 In doing so, Adolf Eichmann attempted to provide an answer to the question whose point of view can tell a holistic history of the Shoah. He could indeed describe the regime’s fraught anti-Jewish policy and its actors, starting with both his efforts – and his lack of effort to testify to the crimes he saw, denounce Nazi  TET, session 94.  ISA, “Götzen,” p. 13–14/ AE 6.  TET, session 87.  On the concept and its heuristic contribution, see Dirk van Laak and Dirk Rose eds., Schreibtischtäter. Begriff- Geschichte – Typologie (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018).

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genocide, and underline his alleged disregard for Nazism since 1941, while chiseling its posterity as an advocate for a positive Nazism. However, no more than for the other criteria, this sensory presence fails to fully qualify Adolf Eichmann as a witness because, once again, the conditions of the judicial witness are hijacked by those of another type of witness, but also because the accused in the glass booth, by refusing to consider his actions in terms of violence, refused to consider what the system was made up of – each component was necessary to ensure the other, which resulted in genocide. As Goda points out, based on Hannah Arendt’s thinking, “collective evil is characterized by personal discipline and submission to superior orders, a phenomenon, which Arendt tried to capture with the concept of the banality of evil.80 Adolf Eichmann exhibited the reverse of the St. Thomas syndrome: he acted, not as if could only believe what he saw and touched with his own eyes and hands, but as if he was incapable of believing what he experienced first-hand. In front of the first Jewish corpses he encountered, he declared: “I found it unbelievable, something I could not grasp.”81 No doubt Adolf Eichmann touched on one of the specificities of Nazism without assuming it. In this, the Täter could not be a witness since he was, by nature, a perpetrator of violence. This fact fundamentally distinguished him from the victim-witnesses.

Adolf Eichmann, Witness for the Future Adolf Eichmann in the glass booth was not content to testify in the present for justice. The 15 charges brought against him, which covered all aspects of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, the 1,600 documents produced by the prosecution, and the 110 or so witnesses against him, gave the trial in Jerusalem a historical dimension that was relayed worldwide by the images of Leo Hurwitz.82 Adolf Eichmann quickly became aware of this and regularly asked his lawyer about how his statements were repeated in the press. This show trial reserved a special place for Adolf Eichmann, and not only in the judicial order. Unlike the trial’s other protagonists – the prosecution, the judges, but also his counsel –Adolf Eichmann was the only one to have lived in the Nazi system from the inside, and was continuously, at the minimum, a part of it, even if he was not always the one giving

 Norman J.W. Goda ed., Rethinking Holocaust Justice. Essays across Disciplines (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 58.  TET, session 94.  See Sylvie Lindeperg and Annette Wieviorka eds., Le moment Eichmann (Paris: Albin Michel, 2016).

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orders. His participation and his actions earned him a trial 15 years after Nazism’s collapse. During his deposition, the unusual place he occupied as a modern bureaucrat working in the backoffice of the Nazis’ mass murder industry predisposed Adolf Eichmann to make the link between yesterday and today. How did he use his position as a witness testifying about the past not only for a contemporary audience but also as a defense strategy and a way of marking his place in history? How did he see himself as a witness for the future? History, as a trace of the past, is of course present through the documents presented, but it is also, as an interpretation of events, depicted by the numerous books that Adolf Eichmann mentioned in his deposition. Books from the past, such as The Jewish State, which he insisted on attributing wrongly to Alfred Boehm, books on the past by historians such as Reitlinger or Poliakov that he quoted constantly, and even books created in the course of the trial, such as Dr. Hans Globke –which he referred to as the “Globke-Buch” in his notes – which he read in Jerusalem.83 Finally, Adolf Eichmann himself alluded to the book that he intended to write, transforming his testimony into a witness for the future and the accused into a historical witness. On July 13, 1961, he did not intend to evade the questions on his role, but instead told the court of “[his] intention to ask for permission after the trial to put these matters down in the form of a book (. . .) to serve as a deterrent example for today’s generation and that of the future.”84 One of the judges told him that it would be a matter of “describing what was done to the Jews as one of the greatest crimes ever committed in the history of mankind.”85 By agreeing, Adolf Eichmann gave his trial a purpose that was no longer defined by the judicial framework. His testimony was no longer simply that of an eyewitness recounting what he had seen, but that of an actor from the past who intended to draw and transmit lessons from history. Adolf Eichmann thus, tried to position himself as a moral man. In a programmatic note addressed to his lawyer on June 7, 1961 – nearly two months after the beginning of the trial and two weeks before he took the stand as a witness – Adolf Eichmann was delighted at the idea that all his notes would be handed over, along with the documentary ensemble, to a university,86 explained how he envisaged his role as a great witness:

 Reinhard-M. Strecker ed., Dr. Hans Globke. Aktenauszüge, Dokumente (Hamburg: Rütten & Loening, 1961).  TET, session 95. Adolf Eichmann already mentioned this project during the preliminary investigation.  TET, session 104.  BArch-K, ALLPROZ 6–171, 19 recto/38.

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1. You told me today, on the occasion of the meetings: “You are fighting for your life.” (. . .) 2. (. . .) No, fighting for my life is impossible for me in Israel, because the die has already been cast there. (. . .) 3. (. . .) And history will judge me [?] and not Israel. The historians of all denominations and of many nations will study the trial down to the smallest detail, for fifty years and more. And you will see that it will be interpreted one way or the other, according to the Zeitgeist. But perhaps the discourse in the studies and libraries will last even longer than fifty years. 4. For it is all very complicated and confused. The subject matter is enormous and I would be interested in reading all the dissertations and doctoral theses on this process over the next 100 years. (. . .) That is where my interest lies. My children and my children’s children and, if fate wills it, their children and their children, they will read it. And the truth about me [?] will only prevail in a few decades. But in order to make it easier and more comfortable for all those prospective state examiners of jurisprudence, some of whom have not yet been born, to give them hints on how to start their examinations, I would like to do this from a factual point of view. From a factual point of view, this should be the deeper meaning of willingness to take the stand as a witness and to submit myself exclusively to the interrogation of the Attorney General, for as long as it suits him. (. . .) A library of books will continue to spin legends about me for the time being. Until the webs become brittle and the spinning spider dries up for lack of new nourishment. But life is eternal; a new spider will begin, with the network of truth. That is what matters to me.87

This criterion was no longer that of a judicial witness, but that – ultimate in a perspective of immanent justice – a witness of history. Faced with the prosecution, and even with his defense witnesses, Adolf Eichmann prepared to deliver his version for the future and for posterity. He intended to do so by universalizing his experience, by putting forward a speech that detached him from the judicial procedure and allowed his experience to be valued precisely in that it accused him. From then on, the passage of time, because it transformed Nazism and its anti-Jewish policy into a past gone by, promotes the position of historical witness of the accused. In the second version of his memoirs, intended for publication, Adolf Eichmann judged, with “today a distance in time from the events that lies between 16–29 years,” that he could finally extricate himself from those “thousand ideals” that had

 BArch-K, ALLPROZ 6-254, p. 4 verso–5 recto. Assertion to be compared with the last sentence of the dedication in the 1998 edition of Le mensonge d’Ulysse, by the negationist author Paul Rassinier about the “chronicler – witness, too, alas! – only concerned with re-establishing the truth for the historians and sociologists of the future.” As François Hartog points out, also “his testimony was intended from the outset not to say that he saw and endured, not to “establish the facts” but to already “to reestablish,” “The Presence of the Witness,” in Testimony/Bearing Witness, Krämer and Weigel eds., 13.

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once animated him: “And much that was once valid has become invalid. I have gradually thrown what used to be ‘ideological values’ overboard as junk over the years.”88 In so doing, Eichmann, the accused/historical witness integrated his conviction, which he considered to have been achieved already on June 3, 1960, not only as the epilogue of the court, but also of his testimony. Indeed, Adolf Eichmann had declared to the police officer who interrogated him prior to the trial: But be that as it may, I am inwardly prepared to also personally atone for the terrible [?] event, and I know that I am facing [the] death penalty. (. . .). Yes, if it means a greater act of atonement, I am prepared, as a deterrent example for all, as [recent] events have shown, anti-Semites of the countries of this world, to hang myself publicly. Let me first write a book about the horror as a warning and deterrent for this present and future youth, and then let my life on earth come to an end.89

In this sense, Adolf Eichmann as an eyewitness is transformed into a watchman to address posterity so that his experience was not in vain, defining what Aleida Assmann describes as the historical witness. His testimony, presented as knowledge, was therefore primarily intended for young people, who he felt would become the sole judges of his actions. In the first version of his memoirs, completed on June 16, 1960, Adolf Eichmann, who was questioned at the same time in the context of the preliminary investigation, wrote: All that remains for me then is to repeat the same thing in court, to accept the punishment provided for it, and to tell the coming generations that they should always bear in mind as a warning guideline for their lives the last terrible final point that the Middle Ages, which ended on May 8, 1945, were still able to determine, so that peace on earth and harmony among all the people of this earth may finally be given to them. And I call out to the youth still living and to the youth yet to come (. . .).90

In the second version, written two and a half months later, he stated: There is probably no one alive whose own eyes have seen the ultimate horror, the infernal, apocalyptic thunderstorm in the comprehensiveness that I was destined to see. No one can therefore forbid me to raise the finger of warning. For the tongues of idols [Götzen] are supple and their words enticing. And in warning my sons against such and similar “gold-laced” preachers of obedience, with their evangelistic phrases of nationalism, of holy war, and whatever other soothing words

 ISA, “Götzen,” p. 13/ AE 5.  ISA, preliminary investigation, band 8, March 6, 1960, p. 361 / 46.  ISA, “Meine Memoiren,” June 16, 1960, 126.

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they may come out with, I warn – on the basis of my experience – all the youth, today and tomorrow, against these dancing idols.91

However, universalizing his message stumbles on the fact that it was the young Germans who were the primary target of his message, as one of the judges already pointed out during his interrogation: “You see, you wanted to write a book, and you wanted to give an example, an example of expiation to the generations to come. You were thinking more particularly of young Germans . . . .”92 “Yes,” agreed simply Adolf Eichmann. In order to put an end to this “Götzentotentanze” (danse macabre of idols), which refers to the system of obedience brought to a climax under Nazism with the Führerprinzip, the accused addressed his historical lesson primarily to German youth, who he wanted to ensure were would not feel guilty for being German. Adolf Eichmann’s testimony could “not be determined outside of testimony constellation that encompassed the trial of witness, testimony and addressed and is furthermore embedded in specific cultural-historical situations and traditions. (. . .) It requires an auditorium that trusts the witness and constitutes his speech as ‘true speech’, as testimony, in the first place.”93 Adolf Eichmann based his desire to act – one could even speak of a mission – as witness to history, precisely on his position within the Nazi system. His intention was not to accept responsibility for his actions and acknowledge that the truth of the accusations leveled, but rather as a strategy to disprove the charges and position himself as a victim: “That is what the masses already feel today, also in my case. And therefore, I will be acquitted. And if this is not taken care [?] of by an Israeli court, then the near future is already taking care of this. Well, then I will be branded a martyr for those who receive orders [Befehlsempfänger].”94 Through his supposed sacrifice, Adolf Eichmann sought to make it appear as if he was helping future generations by universalizing his experiences and therefore gave his historical testimony a “dimension monumentaire.”95 Adolf Eichmann, as “witness” in Jerusalem, conceived of his testimony as a chance to speak on behalf of a world that had disappeared, the defeated “Third Reich” and its ideology, in which he had believed. Given the scale of the trial he considered himself the last of the high-ranking Nazis who would testify to the

 ISA, “Götzen,” p. 534–535/ AE 173.  TET, session 106.  Krämer and Weigel, Testimony/Bearing Witness, x. See too Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (ed.), Testimony. Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992).  BArch-K, ALLPROZ 6 / 172, 3 verso.  Renaud Dulong, “Qu’est-ce qu’un témoin historique.” Accessed December 20, 2021. http:// www.vox-poetica.org/t/articles/dulong.html.

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past. He spoke, on behalf of his comrades, for and to those thousands, indeed millions, of Germans who had embraced National Socialism and allegedly sacrificed themselves for it. He also sought to enlighten future generations through his words, his writings, and the example of his death. By attempting to build a “moral community,” he hoped to give National Socialism a future in a sense that he hoped to give National Socialism a positive legacy going forward. Understanding Adolf Eichmann as a witness thus allows us to question the “specific cultural frameworks” in which the “performative act” of testifying is embedded and which “define in advance certain ‘scripts’ for the roles of this interaction as well as for the choice of what will be evoked and the way it should happen and be interpreted.”96 In the glass booth, the former SS officer used several registers of testimony, the overlapping of which was part of his defense strategy. He sought to use the trial to tell his own twisted version of the truth and conceived of himself both as a witness to the past and as a victim of the very Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity for which he was on trial. Therefore, as one of the judges summarized it, “and even if the Court is objective, as I have said to you, that does not mean that we are so naive as to believe everything that every witness, or an accused as a witness, tells us. You can assume that we shall make every effort to sift the truth from the falsehoods.”97 Sixty years after the trial, it is precisely this ambiguity that has allowed us to explore the extent to which the notion and play of different types of testimony was part of Adolf Eichmann’s defense strategy in Jerusalem.

Bibliography Assmann, Aleida. “History, Memory, and the Genre of Memory.” Poetics today. International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication, 27 no. 2 (Summer 2006): 261–274. Assmann, Aleida. “Vier Grundtypen von Zeugenschaft.” In Zeugen und Zeugnisse. Bildungsprojekte zur NS-Zwangsarbeit mit Jugendlichen, edited by Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft,” 12–26. Berlin, 2008 (1st edition: 2007). Bilsky, Liora. “5. The Eichmann Trial: Towards a Jurisprudence of Victims as Eyewitnesses to Genocide.” In The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered, edited by Rebecca Wittmann, 104–122. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. Bourdieu, Pierre. “La délégation et le fétichisme politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 52–53 (June 1984): 49–55. Bourdieu, Pierre. Sur l’État. Cours au Collège de France, 1989 – 1992. Paris: Seuil, 2012.

 Assmann, “Vier Grundtypen von Zeugenschaft,” 13.  TET, session 106.

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Browning, Christopher R. “Perpetrator Testimony. Another look at Adolf Eichmann.” In Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, 3–36. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Confino, Alon. A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Conze, Vanessa. “Ich schwöre Treue . . .”: der politische Eid in Deutschland zwischen Kaiserreich und Bundesrepublik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020. Dean, Carolyn J. The Moral Witness. Trials and Testimony after Genocide. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Dulong, Renaud. “Qu’est-ce qu’un témoin historique.” Accessed December 20, 2021. http://www.vox-poetica.org/t/articles/dulong.html. Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori, eds. Testimony. Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. London: Routledge, 1992. Foucault, Michel. Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice. Cours de Louvain, 1981. Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2012. Gallus, Manfred. Gläubige Zeiten. Religiosität im Dritten Reich, 65–70. Freiburg – Basel – Wien: Herder, 2021. Goda, Norman, J.W., ed. Rethinking Holocaust Justice. Essays across Disciplines. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Alcan, 1925. Halbwachs, Maurice, La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950 (1st edition 1925). Hartog, François. “The Presence of the Witness.” In Testimony/Bearing Witness. Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture, edited by Krämer, Sybille and Weigel, Sigrid, 3–16. London – New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Klemperer, Victor. The Language of the Third Reich. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006 (1st English edit.: 1957). Originally published in LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii. Notizbuch eines Philologen, translated in English by Martin Brady (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1947). Krämer, Sybille and Sigrid Weigel, ed. “Introduction: Converging the Yet-Separate Theoretical Discourses of Testimony Studies” to Testimony/Bearing Witness. Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture, ix-xli. London – New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. Laak, Dirk van and Dirk Rose, ed. Schreibtischtäter. Begriff- Geschichte – Typologie. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018. Lindeperg, Sylvie and Annette Wieviorka, ed. Le moment Eichmann. Paris: Albin Michel, 2016. Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Michman, Dan. “Täteraussagen und Geschichtswissenschaft. Der Fall Dieter Wisliceny und der Entscheidungsprozess zur “Endlösung.”” In Deutsche, Juden, Völkermord. Der Holocaust als Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Jürgen Matthäus and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, 205–22. Hamburg: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006. Popper, Robert. “History and Development of the Accused’s Right to Testify.” Law Quarterly, 4 (1962): 454–471. Rassinier, Paul. Le mensonge d’Ulysse. Paris: France Libre, 1998.

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Richmond, Thomas. “The Perpetrators’ Testimonies in Shoah’.” The Journal of Holocaust Education, 5 no. 1 (Summer 1996): 61–83. Schmitz-Berning, Cornelia. “Gottgläubig.” In Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus, 281–283. Berlin – New York: de Guyter, 2007 (1st edit.: 1997). Stangneth, Bettina. Eichmann before Jerusalem. The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, trans. Ruth Martin. New York: Knopf, 2014. Strecker, Reinhard-M., ed. Dr. Hans Globke. Aktenauszüge, Dokumente. Hamburg: Rütten & Loening, 1961. Weigel, Sigrid. “Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft, Klage und Anklage. Die Geste des Bezeugens in der Differenz von identity politics, juristischem und historiographischem Diskurs.” In Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft. Jahrbuch des Einstein Forums 1999, 111–135. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2000.

Joan Ramon Resina

The Witness’s Brew. On Imposture and Impostor Hunting Eh, un’impostura de la gente plebeia! Don Giovanni

The Incentive to Delude If Donald Trump’s presidency encouraged a linguistic trend, it was the use and overuse of the word “fake.” From fake news to fake votes, fake products and fake people, the idea of the false rose to prominence, as did the art of the scam. Concern with the inauthentic is not new by any means. Earlier times were acquainted with the counterfeiter and with the swindler, and before those with the forger, the picaro and the rogue. Common to all these manifestations of the spurious called forth by the power of illusion is the idea of imposture, the passing of something or someone for that which they are not. Impersonation has existed since ancient times, as the Biblical story of Esau and Jacob shows. It was not uncommon in the Middle Ages. The case of Martin Guerre, brilliantly studied by Natalie Zemon Davis,1 illustrates the impostor’s ability to take in an entire village and raises questions about the inadvertence of the spouse, who lived intimately with the impostor for years before the real Martin turned up. Although personality theft was a crime and the bogus Martin paid for it with his life, the words “impostor” and “imposture” emerged with modernity, suggesting semantic specialization to stress the awareness of the social aspects of impersonation. According to the OED, these two words first occur in English in 1586 and 1537 respectively. In the Romanic languages they appear at roughly the same time. Based on these dates, it has been suggested that concern with false identity was a byproduct of the discovery of the individual in the Renaissance.2 It is certain at any rate that the early

 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).  Tobias B. Hug, Impostures in Early Modern England. Representations and Perceptions of Fraudulent Identities (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), 2. Joan Ramon Resina, Professor of Iberian Studies and Comparative Literature, Stanford University, USA https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-008

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modern age was obsessed with deceit, disguise, and illusion. Castiglione, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Calderón de la Barca were all fascinated by disguise and pretense. Cervantes belabored the notion of fraudulent identity to defend the copyright on his character Don Quixote when an imitator, the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, sought to exploit the success of the book by launching a sequel, which in turn motivated Cervantes to write a second part to debunk the imposture. In the second part, Don Quixote is recognized and acclaimed as the genuine one by other characters, although he is no more a knight errant than the windmills he fought in the first part were giants. What makes Don Quixote intriguing is not the contrast between madness and common sense, but the suspicion that, as he oscillates between delusion and good sense, he is aware of not being who he says he is. And yet, after every misadventure, he launches forward with willful conviction in his pipedream. Don Quixote is ridiculous because his imposture fails to meet the standards of credibility. Only Sancho Panza is taken in by his master’s antics, aided by the florid rhetoric the latter has culled from chivalric fiction. But Sancho is an ignorant peasant impressed by the hidalgo’s oratory and made gullible by ambition. As Judge Gerald Sparrow said: “There would of course be no swindlers if there was no greed on the part of the public. Public cupidity is what keeps fraud alive . . . .”3 But neither is Don Quixote an outright swindler nor Sancho particularly avaricious, although in point of ambition they are both equally extravagant. If Don Quixote envisions conquering islands, Sancho dreams of governing them. With this snare, the false knight drags the false squire across Spain. This example shows one of the rules of imposture: impostors succeed when they play up to society’s expectations. Pandering to a broadly shared desire is key to the impostor’s ability to deceive. Impostures differ in their aim, but they often involve crossing a social threshold to satisfy an inner need or compensate for a psychological deficiency. Imposture has been analyzed with reference to Erving Goffman’s idea of the presentation of the self, but it can also be understood anthropologically in terms of Arnold Van Gennep’s rituals of elevation of status. Taking into account a society’s distribution of status according to real or symbolic power goes a long way toward determining the types of imposture most likely to emerge in it. As nineteenthcentury historian Jacob Burckhardt stated: “Even the forger, once recognized as such, can by his very forgery, with the purpose he intended to serve, involuntarily provide very valuable information” (10). Information, in the first place, about the character of the forger, but also about the incentives that motivate him and the limitations that prevent most individuals from crossing the threshold beyond which

 Egon Larsen, The Deceivers. Lives of the Great Impostors (New York: Roy Publishers, 1966), 10.

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personal credentials are no longer secure. Impostors transgress that threshold, revealing its gaps by exploiting the confusion of identities or even living the confusion as their genuine self-identity. For an imposture to succeed, there must be a social “slot” for it. An impostor satisfies an expectation and simultaneously disappoints it. As Tobias B. Hug put it: “While imposture gives us an idea of certain social roles, their appropriate behavioral codes as well as their social boundaries, it reflects too another dimension: the tension and ‘permanent duality’ between individual and society which Emile Durkheim described.”4 This means that, while impostors tend to incorporate the most rewarding principles of social behavior in their appearance, they are all the more castigated for it once they are unmasked. Although rogues have often enjoyed a degree of understanding and even popularity, it is by no means certain that the impostor who holds up a mirror to society invites more sympathy than his victims.5 Or does he?

Forging the Witness The last two decades of the twentieth century took place under the sign of genocide. In the wake of the Holocaust, decolonization struggles and the Civil Rights movement, news of atrocities around the world rattled people’s ethical imaginations. In the 1980s, the genre of “Testimonio” emerged in Latin American studies with the publication of the autobiographical I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), a work dictated to anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray by the K’iche’ activist, who describes atrocities committed against her people during Guatemala’s thirty-sixyear-long civil war. The popularity of this work led to Menchú being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, significantly on the five hundredth anniversary of the start of the colonization of the Americas by Castile. Seven years and several awards later, Menchú’s reputation was shaken when anthropologist David Stoll found out that she had altered elements about her life, family, and village to meet the publicity needs of the guerrilla movement. The accusation implied that her work was, to some extent, a piece of propaganda. As Stoll put it: “Aside from being a life story, however, I, Rigoberta Menchú was a version of events with specific political objectives.”6 In his onsite investigations, Stoll found not just deliberate

 Hug, Impostures, 4.  Larsen, The Deceivers, 10.  David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999), 3.

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inaccuracies but also that her stance in favor of the guerrilla was not shared by many among the indigenous population. Her story was not really “the story of all poor Guatemalans,” nor was her experience “the reality of a whole people,”7 as she famously alleged at the beginning of the book. Her story, in other words, was not intended for the people she claimed to represent but for those in the developed world who were eager for an icon that embodied all they knew or thought they knew about the continuity between the destruction of indigenous cultures by European colonizers and the ravages of present-day capitalism on peasant populations. As a member of an indigenous family who had suffered violence and as a woman, Rigoberta possessed the mark of the thrice oppressed. Stoll explained the success of her self-presentation as the combined effect of familiarity with historical truths and an excess of intention smuggled inside those truths: One reason Rigoberta’s story achieved such credibility is that, to anyone familiar with how native people have been dispossessed by colonialism, it sounded all too familiar. Her experiences were an amazing microcosm of the wider processes that over the past five hundred years have taken the land of indigenous people, exploited their labor, and reduced them to second-class citizens in their own countries. Standing in for European colonizers were their contemporary heirs, the Spanish-speaking whites and mestizos known as ladinos.8

The fact that Guatemalan peasants faced severe problems did not by itself substantiate Menchú’s representation of the guerrilla as a peasant uprising. But the willingness of Western intellectuals to apprehend Central American politics in those terms could result in the dubious standard of responsibility “that it is enough to identify some person or group as representing the oppressed, then refrain from contradicting them.”9 A similar disinclination to contradict, let alone challenge the status of a representative victim explains the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski. In 1995, German publishing house Suhrkamp published his Fragments, Memories of a Wartime Childhood, and the book was quickly translated into twelve other languages. In this memoir of his infancy, Wilkomirski claimed that he had been born to a Jewish family in Letland in 1939 and in November 1941, at the age of three, had witnessed the massacre of Jews in Riga. Having lost his family, he was interned in the Majdanek and Auschwitz camps, and after the liberation he was sent to an orphanage in Switzerland, where he was adopted by the prosperous Dössekker family and taken into their home in Zurich. Published in the heyday of the Holocaust cultural industry, Wilkomirski’s account of childhood spent in the extermination camps brought him visibility and a

 Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú, 3.  Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú, 5.  Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú, 12.

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series of awards, among them the National Jewish Book Award in the US, the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in the UK, and the Prix de Mémoire de la Shoah in France. It all went gloriously for three years: reviewers were deferential, Holocaust historians praised the book’s testimonial value, and Wilkomirski, showered with honors, went around telling his story to tearful audiences. Success lasted until August 1998, when Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried showed that Bruno Dössekker, the pretended Binjamin Wilkomirski, was born Bruno Grosjean on 12 February 1941, too late to have any memory of the Riga massacres, and not in Latvia but in Switzerland. Soon after his birth, his unmarried mother had placed him in an orphanage, where he spent the war years until he was adopted by the Dössekkers in 1945. He was not Jewish either, something no one had bothered to ascertain.

Enric Marco Comes on Stage Ten years after Bruno Dössekker, formerly Bruno Grosjean, launched his career as Binjamin Wilkomirski, a similar case came to light in Spain. Enric Marco was not the first impersonator of a concentration camp survivor to be unmasked in that country. A few months earlier, Antonio Pastor Martínez had been exposed. Yet Marco’s exposure gained him a notoriety commensurate with the fame he had enjoyed during the previous years. What was so different about this case that sent ripples through the media, earning Marco the attention of documentarists and of a writer of bestselling fiction? Marco was neither a third world native nor a peasant or a woman. Neither was he Jewish or pretended to be. And yet, although an ordinary citizen, a retired mechanic, he had maintained the status of camp survivor for years with striking success. By forging a camp registration document to usurp the identity of a real Catalan inmate, he had gained admission to Amical Mauthausen, the Spanish association of deportees and survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Once there, he had wiggled his way up to the presidency. In that role, he had given interviews and countless talks in high schools, TV channels, radio stations and other venues, sometimes several in a day, culminating in an address to Spanish Parliament on January 27, 2005, where his oratorical skills and inventive daring elicited emotional responses from deputies. Then, on May 5, 2005, at the height of his glory Marco’s fictive persona came crushing down. It was only two days before the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen. Spain’s president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had announced his attendance to the ceremony, and for the first time a Spanish deportee was going to deliver the general address in the name of all deportees. The person chosen was

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Enric Marco, and the man who stopped him in the nick of time was an inconspicuous historian named Benito Bermejo. Four years later, Marco was given an opportunity to tell the story of his imposture in the documentary Ich bin Enric Marco, directed by Santiago Fillol and Lucas Vermal. In the film Marco is given free rein to produce himself through speech and gesticulation, including long stretches of silence in what appears to be a struggle for self-revelation. Although there are moments of dialog, the film makes the impression of a long soliloquy. The emerging story could be regarded as an alternative lie, an attempt at self-exculpation through a more humble though still unmistakable insistence on the victim’s role, this time assembled from an admixture of the fallout of his imposture and elements of biographical truth. As when he asserts: “Enric Marco did not lie, even though he was a liar.”10 Or when he proposes: “Let them not believe me, but they ought to believe the things I have said. I never lied.” Or when he insists on a parallelism between his experience as Gastarbeiter in Nazi Germany within the frame of an agreement between the Franco Government and the Third Reich and the experience of concentration camp deportees. The lynchpin for this presumptive comparison is his brief detention at Gestapo headquarters in Kiel and the time subsequently spent in the city’s prison. The fallacy turns on a tortuous syllogism, which runs like this: Nazis sent their prisoners to concentration camps. I was a prisoner in Nazi Germany, consequently I was in a concentration camp. In his own words: “I identified myself greatly with all of this [the fate of camp inmates] to the point of feeling it as my own, perhaps because my experience was similar. But in spite of all, this [Flossenbürg] is still my concentration camp and that of my comrades.” Marco’s logic operated through condensation and displacement of memories, exactly as the dream process. He had wondered into his lie as into a dream, and once there he condensed the stories (real and imagined) of survivors that he had picked up during years of research on the concentrationary universe. Post facto, everyone agreed that he had been a hyperreal inmate. In interviews and public addresses he endowed the experience of the camp with clear, well defined edges. In the documentary “Memory of the Holocaust” (2004), he describes in sensory detail the thick, suffocating air of human bodies packed next to each other in the barrack. The fact that he was never at a loss for words to express what real inmates always had difficulty organizing into a coherent narrative should have made people wary. But no one mistrusted the stylized, sonorous language and the discourse full of commonplaces from bad Spanish literature so uncharacteristic

 The translation of quotations, unless otherwise indicated, is mine.

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of the witness community. In the documentary, journalist Carme Vinyoles, who with her colleague Pau Lanao had interviewed Marco back in the glorious days, admits that they should have been more suspicious, but they weren’t because he “gave us in the media everything we wanted,” the ready-made stories that fitted their expectations like a glove. At a certain point, the tale’s coherence had taken over, and the memories of the “real” Marco had evaporated in the brightness of the historical memory. The documentary shows him undertaking a trip to the “places of memory” in search of his real self. On his way to Metz, the city where Spanish workers were relayed to their German destinations in 1941, we hear him singing “Lili Marlene” to himself, the way Marcel unlocks his memories with the madeleine in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Overlooking the Metz train station, he talks about the difficulty of separating his memories, ordering them, and threading them into a logical sequence. The blockage is rather ironical for someone who had hitherto accomplished prodigious feats of recollection. Going back to Kiel after all those years is presented as a search for time lost. But time has elapsed for good, and places bear only a deceptive resemblance to themselves. Standing in the courtyard of Kiel’s prison, Marco appears perplexed; then he breaks his silence with these ambiguous words: “They have taken things away from me. I should have recovered all that.” The words are ambiguous, because it is not clear whether by “things” he means the material support of his memories or the honors that his deceit had earned him. Nor is the meaning of “all that” any clearer. Is he suggesting that he ought to own up his lie and take control of his “real” memories, or, to the contrary, is he obdurately vindicating an ongoing right to the tribute he had usurped? The latter appears to be the case. At various moments he pitches himself as founder of the historical memory of the Flossenbürg camp – “No one remembered Flossenbürg” – and as the vindicator of the Spaniards who died in the camp: “I hanged the Spanish flag to remember the fourteen Spaniards who died there.” As it turns out, more than fourteen Spaniards perished in Flossenbürg, although at the time Marco could not have known this. In another tactical mistake, he, a self-styled maquis and anti-Franco resister, had chosen the monarchical rather than the republican flag to honor the victims. But to Marco these details were irrelevant compared to the assistance he had rendered to “his comrades.” He was still one of them; the fact that he hadn’t been in a concentration camp was just a matter of chance. Is he sorry for what he has done?, he is asked. “Apologize? What for?” he asks by way of an answer. “For the consequences? For those I am sorry indeed.” Once again, the impostor treads a very thin line between irreconcilable meanings. That is his game. What consequences is he referring to? The offence inflicted on the survivors? Exploiting their pain and traumas for personal gain? Misleading people, school

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children in particular, into admiring him as a courageous witness? Humiliating the Amical Mauthausen and damaging its mission? Causing pain to his own family for deluding them along with everyone else? Or was he thinking only of the consequences to himself, the dishonor, shame and credibility lost beyond recall, of the forfeited respect of friends and acquaintances, of the dissipated prestige and the blow to his outsized vanity? The revulsion that Marco’s lie elicited in people who had admired him prevented them from sharing his point of view. Time and again, he insisted that the lie was a matter of the witness’s legitimacy, not of the validity of the account. As the patrimony of millions of victims, the experiences of the camps were, so to speak, universal; they were out there, ready for the taking through sincere identification. If he had not been deported to a camp, he had nonetheless been incarcerated in Germany during the war on charges of conspiring against the constitution of the Third Reich. But in this respect too, the facts could be embroidered. Whereas Marco claimed that he had been court martialed, in reality he had been tried in a civil court and released. The judge had dismissed the charges following a favorable statement by Marco’s supervisor and the recanting of two Spanish witnesses who had accused him of trying to recruit them for a communist plot. In his own mind, Marco had never subverted the truth; he had merely “borrowed” it. “Misappropriate” was not a verb he was willing to use for his deception. Digging his heels in what others might judge a semantic illusion, he denied having ever lied or committed a serious offence: “What crime did I commit?” he asks at the end of the documentary. Many years earlier, Erwin Goffman had furnished a clue to Marco’s refusal to admit having injured the truth: Sometimes when we ask whether a fostered impression is true or false, we really mean to ask whether or not the performer is authorized to give the performance in question, and are not primarily concerned with the actual performance itself. When we discover that someone with whom we have dealings is an impostor and out-and-out fraud, we are discovering that he did not have the right to play the part he played, that he was not an accredited incumbent of the relevant status. We assume that the impostor’s performance, in addition to the fact that it misrepresents him, will be at fault in other ways, but often his masquerade is discovered before we can detect any other difference between the false performance and the legitimate one which it simulates.11

Marco stresses this very point when he asks whether his discourse injured history in any way. The question is rhetorical, of course, because he had communicated the historical facts except for one negligible detail: that he had never been interned in an extermination camp. But how could one individual among millions

 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 59.

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make any difference? Had he not been within a hair’s breadth of being deported to a concentration camp? He had merely tweaked the truth, otherwise without distorting the historical narrative. It was only a matter of his legitimacy as witness, but in this regard too circumstances had been propitious. Marco’s performance had been made possible and, in a way, inevitable by the general fascination with witnesses’ accounts. For a while he had succeeded not so much by adapting his autobiography to the experiences of deportees, for he had embellished them to a degree that should have caused disbelief – his description of beating a SS at a game of chess, calling that victory his Stalingrad, was reckless even by his own standards –, but by meeting the emotional requirements of his audiences. By and large, crowds are stirred by causes bearing a social stamp of approval, and this was finally the case with the survivors of Nazi camps after half a century of neglect in Spain. As Tobias Hug observes: “Successful impostors might even be seen as a paradigm of the ‘perfect’ acquisition of the behavioral codes of the culture into which they have temporarily intruded.”12

In the Eye of the Beholder Marco’s imposture came very close to succeeding, or rather it succeeded fantastically for a time, soaring like a balloon before it was punctured two days from its apotheosis. Although it crashed down in the end, a few years later Marco’s career rose from its ashes to enjoy a second life (and a second death) in The Impostor (2014), a novel by Javier Cercas. Unintendedly, his fraud ended up serving as a refracting medium for the author’s self-analysis, Marco playing the part of a screen-image for the analyst’s unconscious. Ostensibly a study of Marco’s hoax, the novel turns out to be an exercise in self-fashioning. So much so that, when read literally, the title page of the book declares its true subject: “El impostor Javier Cercas.” The English edition, however, obscures this declaration at the threshold by inverting the title-author order: “Javier Cercas The Impostor.” Grandson of a local Falangist leader who supported the military coup and fought on the side of Franco, Cercas first became known for his novel Soldiers of Salamis (2001), published at a time of renewed interest in the Spanish civil war. Under pretense of recovering the memory of the defeated, Cercas (who lends his name to the central character and narrator) not only conveys the message that it is noble to forgive; he promotes the notion that it is even better to forget. His hero is not an Achilles or an Ajax fighting for the legitimate cause, but an anonymous  Hug, Impostures, 6.

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militiaman, sentimentalized in the act of dancing to a patriotic march while holding a broom as dancing partner. At the peak of narrative tension, this mock-epic character, who later receives the surname Miralles, helps a high-profile Falangist escape from the firing squad. A half century later the acquital is replicated when the aged militiaman, tracked down by Cercas, refuses to remember, conveying the moral of reconciliation through oblivion. Here if anywhere the medium is the message. To fully understand the novel’s implications, it is important not to lose sight of Cercas’s biographical relation to the Falangist victors. Nor should his apparently neutral injunction to forget be detached from the offhand reflection that the Falangists won the war but lost literary history, as if accountability for political crimes were a matter of poetic justice. With such calculated frivolity Cercas hoodwinked a large readership, but could not delude the few alert critics who recognized his engagement in the historical revisionism that was emerging in Spain at the time, promoted by a new reactionary breed of historians and critics – Andrés Trapiello is mentioned in the novel. Cercas collaborated in the rehabilitation of fascism by recalling Falangist poet Rafael Sánchez Mazas from oblivion to make him not just an object of mercy in the novel but also an object of interest in the real world. In his review of Soldiers of Salamis, Josep Maria Lluró asked the basic question: “What is the nature of testimony in this novel?” adding: “As fiction, the reasonable answer is that there is no testimony; but by playing with the trompe-l’oeil of the false truth of narrated history, there is certainly testimony. The issue is to ascertain its nature.”13 Clear-sighted as to Cercas’s gambit, Lluró concluded that the book opened a route for and in fact encouraged the revisionist debate about the Spanish Civil War in order to justify the past. Another critic, Ken Benson, called attention to Cercas’s technique for producing the impression that the author does not “lie” or “invent,” but narrates from experience.14 Burdening the reader with the impossible task of distinguishing between what is invented and what is actually lived,15 Cercas obtains the same result as Marco with his theatrical skills. Few readers of that novel understood it as a roundabout resolution of an Oedipal conflict. Cercas displays the ambivalent emotions typical for the offspring of fascist families socialized in a disapproving environment. In Girona, where Cercas grew up, Falangism was nothing short of disgraceful. The contradiction between the family’s history and the child’s desire to fit in

 Josep Maria Lluró, “Novela para una liquidación,” Lateral, 88 (2002), 8.  Ken Benson, “Fronteras entre ficción y dicción: Rosa Regás, Enrique Vila-Matas, Justo Navarro y Javier Cercas,” in El columnismo de escritores españoles (1975–2005), ed. Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer (Madrid: Verbum, 2006), 102.  Benson, “Fronteras entre ficción y dicción,” 103.

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the peer group, between identifying with the Falangist grandfather and the father, himself a functionary in the Francoist administration, and rejecting their political ideology, required constant and possibly painful negotiation. Soldiers of Salamis was a balancing act: the Falangist is saved and recovers his social authority, but moral honors are rendered to the defeated in exchange for their amnesia. The proposition was a historical imposture, but the times were ripe for impostors. Unlike Germany, where children and grandchildren fearfully scrutinized their families for any tainting association with National Socialism, in Spain blurring the past allowed the heirs of Francoism to don the new democratic apparel and flaunt unimpeachable constitutional credentials. As Colm Tóibín put it in his review of Soldiers of Salamis: “In Spain, in those years, you did not need to kill your father, merely create a new image for him, a new agenda and cheer him on his way.”16 And Enzo Traverso, apropos of a more recent novel, in which Cercas goes even further in removing the taint of fascism from the Falangist hero,17 writes: “In terms of public use of the past, Cercas’s literary non-fictions or ‘real stories,’ fuel the cause of historians who, by emphasizing the clairvoyance of an ‘amnesiac’ transition, establish an equivalence between the Popular Front of 1936 and Francoism, thus postulating the benefits of an anti-anti-Francoist liberal democracy.”18 The moment Miralles, the “good” transferential father, advises the narrator to drop the Civil War into the dustbin of history, the Francoist father is acquitted, and the work of mourning comes to an end. But whereas the fictional Cercas finds peace in amnesia, the real-life Cercas knows that failing to address the Oedipal conflict produces false closure. He also knows that to argue for transcending history is to endorse an imposture, as blatant as his quest for the ultimate truth of the impostor by implacably “peeling the onion” of Marco’s persona.19 Cercas is fully aware that, as in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” the best way to hide a secret is to place it in plain sight. Enric Marco’s case was a windfall for Cercas, who could use it to hide behind the false anti-fascist to call into question the value of testimony. Although Cercas ostensibly undertakes the analysis of Marco’s self-aggrandizement, what strikes the reader most is the narrator’s narcissism. This quality had already featured in Soldiers of Salamis, but now it obtruded in the narrative to the point of interfering with the analysis of the central character. However, this may obey a compositional logic less straightforward than meets the eye. Once it is

 Colm Tóibín, “Return to Catalonia,” The New York Review, October 7, 2004, 37.  Lord of All the Dead, trans. Anne McLean (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2019).  Enzo Traverso, Singular Pasts. The “I” in Historiography, trans. Adam Schoene (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), 117.  Javier Cercas, The Impostor, trans. Frank Wynne (London: MacLehose Press, 2017), 103.

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understood that Cercas’s purpose was not to unmask the already unmasked Enric Marco, but to exorcise his own demons, the self-infatuation makes perfect sense. For example, in this pseudocritical statement: Unlike great novelists, who in exchange for a factual lie deliver a profound, disturbing, elusive, irreplaceable moral and universal truth, Marco delivers only a sickly, insincere, mawkishly sentimental story that from the historical or moral point of view is pure kitsch, pure lies; unlike Marco, great novelists make it possible, through their paradoxical truth fashioned from lies – a truth that does not hide reality, but reveals it – to know and recognize the real, to know ourselves and recognize ourselves, to gaze into the reflective waters of Narcissus without dying.20

“Mawkishly sentimental” is a suitable description for Soldiers of Salamis. Furthermore, contrasting the author’s narratological sophistication to Marco’s crudeness, the quoted passage distills anxiety about the status of Cercas’s own work. Reckoning Marco a bad narrator (although others had described him as a superb raconteur) and unfairly comparing him to great novelists, Cercas implicitly put himself in the latter’s company. His stories, like theirs, are life-jackets; they help him to know himself without drowning in his own reflection. Lies, he says with the kitschy morality he resents in Marco, are not pretty in life although they are nice in novels – all novels, he adds, except in his, which is pure, unadulterated truth.21 Fair enough, if it were not a novelistic cliché.

The Impostor on the Couch Cercas constructs a playful “da-fort” game around his obsession with Marco, son semblable, son frère. Unabashedly comparing himself to Cervantes, Cercas appeals to this hall-of-fame refraction to convince us, and perhaps also himself, that the salvific mission undertaken on Marco’s behalf answers to his own need to reconcile his self to his public image.22 “Am I trying to save myself by saving Marco?” he asks repeatedly (396), and the question’s recurrence – iteration is a conspicuous trait of this book – takes on the aspect of a compulsion to repeat. Although he shows Marco resisting his exhortations to avow the truth in meetings reminiscent of psychoanalytical sessions, it is Cercas who drags his feet when cajoled by Mario Vargas Llosa and others to take up the subject of imposture. His account of how he

 Cercas, The Impostor, 205.  Cercas, The Impostor, 205.  Cercas, The Impostor, 396.

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came to write the story bears all the marks of resistance to an unwelcome revelation. The sudden, compulsive decision to write about Marco looks suspiciously like symbolic displacement and full-fledged transference. It was not intellectual interest in the case, he admits, but irresistible inclination, “as though I sensed in Marco some profound connection. This worried me; it also produced a feeling of vertigo, an inchoate dread.”23 The vertigo prevailed, at least momentarily, and four years elapsed before Cercas sat down to work on the book. In the meantime, the subject, largely forgotten by the public, lost no significance for him until Marco became the symbolic object of a neurosis. “I had never completely forgotten Marco, never forgotten that he was there, in the background, disturbing, mesmerizing and dangerous, like a grenade that, sooner or later, I would have to throw so it did not blow up in my hands, like a story that, sooner or later, I would have to tell in order to be free of it.”24 Cercas describes his mood at the time in terms of clinical depression, and his decision to write the book as a therapeutic attempt to overcome his selfdiagnostic: “it was better to try than to carry on trudging through the slough of despond.”25 Here there is no emotional distance between the novelist and his anti-hero. Marco is a projective screen for a threat that Cercas feels lurking in the backroom of his mind or in the magazine of a weapon (the alternative meaning of recámara, which the translator renders innocuously as “background”), enticing and dangerous like a repressed memory. His obsessive-compulsive engagement with Marco finds a narcissistic outlet in projection, as if Cercas were fighting his own reflection in a mirror. This self-conscious reflexivity is stated in the title of the novel’s second part: “The Novelist of Himself” (151). Ostensibly about Marco’s biography, this part’s real subject is the writer’s self-seeking narcissism. Cercas’s comments on kitsch can be read in this way, as well as his considerations on the import of lies in Plato, Montaigne, Voltaire, and Kant. The perfunctory display of philosophical knowingness resembles Marco’s compression of Holocaust readings into his pseudo-testimonial yarns. One instance of philosophical kitsch is when Cercas helps himself to Kant’s example of the killer at the door to refute Marco’s claim that his testimony may be false as testimony but valid as historical truth. Cercas enlists Kant in support of an absolutism that no longer refers to moral obligation but extends to judging error immoral, an extreme never intended by Kant or contemplated by the categorical imperative. Taking exception at Marco’s mistake about the existence of a gas chamber in Flossenbürg – a factual error that should

 Cercas, The Impostor, 16.  Cercas, The Impostor, 28–29.  Cercas, The Impostor, 29.

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have flagged the imposture – Cercas feels authorized to emit the following verdict: “This sort of factual error is much more important than it might appear, because a single fabricated ‘fact’ turns a true story into a fiction, and just as a single germ can result in an epidemic, that ‘fact’ can contaminate all the stories that follow with fiction.”26 Such stringency not only turns many a historical work into fiction, but degrades his own “fiction of the real” to the status of a historical fake. One by no means innocent factual mistake in Soldiers of Salamis will suffice to make the point. Of a higher grade than Marco’s blunder about the gas chamber in Flossenbürg is Cercas’s description of Miralles as a militiaman. By January 1939, when the event that motivates the novel allegedly took place, the republican militias had long ceased to exist, forcibly integrated into the communist-led Republican army. Unlike Marco, who was under the impression that all Nazi camps featured a gas chamber, Cercas deliberately mislead his readers with regard to his hero’s ideological ascription. Narratively, Miralles would have been less attractive as a soldier in a communist unit. But romanticized as a free-spirited, warweary anarchist, he could be set up as an object of post-Cold War admiration. And the “mistake” was compounded by turning a Catalan militiaman into a Spanish patriot and erasing the national character of the war. In the novel’s schmaltziest moment, Miralles is shown dancing to “Suspiros de España” (Sighs of Spain), a military march to which lyrics were added in 1938 for Benito Perojo’s film of the same title. Dancing ecstatically to this music on the eve of exile, Miralles communes with its patriotic nostalgia. Thus, it is not the narrative logic that necessitates the scene, but the song’s iconic motif that calls for the scene. The point is to show that a “good republican” feels the “mortal pain” of separation from the “glorious” fatherland (in the song’s lyrics) as staunchly as the staunchest Falangist. What makes the scene outrageously fraudulent is the emotional hijacking of a Catalan soldier on the verge of losing his fatherland. Cercas turns Miralles into a vehicle for the maudlin propaganda of his enemies. As Philippe Di Folco remarks: “In fact, the impostor does not make the mistakes of a simple liar or the errors of the thoughtless because he knows: who he is talking to; why he speaks; from where he speaks; that he must sustain his role as long as possible.”27 In the same way, Cercas knew that he was writing for an audience eager for the tale of a semi-tragic hero, whose victory in defeat consists in substituting spontaneous generosity for ideological revenge. Foregrounding Miralles’s compassion in implicit contrast to the barbaric reprisals of the Falangists permitted Cercas to affect impartiality. Highlighting the soldier’s act of mercy could easily be, and was in

 Cercas, The Impostor, 187.  Philippe Di Folco, Petit traité de l’imposture (Paris: Larousse, 2011), 26.

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fact, mistaken for sympathy with the loyalist side in the war. Narratively, the “mistake” made sense. Had Cercas stressed the soldier’s ideology or even the cause for which he fought, he could hardly have used this episode as a parable for the amnesty of Francoist crimes through social amnesia. The confectioner’s sentimentality at work in this scene spreads to the entire novel, turning it into historical kitsch as defined by Cercas: What is kitsch? First and foremost, it is an artistic term that implies a debasement – or at least a significant devaluation – of genuine art; but it is also a negation of everything that is unacceptable in human existence, by veiling it behind a façade of sentimentalism, superficial beauty and affected virtue.28

Marco had been discredited long before Cercas turned to him, or rather on him, but until then no one had thought to analyze his case from an aesthetic point of view. Cercas did, retaining nonetheless the moral passion. Under pretext of psychological scrutiny, he tears Marco apart like a Maenad, going well beyond the public scandal to produce a moralistic portrait of the quintessential impostor. Abhorrence and conceit concur in turning an alleged piece of investigative journalism into novelistic kitsch with numerous melodramatic reversals. For instance, Cercas’s critique of Marco’s narrative style reads like a description of his own incursion in the novel of historical memory: “narratives larded with sentiment, with theatrical effects and melodramatic moments, unsparing in their bad taste but oblivious to the complexity and the ambiguity of truth, starring a papiermâché hero capable of coolly maintaining his dignity when faced with a Nazi brute, or a Falangist brute.”29 This description of a papier-mâché hero applies to Miralles as much as to Marco. The militiaman’s cardboard ideality was a perfect screen to preserve the Falangist grandfather from sitting on the bench at the court of historical memory. Behind Miralles’s absolutory gesture stood the Falangist’s grandson and the Francoist’s son, eager to submerge the forebearers in the cleansing waters of Lethe. The imposture consisted in making people believe that he was thereby contributing to the historical memory. In self-delusion as grotesque as Marco’s, Cercas advances the claim of having pioneered the vogue for historical memory in Spain. In a revealing dialog with Marco (reminiscent of Miguel de Unamuno’s dispute with Augusto Pérez in Niebla),30 Cercas imagines a reversal, with Marco in the role of accusatorial superego grilling the author with questions. “Who in Spain had ever heard of historical memory when your novel was published?”

 Cercas, The Impostor, 187.  Cercas, The Impostor, 187.  Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988), 277–285.

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asks Marco. And Cercas: “You’re not trying to tell me that my novel is to blame for the apotheosis of historical memory? I’m vain, but I’m not stupid.”31 The last phrase is exact, and it applies to Marco as much as it does to Cercas, who ventriloquizes his subject and invokes poetic license to parry the charge of bad faith. The novelist is allowed to lie; nay, “the novelist has a duty to deceive,”32 he asserts, forgetting his allegation that in this book he is telling “the whole truth.”33 Cercas fails to convince his alter ego, and Marco continues the mirroring game by appealing to his vanity: “You did exactly the same thing I did, you made historical memory fashionable, you helped to create the industry of memory just as I did, more so than I did.”34 At stake in the dialectical attribution and rejection of responsibility is a competitive relation to the historical memory. Just as the “memory industry” allowed Marco’s lie to soar, it was key to Cercas’s literary success. And now he continued to exploit that “industry” under the pretense of denouncing its excesses. The point of the fictitious dialog in a “novel of the real” appears to be the interchangeability of author and character in the shared Unamunian wisdom that “fiction saves, reality kills.”35 What are we to make of this life-saving detour through fiction in a book that purports to put us on guard against the ruses of memory? Cercas introduces the fictional dialog by claiming an exception to the book’s realism. For once, he says, the fiction is his, not Marco’s.36 But the divertimento remains an unjustified interpolation to a text supposedly reporting the unadulterated facts. Its sole connection with any sense of objectivity is Cercas’s declaration that the dialog actually occupied his mind for one day. The reader is assured that the dialog is a literal transcription of the author’s fantasy. It is even dated to produce the desired effet de réel. Yet, although only a daydream, it is, like most dreams, psychologically motivated. Embedded in a text that claims analytical status, the imaginary dispute between author and character is nothing short of narcissistic self-indulgence, a kitschy variation on the psychoanalytical countertransference that occurs when the therapist projects his own emotions onto the analysand. And just as transference blinds the subject of analysis to the origin of his emotions, countertransference deludes the analyst about the source of the resistance he encounters.

     

Cercas, The Impostor, 352. Cercas, The Impostor, 354. Cercas, The Impostor, 361.The translator omits the word “whole” from the original. Cercas, The Impostor, 357. Cercas, The Impostor, 358. Cercas, The Impostor, 349.

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Fiat fictio, pereat memoria “Kitsch,” says Cercas, “is the spontaneous style of the narcissist, the tool he uses in his assiduous attempt to hide reality so as not to know or recognize it, so as not to know or recognize himself.”37 His alleged contribution to the historical memory in Soldiers of Salamis and his denunciations of memory in The Impostor converge in the apology of the status quo, not only in these books but in real life, as Cercas’s increasingly outspoken political averments reveal. Hug points out that “the unmasking of an imposture might reaffirm social boundaries such as with the detection and punishment of criminals.”38 This observation explains not only Cercas’s “unmasking” of the already unmasked Marco, but also his taking advantage of this case to castigate the historical memory movement. A movement that he declares dead – “few people in Spain still remember the so-called historical memory,”39 yet finds it necessary to subvert. To do this he needs to disallow not just the false witness but also the witness as bearer of reliable knowledge. Citing extensively from a previous article of his with the revealing title “The Witness’s Blackmail,” Cercas recoups the stale arguments against memory: its fragility, unreliability, selfishness and convenience.40 But when he pits the orderly, impartial narrative of the historian against the partial, chaotic memory of survivors, Cercas shows his hand. When people throughout Spain found the courage to demand accountability for the crimes of the Franco era, the Francoist establishment reacted by denouncing those long-overdue demands as blackmail and refused to make restitution of any kind. This was not only a time of “lethal risks” stemming from memory41 but also a time of historical revisionism, when neo-Francoist historians enjoyed popularity with best-selling books by the likes of Pío Moa, and the archconservative Real Academia de la Historia elicited a deeply flawed report on the teaching of history in Catalonia as part of an effort to keep the lid on the viewpoint of the subject nationalities.42 Considered against this background, Cercas’s self-appointed mission to debar the witnesses from reclaiming the past revealed troubling implications that time would only confirm. In this context, repeated reference to psychoanalysis throughout the book is less frivolous than it might at

 Cercas, The Impostor, 188.  Hug, Impostures, 5.  Cercas, The Impostor, 302.  Cercas, The Impostor, 278.  Cercas, The Impostor, 298.  Antoni Segura (ed.), Els llibres d’història, l’ensenyament de la història i altres histories (Barcelona: Fundació Jaume Bofill, 2001).

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first appear, because in the hysteria about the rising tide of historical memory it was easy to perceive fear of a return of the repressed. Cercas’s excoriation of witnesses’ accounts clashes with Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s explanation for the worldwide interest in survivor memories. According to Reemtsma, these books are read because of the extreme violence their authors experienced; this is why they are granted interpretative authority.43 But in Cercas’s firstperson novels a mélange of fiction and reportage muddles the referentiality. The author wants both to have his cake and eat it. As fiction, the worldview in his books cannot be challenged, because as Lukács pointed out, fictional worlds are impregnable, there being no model to contrast them with.44 But insofar as Cercas claims the character of reportage for his narratives, they become answerable to the requirements of neutrality and validation by the facts. Blending objectivity and subjectivity, fact and fiction, lands them in the same category as Marco’s discourses, namely in the muddled waters of the historical memory that Cercas denounces as “absurd” and “futile.”45 Aware that “the emphasis on the truth betrays the liar,”46 he tempers his attack on Marco’s personality with the fleeting admission that “I lie. I too attempted to conceal the truth.”47 He is referring to his newfound affection for Marco, a feeling contradicted by the overt hostility expressed throughout the book. Pompously proclaimed a heart-wrenching confession, this dubious affection serves him to deck himself out with a modicum of empathy. As Belinda Cannone writes in Le sentiment d’imposture, “the image that [the impostor] has of himself is split: the impostor hosts, next to (but never coinciding with) his global sentiment about himself, an unattainable double, who he thinks he should be and who acts on him like a permanent reproach.”48 Cercas uses Marco to fashion his own ideal self, feigning a literary destiny on a par with Cervantes’s and, less grandiose albeit not more persuasive, Truman Capote’s. “Just as Alonso Quixano had created Don Quixote and had him perform his lunatic feats so that Cervantes might decipher them, recount them and share them with the world as though Don Quixote and his pen made but one; in short, I was not using Marco as Capote had used Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, it was

 Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Mord am Strand. Allianzen von Zivilisation und Barbarei. Aufsätze und Reden (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998), 229.  Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1974), 11.  Cercas, The Impostor, 298.  Cercas, The Impostor, 292.  Cercas, The Impostor, 326.  Belinda Cannone, Le sentiment d’imposture (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2005), 30–31.

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Marco who was using me the way Alonso Quixano used Cervantes.”49 By reversing the causal relation between author and character, he both gives vent to delusions of greatness and feigns to retract them on the spot. On closer look, though, what is retracted is not the conceit but ownership of the idea. Thereby the thought is preserved, but he tries to erase the fact that it is he who has thought it. “This thought came to me in a second, as the car coasted down La Rabassada. A second later, I tried to forget it.”50 As Di Folco summarizes: “The false elaborates a simulacre of destiny.”51 In this case all the more spurious, since Cercas can only sustain the fraud by generating the illusion that it is the character who uses the author for his own ends. And this legerdemain takes place in a story in which the fiction is supposed to be all Marco’s! Just as Cercas had earlier pleaded oblivion on behalf of the Falangist grandfather, he now deployed mitigation strategies on behalf of Marco while feigning to revile those who played along: “Some seemed to be genuine in their defense of him. Among them there were those who rehashed the arguments used by Marco himself, particularly the argument that his lie was a good lie, or at worst a venial sin, since it had contributed to publicizing truths that needed to be known.”52 Blunting the lie by honoring a “truth” that supposedly needed to be told had been Cercas’s strategy in Soldiers of Salamis. Since then he has learned to relocate responsibility by commissioning others to express his mind. Thus: “There were also people who appended to this a further argument, whereby there were impostors who were much worse than Marco, whose lies triggered wars, suffering and death and whose crimes went unpunished.” Exoneration by comparison is Cercas’s strategy of defense for his great-uncle in Lord of All the Dead, where he transmogrifies a volunteer fascist into an idealist naively fighting someone else’s war. But it is above all with the final plea on behalf of the impostor that he gives away the hoax: “There was no shortage of those who tried to argue that we are all impostors and that, in one way or another, we all reinvent the past, and hence everyone is tainted with Marco’s guilt.”53 With this statement reportage definitively turns into fabulation, the alleged multitudinous opinion failing to veil Cercas’s oft repeated claim of universal imposture. If everyone is dishonest, then no one is, and we are all Marco. In the introduction to Hoaxes, Curtis McDougall wrote: “Lurking in the back of the mind of many a veteran writer is the ambition once in his career to tell the

    

Cercas, The Impostor, 329–30. Cercas, The Impostor, 330. Di Folco, 26. Cercas, The Impostor, 366. Cercas, The Impostor, 367.

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truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as he sees it.54 In The Impostor, Cercas claims to have realized this ambition, formally distinguishing the truthclaim in this book from that of his previous and better known one. “Soldiers of Salamis isn’t a non-fiction novel or a true story,” he says to his alter ego in the fantasized dialog. “The narrator says that it is,” retorts Marco. And Cercas: “But that doesn’t mean that it is. The first thing you have to do when reading a novel is distrust the narrator.”55 By inserting a critique of his earlier novel in a fictional dialog, Cercas preempts criticism of the current book’s truth claim by calling attention to the narrator’s unreliability. Just as Marco’s lie, according to Cercas, infected everything he said and did, his narratorial disclaimer taints every possible truth in the book, including the author’s self-identification with his subject. When Marco, in the fictitious dialog, says to his Nemesis: “That is the truth, Javier. The truth is that you are me,”56 the phrase is meant as a logical fallacy of the same species as Epimenides’s “all Cretans are liars.”

Diffusing the Imposture For all his pretended desire to save Marco by egging him on to strip psychologically, it is Cercas who resists peeling off his own masks as he struggles with the impostor’s riddle.57 His alleged compassion was jolted in real life when Enric Marco turned up in the audience at the literature festival MOT in April 2016, and just as Cercas was beginning to speak about The Impostor rose up and called him a liar. Surprised, the novelist cynically invited “his character” to come on stage and debate with him. On this occasion, as he had in the book, Cercas proffered the logical fallacy that “we are all Marco.” In his opinion, Marco was an exemplar of the general vacuity and gregariousness who had taken to an extreme the universal, selfserving disposition to falsify the past. Ultimately, Marco provided Cercas with an argument against the historical memory by embodying the danger of exceeding epistemological objectives while serving an unjustified cause: Marco launched himself into so-called historical memory, eagerly joined this great movement, used and fostered the industry of memory and allowed himself to be used by it, apparently seeking to face up to his own past and advocating – in fact demanding – that his

   

Curtis Daniel McDougall, Hoaxes (New York: MacMillan, 1940), v. Cercas, The Impostor, 354. Cercas, The Impostor, 364. Cercas, The Impostor, 406.

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country do likewise, when in fact he, and his country, did so only in part, only enough to control without truly confronting the past so it might be used to other ends.58

In Marco, Cercas saw an opportunity to arraign the movement for the recuperation of the historical memory for the equivalent of Stoll’s accusation of partisanship against Rigoberta Menchú’s autobiographical account. Finding out the whole truth about Marco became a pretext for unmasking the fraud of the “so-called historical memory” (again and again Cercas uses “so-called” to suggest that the very concept of historical memory is an imposture). His description of Marco as “the man who lies to hide what he is ashamed of, what makes him different from other people (or what he believes makes him different from other people), the man guilty of the profound crime of always saying Yes,”59 is a self-reflection in the mirror he holds up to his scapegoat. It is Cercas rather than Marco who must have felt different as the son of a Francoist functionary transferred to the culturally Catalan and politically republican city of Girona. Awareness of the family’s Falangist past would have undermined the boy’s selfconfidence growing up among peers with antithetical backgrounds and persuasions. It would have taken him years and writing a few “memory” novels to work out the distress.To some such feeling of discordance with his surroundings he probably owes his insatiable need for approval, which he gratifies by flattering the social and political powers. With a rare instinct for opportunity, Cercas has built his career on the moving sands of political orthodoxy, championing the status quo with the climber’s unerring feelers. In public life, as in his books, he lives out a fantasy of righteousness by proposing and retracting, asserting and disclaiming. Thus, on September 7, 2019, invited by the government of his native Extremadura to deliver the official address during the “citizen” award ceremony at the Roman theater in Merida, Cercas stoked the anti-Catalan sentiment prevalent in this region by gratuitously bringing up the subject of Catalonia’s bid for independence. What effect was he looking for, when in reference to the conflict between his adopted region and the state from which it strove to separate, he alluded to the role of the military unit that had just received one of the “citizen” awards? The timing of Cercas’s seemingly spontaneous captatio benevolentiae is as important as the place of elocution. The ceremony took place shortly after the conclusion of the five-month-long trial of nine Catalan elected politicians and civic leaders, and only five weeks before Spain’s supreme court sentenced them to a combined prison term of over one hundred years. In the ensuing controversy over Cercas’s intention with that speech, he threatened to sue the person who

 Cercas, The Impostor, 407.  Cercas, The Impostor, 408.

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uploaded the video with the provocative fragment of his speech. This sequence captures the moment when, looking at the uniformed general near him, Cercas says that a solution to the situation in Catalonia could be to leave the problem in the hands of his unit. On hearing those words, the military leader nods with eloquent satisfaction. In light of the use that Cercas had made of Marco’s statements, actions and even omissions, his denial of significance in his wink to the armed forces in an ambience of extreme political hostility against Catalans seems disingenuous. As does protesting that his words were taken out of context, when the problem was precisely that there was no acceptable context for inviting an army unit to intervene against the Catalan people’s democratic expression of their will. Although a dispassionate viewing of the sequence allows for the possibility that Cercas’s fawning remark was no more than a rhetorical flourish, the occasion and the addressee certainly made it inappropriate and bespeak a sickly need to court favor. Never was Cercas as close to Marco as in this speech, and nowhere was someone’s inner rift so exposed as his was on that stage, where his efforts to appear at ease brought to mind Cannone’s commiserating insight into the impostor: “Even so, you do not question the enormity of the pain that has generated such a crazy, exhausting endeavor (he had to learn so many things in order to be credible, he had to become an extraordinary specialist even in the details).”60 And one wonders which of the two, Cercas or Marco, this definition suits the most.

Bibliography Benson, Ken. “Fronteras entre ficción y dicción: Rosa Regás, Enrique Vila-Matas, Justo Navarro y Javier Cercas.” In El columnismo de escritores españoles (1975–2005), edited by Alexis Grohmann and Maarten Steenmeijer, 97–122. Madrid: Verbum, 2006. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Greeks and Greek Civilization. Translated by Sheila Stern. Edited by Oswyn Murray. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Cannone, Belinda. Le sentiment d’imposture. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2005. Cercas, Javier. “Discurso ciudadano del Día de Extremadura.” Accessed 7 September, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqTIgVtsLv8&t=1041s. Cercas, Javier. The Impostor. Translated by Frank Wynne. London: MacLehose Press, 2017. Cercas, Javier. Lord of All the Dead. Translated by Anne McLean. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2019. Cercas, Javier. Soldiers of Salamis. Translated by Anne McLean. New York: Vintage, 2020. Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Di Folco, Philippe. Petit traité de l’imposture. Paris: Larousse, 2011.

 Cannone, 152.

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Fillol, Santiago and Lucas Vermal. Ich bin Enric Marco. Spain. Umbilical Produccions, Prodimac S.L., 2009. Gibbons, Fiachra and Stephen Moss. “Fragments of a Fraud.” The Guardian, October 14, 1999. Accessed 12 January, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/oct/15/features11.g24 Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959. Hug, Tobias B. Impostures in Early Modern England. Representations and Perceptions of Fraudulent Identities. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009. Larsen, Egon. The Deceivers. Lives of the Great Impostors. New York: Roy Publishers, 1966. Lluró, Josep Maria. “Novela para una liquidación.” Lateral, 88 (2002): 8–9. Lukács, Georg. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1974. McDougall, Curtis Daniel. Hoaxes. New York: MacMillan, 1940. Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian woman in Guatemala. Edited and introduced by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Translated by Ann Wright. London and New York: Verso, 1984. Reemtsma, Jan Philipp. Mord am Strand. Allianzen von Zivilisation und Barbarei. Aufsätze und Reden. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998. Resina, Joan Ramon. The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. Segura, Antoni, ed. Els llibres d’història, l’ensenyament de la història i altres històries. Barcelona: Fundación Jaume Bofill, 2001. Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999. Tóibín, Colm. “Return to Catalonia.” The New York Review, October 7, 2004: 36–39. Traverso, Enzo. Singular Pasts. The “I” in Historiography. Translated by Adam Schoene. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. Unamuno, Miguel de. Niebla. Ed. Mario J. Valdés. Madrid: Cátedra, 1988. Van Gennep, Arnold. The rites of passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Vera Schwarcz

Expanding Historical Empathy: How the Holocaust is Helping Chinese Remember Atrocities of the Mao Era Voices mute forever, or since yesterday or just stilled. If you listen hard, you can catch the echo. Primo Levi “Voices,” February, 1981

At Yad Vashem, young Chinese are crying. It is the fall of 2019, before Corona erected huge barriers in both cross-cultural communication and travel. These advanced students have been here for two weeks as part of a special seminar called “Teaching About the Holocaust, Anti-Semitism and Israel.”1 I am the last lecturer in the program, speaking their native tongue. I honor their tears and ask: “What do you think enables you to express such empathy for Jewish suffering?” As last year, this group remains speechless at first. I go on to suggest it is their own inexpressible grief and the pain of their parents and grandparents that cannot be spoken of on the Chinese mainland. The Communist Party representative in the group jumps up to declare that the only sorrow they carry is China’s humiliation by the Japanese during World War II. The other young educators contradict her. They acknowledge that there is more to the story. After my talk, several come up and share tales of atrocity endured by close relatives. And how these remain unmentionable in China today. Tears flow more freely out of the politically monitored lecture hall. These students and teachers in their late 20s carry degrees, prestige and enforced forgetting. Most of them were young children when tanks marched into Tiananmen Square in 1989. Their parents swallowed tales of that atrocity to keep them safe and help them get into the best schools. More recently, behind closed doors, elders have started speaking. Young Chinese Holocaust educators are waking up to what it means to be a citizen of the “Republic of Amnesia.”2 When I show my first slide, there is a sigh of recognition:

 I am indebted to Mr. Ephraim Kaye, Director of the Jewish World Seminars Department for inviting to be participate in this yearly seminar for young Chinese Educators. I was the last lecturer in the program after the group had been studying the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and had extensive conversations with the survivors of the Shoah.  Louisa Lim, The Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (London: Oxford University Press, 2014). Vera Schwarcz, Emerita Professor of History & East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University, CT USA https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-009

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This is the heading of a website dedicated to those persecuted and killed during the last Maoist mass movement which attacked intellectuals and high Party officials.

Fig. 1: Garden of Remembrance for those Persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, a website dedicated to those persecuted and killed during the Cultural Revolution. Accessed 12 Apr. 2022. http://www.chinese-memorial.org.htm With permission from Professor Wang Youqin.

It contains individual portraits and narratives about hundreds of victims. My goal is not to enter into comparative victimhood. I don’t want to discuss who suffered more: Chinese kin or Jewish survivors they had been listening to for weeks? I focus instead on the Chinese characters from the website which express a determination to inscribe memory for future generations. In Chinese, the website is called “Garden of Remembrance for those Persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.” The two-character for painful death (死难 si nan) leaves no ambiguity about the atrocities which took place between 1966 and 1976. Professor Wang Youqin’s introduction develops the theme of the “Chinese Holocaust” without diminishing the uniqueness of the Jewish experience. What concerns her is the brutal, state-organized attack upon educated leaders who were publicly tortured and killed for no crime other than an outlook deemed “counterrevolutionary” by the Red Guards and their sponsor, Mao Zedong. Wang understands religion, race and ethnicity played a key role in the European genocide. Yet, she argues that Mao intended to wipe out whole strata of the Chinese population by unleashing armed youth against vulnerable elders.3 Unlike massive killings of landlords in the early 1950s, this is a campaign that targets intellectuals and party officials – lumped all together in a criminalized cohort of “reactionaries.”

 Seth Sanders, “Website documents oral history of China’s Cultural Revolution,” The University of Chicago Chronicle, 21:5 (November 15, 2001). Accessed 12 November, 2021. http://chronicle.uchi cago.edu/011115/china.shtml

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For young Chinese educators in the lecture hall at Yad Vashem this is recent history. None have seen this website before. Now, after intimate conversations with Holocaust survivors, they start to feel the depths of unknowing which they carry within. They know, without having read Margaret Hillenbrand’s recent book, that there is a code for “knowing what not to know in contemporary China.”4 What I hope they will carry home from their weeks in Israel is permission to remember. Even if they cannot write or teach about atrocities in their own history, they now have a Jewish and Chinese lexicon for thinking about historical trauma. Survivors of the Holocaust like Primo Levi are no strangers to the hard dilemmas of finding a language for witnessing and remembrance. Without explicit political pressure to forget the Shoah, they struggle with the passage of time, Holocaust deniers and the ordinary distractions of young people. All this troubled Levi literally unto death. His 1981 poem “Voices” addressed the next generation directly. He warns them against the fading into muteness which is the fate of survivors. He knows that children and grandchildren can catch merely an echo of the horrors he knew so intimately. Yet he calls out to them. The Chinse educators at Yad Vashem hear him. They have laid their hearts open to narratives that echo grief buried in their native terrain. Sense-making is their calling now. We speak about 同情 tongqing – the emotion-laden expression in Chinese for “empathy.” “Fellow feeling” just does not convey what this term allows for and demands of the late comers to the study of the Shoah. Chinese students speak openly about having been touched to the core by survivors’ testimony. They are going home with a new vocabulary for the wounds of history in China, and beyond.

Picturing the Unimaginable After two weeks at Yad Vashem, horrors away from home have become familiar, even somewhat conceivable. What is less acknowledged by the younger Chinese generation is how images of Jews being humiliated by the Nazis call to mind the brutal persecutions of their own grandparents during the Cultural Revolution. Even if their kin took part in victimizing others – since no bystanders were countenanced during the violence of 1966–1976 – they know nothing about that history. Family members, like the state itself, demand silence and amnesia about that horrific set of events.

 See Margaret Hillenbrand, Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2020).

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In the upbeat propaganda after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the population on the mainland was urged to forget about the past, to move on toward a bright socialist future. For a very brief period of time in 1977–78, former Red Guards tried to write about their own sufferings in the so-called “scar-literature.” Before being suppressed by the state, their jottings became fuel for the shortlived “democracy movement” of 1979. Not surprisingly, most middle-aged perpetrators and survivors chose to swallow their memories. A broken-hearted bitterness lingers nonetheless. Images such as that of an aged Jew having his beard shaved while Nazis were looking on in delight echo humiliations which cannot yet be fully named in China.

Fig. 2: An aged Jew having his beard shaved while Nazis were looking on in delight (“Reinrassige Juden angetreten zur Schoenheitspflege, 194”), The United States Holocaust Museum Archives, photograph 18582, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Philip Drell.

Here is power at its most naked and nastiest. Criminalization of tradition – which had been once venerated is intimately familiar to survivors of the Cultural Revolution. They also knew hatred close up. De-humanization of those who embodied culture and education was the first stage of atrocity in China, as in Europe. A favorite past time of Red Guard mobs was to torture teachers and high-level officials in the “airplane” position: Violently pulling back the arm of the victim (often

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tied to a pole) while the head is forcible bent backwards and the “counterrevolutionary” is spat upon and beaten. If confessions of culpability were not sufficiently sincere or prompt, the further humiliation of the Yin/Yang haircut (half only so all could see the ravage) was enacted – always in the face of a cheering crowd. Since the history of the Cultural Revolution is not taught in Chinese schools, images such as the torture of General Huang Xinting are not well known. Nonetheless, elders like Wang Youqin in Chicago are making sure that traces of recollection are never fully erased.

Fig. 3: General Huang Xinting’s torture. Still taken with friendly permission from the Morning Sun (accessed 12 Apr. 2022) https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2004/01/13/2003087412.

What makes the burden of memory much heavier in China is that fellow countrymen were brutalizing each other during the long period of Maoist atrocities which culminated in the 1960s. Internecine hatred fueled by political ideology is not unknown in Communist regimes. Yet the close-up, hands-on violence of the Cultural Revolution remains shocking to young and old alike. When the journalist Zheng Yi first published his book about cannibalism southwest China, voices of disbelief colluded with Party suppression to squelch the evidence of how far brutality had extended in the 1960s. Since then, several other writers have documented the phenomenon of eating

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human parts of political victims as an expression of the total erasure of “class enemies” and of loyalty to the Thought of Chairman Mao.5 Each of these works carries some direct references to the Jewish Holocaust. More than any other instance of twentieth century genocide (like the one in Cambodia or Rwanda), it the Shoah that has become iconic for Chinese intellectuals who try to conceive and live with darkest aspects of the Maoist legacy. Although Wang Youqin’s website is banned on the mainland, overseas scholars and young Chinese able to jump the Party’s firewall, can find plenty of information on the internet. Information, however, does not necessarily lead to taking up the challenge of witnessing the witness. Activists against the regime’s willful amnesia have been forcibly prevented from giving support to dissident-victims. Legislation in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland requires absolute loyalty to the Party narrative. Disobedience leads to jail or exile. Nonethless, there are a few brave voices closer to home that allow the younger generation to hear the depths of suffering endured by their parents and grandparents. Yang Jisheng, an octogenarian journalist still on the mainland has taken upon himself the task of burdensome “testimony” in the manner described by Dori Laub and Shoshana Feldman. Yang’s first book of witnessing was consciously entitled Tombstone: The Great Famine of 1958–1962 in order to call to mind his own father’s missing grave among the 30 million who died of starvation and other forms of unnatural death during Maoist “Great Leap Forward” (1958–1962). Laden with gruesome details from official archives, Yang’s work leaves no doubt that he is aiming for something deeper than information gathering. He wants to create a mirror in which both China’s youth and her silenced elders will recognize their suffering and demand some kind of reckoning with historical memory.6 Yang Jisheng latest book on the Cultural Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down documents nearly 2 million deaths and many more examples of horrific torture during the Maoist campaigns against “political vermin” –臭老九 chou lao jiu, “stinking ninth” – the title given to educated intellectuals and Party leaders who were deemed enemies of the people and of Chairman Mao. As during the Shoah, demonization preceded persecution and murder. Before young Red Guards could be made to attack and kill teachers and parents they had to believe that they were poisonous pests more dangerous than all other categories of criminals combined. Ancient Confucian values of respect for elders had be ripped out from the hearts and

 Zhang Yi, Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993). See also, Donald S. Sutton, “Consuming Counterrevolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 No. 1 (January 1995): 136–172.  Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013).

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minds of students who kicked, punched and beat to death prominent educators such as Bian Zhongyun, Principal of Beijing’s most prestigious high school. Teenage girls took off their iron-studded belts to commit this intimate, mob-instigated murder.7 Much as the post-Shoah lexicon is enriching Chinese testimonial literature, so too Western empathy may be deepened and expand as we now contemplate victims of Maoist atrocities. Leftist activists in the 1960s and 1970s could claim ignorance of what was going on in closed-off China. In the twentyfirst century, however, we no longer have that luxury. Yang Jisheng and others have flooded us with numbers and personal stories. They have also endowed us with a new vocabulary for disaster, most notably 天翻地覆tianfan difu – literally: sky turned over earth flung upward.8 A world turned upside down gives a uniquely vivid connation to a universe in which all ethical values have been uprooted, flung into the wind. No steady soil upon which to stand, no inner fulcrum to guide one through darkness. The Hebrew/Yiddish expression Churban‫ חורבן‬connotes fiery destruction and links the Shoah to the history of the holy Temple in Jerusalem. By creating a bond, it gives us linguistic and spiritual tools to start the project of meaning-making out of the inconceivable atrocities of the Holocaust. In Chinese, 天翻地覆tianfan difu forces us to imagine a society in which familiar values identities were torn apart by a cosmic earthquake which left young and old wounded by pain, and guilt. Dori Laub and Shoshana Feldman documented decades ago the “vicissitudes of listening” to survivor testimonies. Laub, as a psychoanalyst, develop further the theme of the empathic ear which enables witnessing to start as a possibility within victims of the Holocaust. Such an ear is still sought in China’s “Republic of Amnesia.” Even fifty years after the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine, even three decades after the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, the silencing of memory is front burner business for the Chinese Communist Party. The demand for absolute loyalty to current CCP Chairman Xi Jinping has further tightened the limits of historical memory. Xi is making great use of nationalism to minimize accounts of intraChinese atrocities even during the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–1864 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Today’s climate of repression, however, cannot totally thwart the need to be heard, to confess, to lighten a bit the burden of rancor that shadows Chinese life despite government propaganda about a harmonious socialist society.

 Ye Weili, “The Death of Bian Zhongyun,” The Chinese Historical Review 13, No. 2 (February 1, 2017): 203–240. Further evidence about the humiliations and murder of teachers by their students in documented in Wang Youqin’s essay: “Student Attacks Against Teachers,”Issues & Studies 37, no. 2 (March/April 2001): xx-xxx.  Yang Jisheng, The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giraux: 2021).

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The Red Guard generation is now in their 60s. They have penned many essays and books (not all published) about their quest for 道歉 – daoqian, poorly translated as “apology.” More useful for this study about a comparative lexicon for witnessing is the subtler notion of being “moral regret” which implies being sickened to the core by the true face of one’s own actions.9 Two Chinese characters convey worlds of meaning that lie behind expressions of public sorrows of such luminaries as Song Binbin, once a darling of Chairman Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square. An aging, wealthy widow now returned from abroad, Song speaks and writes about what it feels like to be corroded from within by her role in the murder of the high school principal in Beijing. The victim’s husband (and many others on the Chinese mainland) refused to accept Song’s ritualized bowing down in sorrow for crimes committed during the Cultural Revolution.10 They argue that something more is needed. Without access to the complex literature produced by Laub and Feldman, relatives of the murdered insist that narratives of atrocity need more listening ears, need to trouble the conscience of future generations more deeply than a bow or a bronze commemorative statue. Voices, as Primo Levi’s poem (and lifelong testimony) insisted, need to be sought, heard. Even if muted (by the pain of recollection) – or as in China, still muted by the state – amnesia, voices need to be sought out. We, who are witnessing the witness, need to run, to tire ourselves out catching the echo of a world in which humanitarian values were flung into the wind by an earthquake beyond the Richter scale.

Voices and Museums The challenge of connecting to the past is an enduring one– for witnesses as well as for those of us who come after and seek to create public and personal spaces for painful truths. Holocaust museums and testimony archives have set the standard for such spaces and are being studied by victims from South Africa, Cambodia and Rwanda. Yad Vashem is the one of the key places for this cross-cultural conversation about memory and memorialization. In China after the death of Mao in 1976, the first impassioned argument for the building of a Cultural Revolution Museum came from the writer Ba Jin. A victim incarcerated in the “ox-pens “built for

 “红卫兵道歉文化大革命再反思” (Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution Era apologize and urged to rethink,”www.dw.com (August 9, 2013).  Tyler Roney, “Famous Chinese Princeling Apologizes for the Cultural Revolution,” The Diplomat (January 16, 2014.) Accessed 16 November, 2021. https://thediplomat.com/2014/01/famous-chi nese-princeling-apologies-for-cultural-revolution/

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the persecution of prominent intellectuals, Ba Jin had visited Auschwitz in the 1950s. Now, in the light of his own horrors (and those of his aged wife – both having been imprisoned, beaten, forced to clean toilets and to pen endless confessions filled with lies), he called his fellow countrymen to conscience. Ba Jin did far more than point fingers at Mao and the Red Guards. He asked for a building which would allow all fellow citizens to face their culpability, a mirror that would prevent self-exoneration: The building of a Cultural Revolution Museum is not the responsibility of one person. It is our responsibility to do all we can so that our descendants, generation after generation, will guard the painful lessons of the past. “Don’t allow history to repeat itself” should not be an empty slogan. In order for all to see clearly, to remember truthfully . . . each will recall his or her behavior during that decade. Masks will fall, each will search his or her conscience, the true face of each one will be revealed, large and small debts of history will be paid.11

Unmasking one’s face is a difficult, painful endeavor that few would welcome in China, or beyond. Perpetrators of Europe’s atrocities have only recently begun to bear witness to their own crimes. No wonder that Ba Jin’s words fell upon deaf ears – certainly in the public domain. The Communist regime wants both pain and complicity to be forgotten. Yet the term 历史欠债 lishi qianzhai –“indebtedness to history” is all too familiar in the Chinese lexicon. From ancient times onward, filial piety required indebtedness to parents, to the state and to history itself. The quest for truthful witnessing did not start with Ba Jin. It is a familiar, spiritual value which cannot be fully coopted by the autocratic state. It may even come to enrich the language of recollection in Western reckonings with the legacy of genocide. In this essay about the Cultural Revolution museum, a Chinese intellectual uses language consciously crafted by Jewish survivors. Ba Jin wants to create a monument that will teach children the harrowing lessons of the past. He goes as far as to write about his own guilt for not protecting his wife from accusations and beatings. He describes openly cowardice, both public and personal. To re-present such nuanced culpability and victimization is perhaps beyond the possibility of physical structure. It is only voices of regret and of truthful digging into the morass of Maoism which are carrying forward Ba Jin’s agenda in China today. The current regime of Xi Jinping frowns upon studies of Cultural Revolution while encouraging the glorification of the Red Heritage precisely upon sites where murderous activities and famine prevailed.12 At the same time, filmmakers,

 Ba Jin, “A Museum of the Cultural Revolution.” Accessed 16 November, 2021. http://www.cnd. org/cr/english/articles/bajin.htm.  Zheng Wang, “The Past’s Transformative Power,” The Wilson Quarterly (Fall 2020). Accessed 17 November, 2021. http://works.bepress.com/zheng_wang/98/; Evan Osnos, “Does Xi Jinping’s

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photographers and independent investigators are collecting testimonies from victims and perpetrators alike. Voices prevail where space is forbidden to remember. Behind closed doors, editors of underground journals such as记忆 Ji Yi Remembrance – had tried to promote discussions along the lines that Ba Jin had envisioned would take place in a Cultural Revolution Museum.13 Voices, however, as Primo Levi feared, fade with the passage of time. They need concrete containers to resist the erosion of interest and the shifting winds of political necessity. Ba Jin, like Jewish survivors, placed his hope in youth – more precisely in a space where youth could come to its own accounting. As Dori Laub and other argued, witnesses to witnessing have to take on some of the burden of memory transmission over time. The stumbling block in China comes not only from state repression but also from the excessive materialism promoted by the regime as an antidote to recollection. Dissident Liu Xiaobo, the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Peace, described with cutting clarity the “philosophy of pork” prevailing in the People’s Republic today: Not only the countless historical tragedies but also the most recent atrocity has been erased until it disappeared completely . . . In this atmosphere of brutality and amnesia, elites created the “philosophy of pork” . . . Mediocrity reigns through profiteering and has penetrated into the bone marrow. The boundary between justice and evil is blurred by common greed and vested interests.14

Liu Xiaobo’s own acts of witnessing focused upon the dis-remembered massacre of June 4th, 1989. This is the most recent memory that needs active forgetting in China, and now also in Hong Kong. How many were murdered on the streets of Beijing is unknown, unmentionable. The Mothers of Tiananmen, who seek to mourn their children have been ostracized, silenced. Yet the urge to hear voices, to glimpse an unvarnished image of past remains vibrant, unassuaged. In one corner of the western province of Sichuan, a hugely wealthy businessman, has found a way around the massive silencing imposed by the Communist regime. Fan Jianchuan was a small child during the Cultural Revolution. When he was merely 9 years old, he watched his father being denounced and beaten repeatedly as a “capitalist roader.” At one public torture session, the father

Seizure of History Threaten His Future,” The New Yorker (November 10, 2021). Accessed 17 November, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/does-xi-jinpings-seizure-of-historythreaten-his-future; Chris Buckley, “Xi Extols China’s Red Heritage in a Land Haunted by Famine,” The New York Times (September 30, 2019). Accessed 17 November, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/ 2019/09/30/world/asia/china-mao-zedong-xi-jinping.html  See Wu Di and He Shu 记忆 Remembrance (Beijing: 2016–2017).  Liu Xiaobo and Jean-Philippe Beja (translator), La philosophie du porc et autres essais. (Paris: Bleu du Chine, 2011).

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called to the boy to run home and finds some documents to counter the murderous accusations. Helpless at the time, the child developed a passion for collecting newspapers and documents.15 After serving in the army and becoming mayor of a town in Sichuan, Fan rode the currents of the Chinese economy to amass a fortune estimated at 300 million dollars. The son of a victim became the man who never stopped collecting documents, letters and mementos of the Cultural Revolution. At first Fan Jianchuan built warehouses for his massive collections. More recently he came up with the idea of a huge museum complex nestling the “Red Era” inside a hall of mirrors. Having collected over 50, 000 looking glasses decorated with Maoist sayings from the Cultural Revolution, Fan designed a maze where corridors lead nowhere, or loop back on themselves: “Refracted and warped, the metaphor is obvious; it invites the viewer to imagine themselves, lost in that milieu, the individual obscured behind the slogans.”16 One of the glass works in Fan’s Museum brings individuals in close contact with the history portrayed in a roundabout fashion: The bloody hands call to mind the Red Guards who had beaten Fan Jianchuan’s father and killed so many more. There are children’s prints, as if part of a game, as if a teacher traced them in school. But the names of victims alongside each palm allows no such mental subterfuge.17 This is a mirror for a whole society which had trained its youth to wreak havoc upon the aged in the guise of political correctness. With his wealth and influence, Fan Jianchuan has danced around the restrictions imposed by the regime. His requests to mount more extensive exhibitions about the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–58 and the Great Famine which followed were all rejected. For now, Fan is left with thousands of huge Mao statues and a stash of documents that researchers are not allowed to explore. A custodian of the unmentionable atrocities of the Mao era, this one museum builder contents himself with the official gloss: “Collect disaster for the sake of tranquility.”18 “Disaster” (灾难 zainan, literally “destructive hardship”) is too quiet, too conventional an expression for the horrors which cannot be buried or fully voiced inside China. “Tranquility” as codified by the Communist Party rings increasingly hollow. Hence the interest in the Shoah and strategies for witnessing developed over the decades by survivors and scholars in the West. When Wang Youqin set up the memorial garden for the dis-remembered, she was using the term “Holocaust”  Barclay Bram Shoemaker, “Fan Jianchuan’s Museum Industrial Complex,” The London Review of Books, 40 no. 2 (January 25, 2018): 22.  Shoemaker, “Fan Jianchuan’s Museum Industrial Complex.”  Shoemaker, “Fan Jianchuan’s Museum Industrial Complex.”  Shoemaker, “Fan Jianchuan’s Museum Industrial Complex.”

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intentionally, fully informed that the atrocities suffered by Chinese under Mao and those of Jews under the Nazi regime are incomparable. What interests her is how remembrance may become rooted in the consciousness of youth, despite the paucity of victims’ voices allowed into the public domain.

Who is Listening Two decades before the online memorial took shape, the Chinese writer Liu Binyan made a startling speech to the Writers Union in Beijing. “Rehabilitated” as a former “Rightist” Liu was expected to pay homage to the communist regime with gratitude. Instead, on November 9th, 1979, he proceeded to list all the injustices and crimes that he had personally witnessed during decades of exile in the countryside. Not content to detail his experiences with enforced silence, Liu went on to call upon fellow writers to take the risk of speaking out when others are bullied into forgetting. His famous words: “We cannot be auditors (literally 旁观者 panguangzhe “bystanders”)–in the courtroom of history” continue to ricochet among intellectuals seeking to bear witness in China today.19 The opposite of the bystander is the witness – a role which in Chinese has distinctly moral connotations: 见证 jianzheng means to look (to actually see!) and set aright what is wrong or crooked. Despite great odds, Chinese survivors and perpetrators of atrocities have been recording their recollections in conscious acts of testimony. Among those who troubled the peace of the “Republic of Amnesia” most explicitly was Liu Xiaobo, who refused to adopt the “philosophy of pork.” Unable to forget what he himself saw in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Liu made a point of writing a poem or an essay on each anniversary of the June 4th massacre. Even when jailed, he found ways to get his words out, to have them printed. A conscious heir to Liu Binyan’s moral mission, Liu Xiaobo used his court appearances to challenge the regime’s version of historical truth, not only the trumped-up charges against his own lack of “patriotism.”20 The 2010 image of an empty chair at the Oslo ceremonies became an unforgettable symbol of Chinese courage in the act of witnessing.21 Overseas Chinese and  For further discussion of essay, see Vera Schwarcz, Colors of Veracity: A Quest for Truth in China and Beyond (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2017), 92–98.  Liu Xiaobo, No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems. Introduction by Perry Link, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013).  The 2010 image of Liu Xiaobo’s empty chair is available at https://www.foxnews.com/world/ nobel-peace-prize-the-odds-that-trump-kim-jong-un-pope-francis-will-win-coveted-prize (Accessed 12 April, 2022).

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Western journalists did not fail to make the visual and historiographical link between Liu Xiaobo’s empty chair and the Nazi regime which forbade Carl von Ossietzky from receiving the 1935 Nobel peace prize. Both Liu and von Ossietzky died while jailed. Both are reminders of the high price paid by men of conscience who refuse to be mere auditors in the courtroom of history. In places and in times when “judges” (in this case, political authorities) fail to listen, the responsibility falls upon all of us, latecomers to historical trauma. As Dori Laub argued, we become listeners, partners in acts of witnessing in order to ensure that amnesia does not become the permanent fate of those who suffered. In the West, this participatory activity has been facilitated by the Jewish lexicon for recollection and witnessing. Both ‫( עדות‬edut testimony) and ‫( זכור‬zachor remembrance) appear in the Torah as acts incumbent upon the children of Israel as well as upon the creator of the universe.22 Taken together, they have created a legacy of commitment which young Chinese educators at Yad Vashem found to be both novel and inspiring. In speaking to them, I describe my own personal experiences of having become a witness to unspeakable Chinese memories of the past decades. Through oral interview work carried on behind closed doors, away, from the ears of official censors, I have been privileged (and burdened) to receive testimonies such as that of the forgotten founder of the Communist Party. My book entitled Time for Telling Truth is Running Out was cut and translated into Chinese as “Conversations with Zhang Shenfu.”23 Even the one third published by the Beijing National Library sufficed to arouse ongoing interest and empathy for voices stifled on home ground. In 1989, on the day that Martial Law was declared in Beijing and the campus of Peking University was surrounded by tanks, I was talking with Zhang Shenfu’s younger brother – the eminent professor of philosophy Zhang Dainian. A victim of repeated campaigns against the educated including the AntiRightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution, this octogenarian could not but dread the tragedy unfolding on the streets around us. In muted tones, away from public ears, Zhang Dainian said to me: “You are Jewish. You and us, the Chinese people, have suffered much at the hands of history. You understand what is happening right now We have a wordless covenant.”24 The last sentence – 我们有知音 (women you zhiyin) cannot be translated into English.

 For further discussion of “edut” and “zachor,” see Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (New York: Columbia University Press: 1982).  Vera Schwarcz, Time for Telling Truth in Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).  Vera Schwarcz, “Memory, Commemoration and the Plight of China’s Intellectuals,” The Wilson Quarterly, 13 no. 4 (Autumn, 1989): 120–129.

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It draws upon the classical Chinese phrase which goes back to the story of two friends who shared a unique mutual comprehension. When one died, the survivor shattered his own zither out of grief for the one person in the world who had heard the sound of his heart/mind without words. In late May 1989, days before the shooting of empty-handed students in Tiananmen Square, Zhang Dainian used this classical phrase consciously. He was pulling me into yet another act of witnessing because I was Jewish, because I was the daughters of Holocaust survivors from Romania, because I had listened and published his older brother’s testimonies when they were still unheard on the Chinese mainland. At Yad Vashem, three decades later, I am passing on the baton. Even if they had not been allowed to learn about the massacre of 1989 from their parents, even if grandparents had swallowed recollections of participation and abuse during the Cultural Revolution, even if there were no names for great grandparents buried in mass graves during the Great Famine, young Chinese educators had 知音 zhiyin– a wordless understanding of Jewish suffering during the Shoah. In my talk with them, as in this essay, I try to build an expanded lexicon for historical empathy. As Primo Levi intuited in his dark poem of 1981, the younger generation witnessing the witness, has a tough road ahead: You’ll have to run the last lap deaf, You will have to run the last lap by yourself.25

The pain of atrocity is deafening indeed. But deafness need not have the last word. We can find a language for listening that will carry us on the lonely lap ahead. The rank of survivors is thinning. We have no choice but to carry their voices within ourselves. And to create an audible framework for them without.

Bibliography Buckley, Chris. “Xi Extols China’s Red Heritage in a Land Haunted by Famine,” The New York Times (September 30, 2019). Accessed 17 November, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/ world/asia/china-mao-zedong-xi-jinping.html Di, Wu and Shu, He (ed) 记忆 Remembrance. Beijing, 2016–2017. Hillenbrand, Margaret. Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2020. Jin, Ba, “A Museum of the Cultural Revolution.” Accessed 16 November, 2021. http://www.cnd.org/cr/ english/articles/bajin.htm.

 Primo Levi, “Voices” in Carolyn Forche (ed.), Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (New York: Norton,1997), p. 357.

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Jisheng, Yang. Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013. Levi, Primo. “Voices” in Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forche, 377. New York: Norton, 1997. Lim, Louisa. The Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, London: Oxford University Press, 2014. Liu Xiaobo, No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems. Introduction by Perry Link. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2013. Osnos, Evan. “Does Xi Jinping’s Seizure of History Threaten His Future,” The New Yorker (November 10, 2021). Accessed 17 November, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/news/ daily-comment/does-xi-jinpings-seizure-of-history-threaten-his-future Roney, Tyler. “Famous Chinese Princeling Apologizes for the Cultural Revolution,” The Diplomat (January 16, 2014). Accessed 16 November 2021. https://thediplomat.com/2014/01/famouschinese-princeling-apologies-for-cultural-revolution/ Sanders, Seth. “Website documents oral history of China’s Cultural Revolution,” The University of Chicago Chronicle, 21:5 (November 15, 2001). Accessed 12 November, 2021. http://chronicle.uchi cago.edu/011115/china.shtml Schwarcz, Vera. Colors of Veracity: A Quest for Truth in China and Beyond. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2017. Schwarcz, Vera. Time for Telling Truth in Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Schwarcz, Vera. “Memory, Commemoration and the Plight of China’s Intellectuals,” The Wilson Quarterly, 13 no. 4 (Autumn, 1989): 120–129. Shoemaker, Barclay Bram “Fan Jianchuan’s Museum Industrial Complex,” The London Review of Books, 40 no. 2 (January 25, 2018): 22. Sutton, Donald. “Consuming Counterrevolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 No. 1 (January 1995): 136 –172. Wang Youqin. “Student Attacks Against Teachers,” Issues & Studies 37, no. 2 (March/April 2001): xx-xxx. Wang, Zheng. “The Past’s Transformative Power,” The Wilson Quarterly (Fall 2020). http://works.be press.com/zheng_wang/98/ Weili, Ye. “The Death of Bian Zhongyun,” The Chinese Historical Review (February 1, 2017): 203–240. Xiaobo, Liu. La philosophie du porc et autres essais. Translated by Jean-Philippe Beja. (Paris: Bleu du Chine, 2011). Yerushalmi, Yosef Hai. Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. New York: Columbia University Press: 1982. Zhang Yi, Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993.

Amos Goldberg

Witnesses, Silence and Mimicry in Elias Khoury’s “Children of the Ghetto” My Name is Adam: The Children of the Ghetto Vol I, by the Lebanese author and intellectual Elias Khoury, came out in Beirut in 2016 as the first volume of a trilogy aimed at setting out the ongoing story of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). The second volume, Stella Maris (‫)ﻧﺠﻤﺔ ﺍﻟﺒﺤﺮ‬, was published in 2019, also in Beirut. These two books, one picking up where the first left off, were translated into Hebrew by Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani as part of the Maktoob series put out by the Van Leer Institute, while only the former was thus far translated into English.1 The third volume is slated to come out in Arabic in the near future with a Hebrew translation close on its heels, to complete the trilogy. To an extent this trilogy is a continuation of Khoury’s monumental novel of 1998, Gate of the Sun (Bāb al-shams), which was also translated into Hebrew in 2002 and into English in 2007.2 Of the fourteen novels Khouri has written to date, many of them widely translated, including into Hebrew, these four are the main ones dealing with the Palestinian Nakba. Nearly all the others are concerned with the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), in which Khoury took part and was wounded in the eye. It is important to indicate here that despite Khouri’s being Lebanese, of Greek  Here I will refer to the English translation of the former: Elias Khoury, My Name is Adam: Children of the Ghetto Volume I, translated by Humphrey Davis, (London: Maclehose Press 2018). And to the Hebrew Translation of the latter: Elias Khoury, Stella Maris [in Hebrew], translated by Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Van Leer Institute Press and Yediot Books, 2019). Shenhav-Shahrabani gives his perspective on translating these two novels to Hebrew, and on the books more broadly, along with many biographical details about the author and his friendship with him, in A Story Beginning with an Arab’s Eyebrows: Translating in Dialogue with Elias Khoury [in Hebrew] (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2020). Except for certain paragraphs, I did not read the the novels in their original Arabic. I am very conscious of my position within this specialism as a Jewish Israeli Holocaust and trauma scholar who has relied mainly on the Hebrew and English translations. I am also aware that translation always involves matters of power relations and domination especially in a colonial context. Nonetheless, addressing dominant themes in the novel rather than conducting a close reading of it, I believe that my analysis is still worthy of attention – especially bearing in mind that Khoury himself asserted that Bāb alshams was “written in two languages . . . Arabic and Hebrew at the same time. I mean that when I was working on this book I discovered that the other is the mirror of the self.” Quoted in Adina Hoffman, “Recollecting the Palestinian Past.” Raritan 2006, 26 no. 2: 60).  Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun, translated by Humphrey Davis (New York: Picador, 2007). Amos Goldberg, Associate Professor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-010

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Orthodox extraction, he is one of the Arab world’s progressive intellectuals most identified with the Palestinian cause. He joined the PLO at the end of the 1960s and edited the leading Palestinian journal Shu’un Falastinia (‫ )ﺷﺆﻭﻥ ﻓﻠﺴﻄﻴﻨﻴﺔ‬together with Mahmoud Darwish, and later also the journal El-Carmel. Today he edits Majallat alDirasat al-Filastiniyya (‫)ﻣﺠﻠﺔ ﺍﻟﺪﺭﺍﺳﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﻔﻠﺴﻄﻴﻨﻴﺔ‬, a journal for Palestine studies. The plot of The Children of the Ghetto3 is ultimately quite simple. Some notebooks come into the hands of a fictional character, a writer called Elias Khoury, among them some fragmentary notes written by one Adam Dannoun before his mysterious death in a fire in his room. In fact, the fictional Khoury receives two texts. One is the beginning of a novel about the Ummayad poet Waddah alYaman, and the other is autobiographical notes by Adam. The fictional Adam is a al-Lydd (Lod) -born Palestinian. Born in 1948 (like the actual writer, Elias Khoury), he survived the massacre and expulsion of Lod’s Arabs committed by the Israeli forces in July 1948. At first, he seeks to assimilate into Jewish-Israeli society. He invents a new biography for himself as a Jew, and even finds love with a Jewish woman, called Dalia. But despairing about the possibility of integrating and assimilating, he emigrates to New York. There he reveals that the story he has been telling himself his whole life about his father being a war hero killed in the 1948 war is not true. The truth is that like Khaldun/Dov in Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Return to Haifa,4 he was abandoned by his parents during the flight from Lod. In a series of fragments Adam reconstructs the history of the fall of al-Lydd so as to know more about his own history, all the while pondering the history of Arabic literature and the draft of the allegorical novel he is writing. Many scholars who related to this novel agree that one of its central themes, and plausibly the most important, is silence and particularly the imposed on the Palestinians regarding narrating the ongoing Nakba. And indeed, the silence, its metamorphoses and derivatives appear on nearly every page of the book. It is noteworthy that some readers have also seen in the fate of Waddah al-Yaman, the poet at the center of the novel Adam has begun writing, a vivid metaphor for

 In the original Arabic the novel’s title is: Children of the Ghetto: My name Is Adam (‫ ﺍﺳﻤﻲ ﺍﺩﻡ‬-‫)ﺃﻭﻻﺩ ﺍﻟﻐﻴﺘﻮ‬. In the English it was switched to My Name is Adam: The Children of the Ghetto. Hence, I will refer to novel in the text of this article as Children of the Ghetto while in the reference as My Name is Adam.  Ghassan Kanafani, “Returning to Haifa” in Palestine’s children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, translated by Barbara Harlow, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000), 149–196.

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Palestine. Waddah’s life was cut short when he was thrown down a well, in a locked trunk, where he died in silence.5 In fact, Palestinian literature since 1948 has to a great extent been taken up by the issue of silence. Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Men in the Sun, for example, recounts the attempts of Palestinian refugees to cross the border from Iraq to Kuwait, and ends with their deaths in silence in the container of a water tanker. Mahmoud Darwish explained in this context, in an interview with Helit Yeshurun from 1996, how he sees his own great literary undertaking: “There is no place for the Homeric poet,” he declares. But, he continues, “there is a place for the poet of Troy. We haven’t heard his poem. We haven’t heard Troy’s account. I’m sure there were poets there. The voice of Homer, the victor, vanquished even the Trojan’s right to complain. I try to be the poet of Troy” (italics mine).6 Darwish sees himself as destined to tell the story of the silence of the vanquished. Khoury too is much taken up by this silence. Gate of the Sun, Bāb al-shams, his previous novel, dealing with the Nakba and of which our book is a continuation, is an attempt to come to terms with the loss of narrative power; this is how Anton Shammas saw it when he wrote that the book “returns the right to the story to its owners. And those who were thrown off the map, out of their native land, out of history, are coming back to realize their right to speak in the name of memory, using the language which expropriated their voice and obliterated their map.”7 Analyzing the problem of silence in The Children of the Ghetto, Raef Zreik identifies different kinds of silence. There is a silence emanating from trauma, for example, which provides no tools for the subject to narrate what has happened to her/him. Sometimes, though, the problem is not in the speaker but in the addressee unwilling to hear the story intended for his/her ears, thus condemning the speaker to actual silence. Sometimes silence is a kind of right as when the accused in an investigation is permitted to remain quiet so as not to incriminate him/herself. All these silences and others are present in the novel, as Zreik indicates. But for him the main silence which the novel confronts is different again;8  See e.g., Hassina Mechaï, “From Jewish Ghettos to Palestinian Ghettos; Elias Khoury on His New Novel,” Middle East Monitor 2018. In fact, the narrator says explicitly: he wanted to write a novel about Waddah al-Yaman in a way that would serve as a “major Palestinian metaphor.” Khoury, My Name is Adam, p. 155.  Helit Yeshurun, “‘Exile Is So Strong Within Me, I May Bring It to the Land’: A Landmark 1996 Interview with Mahmoud Darwish,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 42 no. 1 (Autumn 2012): 46–70.  Anton Shammas, cover notes to the Hebrew edition of Gate of the Sun.  Raef Zreik, “Writing Silence: Reading Khoury’s Novel Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam,” in The Holocaust and the Nakba, edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (Columbia University Press, 2018), 312–319.

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it is Ma’amoun, the blind intellectual (a kind of synthesis of Borges and Darwish) who formulates it, when he arrives in New York to give a lecture about how Palestinian literature deals with silence and the silencing of the Nakba: the crime of the imposition of silence on an entire people. I do not speak here of the silence that follows what in the language of psychiatrists is called a “trauma,” but of the silence imposed by the victor on the vanquished through the power of the language of the Jewish victim, which dominated the world, meaning the West, following the crimes of the Second World War and the savagery of the Nazis Holocaust. No one listened to the cries of the Palestinians, who died and were dispossessed in silence. This is why literature came to forge a new language for the victim, or in other words to proclaim a literature of silence, and to take us, with Mahmoud Darwish, to “wherever the wind blows.”9

What is at stake is an active historic silencing by the concrete Jewish experience of the twentieth century, which is spoken in the language of the victim and in a voice so loud that there’s no other voice, certainly not of the Jews’ enemies in the struggle over the land of Israel/Palestine, which can be heard alongside it. The Jew’s voice is the voice of the Holocaust victim, and it overshadows Palestinian voices until they are inaudible.10 Mahmoud Darwish said similar things, albeit much more sarcastically, to Helit Yeshurun in 1996: “How can you explain,” he asks her referring to the First Intifada, “given everything that happened to the Palestinians, when they [the Israelis] were breaking our arms – it was shown for one minute on French television, and this brought us a whole week of films about the Holocaust. For the sake of balance.”11 This is a structural problem, explains Zreik: “When it is impossible to develop a version of events due to the grammar dominating the field, then there is no need for suppression from without: the field itself suppresses by not permitting

 My Name is Adam, 367. The phrase “‫ﻣﻬ ّﺐ ﺍﻟﺮﻳﺢ‬,” – “wherever the wind blows” – makes frequent appearances in Darwish’s poetry. In one of his poems, for example, “Standing Before the Ruins of Al-Birweh,” in which he laments the destruction of his village, he uses this expression in describing the journey of the refugees and the construction of their tents. I am grateful to Dr Iyas Nasser for pointing this out to me. Within the book, as Adam reports, Ma’amoun, one of Adam’s father figures, relates to precisely this issue: “The key to reading literature of the Nakba was in what wasn’t said [. . .] all the verse of Darwish poetry should be read though its references to the expulsion from the village of al-Birwa [. . .] it was the role of criticism to give voice to the silence, not the sounds, of the words.” See Khoury, My Name is Adam 317.  Khoury explicitly addresses this in his interview with Liron Mor, “You Never Return, You Go,” Eretz Ha’emori 25.7.2013 [in Hebrew]. Accessed 24 October, 2021. http://haemori.wordpress. com/tag/‫שמס‬-‫אל‬-‫באב‬/.  Yeshurun, “Exile,” 192.

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the account to emerge from within in the first place.”12 Consequently, Zreik points out, the situation of the Palestinians corresponds exactly to what Jean François Lyotard calls, in relation to Holocaust denial, the “differend” – a situation where there is a structural impossibility of the victim proving the wrong done to him/ her.13 In a field in which Holocaust discourse is so dominant and in which the “Jews” figure as the ultimate victims, the Palestinians – as a matter of structure – have no possibility of proving their victimhood and the great harm done to them. And yet the problem seems even more acute. For in Western poststructuralist theory at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the event most identified with silence and what “goes beyond words and language” is the Holocaust. Adorno set the tone in his well-known saying (from which he later withdrew) that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric, effectively a decree of silence on poetry and George Steiner dedicated an entire book to this theme already in 1967.14 Emblematic of the nineteen nimieties is Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony in which they called the Holocaust “an event without a witness,”15 because in their reliance on the trauma paradigm, they find silence at the heart of all testimony. The discourse of the silence of “what cannot be told” about “the event beyond words” has also become very popular in everyday language in Israel about the Holocaust. This discourse is brilliantly and sharply criticized by Naomi Mandel. She distinguishes between silence as it sometimes exists particularly in traumatic situations, as well as the limitations of language to describe human experiences, particularly those of trauma, pain, loss and suffering, and a discourse which makes of these phenomena a central rhetorical trope. The result of such a discourse is always political, argues Mandel: “That distinction cannot but become politicized when what lies beyond language’s limits is ‘Auschwitz.’”16 The reason for this is clear, in my opinion. The limitations of language for describing a traumatic reality, and perhaps even reality in general, are known and have been discussed ad nauseam. But an identification of an event as an embodiment within history of what is beyond it, and consequently beyond words, gives it a special and nearly sacred status as a symbol of suffering and evil. Consequently, a whole hierarchy is formed of other events of suffering,

 Zreik, “Writing Silence,” 311.  Zreik, “Writing Silence,” 309. See Jean-Françios Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).  George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the inhumane (New York: Atheneum, 1967).  Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (Routledge, 1992).  Naomi Mandel, Against the Unspeakable (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 11.

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each of which receives a value determining its place on this hierarchical ladder. That place to a large extent determines the moral virtue and validity of political claims associated with each of these events. The Holocaust becomes the cornerstone of a symbolic political system in which the Palestinians appear to be on the lowest rung. The struggle over position within the hierarchy is necessarily political. And indeed, in the context we are dealing with it seems that the political consequences are particularly severe, inasmuch as it is not only that the talk on the Holocaust–as Darwish and Khoury say – obscures Palestinian suffering, but that even silence about the Holocaust tends to overshadow the language of silence of the Palestinian Nakba. It seems then that this multifaceted problem calls for Khoury’s new poetic language. But what is this new language made of and how does it go about overcoming the silencing of both speech and silence? There is no doubt that Khoury’s novels give a very complex answer to this question, one which cannot easily be reduced to a series of principles. Still, a number of relevant issues seem clearly to emerge in the novel. First, this new language is literary and not historical. It is within the power and the task of literature to overcome the silence which has been imposed on the Palestinians, and to make their unheard voice heard. This emerges with great force in a number of places in the novel. Contemplating the poet Waddah al-Yaman, who was thrown, silent in the chest where he had been hiding, into the well where he drowned, Adam writes that many who tell the poet’s story end it “with the words of the king” so that readers don’t have a chance to listen to the victim’s perspective. “In this way the writing of the story becomes part of the victors’ version of history, and thus we betray literature, whose first task is to upend that formula and make the story the history of the vanquished, which the historians haven’t dared to write”.17 This assertion is very clearly instantiated in the case of the Palestinians. When Adam meets a Palestinian historian and tells him part of his story, the historian asks him for documentation to back up his claims. “History,” he argues, “has to rest on written documents, preferably official documents.” Adam wonders: “The whole history of our Nakba is unwritten. Does that mean we don’t have a history? That there was no Nakba? Does that make sense?”18

 Khoury, My Name is Adam, 92. The last words “which the historians haven’t dared to tell” were omitted from the English translation though they do appear in the original Arabic: ‫ﺗﺎ ﺭﻳﺦ ﺍﻟﻤﻬ ﺰ ﻭﻣﻴﻦ ﺍﻟﺬﻱ ﻻ ﻳﺠ ﺮ ﺅ ﺍﻟﻤ ﺆﺭ ﺧﻮﻥ ﻋﻠ ﻰ ﻛ ﺘﺎﺑﻬﺎ‬  Khoury, My Name is Adam, 162–163. A similar argument has gone on in Holocaust historiography. Raul Hilberg’s position is well known: he refused to rely on the written history of the Holocaust, but only on official documents. By contrast, many others argue that this is to give a voice to the murderers alone. The history of the victims has to rely on personal testimony – written or oral.

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Because of this only literature can redeem the Palestinian victim from her silence and give her a voice. But what is the nature of this literary language and what are its qualities as it comes to be in The Children of the Ghetto? Refqa AbuRemaileh suggests the Arabic concept tibaq (‫ )ﻃـﺒـﺎﻕ‬as a key to understanding the poetics of The Children of the Ghetto. Its meaning, she explains, is in many ways similar to that of point and counterpoint in music. It is a poetics based on the immanent duplicity of language which does not harmonize but rather juxtaposes contrasting ideas.19 “At the heart of the concept of tibaq is not simply the reiteration of dichotomies or binaries but also the possibility of the existence of the thesis/antithesis as simultaneous irreconcilables.”20 This does indeed seem to be an interpretive key to understanding the story, characterized as it is so clearly by duplicity and multiplicity. And so to give just one example from many scattered throughout the story, and among those which Abu-Remaileh discusses; Ma’moun calls the protagonist, Adam, Naji (‫)ﻧـﺎﺟـﻲ‬, (Survivor). This irritates Adam no end, who wants to keep his original name. But Ma’moun insists and argues that “‘time will teach you what it means to bear two names.’”21 And these are indeed two names with completely different orientations. Adam is the first human. The survivor, is the last of a group of victims which has been wiped out. The identity of the first is based on the open future, and the second on the catastrophic past. Indeed, point and counterpoint. The year 1948 is another kind of tibaq, explains Abu-Remaileh. “In 1948 the Israelites walked in the water to reach the Holy Land. The Palestinians walked in the water to drown,” she quotes Jean-Luc Godard,22 and enumerates some pairs of tibaq appearing in the novel, and which delineate the paradox of the Palestinian story, among them “Palestinian/Israeli; Lidd ghetto/Warsaw ghetto; and even Nakba/Holocaust.”23 Perhaps because I come to the novel from a Jewish-Israeli perspective, it seems to me that these pairs are most central to the novel, and that they are one of the keys also to understanding Khoury’s poetic language, which aims, as we saw, to oppose silence by means of a language of silence.

 See for example: Rebecca Dyer, “Poetry of Politics and Mourning: Mahmoud Darwish’s Genre-Transforming Tribute to Edward W. Said,” PMLA, 1 (22, October 2007): 1447 – 1462, particularly note 2.  Refqa Abu-Remaileh, “Novel as Contrapuntal Reading: Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam,” in Bashir and Goldberg (eds), The Holocaust and the Nakba, 297.  Khoury, My Name is Adam, 135. He also has the nickname “Trauma,” a word whose meaning he only comes to understand when he begins to learn about the Holocaust at Haifa University.  Abu-Remaileh, “Novel as Contrapuntal Reading,” 299.  Abu-Remaileh, “Novel as Contrapuntal Reading,” 297.

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In the very title of the novel one already comes across a most important element of this new language of tibaq. Khoury creates a language which is dialogical, open, intimate and tense, with the language of the Israeli oppressor, and its most basic historical signifiers. For the word “ghetto” is without doubt one of the most charged and meaning-laden signifiers in modern Hebrew and in fact in contemporary Jewish consciousness. The historical basis for using the word “ghetto” in this novel is its realistic referentiality. The story is that of Adam Dannoun who grew up in Lod after the massacre and the expulsion of July 1948, and a great part of the plot, particularly in the third part of the novel, takes place in the difficult days of the fall of alLydd. In a number of Arab cities conquered by the Israelis in 1948, the military government established barbed wire urban enclaves for the survivors of the Arab population remaining in the city; they were called by government officials and army officers, as well as by Jewish and Arab inhabitants, “ghettos” – the Lod Ghetto, the Jaffa Ghetto, the Ramla Ghetto and more. In Arabic, Khoury explained in an interview, the word ghetto doesn’t exist. The Arabs learned it from the Jewish guards; but until today, if you ask residents of Lod where the ghetto is, they will lead you to the Arab neighborhood.24 Yochi Fischer and Danny Monterescu have both recently written interestingly about these ghettoes.25 The ghetto is not Khoury’s invention, then, but a return to a forgotten linguistic and urban reality. It is not though, of course, a naive realistic invocation. Khoury and the narrator are well aware of the multiple and loaded meanings of this signifier in Hebrew and in the languages spoken by Jews and non-Jews in Europe and the west. One of these meanings is “the ghetto of the Middle Ages,” which is to say a quarter where Jews were forced to live in some European cities – particularly in Italy and central Europe – from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This was the ghetto that came into being in early modern Europe, and exit from which, as in the title of Jacob Katz’s well known book Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870, signified for the Jews, but to a great extent for Europe’s Christians too, the transition to modernity, with the Emancipation of the Jews and their gradual becoming, at least formally, citizens with equal rights and obligations. Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, the Hebrew translator of Khoury’s trilogy, points to another ghetto he says Khoury was aware of in writing the The Children of the Ghetto – the novel written by Israel Zangwill in Britain at the end of the  Hassina Mechaï, “From Jewish Ghettos to Palestinian Ghettos.”  Yochi Fisher, “What does Exile Look Like? Transformation in the Linkage between the Shoah and the Nakba,” in Bashir and Goldman (eds) The Holocaust and the Nakba, 173–186; Daniel Monterescu, Jaffa Shared and Shattered [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Bavel, 2020).

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nineteenth century – bearing the same name – about a neighborhood of Russian Jewish immigrants.26 Indeed there is no doubt that Khoury knew of Zangwill because he explicitly mentions him in his essay writing. Along with other Arab and Palestinian intellectuals he relates to the saying– common in Zionist circles and often attributed to Zangwill – about the land of Israel being “a land without a people for a people without a land.”27 Khoury however emphasizes how tracing its provenance to Zangwill is erroneous. Anyway, as Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani argues, “using this title, Adam explicitly positions himself deep in the Hebrew and Zionist discourse about pogroms, homeland, and exile.”28 But even if these discursive contexts are present in the novel, without doubt the primary allusion, openly named any number of times, is the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust. In fact, the whole novel is based on a displacement of the language of the Holocaust into a description of the Nakba and its consequences. It begins as a comic movement of survivors, when Adam Dannoun, a survivor of the al-Lydd ghetto, trying to assimilate to the young Jewish Israeli society, crafts an alternative biography for himself. In this biography he indeed comes from a ghetto; not the one of Lod, however, but rather that of Warsaw. He invents a father who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, came to the land of Israel and fought in the War of Independence. He explains: “I read lots of books about the Warsaw Ghetto, went there with a group of students, received my baptism at Auschwitz, and lived the same terror lived by that third father of mine who never fathered me.”29 Later he declares, “at one stage of my life I believed I was Jewish, the son of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto.”30 This world of metaphors, displacements, and similes becomes increasingly dense as the novel progresses. It is important of course to point out that this is not the only intertextual braid at work in this novel. Quite the contrary, it is an intertextual novel through and through, by means of which the author holds a dialogue, both open and hidden, in almost every word and every sentence with the Arabic literary tradition – from the pre-Muslim period up until today, and with Palestinian literary tradition including his own books, foremost among them Gate of the Sun from 1998. The novel also conducts a dense dialogue with the classical, European, Christian and

 Email from Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani (August 7, 2021), conforming that Khoury said so explicitly before the novel’s publication.  Elias Khoury, Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol (New York: Archipelago Books, 2016).  Yehoudah Shenhav, “Silence on a Sizzling Tin Roof: A Translator’s Point of View on Children of the Ghetto,” in Bashir and Goldman (eds) The Holocaust and the Nakba, 334.  Khoury, My Name is Adam, 275.  Khoury, My Name is Adam, 417.

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Jewish traditions, and even with Hebrew literature itself. It is a thoroughly intertextual and dialogic text whose intertextuality is one of its poetic principles. As Kristeva and many other theoreticians understand it, intertextuality brings out how a text never has a self-sufficient origin but is the product of a web of texts which precede it and which are themselves made up of a braid of texts.31 The novel’s intertextual density, exactly as in the question of the fathers which occupies Adam Dannoun, teaches that the story – any story: the novel, a personal story, a national narrative – lacks a clear origin and clear temporal boundaries. All these produce a text which is condensed and loose at the same time. It is very condensed in intertextual citations and references, and extremely loose in being dispersed in many directions without center of gravity or clear textual origin. However, and as I already asserted, of the multiplicity of intertextual ingredients among which the novel wanders, the most pronounced – and quite unexpected and non-routine – semantic field it invokes is that of the Holocaust. The plot recalls death treks like the death marches familiar to us from the end of World War II, the topos of “like sheep to the slaughter” recurs countless times, there is of course the ghetto which constitutes the locus of the story as well as providing its title, the novel refers to the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, with whom the narrator argues, and finally those burying the bodies from the massacre at Lod are described as a Sonderkommando. It seems that the language of the Holocaust is the central discursive frame for the whole novel. The sequel, Stella Maris, will further expand this usage. Of course, Khoury is not the first in Palestinian and Arabic literature and culture to relate to the Holocaust when writing on the Palestinian experience. As Honaida Ghanim recently pointed out, Rashid Hussain did so in a long poem from 1963 which brings together a Holocaust survivor, Yaffa, and Jaffa, the town.32 Another example is Ghassan Kanafani in his novella of 1969, Return to Haifa. It tells of a Palestinian couple who return after the 1967 war to their house in Haifa from which they fled/expelled in the 1948 war, to find a Holocaust survivor, her husband and son living in it. The son is in fact the child of the Palestinian couple, who had abandoned him during the chaotic and fearful flight. A tense and dramatic dialogue develops between the two couples, and with the biological/adopted son – Khaldun/Dov.

 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” in Desire in Language: Approach to Literature and Art, edited by L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980 (1977), 64–91.  Honeida Ghanim, “When Yaffa Met (J)Yaffa: Intersections Between the Holocaust and the Nakba in the Shadow of Zionism,” in Bashir and Goldman (eds) The Holocaust and the Nakba, 92–113.

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Perhaps one can also see in the famous previous novella by Kanafani, the abovementioned Men in the Sun, a certain reference to Holocaust symbols. The story tells of a number of Palestinian men as they try to steal across the border from Iraq to Kuwait in the container of a water tanker. In the end they die in the burning hot sealed container. Would it be entirely unfounded to interpret this as Kanafani giving his protagonists a kind of Middle Eastern crematorium death? And there are of course Darwish and Said and others, like Khoury himself in Gate of the Sun.33 In recent years, it even seems that the Holocaust, and particularly its relation to the Nakba, preoccupies Arabic literature more than ever, and some novels focusing on this theme published in recent years, apart from those of Khoury, have received critical acclaim and even won prestigious prizes.34 But it seems that none of these authors has done what Khoury has done here. What is extraordinary is not only that the Palestinian protagonist invents the biography of a son of a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto, but also the compression in which the language of the Holocaust is present as one of the main linguistic registers by which the Palestinian story is told. If we revisit now the question of silence and silencing which the novel deals with, what emerges from Khoury’s story is that one of the strategies – perhaps the primary one – enlisted to overcome the problem of silence and to create a new language of the victim, is to talk of the catastrophe while using the language of the Palestinian victimizer! If we go back to Abu-Remaileh’s concept, tibaq, that doubling of point and counterpoint – the most surprising and daring example of it in the novel to my mind is the very complex relationships of the Holocaust and the Nakba signifiers. In the subsequent novel, Stella Marias, as well, Khoury pursues this direction of tibaq of the Nakba and the Holocaust, but sometimes in a different form. There, among other things, he summons the protagonist-narrator, Adam Dannoun, to a conversation with Marek Edelman, an anti-Zionist and deputy commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who after the war remained in Poland and became a well-known cardiologist. Adam arrives at the meeting posing as a  See Amos Goldberg, “Narrative, Testimony, and Trauma: The Nakba and the Holocaust in Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 18 no.3 (February 2016): 335–358.  The best known is Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba ‫ ﻛﻮﻧﺸﺮﺗﻮ‬:‫ﺍﻟﻬﻮﻟﻮﻛﻮﺳﺖ ﻭﺍﻟﻨﻜﺒﺔ ﻣﺼﺎﺋﺮ‬ by Rabai al-Madhoun, which won one of the most important literary awards in the Arab world. The Algerian writer Anouar Benmalek wrote a novel dealing with the Holocaust as connected to the Herero and Nama genocide. I am grateful to Dr Sadia Agsous for these two references. Nina Fischer, “Entangled suffering and disruptive empathy: The Holocaust, the Nakba and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin,” Memory Studies, 15 no. 4 (6 January, 2020). https:// doi.org/10.1177/1750698019896850.

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Jewish student, the son of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, along with his professor, who had led Adam and a group of students on a trip to Poland. Adam and the professor go alone to meet Edelman. This episode and the dialogue which develops are to my mind one of the high points of the two books, considered together.35 The Palestinian scholar Joseph Massad claimed that the Warsaw ghetto uprising “was always inspirational to the Palestinians. In the heyday of the PLO as a symbol of Palestinian liberation, the organization would lay flower wreathes at the Warsaw Ghetto monument to honor these fallen Jewish heroes.”36 But the fictional conversation with Edelman goes in a completely different direction. During the tense and dense discussion with Edelman, based to a large extent on the real 1977 interview he gave to the Polish writer Hanna Krall,37 Edelman does all he can to puncture the myth of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and that of himself. “Adam and the professor were enthralled by the myth about him, but he burst it at the first opportunity.”38 Memory and narrative need to be living, human and vulnerable and not frozen and mummified in the form of a myth, argues Edelman. The professor cannot understand him. He is angry and disappointed. But for Adam, what Edelman says is full of meaning. “Eventually he knew that this was a lesson he had learned from two people – Marek Edelman and Khalil Ayyoub, the narrator of Gate of the Sun – and he would come to understand that what he wrote today in his exile in New York was nothing but an attempt to absorb this lesson.”39 Both Edelman and Khalil Ayyoub oppose the myth of national heroism and swap it for traumatic human stories shot through with silences, emotion, weakness and pain. From this perspective, the stories of the Lod and Warsaw ghettos, Adam maintains, “are similar even while being different in many ways.”40 What then is the meaning of this doubleness, this tibaq of the ghettoes – of the memories and the stories between the Warsaw Ghetto and Lod Ghetto, between the Holocaust and the Nakba? It seems to me that from a Palestinian perspective there

 Edelman drew much criticism in Israel when, in 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada, he wrote an open letter to the Palestinian “partisans” calling on them to strive for peace, while refraining from calling their actions “terrorism.” He also met that year with Palestinian representatives at his home in Lodz. Accessed 13 October, 2021. https://www.haaretz.com/1.5030288  Quoted in: Aniie Levin, “A Legacy of Resistance,” SocialistWorker.org October 12, 2009. Accessed 3 November, 2021. https://socialistworker.org/2009/10/12/legacy-of-resistance  Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: an Intimate Conversation with Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, translated by Joanna Stasinska (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1986).  Khoury, Stella Maris [in Hebrew], 186.  Khoury, Stella Maris, 186.  Khoury, Stella Maris, 192.

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is in this a not insignificant risk. For by this stratagem, the Palestinian story opens itself to the Jewish-Israeli – its victimizer’s – language which penetrates its core – and this can bring about a loss of the narrative’s inner unity and its organic growth from the language of Palestinian experience. It makes use of an alien and even hostile linguistic and historical corpus to tell the Palestinian story, to the extent that it becomes a central interpretive key for understanding it. In a world where one of the main political achievements of the Palestinian national movement is to have created an ongoing, national identity committed to struggle, this linguistic project takes on itself the great risk of undermining that identity from within From a Jewish perspective too, this process is highly charged. There is great sensitivity among many Jews, including scholars, about analogies for and historical juxtaposition of the Holocaust, and all the more so in the Palestinian context. In fact, even the narrator of The Children of the Ghetto several times wonders about the validity of historical comparisons and analogies. Actually, the narrator negates the Holocaust/Nakba comparison most explicitly: “I don’t want to draw a comparison between the Holocaust and the Nakba. I hate such comparisons and I believe the numbers game is vulgar and nauseating. I have nothing but contempt for Roger Garaudy and others who deny the Nazi Holocaust.”41 And Adam subsequently talks about an article which maintains a parallel between the Nazi method of murdering the Jews and the way the murders were carried out in the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. The narrator comments: I don’t like that kind of comparison. It deprives things of their meanings and turns mankind’s relationship to history into boring repetition by seeming to equivocate and declare the criminal innocent by making him just a copy of some other criminal and by treating war crimes as though they were inevitable. It turns the victims into numbers by ignoring their singularity and the singularity of the tragedy of each.42

Nonetheless, as I have argued and as is unmistakable in these novels, the analogy and the connection made between the two events are central to them. Criticism in Israel had been quite indifferent to these two books. Apart from a number of articles in Haaretz newspaper, altogether positive in tone and one even enthusiastic, not much has been written.43 But certainly there have also been disapproving voices. A. B. Yehoshua, speaking at an event at the Van Leer Institute  Khoury, My Name is Adam, 417.  Khoury, My Name is Adam, 216. And see also in other contexts immediately after pages 218–219.  Avraham Burg called The Children of the Ghetto “close to perfection.” Avraham Burg, “Between Two Traumas,” [in Hebrew] Haaretz, May 11, 2018. See also Adi Keissar, “Stella Maris: An Attempt to Find a New Language for Pain” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, July 23, 2020; Ehud Ein-Gil, “From the Lod Ghetto to the Warsaw Ghetto and Back” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, August 5, 2020.

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in Jerusalem to mark the publication of The Children of the Ghetto, related to the links the novel makes between the Holocaust and the Nakba with both empathy and dismissal: “The association of the Holocaust and the Nakba is first of all to the detriment of the Arabs. They don’t understand how they are failing themselves by connecting the Holocaust and the Nakba [. . .] for these are two deeply and impossibly different things.” Jews are unconvinced by this linkage, Yehoshua continues, because “there was a war here, a defeat. The destruction of villages happens throughout the world. What happened to the Jews is an entirely different story. It is Judaism’s deepest downfall.”44 The historian Daniel Schwartz, who wrote a history of the “ghetto” in Europe and the US, devotes nearly a whole page to Khoury’s The Children of the Ghetto out of the three pages of his afterword given over to Israel. He concludes thus: “There is thus a triangular structure to the ghetto metaphor in contemporary Israel/Palestine, where the term serves not only as fodder in the ongoing conflict between the Israeli left and right but also as a rhetorical arrow in the Palestinian quiver against Israel.” In Yehoshua’s opinion the comparison is a rhetorical stunt, lacking finesse and aimed at arousing empathy, but a failing one, while Schwartz thinks of it as a political and rhetorical stunt aimed at criticizing Israel by connecting it to Nazi Germany, so that the Palestinians can be called the “the Jews of the Jews.”45 But can one read differently these analogies – this tibaq, to return to the language of Abu-Remaileh – of the Lod Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto, the Nakba and the Holocaust, of Jewish and Palestinian traumas? Does this effort of comparison have the power to give a language to silenced Palestinians as well as teaching something to Jews and others, whose ears have, as the narrator sees it, been blocked by the story of the Holocaust? For Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, the Hebrew translator of the two novels, the combining and entanglement of the two stories is above all a linguistic device to undo polarized dichotomies – of Hebrew and Arabic, of the Jews’ language and the Arabs’, of the language of the Holocaust and the language of the Nakba – an entanglement which is in fact “the meeting of the metaphor of the Holocaust with the metaphor of the Nakba.”46 And this bilin-

 Book launch of Hebrew translation of The Children of the Ghetto, Van Leer Institute, May 2, 2018. Accessed 5 November, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYywIqRYiKY, min. 8:50– 10:16 [in Hebrew].  Daniel B. Schwartz, Ghetto: The History of a Word (Harvard University Press, 2019), 199–200.  Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, “Translator’s Note,” in Khoury, Children of the Ghetto [in Hebrew], 387.

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gualism, suggests Shenhav-Shahrabani, ultimately points towards a binational political model between the sea and the Jordan River.47 Avraham Burg takes a similar direction (though a bit overstated) when he argues in a review of The Children of the Ghetto that “it seems, from the perspective of Khoury/Adam, that the Israeli and Palestinian fates are so intertwined as to comprise a single split personality,” concluding, “I feel that this is Khoury’s existential argument: The death marches went from Auschwitz to Birkenau [!] and from Lod to the West Bank. The dead didn’t really care why they died. Their suffering was similar. Therefore, we should talk about what we have in common rather than competing over who suffered more. Traumas of the past are the starting point for the hopes of the future.”48 I want to make my own suggestion and propose an interpretation of the poetic tibaq of the Holocaust and the Nakba in Khoury’s writing which I think can have a particular resonance for us Jewish Israelis. As we saw, tibaq involves a kind of doubling. There have been readers of Khoury’s novels who use the metaphor of a mirror to describe some of the doubling that occurs in his fiction. Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani wrote that the narrator of Stella Maris often resorts to counterfactuals – as opposed to what unfolded in reality, pointing to the many possible versions of events – “An infinity of parallel mirrors” bringing to mind “Borges’ ‘The Garden of Forking Paths.’”49 In an article on heterotopia in The Children of the Ghetto, Farah Aridi lingers on a scene in which Adam looks out of the window of his apartment in New York, but rather than seeing outside, he sees his reflection, though in an alienated and complex way.50 Omri Ben Yehuda has dedicated a whole article to a comparative investigation of the poetic principle of the mirror in these novels of Khoury alongside Anton Shammas, Bialik and others.51 He even quotes Khoury himself who in 2012 wrote that the mirror is the literary principle of his writing on the Nakba. “I tried to create mirrors instead of allegories and metaphors” – the allegory, for example, “pretends to reflect reality, while mirrors reflect other mirrors. My stories were mirrors of stories, and pain mirrored pain.” says Khoury.52

 Yehouda Shenhav-Shaharabani, “Swapping Geographies, Mixing Languages: The Hebrew Speaking Universe of Khoury’s Palestinian Novels,” Banipal, 67 (Spring 2020): 117–124.  Burg, “Between Two Traumas.”  Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, “Afterword,” in Khoury, Stella Maris [in Hebrew], 358.  Farah Aridi, “Heterotopic (Dis) placement in Elias Khoury’s Awlad al-Ghetto: Ismi Adam: Writing as Reclamation of Place,” antae, 5 no. 1 (February 2018): 67–68.  Omri Ben Yehuda, “‘Words that Turn Mirrors of Words’: Political Intertextualities in Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto,” Postcolonial Interventions, 7 no.2 (2022): 133–185.  Elias Khoury, “Rethinking the Nakba,” Critical Inquiry, 38 no. 2 (Winter 2012): 266.

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Pursuing this argument, I want to propose that the mirror can indeed serve as one of the interpretive keys for understanding the tibaq so characteristic of Khoury’s recent novels, but as a form of imitation. Or to be more precise, as mimicry – a concept Homi Bhabha coined and developed in the context of colonialism. I propose this concept to help understand Khoury’s poetic and political act, using it as a critical concept without adhering to all aspects of its original meaning. Let’s recall what Bhabha’s mimicry is – it is the way the colonial system and the colonized subject imitate or are compelled to imitate, the civilizational gestures of the colonizer. The colonized for example speaks the colonial language but with a strong local pronunciation (African or other), with his own syntax and grammar. She speaks and behaves similarly but not identically to her ruler. There is always a difference: “It is the same but not quite – it is the same but not white,” explains Bhabha. The ruler sees an insufficient act of imitation, and this causes him existential anxiety, because it reflects the partiality and fragility of his rule. After all, one can adopt his language, his cultural gestures, his behavior, even change them so that they become something both different and the same. These gestures show that even the colonizer’s language and culture can be altered by the native, while the colonizer is powerless in the face of such processes. He is not fully in control, not even of his language. By means of the native’s gesture he appears to himself in a slightly distorted way. The effect of the mimicry according to Bhabha then is a doubleness - an enforced and asymmetrical duplication, which splits the illusory consciousness of the colonial ruler: “The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.”53 As we have already seen, Khoury is well aware that there is a great difference between the Holocaust and the Nakba, and he puts it explicitly in the mouth of his protagonist: “I hate such comparisons.” And indeed, I argue, there is no comparison in Khoury’s novels, but rather an act of imitation – of mimicry – in which a subject adopts and imitates the ruler’s language and thus exposes something fundamental about it. This “something” lacks any parodistic aspect as it shows no hint of contempt or disrespect towards the Holocaust. Khoury’s novels preserves the memory of the Holocaust and respects it while at the same time it cracks its fetishization. And this in my opinion is precisely the alchemy of the tibaq of the Holocaust and the Nakba in The Children of the Ghetto and Stella Maris. Khoury indeed takes the Holocaust very seriously. In his review of Stella Maris in Haaretz, Ehud Ein-Gil is impressed by “the unprecedented literary and

 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October, 28 (Spring, 1984): 129 (Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis).

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political act of the Lebanese novelist, writing about the Nakba, the Palestinian tragedy, while identifying with the Jewish victims of the Nazis, and demonstrating sympathy, solidarity and sensitivity towards the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as towards the silent heroism of the murdered Jews.”54 Ein-Gil is right. The Holocaust is an event so foundational and traumatic that the Palestinians too must reckon with it in fashioning their identity. And indeed, in one of the monologues delivered by Khalil, the narrator of Gate of the Sun, to Yunis, a hero of the Palestinian struggle, now on his death bed in hospital, he says: But tell me, what did the nationalist movement posted in the cities do apart from demonstrate against Jewish immigration? I’m not saying you weren’t right. But in those days, when the Nazi beast was exterminating the Jews of Europe, what did you know about the world? I’m not saying – no, don’t worry. I believe, like you, that this country must belong to its people, and there is no moral, political, humanitarian, or religious justification that would permit the expulsion of an entire people from its country and the transformation of what remained of them into second-class citizens. So, no, don’t worry. This Palestine, no matter how many names they give it, will always be Palestinian. But tell me, in the faces of people being driven to slaughter, don’t you see something resembling your own? Don’t tell me you didn’t know, and above all, don’t say that it wasn’t our fault. You and I and every human being on the face of the planet should have known and not stood by in silence, should have prevented that beast from destroying its victims in that barbaric, unprecedented manner. Not because the victims were Jews but because their death meant the death of humanity within us.55

It seems, then, that the Holocaust is at the heart of Khoury’s thought and awareness.56 But despite the utmost seriousness with which Khoury takes the Jewish catastrophe, which he also sees as a universal catastrophe, and despite, as we have seen, that he does not compare the Holocaust and the Nakba, in these novels he ultimately shows that even the Holocaust – without denying or minimizing it, and without denying its monstrous proportions – is for all of us also language. And no less significant, in the Israeli context, and within the new Judeo-Christian partnership in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, it is a language of colonial rule and silencing of the colonized!57

 Ein-Gil, “From the Lod Ghetto to the Warsaw Ghetto and Back.”  Khoury, Gate of the Sun, 295–296.  Khoury also belongs to a group of Arab intellectuals fighting against Holocaust denial in the Arab world and which prevented a gathering of Holocaust deniers taking place in Beirut. See Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (Macmillan, 2010), 266.  Omri Ben Yehuda reads The Children of the Ghetto more critically and sees it as an act of appropriation and not of subversive mimicry. See Ben Yehuda, “‘Words That Turn Mirrors of Words.”

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I therefore propose to see these novels as a rare opportunity to perform an act of decolonization on the Hebrew language at the heart of which lies the discourse of the Holocaust. The act of mimicry undermines the sacred authority and authenticity of language – and asserts that no one owns it, even in the case of Jews talking about the Holocaust in their struggle against the Palestinian over Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. And when the language of catastrophe is not owned by any one subject or group, the door is opened to the creation of a new language in which the Palestinian and the Jew can tell their stories as related to and entangled by one another – let’s indeed call it, following Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, a binational language.

Bibliography Abu-Remaileh, Refqa. “Novel as Contrapuntal Reading: Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam.” In The Holocaust and the Nakba, edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 295–306. https://doi.org/10.7312/bash18296-015 Achcar, Gilbert. The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. New York: Macmillan, 2010. al-Madhoun, Rabai. Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba ‫ ﻛﻮﻧﺸﺮﺗﻮ ﺍﻟﻬﻮﻟﻮﻛﻮﺳﺖ ﻭﺍﻟﻨﻜﺒﺔ‬:‫ﻣﺼﺎﺋﺮ‬. Beirut: Arab Institute for Publication, 2015. Aridi, Farah. “Heterotopic (Dis) placement in Elias Khoury’s Awlad al-Ghetto: Ismi Adam: Writing as Reclamation of Place,” antae, 5 no. 1 (February 2018): 62–74. Ben Yehuda, Omri. “‘Words that Turn Mirrors of Words’: Political Intertextualities in Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto.” Postcolonial Interventions, 7 no.2 (2022): 133–185. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October, 28 (Spring, 1984): 125–133. Dyer, Rebecca. “Poetry of Politics and Mourning: Mahmoud Darwish’s Genre: Transforming Tribute to Edward W. Said.” PMLA, 1 (22, October 2007): 1447–1462. Ein-Gil, Ehud. “From the Lod Ghetto to the Warsaw Ghetto and Back” [in Hebrew]. Haaretz (August 5, 2020). Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Basingstoke and New York: Routledge, 1992). Fischer, Nina. “Entangled suffering and disruptive empathy: The Holocaust, the Nakba and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin.” Memory Studies, 15 no. 4 (6 January, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698019896850 Fisher, Yochi. “What does Exile Look Like? Transformation in the Linkage between the Shoah and the Nakba.” In The Holocaust and the Nakba, edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, 173–186. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Ghanim, Honaida. “When Yaffa Met (J)Yaffa: Intersections Between the Holocaust and the Nakba in the Shadow of Zionism,” in The Holocaust and the Nakba, edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, New York: Columbia University Press, 2018: 92–113. https://doi.org/10.7312/ bash18296-006 Goldberg, Amos. “Narrative, Testimony, and Trauma: The Nakba and the Holocaust in Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 18 no.3 (February 2016): 335–358.

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Hoffman Adina. “Recollecting the Palestinian Past.” Raritan 2006, 26 no. 2: 52–61. Kanafani, Ghassan. “Returning to Haifa.” In Ghassan Kanafani et al. Palestine’s children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories. Translated by Barbara Harlow. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000, 149–196. Keissar, Adi. “Stella Maris: An Attempt to Find a New Language for Pain” [in Hebrew]. Haaretz (July 23, 2020). Khoury, Elias. “Rethinking the Nakba.” Critical Inquiry, 38 no. 2 (Winter 2012): 250–266. Khoury, Elias. “You Never Return, You Go.” Interview with Liron Mor. Eretz Ha’emori 25 (July 7, 2013) [in Hebrew]. Accessed 24 October, 2021. http://haemori.wordpress.com/tag/‫באב‬-‫אל‬-‫שמס‬/. Khoury, Elias. Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol. Translated by Humphrey Davis New York: Archipelago Books, 2016. Khoury, Elias. Gate of the Sun. Translated by Humphrey Davis. New York: Picador, 2007. Khoury, Elias. My Name is Adam: Children of the Ghetto Volume I. Translated by Humphrey Davis., London: Maclehose Press 2018. Khoury, Elias. Stella Maris [in Hebrew]. Translated by Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Van Leer Institute Press and Yediot Books, 2019). Krall Hanna. Shielding the Flame: an Intimate Conversation with Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Translated by Joanna Stasinska. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1986. Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue, and Novel.” In Desire in Language: Approach to Literature and Art, edited by L. S. Roudiez., 64–91. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980 (1977). Levin, Aniie. “A Legacy of Resistance,” SocialistWorker.org (October 12, 2009). Accessed 3 November, 2021. https://socialistworker.org/2009/10/12/legacy-of-resistance. Lyotard, Jean-Françios. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Translated by George Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Mandel, Naomi. Against the Unspeakable. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Mechaï, Hassina. “From Jewish Ghettos to Palestinian Ghettos; Elias Khoury on His New Novel.” Middle East Monitor, February 22, 2018. Monterescu, Daniel. Jaffa Shared and Shattered [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Bavel, 2020. Schwartz, Daniel. Ghetto: The History of a Word. Harvard University Press, 2019. Shenhav-Shaharabani, “Swapping Geographies, Mixing Languages: The Hebrew Speaking Universe of Khoury’s Palestinian Novels.” Banipal, 67 (Spring 2020): 117–124. Shenhav-Shahrabani, Yehouda. A Story Beginning with an Arab’s Eyebrows: Translating in Dialogue with Elias Khoury [in Hebrew]. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2020. Shenhav, Yehoudah. “Silence on a Sizzling Tin Roof: A Translator’s Point of View on Children of the Ghetto.” In The Holocaust and the Nakba, edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.7312/bash18296 Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the inhumane. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Yeshuran Helit, “‘Exile Is So Strong Within Me, I May Bring It to the Land’: A Landmark 1996 Interview with Mahmoud Darwish. Journal of Palestine Studies, 42 no. 1 (Autumn 2012): 46–70. Zreik, Raef. “Writing Silence: Reading Khoury’s Novel Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam.” In The Holocaust and the Nakba, edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018, 312–319. https://doi.org/10.7312/bash18296-01

Anna Pollmann

No Judges, Only Witnesses: Witnessing Genocide in the Vietnam Tribunalʼs Courtroom Setting of 1966–1967 Introduction “What a strange Tribunal: a jury but no judge!” read a Paris newspaper headline, which Jean-Paul Sartre quoted in May 1967 in an address inaugurating the opening session of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal in Stockholm.1 The Vietnam tribunal was initiated by the British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell as an extralegal institution to document and investigate atrocities committed by the US Army in Vietnam. His opening remarks to the second session in Kopenhagen a few months later might irritate our legal consciousness even more: “We are not judges. We are witnesses. Our task is to make mankind bear witness to these terrible crimes, and to unite humanity on the side of justice in Vietnam.”2 Though staged with all the elements that characterize a court proceeding, in the Stockholm courtroom nothing was ordinary. First of all, the tribunal had no mandate under international law. Neither the place – the Swedish capital – where the gathering convened, nor the form of a tribunal were obvious. Neither the roles the invitees assumed in this setting, nor the legal categories referred to. For jurors, Russell had invited a transnational – although in its majority European, pro-communist, and anti-Stalinist – milieu of activists and writers. Most of them were not distinguished politicians, lawyers or attorneys, but rather chosen for their intellectual and moral contributions to – as Russell put it – “what we optimistically call ‘human civilization.’”3 With the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as executive president, the tribunal was presided over by one of the most  Jean-Paul Sartre, “Inaugural Statement to the Tribunal,” in: Against the Crime of Silence. Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, ed. John Duffett (New York/London: O’Hare Books,1968), 40–48, see: 44.  Bertrand Russell, “Opening Statement to the Second Tribunal Session,” in Sartre, “Inaugural Statement to the Tribunal,” 315.  Bertrand Russell, “Opening Statement to the First Meeting of Members of the War Crimes Tribunal, London, November 13, 1966,” in Prevent the Crimes of Silence, Reports from the Sessions of the International War Crimes Tribunal founded by Bertrand Russell, edited by Peter Limqueco and Peter Weiss (London: The Penguin Press, 1971), 58. Anna Pollmann, Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer, Konstanz University, Germany https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-011

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influential European intellectuals after World War II. Sartre in his opening speech justified the tribunal’s legitimacy with reference to the “ambiguous body” of Nuremberg.4 In times of decolonization and the Cold War, the “precedence” of the principles of the 1945–46 International Military Tribunal, whose proclaimed universalism had remained unfulfilled, was being taken up. Though not a central indictment in Nuremberg, the question if the atrocities could be categorized as genocide became its most prominent feature in public. Outside the site of the tribunal – the Folkshuset in Stockholm – the filmmaker Staffan Lamm captured scenes of protest and street fighting.5 Since the tribunal convened with the Swedish government’s approval and the support of the Swedish Social Democratic party, it was guarded by the police, who separated the antiwar demonstrators from the pro-American protestors who called the tribunal a “farce” and carried signboards asking “Who is paying for the tribunal – Moscow or Beijing?” and declaring “down with the judges.” Given the context of the Cold War – reflected in the tribunal’s anti-American spirit, its pro-communist personnel and, last but not least, public suspicion that the event was influenced by the Soviet Union – the meeting was of a highly symbolic character and mostly condemned or ridiculed by the international press.6 Lamm’s footage does not only give insight into the enormous organizational effort made by the Foundation and the network surrounding the Tribunal to condemn American warfare in Vietnam. Furthermore, he captured the zealous atmosphere of the Stockholm process days. We can see close-ups of Vietnamese eyewitnesses waiting in a busy lobby, a court room packed with leftwing European intellectuals, interrogations in their dense cigarette smoke. This article states how 22 years after the end of World War II a transnational leftwing civil society tribunal referred to new and universal concepts in international law, primarily the concept of genocide. It approaches the question how law

 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Inaugural Statement,” in: Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 42.  “Anatomy of a War,” Jacobin Magazine. Accessed, September 10, 2022. https://www.jacobin mag.com/2014/08/anatomy-of-a-war/; the descriptions of the site which follow are taken from this footage.  Russell himself had criticized America’s warfare in Vietnam in numerous articles beginning in 1963, see, for instance: Bertrand Russell on “the Sinful Americans,” Harper’s Magazine (June 1963), 21–22; “Lord Russell’s Letter,” New York Times, April 8, 1963; for political context and criticism of the Vietnam tribunal, see Philipp Gassert, “Das Russell-Tribunal von 1966/67. `Blaming and Shaming` und die Nürnberger Prinzipien,” in Toward a New Moral World Order? Menschenrechtspolitik und Völkerrecht seit 1945, edited by Norbert Frei and Annette Weinke (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 149–163, see: 151f.; Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, Judith Apter Klinghoffer, International Citizensʼ Tribunals. Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance Human Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2002), Chapter XI: Plan of Action, 111 – 122.

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was imagined by intellectuals as a sphere of political intervention and what is at stake, if they do so. How through their legal politics and interventions on an “ambiguous body” of legal categories did they shape our understanding of mass atrocities? Given the different biographical backgrounds of the tribunal’s members, how did legal concepts provide a framework for understanding and expressing various historically distinct experiences of mass violence in the twentieth century? The linguistic combination as “witnessing genocide” or “witness to genocide” may have become an idiom or even a “central trope of contemporary moral culture” as Carolyn J. Dean argued in her monograph The Moral Witness.7 From the establishment of video collections such as the Fortunoff and Spielberg archives, which feature eyewitness testimony primarily from Holocaust survivors, the act of witnessing has been analyzed from many different disciplinary perspectives ranging from literature to psychoanalysis from conceptions of trauma to authenticity.8 Dean neither follows an anthropological framing nor a mere legal understanding of witnessing. Instead, she focuses the historical and social circumstances in different court room settings, where victim’s suffering was put in front to make claims about mass atrocities.9 Her study features five case studies between the 1920s and the 1990s, investigating how these “created a moral imperative to make some crimes of mass violence legible in new ways or to create a narrative about genocide. They therefore also changed the understanding of genocide in Western imagination.10” Dean identifies how the narrative changes in the 1990s with human

 Carolyn J. Dean, The Moral Witness. Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2019), 1.  Some examples from this vast body of literature: Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony. Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999); Thomas Tresize, Witnessing Witnessing. On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Sybille Krämer and Sigrid Weigel (eds.), Testimony/ Bearing Witness. Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017).  Dean, The Moral Witness, 11; for further approaches to specific historical settings of witnessing Nazi crimes see for example, the conference “Juridical Testimonies after 1945 – Expectations, Contexts and Comparisons,” held at the Leibniz Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur Simon Dubnow in April 2019; Katharina Stengel, Die Überlebenden vor Gericht AuschwitzHäftlinge als Zeugen in NS-Prozessen (1950–1976) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2022); Dagi Knellessen, “Transnationale Zeugenschaft. Jüdische Überlebende in den ersten SobiborVerfahren 1949/50 in Frankfurt am Main und West-Berlin,“ in Im Schatten von Nürnberg. Transnationale Ahndung von NS-Verbrechen, edited by Enrico Heitzer et.al. (Berlin: Metropol, 2019), 211–222.  Dean, The Moral Witness, 11.

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rights institutions and the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002, when witnessing became a global obligation detached from victimhood.11 In this historical tension – with explicit reference to the Post 1945 Trials and the category of genocide, but before the politics and semantics of human rights – the Vietnam Tribunal provides meaningful insights into the semantics of international law in Cold War period.12 Dean claims in her introduction that it had been important for Holocaust consciousness in the United States by its outspoken analogies between US bombings and industrial mass killing of Jews or the Vietnamese resistance and the Warsaw Ghetto. In my article I will argue that within Dean’s conceptual framework of “making atrocities legible” the analysis of the Vietnam Tribunal’s proceedings reveals more than mere historical analogies or handling the concept of genocide as a “rhetorical crime.”13 Obviously charges of genocide was one the common threads, that bound different strands of the New Left and the leadership of the Soviet Union together, though Russell’s Vietnam Tribunal was not covered by Soviet media at all.14 There can be no doubt about the fact, that the main indictment “genocide” emerged from a logic of positioning in a biased political sphere of Cold War times. Anson Rabinbach assigned it even dual function apart from its legal origin. From the political sphere of the Cold War, the term later “travelled” into historical methodology and structured narratives of twentieth-century history violence.15 The enormous effort in establishing legal protest in the Vietnam Tribunal’s court reveals contested visions of international justice in a bipolar world. At the same time the Tribunal proceedings and protocols reveal the difficulties of defining and distinguishing mass crimes, especially collective crimes emerging from different historical and political circumstances. These difficulties did not disappear with an applicable legal category. The Tribunal in fact proofs, that the opposite was the case. The article also takes a closer look on what bearing witness to genocide meant in this short time span between the Eichmann Trial establishes the eye- witness of

 Dean, The Moral Witness, Chapter 4: Global Victim and the Counterwitness, 132 –170.  This research gap was just recently filled with volumes such as Matthew Craven et.al., International Law and the Cold War, Cambridge 2020.  In comparison to the rather short legal history of the Genocide Convention from 1944–1948, Anton Wendt-Weiss states that genocide during Cold War period had a long history as a “rhetorical crime,” see Anton Weiss-Wendt, A Rhetorical Crime. Genocide in the geopolitical discourse of the Cold War (New Jersey et. al.: Rutgers University Press, 2018).  Weiss-Wendt, A Rhetorical Crime, 102–105.  Anson Rabinbach, Begriffe aus dem Kalten Krieg. Totalitarismus, Antifaschismus, Genozid (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009), 58–63; for a general analysis of different contexts of use for specific concepts, see Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

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atrocities16 as a moral figure and the Tribunal’s claim for global witnessing, or in Russell’s own words “bearing witness to mankind.” While on one hand the witness status was extended to the Tribunal’s members, on the other hand the legal definition of genocide was expanded. This entanglement of witnessing and defining (as well as agitating) granted a special authority to the Tribunal’s jurymen and women, which were at the same time philosopher-activists. In most cases this authority obviously did not result of “experientially witness status”17 emerging from suffering in concentration camps, during torture or bombings as grounds for defining universal norms,” but from antifascist or anticolonial engagement. Apart from Russell himself, whose duties were increasingly taken over by his assistant Ralph Schoenman, the tribunal was also headed by Vladimir Dedijer (1914–1990), a Yugoslavian resistance fighter and dissident. Other members included such representatives of the European extra-parliamentary left as Günther Anders, the feminist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Gisèle Halimi (b. 1927) of the Paris FLN lawyers’ collective, and the Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967). Most of its protagonists’ politically formative years lay in the 1930s, in antifascist exile or politics, or in the anticolonial struggle after 1945. Others had been involved in post-World War II trials or initiatives for International Law shortly before, either as professionals or as spectators: Leon Matarasso was a member of the French delegation to the Nuremberg trials, Vladimir Dedijer was Yugoslavian delegate at the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952, Peter Weiss developed his documentary play The Investigation (Die Ermittlung, 1965) from his observations at the Auschwitz trials,18 and Günther Anders dealt intensively with the perpetratorship of Adolf Eichmann specifically in the context of the atomic age and visited the postwar trial against Kurt Leibbrand in 1962. This engagement for “human civilization” enabled them, in Bertrand Russells view, to detect and prevent repeated (or if one follows some of their interpretations persistent) genocides and crimes against humanity. In fact, it was a range of different

 Anette Wiviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).  I borrow this quotation from Emma Kuby, who raises similar questions in her historical investigation of the Commission International contre le Régime concentrationnaire (CICRC) operating in the 1950s. The Vietnam Tribunal shared with the CICRC its appeal as a placeholder of the Nuremberg’s universal principles by improvising with legal mechanism. While the CICRC provoked leftist criticism, because affective processes should not lay ground for political judgment (especially against the Soviet Union), the indictment of the US Army was central for the New Left and mobilized strands of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist explanations; Emma Kuby, Political Survivors. The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945 (Cornell: Cornell University Press 2019), 6.  Peter Weiss, The Investigation, New York 1966. For the public reaction to the Auschwitz Trials, see Devin O. Pendas, “I Didn’t Know what Auschwitz Was.” The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials and the German Press: 1963 – 1965, in Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, 12 (2000) Vol. 2, 397–446.

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historical and political experiences of the Tribunal’s judges that resonated in their discernment. In this sense their acts of witnessing connected different time layers, the present of the Vietnam War, but also their judgement on past atrocities. These underlying dynamics at times even led to a tangible memory political conflict among the members. While the London section around the Trotzkyist Ralph Schoenman focused on supporting the revolutionary, anti-imperialist struggle in the “Third World,” they accused the group around Sartre of having a legalist perspective. Their criticism aimed at the fact that too much emphasis was put on the application principles of international law that underpinned the post-war processes. Carl Oglesby, President of the organization Students für Democratic Society, pointed out this conflict by noting that it was not Auschwitz but Guernica that was up for retrial in the Russell Tribunal.19 In recent years and in context of transnational and comparative perspectives to understand state violence there has been a heated controversy regarding the foundational role of the Holocaust for understanding other mass atrocities.20 As James Loeffler points out this critical interest also concerned the origins and genealogy of the legal concept of genocide as formulated by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1943 that lay foundation for the United Nation’s genocide convention in 1948.21 The main line of criticism claims that a Holocaust-centered approach to genocide studies “exculpated European and American regimes for the violence they visited on enslaved, indigenous, and racialized.”22 Dirk Moses identifies this effect as one of the main “Problems of Genocide” as he entitled his 2021 monograph. He argues and polemicizes that the Holocaust worked as an archetype, that other mass atrocities had to be modelled after too be acknowledged as an atrocity.23  See Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer, International Citizensʼ Tribunals, 129–131.  In Germany this controvery came up again with the translation of Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009; this controversy in historiography and memory culture was exaggeratedly coined “Historikerstreit 2.0.”  James Loeffler, “The First Genocide. Antisemitism and Universalism in Raphael Lemkin’s Thought,” in: Jewish Quarterly Review, 112 no. 1 (Winter 2022,) 139–163, here: 142; further and with view to different interpretations of Lemkin see A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and World History. Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology,” in: Dan Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books), 2012, 272–289; Ann Curthoys and John Docker, “Defining Genocide,” in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2008), 9–4; Charlotte Kiechel, “Legible Testimonies, Raphael Lemkin, the Victim’s Voice, and the Global History of Genocide,” in Genocide Studies and Prevention, 13 no. 1 (2019), 42–63.  Loeffler, “The first Genocide,” 142–143.  Dirk A. Moses, The Problems of Genocide. Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), see for example 4, 28 and 395.

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In his analysis Moses states that genocide was, hierarchically thought of as the “crime of crimes,” that it had narrowed the definition of war crimes and applied a very high threshold for articulating those state crimes, that were not committed on the base of ethnicity, as it was the case of the Holocaust, but for political reasons.24 In doing so, he sharply contradicts the singularity thesis. As evident as it might be, that the ratification process was “derailed” by “geopolitical rifts” or “domestic political vulnerablities”,25 the impact of Holocaust consciousness on human rights development is still being debated controversially. Loeffler argues instead, that “the slow, uneven process of Holocaust consciousness impeded effort to frame Jewish death as a self-evident argument for global morality”.26 In this sense the question what the state of Holocaust consciousness looked like by the time of the Vietnam War if and how it became “archetypical,” as argued by Moses, requires a critical historical investigation. Moses claims that the archetype of the Jewish genocide was so persistent, that even Marxist philosophers like Sartre had to refer to it.27 If you adopt a less teleological perspective on Holocaust consciousness than Moses does, the epistemics of the Vietnam Tribunal might appear in a different light. Somewhat pointed, one could read Moses’ description of Holocaust consciousness as an institutional enforcement by conservative (and Zionist) elites through law. Seen from a different angle the legal category of genocide deployed in the Vietnam Tribunal, does not hierarchize but equalize atrocities, by strengthening structural, e.g., Marxist or anthropological interpretations of different kinds of mass murder against distinct groups. From this angle negotiations over the concept of genocide should raise the question if the converging of different historical atrocities does justice to both their very own genealogies and logics.28 The Vietnam Tribunal seems to be an important turning point, where categories of juridical and historical judgement overlap, and this obfuscation provokes debates about comparisons and analogies of mass crimes until this very day.

 Moses, The Problems of Genocide, for example 28 and 396.  Loeffler, “The first Genocide,” 141.  Loeffler, “The first Genocide.”  Moses, The Problems of Genocide, 397 and 423.  In this sense I share Emma Kuby’s reservations towards the assumption, that historical comparison and alignment of different historical experiences necessarily results in a productive multidirectional memory, as literary scholar Michael Rothberg claims. In his point of view an identification of different victim groups necessarily leads to a better historical awareness in collective crimes in respect, see: Kuby, Political Survivors, 10.

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The tribunalʼs clear political bias along with its lack of a mandate in international law may explain why it has only come to marginal attention among researchers in the history of law.29 Only recently can we see more research activity contextualizing the Vietnam tribunal, either within the larger context of the 1968 protests or in the framework of transitional justice, placing more emphasis on the role of non-professionals and laypeople and on the impact of extra-legal knowledge in the field of law.30 This article seeks to shed light on its epistemic character: the appeal, the dissemination and transformation of universal concepts of international law in the political sphere of the late 1960s. At the center is the question what “witnessing genocide” in the specific court room setting in 1966/67 can tell us about understanding and distinguishing mass atrocities. I will first elaborate on the international law references made during the tribunal. In a second step, I will take a closer look at the re-shaping of the genocide concept in writings of selected members Günther Anders, Jean-Paul Sartre and Lelio Basso. The article will finish with a critical examination of the different witness-figures.

Nuremberg, not Jerusalem When the tribunal convened amidst a kind of legal and institutional void following the end of World War II, the Cold War had entered a phase of so-called proxy wars in the former colonial states of Asia and Africa. It is noteworthy that the tribunal took place during and not after the Vietnam War, after the United States had actively and aggressively interceded in the civil war in the former French

 For the first lengthy description of the institutional history of the Vietnam Tribunal based on its protocols, see Klinghoffer/ Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals; more recently Gassert, “Blaming and Shaming”; Marion Breuning, “Von Nürnberg nach Vietnam, Das “Russell Tribunal” von 1967 in historischer Perspektive,” in Deutschland und die USA in der Internationalen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Detlev Junker edited by Philipp Gassert and Manfred Berg (Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2004), 492–504.  For an overview see Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas and Martha Merrill Umphrey (eds.), How Law Knows (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007); for a recent analysis of the impact of the first two Russell Tribunals on the emergence of human rights discourse, see Umberto Tulli, “Wielding the Human Rights Weapon against the American Empire: The Second Russell Tribunal and Human Rights in Transatlantic Relations,” in Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 19 (2021) 19, 215–237; for the context of Transitional Justice: Marcos Zunino, “Subversive Justice: The Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal and Transitional Justice,” in International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2 no. 10 (July 2016), 211–229; Zachary Manfredi, “Sharpening the Vigilance of the World: Reconsidering the Russell Tribunal as Ritual,” in Humanity. An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 9 no. 1 (2018), 75–91.

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colony of Indochina with their Operation Rolling Thunder. After months of gradual escalation in the fight against the communists and the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam coalition (NLF), Lyndon Johnson and his advisors saw themselves as being forced into sending ground troops. When the tribunal convened, this “war without frontlines” (Bernd Greiner) had seen thousands of civilians killed via air raids and brutal military technology like napalm and fragmentation bombs, with many others forced to relocate to so-called strategic hamlets after their villages were burned down. It was through the reporting of Harrison E. Salisbury for the New York Times that pictures of the destruction reached the American public in 1966, with Salisbury immediately accused of communist partisanship.31 Jean-Paul Sartre derives the tribunalʼs legitimacy historically and relates it to the innovations in international criminal law realized by the Allied International Military Tribunal (IMT) for the leading elite of Nazi Germany, held in Nuremberg in 1945–1946, which he declared an “absolutely new event” in human history. The potential to accuse and condemn a military power for its war conduct and crimes against civilians had been addressed for the first time in the multilateral Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 – Sartre also mentions the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, a treaty between the United States and other powers which provided for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. It was the principle of the individual’s responsibility for state crimes that was institutionalized in the Nuremberg proceedings. Only now was the consistent prosecution of war crimes legitimized by a state made possible in an international court, thereby opening a new and “universal” perspective for transnational jurisprudence. Although at that time the effort to create a binding international court had failed, some of the Nuremberg priniciples were implemented in International Law. The London Agreement (also known as the Nuremberg Charter) from August 8, 1945, two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, defined terms such as war of aggression and war crime (when directed towards the civilians of occupied territory), and declared the execution of a common plan or conspiracy to be a crime against peace. One of the categories, crimes against humanity, was entirely new. But concerning the Nuremberg priniciples Sartreʼs inaugural speech at the Vietnam Tribunal included a twist. It was exactly their unfulfilled claim for universality that became a critical point of reference:

 Marc Frey, Geschichte des Vietnamkriegs. Die Tragödie in Asien und das Ende des amerikanischen Traums (Munich: Beck 2010), 127.

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The Nuremberg tribunal, an ambiguous body, was no doubt born of the right of the strongest; but at the same time, it opened a perspective for the future by setting a precedent, the embryo of a tradition. None [sic!] can go back on that, prevent people from thinking back to its session whenever a small, poor country is the object of aggression, prevent them from saying to themselves: ‘but it is this, precisely this, which was condemned at Nuremberg.’ Thus, the hurried and incomplete provisions made by the Allies in 1945 and the abandoned [sic!] have created a real lacuna in international life. There is a cruel lack [sic!] of that institution – which appeared, asserted its permanence and its universality, defined irreversibly certain rights and obligations, only to disappear, leaving a void which must be filled and which nobody is filling.32

The creation of this supranational structure had not yet led to the establishment of the permanent International Criminal Court; this was only achieved in 2002 on the contractual basis of the Rome-Statute from 1998. Sartre saw the colonial involvements of the signing states as the main reason for this lapse. On May 8, 1945, the very same day as the German capitulation, French troops brutally suppressed a demonstration by the clandestine Algerian Peopleʼs Party in the city of Sétif. Demonstrators had displayed the Algerian national flag and called for an end to the colonial régime. The French massacre left almost a thousand protestors dead. In 1946, only one year after the end World War II, France fought in the First Indochina War against the League for the Independence of Vietnam, losing the war in 1954. In short, the Vietnam tribunalʼs self-description was that of an advocate for the Nuremberg principles in an epoch of decolonization and the violent proxy war in Vietnam. As argued by Lawrence Douglas, two competing theoretical frameworks emerged within international legal discourse in the direct aftermath of World War II. The dominant one, represented in the example of Nuremberg, was interstate jurisprudence centered on aggressive war, which was therefore focused on state sovereignty. The second one – defined by the categories of crimes against humanity and genocide – was designed to protect individuals from atrocities committed by states. Both of the latter categories refer to crimes that don’t necessarily need to be connected to war conduct, which led – following Douglasʼs argument – to a jurisprudence of atrocity.33 These categories also included systematic crimes directed against individuals defined and persecuted as members of a specific group, e.g., the murder, deportation or enslavement of civilians constituting their political, racial or religious persecution. In the Nuremberg proceedings, race-specific crimes and crimes

 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Inaugural Statement,” 42.  Lawrence Douglas, “Crimes of Atrocity, the Problem of Punishment and the Situ of Law,” in Propaganda, War Crimes and International Law, edited by Predrag Dojčinović (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 269.

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committed against the warring party’s own civilian population were not of central focus and were generally only investigated in conjunction with war crimes. The initiatives of the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to integrate the legal category of genocide into the Nuremberg verdicts was without success, but it became the basis for the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.34 His definition was initially motivated by the atrocities committed by the Young Turks against the Armenian people during World War I. Lemkin did not, however, coin the term until 1943, applying it to Nazi Germany and the Jews in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published a year later: By “genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing) . . . . [. . .] It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.35

While the genocide convention had not been ratified by the US when the tribunal was initiated – ratification did not occur until 1988 – the criminal offence of genocide became one of the central charges of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal. And not only there, e.g. anticolonial and civil rights activists refered to the convention for claiming justice in their causes. Given the courtroom setting in Stockholm in 1967, one might wonder why rarely references made to the Eichmann trial six years prior. While in Nuremberg the presentation of evidence was based on documents, the testimony of eyewitnesses and survivors played a marginal role. German perpetrators were confronted with their own documents and decrees in their own administrative language. In this regard the Vietnam tribunal was much closer to the Eichmann trial. As Renana

 For the complex meaning of the term and Raphael Lemkin’s efforts to already apply this category to the Nuremberg Trials, see Hillary Earl, “Prosecuting Genocide Before the Genocide Convention: Raphael Lemkin and the Nuremberg Trials, 1945–1949” in Journal of Genocide Research 15 (2013), H. 3, 319.; for a more personal account of Lemkin’s engagement, see Philippe Sands, East West Street. On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016).  Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Washington D.C. 1944, 79.

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Keydar wrote about the Jerusalem trial, the concentration on oral testimony and a plurality of accounts brought “the entirety of the Holocaust to the courtroom,” but also created a meta-narrative of victimhood and resistance.36 The “staging” of witness testimony from the war zone in Vietnam no less followed a meta-narrative. Vietnamese men, women and children were brought from Vietnam to Stockholm. They mostly presented very limited statements and occasional physical proof of their violation by the US Army’s chemical warfare. These accounts were supplemented by the “second hand” witnessing of tribunal members such as Tariq Ali, Ralph Schoenman and several investigation teams, who travelled to Vietnam and met with survivors of the bombings. At the same time, American G.I.s involved in the offensive delivered lengthy testimonies in extended interrogations. Though the actual proceedings of the Vietnam tribunal saw no explicit reference to the trial in Jerusalem, a letter found in the archive of the Fondazione Lelio and Lisli Basso in Rome showed that contact had indeed been attempted with Benjamin Halevy, Moshe Landau, and Yithak Raveh – the three judges of the Eichmann trial were approached not as jugdes, but “to give evidence” for the Tribunal.37 In the Eichmann trial, the category of crime against the Jewish people was at the center of the indictment and functioned as an “accurate translation of the crime of genocide” as it’s defined and implemented by the UN Genocide Convention of 1948.38 It was retroactively applied by Israeli law to include crimes committed from the late 1930s onward. This criminal offence was hard to proof regarding the atrocities committed in Vietnam. It was necessary to widen and thereby obscure Lemkinʼs category in order to transfer it to the postcolonial Vietnam setting. It is mainly the writings of Günther Anders and Jean-Paul Sartre that enable us to understand the fuzziness of the concept at play during the tribunal.

Redefining Genocide The second session of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, which was held in Copenhagen from November 20 to December 1, 1967, was guided by three main

 Renana Keydar, “Rethinking Plurality. On Ethics and Storytelling in the Search for Justice,” in Dibur Literary Journal (2015) 1, 24.  Secretary General’s Report 11. April 1967, in: Archivio Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso Isosco, Fondo Tribunale Russell (Vietnam), Serie 01, Busta 2, Fasc. 6a.  Leora Bilsky, “The Eichmann Trial. Toward a Jurisprudence of Eyewitness Testimonies of Atrocity?,” in Journal for International Criminal Justice 12 (2014), 31.

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questions. Evidence was presented with the aim of determining whether treatment by the US of prisoners of war, first, and civilian populations, second, was prohibited by the Laws of War/International War. The third question to be addressed was “if the combination of crimes imputed to the Government of the United States in its war in Vietnam constitute the crime of genocide?”39 In his opening remarks, Bertrand Russell used Lemkin’s formulation, stating that by this indictment the United States is considered to have committed the “most heinous of crimes,” but that the proceeding needed to maintain “the most exact juridical sense of the term.”40 While the introductory remarks at the proceedings suggest that “the most dramatic moment of the whole tribunal” occurred when “three American ex-G.I.s were called before the assembly in person,” one of the jurors, the German philosopher and writer Günther Anders, remembered the Copenhagen sessions differently. He proclaimed in a letter to his friend Herbert Marcuse that the second tribunal session was “impressive because Sartre and I reformulated the concept of genocide” and that with this it was “possible to simultaneously judge the US Army for genocide.”41 Jean-Paul Sartre had read his statement On Genocide on the very last day of assembly. But although Sartre directly referred to the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, “the most exact juridical sense of the term” was very quickly overstretched in his statement: The convention was tacitly referring to very recent history. Hitler had declared a deliberate plan to exterminate the Jews; he did not conceal the fact that he was using genocide as a political tactic. The Jew had to be put to death, wherever he came from, not because he had taken up arms or had joined a resistance movement, but just because he was a Jew.42

Therefore, he saw it as the task of the Russell tribunal to reveal the US Armyʼs hidden intention to kill the Vietnamese as Vietnamese people, which was hard to prove.43 Sartre described the roots of genocidal tendencies in general and of the Holocaust in particular as residing in the capitalist need for value creation, which was reliant on total warfare. His approach to summarizing and explaining these historically very different mass atrocities – the Holocaust and the Vietnam War – from an anti-capitalist perspective was one of the main reasons why the analogy became

 Duffett, Preventing the Crime of Silence, 311.  Russell, “Opening Statement to the Second Tribunal Session,” 315.  Letter from Günther Anders to Herbert Marcuse, December 29, 1967, Literary Archive Austrian National Library, Günther Anders Materials, 237/B1501.  Jean-Paul Sartre, “On Genocide,” in Duffett, Preventing the Crime of Silence, 350.  Sartre, “On Genocide.” Moses refers to this quotation but stresses that Sartre obscures the difference between Jews and Vietnamese, where the latter were engaged in an insurgency against the US troops, Moses, Problems of Genocide, 241.

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popular in the rhetoric and iconography of the New Left, where the Vietnam War was at the center of political organization and protest in the late 1960s.44 Sartre’s On Genocide speech was published in a more elaborate version in New Left Review, an influential Marxist journal of the British New Left.45 In their introduction to the article, the editors expressed concern that “The term genocide is, perhaps surprisingly, not so much too specific as too generic. [. . .].”46 From the beginning, the definition of genocide was fraught with contradiction. It aimed to explain collective crimes historically and generalize it legally – with view to future genocides. “Lemkin’s Law,” precisely because it represented an important step in the formalization of human rights at the international level, lost definitional clarity. Sartre’s commentary reflects this problem on two levels. In order to condemn the war crimes in Vietnam as genocide, they had to be “ethicized.” Moreover, in his interpretation, both the murder of European Jews and the massacres of the Vietnamese population obeyed the universal principle of capitalist socialization. Günther Anders drew his redefinition even further away from Lemkinʼs original intentions and developed an anthropological interpretation of the atrocities witnessed in Vietnam. For him, the most vital criterion for the classification of genocide was neither the differentiation between military and civilians, nor the primary goal of annihilating civilians of a specific group, but that this goal is realized through the use of a certain kind of technologically innovative weaponry. Through these means, individuals are declared as militarily destructible objects. According to Anders, with the rapid technological progress of the arms industry, individuals would become objectifiable and destructible in high numbers. His redefinition is concentrated around technological feasibility and the industrial armament complex.47 Additionally, Andersʼ terminology was not limited to the field of law around the tribunal. It was distributed further in his welcoming address for the International Vietnam Congress that took place at the Free University of West Berlin in February 1968 The Vietnam Congress became one of the most important events for the student movement. However Anders’ pessimistic approach outlining a history of decline and industrial warfare did not really suit the students and activists eager to adapt the Vietnamese guerillas’ anti-imperialist fight to the Western metropolis.

 Berthold Molden, “Genozid in Vietnam. 1968 als Schlüsselereignis in der Globalisierung des Holocaustdiskurses,” in Weltenwende 1968? Ein Jahr aus globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive, edited by Jens Kastner and David Mayer (Wien: Mandelbaum, 2008), 87.  Jean-Paul Sartre, “Genocide,” in New Left Review, 1 no. 48, London March/April 1968, 13 –25.  Sartre, “Genocide,” 12.  Günther Anders, Visit Beautiful Vietnam. ABC der Aggressionen heute (Cologne: Pahl Rugenstein, 1968), 64.

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Witnessing Genocide In the somewhat politically and spatially distanced People’s Palace in the Swedish capital, an encounter of different witness groups took place which requires some explanation. Staffan Lamm’s documentary opens with a long shot of a young Vietnamese boy’s face. When the camera zooms out, we can see a group of five Vietnamese sitting on a bench in the Folkshuset’s waiting room. Several civilians from North and South Vietnamese villages and hamlets were flown from the ongoing destruction of the South Asian war zone to the social democratic prosperity of Sweden to bear witness to air raids conducted by the American Air Force. At the same time, we hear a voice-over: “And I would like to tell you – and this is first-hand reports – of when we were in Thanh Hóa town after the bombing, 200 homes had been damaged or destroyed in that single raid we witnessed. Mr. Dang Ba Tao the local Red Cross organizer, had been burned to death. We saw the charred remains of his body [. . .].” The male voice continues when a cut leads us to the court room setting and it’s finally revealed to be Tariq Ali himself speaking on the tribunal’s witness stand. The proceedings included testimony from two further eyewitness groups: first, former G.I.s that were questioned during lengthy sessions by individual members of the jury, and second, guerilla fighters from the National Liberation Front who delivered reports. While the testimony and questioning of three G.I.s comprises 100 pages, five short civilian testimonies comprise only six and are hidden anonymously behind the title “Testimony and Medical Report by Vietnamese Victims.” The transcripts finally introduce some of the North-Vietnamese civilian testimonies depicted by Lamm: Do Van Ngoc, the nine-year-old schoolboy; Ngo Thi Nga, a female school instructor; Hoang Tan Hung, a 45-year-old merchant; the 17year-old Thai Binh Dan, who was burned by napalm; and the peasant Nguyen Hong Phuong. Do Van Ngoc recalls a scene in June 1966, when “American planes appeared from over the sea and dropped bombs on the place where we were [herding oxen with his friends, AP].”48 He describes flames reappearing on his and his friends’ bodies even after they jumped into a flooded rice field. In front of the tribunal, he described the scars and pain that still remained from this incident after about a year had passed. Ngo Thi Nga described the overnight bombing of her boarding school and her failed attempt to lead her 15 students to shelter. She realized that both hers and a pupil’s neck were covered with blood without paying much attention to her own injury. After she lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital, the doctors determined that her head had been wounded by

 “Testimony of Do Van Ngoc,” in: Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 218.

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steel pellets. Since the pellets could not be removed surgically, she spoke to the jury of ongoing “tremendous pain” in her head as well as the loss of her eyesight, both of which kept her from returning to teaching. “[T]he steel pellets of the American aggressor force me to continue treatment” is how she ends her testimony.49 In each of these brief medical reports, the act of military aggression was described in abstract terms. The consequences of the use of newly developed chemical weapons and fragmentation bombs, which were not explicitly named in the personal accounts, were described through their physical consequences: the pain and injuries inflicted in and on the witnesses’ bodies. Some of the witnesses’ brief appearances on the stand were even more disturbing because they ended with the humiliating act of stepping towards the jury, undressing and displaying their injuries. This element had been captured on camera by Staffan Lamm, but is not mentioned in the tribunal transcripts. The presence of civilian eyewitnesses from Vietnam seemingly served mainly as a side show to support a different set of testimonies regarding atrocities, which were given much more space and significance during the tribunal. The victim’s perspectives were in the end dominated by experts’ and G.I.’s statements. Seeking counterevidence against what they presumed to be falsified reports by the American government, the tribunal sent its own investigation teams to meet local officials in 1966–67, not only in Vietnam, but also in Cambodia. The second investigation team visited North Vietnam in January and February of 1967 to meet religious leaders and hear about attacks on religious sites, as well as to talk to survivors of the bombings of villages and co-operatives. Ralph Schoenman, the tribunal’s secretary general, presented first-hand evidence that had originally been gathered for the defense of David Mitchell, a young American conscientious objector that refused service on the grounds of the Nuremberg Charter.50 Schoenman had travelled to provinces that had been bombed with phosphorus and napalm as well as small kinetic missiles called “lazy dog.” He met the director of a tuberculosis sanatorium in Thanh Hóa that had been levelled to the ground and relayed the account of the attempted evacuation of wounded patients.51 Similar reports were delivered by the journalists Charles Cobb and Julius Lester, who also met with victims of phosphorus bombings that gave detailed accounts of their bodily injuries, as

 “Testimony of Miss Ngo Thi Nga,” in: Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 219–220, here: 219.  “Report on American Bombing of North Vietnam. Testimony by Ralph Schoenmann,” in: Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 201–204; for a contemporary literary work on the person of David Mitchell, see: Günther Anders, Nürnberg-Vietnam Synopse (München: Voltaire, 1968).  “Report on American Bombing of North Vietnam. Testimony by Ralph Schoenmann,” in: Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 203–204.

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well as with witnesses of the shellings and strafings of strategic hamlets in so-called pacification programs.52 Some investigators witnessed for themselves what Tariq Ali later called “traumatic events,” the bombings of the city of Thanh Hóa, which they visited on January 29, 1967. Commission members and experts, like Jean-Pierre Vigier, translated the testimonies gathered in dozens of encounters with Vietnamese civilians into the rather technical terms of the armament industry and the medical profession for a tribunal that sought to make the crimes in Vietnam legible in terms of international law. It is the quote from a Vietnamese man read to the jury by Tariq Ali which seems to make the investigation team’s mission even more valuable regarding their self-definition as witnesses for “crimes of silence,” thus far unatoned for by International Law: It had been impossible to visualize the agony of those under attack from a cozy office or a cozy home in Western Europe. One was face to face with the situation, which the Vietnamese told us has existed ever since the United States first started the bombing. They said: ‘tell us Comrade, do you think what the US is doing to us today, do you think the use of napalm, of phosphorus, of fragmentation bombs of all the other insidious devices they invented, do you think the United States would use them in Europe today?’ And it was extremely difficult to answer in the affirmative.53

While it was not in question that the atrocities committed in Vietnam could be judged as crimes against humanity according to the Nuremberg Charter, the indictment of genocide in “the most exact juridical sense of the term,” as Russell claimed in his opening statement, was neglected during the proceedings. It was clearly the use of poisonous gas, the internment of Vietnamese NLF guerilla fighters, and the concentration of populations in so-called strategic hamlets that recalled Nazi concentration camps and the annihilation of the European Jews. While there was not much evidence of a genocidal plan or a systematic attempt to destroy the Vietnamese as an ethnic group, the Italian lawyer Lelio Basso relies heavily on statements from former G.I.s made during their tribunal interviews in his Summation on Genocide. The interviews of Donald Duncan, Peter Martinsen and David Kenneth Tuck were built upon the questions of personal responsibility for atrocities and the refusal to obey orders. Personal responsibility for state crimes had been introduced by the Nuremberg Charter and was also a central topic in the defense of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. During the G.I. testimony for the tribunal, the men were asked bluntly about their knowledge of

 “Report on Bombing of North Vietnam. Testimony by Charles Cob and Julius Lester,” in: Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 206–210.  See Tariq Ali’s testimony in: Anatomy of a War. Accessed September 10, 2022. https://www.ja cobinmag.com/2014/08/anatomy-of-a-war/.; this quote from a Vietnamese woman is not included in his testimony in: Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 130–135.

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the Hague Convention and the Geneva Convention, the duty to resist inhumane orders, and the prohibition of attacks against undefended civilian targets. This was contrasted by detailed hearings on incidents and massacres: executions, torture during the interrogations of prisoners of war, wild shootings in villages and the conditions of internees in refugee camps. Concerning the indictment of genocide, the interrogators did not presume knowledge of this definition of mass crime. This may have been due to the fact that US ratification of the Genocide Convention was still pending. However the questions from various jurors repeatedly returned to the subjects of racial hatred, discrimination and the indiscriminate killing of the Vietnamese, regardless of whether the victims had been members or sympathizers of the NLF. During the interrogation of David Kenneth Tuck, the French lawyer Gisele Halimi stated: I have explained to you that one can consider that ‘genocide’ can begin with the words of officers and their method of inspiring their men’s attitude towards a race or a people. Can you say if, before the battle your officers’ words indicated that they wished you to fight a purely defensive war, or that they wished you to exterminate the Vietnamese people?54

Tuck testifies about the contradictions between what he learned before he went to Vietnam – propaganda about saving the Vietnamese from communism and treating them as equals – and the reality after his arrival: open racism against the Vietnamese with references to them as “gooks,” and spoken orders from commanders that openly called for indiscriminate killings. He continues: “I was very shocked, because I had assumed we were fighting to save these people from communism, and now all at once it came to me that perhaps these people were going to practice genocide after all, because here we are lumping all Vietnamese together.”55 In the questioning of Peter Martinsen, a POW interrogator, direct references were made to the destruction of Europe’s Jews. Without being asked for historical analogies, Martinsen elaborates on features of perpetratorship, what later became known as the “Ordinary Man”56 paradigm within Holocaust historiography: [S]omeone has to say that Americans believe that an American doesn’t commit any war crimes, simply because he is an American. They must understand that it does not take a Nazi to commit a war crime, it does not take a Nazi to kill six million Jews. They must understand this, and no one is willing to speak because there is quite a bit of pressure.57

 David Kenneth Tuck, “Testimony and Questioning of David Kenneth Tuck,” in: Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 403–424, here: 408.  Tuck, “Testimony and Questioning of David Kenneth Tuck,” 409.  Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).  “Testimony and Questioning of Peter Martinsen,” in Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 425–456, here: 435.

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Regardless, the G.I. interviews as well as Lelio Basso’s Summation on Genocide reveal the difficulties in applying the crime of genocide’s narrow legal definition to the Vietnam tribunal’s proceedings. It seems that when it came to the mistreatment of the Vietnamese as a people, yet another novelty in international law was being used to fill a gap in legal argumentation. The Stockholm verdict had already seen references to a human right that had become an integral part of the December 1960 UN resolution. This was the right of self-determination. And I quote from the verdict: Because of their systematic employment with the object of destroying the fundamental rights of the people of Vietnam, their unity and their wish for peace, the crimes against humanity of which the government of the United States of America has rendered itself guilty becomes a fundamental constituent part of the crime of aggression, a supreme crime which embraces all the others according to the Nuremberg verdict.58

With this underlying assumption of the human right to self-determination, the verdict of genocide can be seen from a different angle. As Tulli writes, the “basic rationale for the tribunal was massive evidence of crimes ‘perpetrated against the people of Vietnam,’ not against individual Vietnamese.”59 Following this argument, the alleged genocide committed by Americans had a strong resonance in the reported and queried “attacks on the collective right to self-determination.”60 The verdict of the second session of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal was not unanimous among its members, but it was clear. The tribunal had ended with two strong pleas by Jean-Paul Sarte and Lelio Basso for the genocide verdict. Basso resumes: This war of extermination is the natural fruit and necessity of American imperialism. It is not the case of extraordinary ferocity which almost accidentally adds itself to a conventional war. We cannot imagine this war is different from others where both parties commit a few crimes, as is usual throughout the history of wars. Here everything fits: everything reflects the same systematizing. [. . .] [T]he genocidal crimes – everything is explained by the omnipotent imperialism of the United States, which will dominate the world, which will refuse the people’s right to autonomy.61

Whether this is to be interpreted as a rhetorical coup in Cold War political rivalries or a legalist approach to left-wing transnationalism in the late 1960s, the

 “Verdict of the Stockholm Session,” in Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 302–309, here: 308; Moses also points to this connection of genocide and self-determination, Moses, Problems of Genocide, 421.  Tulli, “Wielding the Human Rights Weapon Against the American Empire,” 224.  Tulli, “Wielding the Human Rights Weapon Against the American Empire.”  Lelio Basso, “Summation on Genocide,” in: Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 626–643, here: 627.

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tribunal’s proceedings still reveal another facet of speaking about atrocities. The concept of genocide, developed from the will to distinguish, as history shows, contains its own opposite.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Letter from Günther Anders to Herbert Marcuse, December 29, 1967. In: Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna, Günther Anders Materials, Sign. 237/B1501. Anders, Günther. Nürnberg und Vietnam: Synoptisches Mosaik. München: Voltaire Verlag, 1968. Anders, Günther. Visit Beautiful Vietnam: ABC der Aggressionen heute. Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1968. Anders, Günther. Wir Eichmannsöhne. Offener Brief an Klaus Eichmann. München: Beck, 1964. Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Bilsky, Leora. “The Eichmann Trial. Toward a Jurisprudence of Eyewitness Testimonies of Atrocity?” Journal for International Criminal Justice 12 (2014): 27–57. Breuning, Marion. “Von Nürnberg nach Vietnam: Das “Russell Tribunal” von 1967 in historischer Perspektive.“ In Deutschland und die USA in der Internationalen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Festschrift für Detlev Junker, edited by Manfred Berg and Philipp Gassert, 492–504. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004. Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Matthew Craven et al., International Law and the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Curthoys, Ann and Docker, John. “Defining Genocide.” In: The Historiography of Genocide, ed. By Dan Stone, 9–41. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Dean, Carolyn J. The Moral Witness. Trials and Testimony after Genocide. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2019. Douglas, Lawrence. “Crimes of Atrocity, the Problem of Punishment and the Situ of Law.” In Propaganda, War Crimes and International Law: From Speaker’s Corner to War Crimes, edited by Predrag Dojčinović, 269–294. Abbington: Routledge, 2012. Duffett, John. Against the Crime of Silence. Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal. New York/London: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Earl, Hillary. “Prosecuting Genocide Before the Genocide Convention: Raphael Lemkin and the Nuremberg Trials, 1945–1949.” Journal of Genocide Research, 15 (2013): 317–337. Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori. Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Frey, Marc. Geschichte des Vietnamkriegs: Die Tragödie in Asien und das Ende des amerikanischen Traums. Munich: Beck, 2010. Gassert, Philipp. “Das Russell-Tribunal von 1966/67: „Blaming and Shaming“ und die Nürnberger Prinzipien.“ In Toward a New Moral World Order? Menschenrechtspolitik und Völkerrecht seit 1945, edited by Norbert Frei and Annette Weinke, 149–163. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013.

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Jacobin Magazine. “Anatomy of War.” Accessed September 10, 2022. https://www.jacobinmag.com/ 2014/08/anatomy-of-a-war/. Keydar, Renana. “Rethinking Plurality. On Ethics and Storytelling in the Search for Justice.” Dibur Literary Journal, 1 (2015): 19–28. Kiechel, Charlotte. “Legible Testimonies, Raphael Lemkin, the Victim’s Voice, and the Global History of Genocide.” In Genocide Studies and Prevention, 13 no. 1 (2019): 42–63. Klinghoffer, Arthur Jay and Klinghoffer, Judith Apter. International Citizensʼ Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance Human Rights. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Knellessen, Dagi. “Transnationale Zeugenschaft: Jüdische Überlebende in den ersten SobiborVerfahren 1949/50 in Frankfurt am Main und West-Berlin.“ In: Im Schatten von Nürnberg: Transnationale Ahndung von NS-Verbrechen, edited by Enrico Heitzer et al., 211–222. Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2019. Krämer, Sybille and Weigel, Sigrid. Testimony/Bearing Witness: Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Kuby, Emma. Political Survivors. The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945, Cornell: Cornell University Press 2019. Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Washington D.C: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944. Lewis, Mark. The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Loeffler, James. “The First Genocide. Antisemitism and Universalism in Raphael Lemkin’s Thought.” In Jewish Quarterly Review, 112 no. 1 (Winter 2022): 139–163. Manfredi, Zachary. “Sharpening the Vigilance of the World: Reconsidering the Russell Tribunal as Ritual.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 9 (2018): 75–91. Molden, Berthold. “Genozid in Vietnam: 1968 als Schlüsselereignis in der Globalisierung des Holocaustdiskurses. “In Weltenwende 1968? Ein Jahr aus globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive, edited by Jens Kastner and David Mayer. Wien: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2008. Moses, Dirk A. “The Holocaust and World History. Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology.” In The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, ed. by Dan Stone, 272–289. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. Moses, Dirk A. The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Rabinbach, Anson. Begriffe aus dem Kalten Krieg: Totalitarismus, Antifaschismus, Genozid. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2009. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Russell, Bertrand. “Lord Russell’s Letter.” Harper’s Magazine, June, 1963. Russell, Bertrand. “Opening Statement to the First Meeting of Members of the War Crimes Tribunal, London, November 13, 1966.” In Prevent the Crimes of Silence: Reports from the Sessions of the International War Crimes Tribunal founded by Bertrand Russell, edited by Peter Limqueco and Peter Weiss. London: Allen Lane, 1971. Sands, Phillipe. East West Street: On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity. London: Knopf, 2016. Sarat, Austin et al., How Law Knows. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Genocide.” New Left Review, 1 no. 48 (1968): 13–25.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Inaugural Statement to the Tribunal.” In Against the Crime of Silence. Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, edited by John Duffett (Ed.), 40–48. New York/ London: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Stengel, Katharina. Die Überlebenden vor Gericht Auschwitz-Häftlinge als Zeugen in NS-Prozessen (1950–1976). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2022. Tresize, Thomas. Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Tuck, David Kenneth. “Testimony and Questioning of David Kenneth Tuck,” in: Duffett, Against the Crime of Silence, 403–424. Tulli, Umberto. “Wielding the Human Rights Weapon against the American Empire: The Second Russell Tribunal and Human Rights in Transatlantic Relations.” In Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 19 (2021): 215–237. Weiss, Peter. The Investigation. New York: Calder and Boyard, 1966. Weiss-Wendt, Anton. A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Wieviorka, Annette. Era of the Witness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Zunino, Marcos. “Subversive Justice: The Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal and Transitional Justice.” In International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2 (2016): 211–229.

Leona Toker

Not Typical but Typifying: Varlam Shalamov’s “A Piece of Meat” Memoirs of Gulag experience have been coming out beyond the borders of the Soviet Union ever since the 1920s. However, in the USSR itself, after some propagandistic paeans to the camps published in the early 1930s and largely discontinued when echoes of Nazi camps appeared in Western media, narratives about labor camps started coming out again only about a year after the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (1961). It was there that Nikita Khrushchev “went public” with what had till then been his “secret” revelation of Stalin’s crimes at the 20th Congress in 1956. The first narrative to make a real dent and initiate a new subject and even a new genre of Russian literature was, of course, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962); it appeared shortly after the much less impressive short story, “The Nugget” by Georgii Shelest, published in the daily newspaper Izvestiya. The impact of Solzhenitsyn’s novella has been much discussed:1 in brief, not only did it give millions of readers a sense, though a somewhat illusory one, of what it was like in the camps, but it also seemed to signal a liberalization in the Soviet press, which promised a chance that other Gulag testimonies might also get published in the motherland. This possibility was also semi-illusory: though manuscripts about the Gulag started flowing to editorial offices, the amount that made it to the printing stage was strictly rationed, and the tendency of those accepted for publication was modelled on Shelest’s rather than Solzhenitsyn’s narrative: in tune with the line taken in Khrushchev’s disclosures, these were stories about how the unjustly imprisoned communists remained faithful to their ideals and their party even in the camps.2 The stories of another major Gulag writer, Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982), who did not toe this line, were rejected, drifted

 One of the most recent discussions is Richard Tempest, Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Fictive Worlds (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 69–105.  See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literry Investigation, vol. 2, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), Part III, ch. 11; Mikhail Geller, Kontsentratsionnyi mir i sovetskaia literatura (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1974), 272–281; Dariusz Tolczyk, See No Evil: Literary Cover-ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 185–90 and 210–231; Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 48–52. Leona Toker, Professor Emerita, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-012

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into the Samizdat (that is, started passing from reader to reader and from one home typewriter to another), and were eventually published abroad. In Russia they started coming out only after the beginning of glasnost and perestroika, phenomena which are now regarded as the Second Russian Revolution. Like Solzhenitsyn but independently from this fellow camp-veteran and literary rival, Shalamov started working on his post-camp prose-writing not with directly factographic memoirs but with fictional stories, or rather fictionalized narratives. However, he always regarded his short stories as testimony to the crimes of the regime. One may explain the choice of the fictional mode by the need to format the testimony as “Literature” rather than plain life-writing or journalism, thus enhancing its chance of publication and, in some ways, protecting the author, yet in regard to the literary process in the USSR, such an explanation was not even necessary. The broad reading public in post-World War II Soviet Union had been brought up on realistic fiction and habitually tended to perceive it as not merely representing and programming but actually testifying to the social conditions of the time and place where it was set. Hence, at the time, the choice of the fictional mode did not clash with the testimonial agenda, whereas the broad public also tended to deny the status of “literary art” to factographic life-writing. The distinction between factual attesting and fictionalized narratives is more troubling to modern scholarship than to the Soviet reading experience in the periods of Thaw and Stagnation (roughly 1956–1868 and 1968–1986, respectively). In a contribution to the 2017 collection of essays Narrative as Argument edited by Paula Olmos, I have argued that fictional narratives can double as historical testimony (even though not as court testimony) when they create the sense of exemplifying the typical features or events of the social enclave and historical period in which they are set:3 the “sample convention” tends to neutralize the “as-if convention” that characterizes fictionality.4 Here I propose to adjust that statement by applying it to the representation of events that were exceptional rather than typical, so long as these events were “typifying” – in the sense that they could take the given shape only under given circumstances. It is not every social structure that can produce every kind of aberration: certain excesses are exceptions that support the rule – they have the power to reveal the deep-seated features of a social enclave just as well as, or even better than, the accounts of the fairly typical. Two reading

 See Leona Toker, “The Sample Convention, or, When Fictionalized Narratives Can Double as Historical Testimony.” In Narration as Argument, ed. Paula Olmos (Heidelberg: Springer, 2017), 123–140.  On the “as if” convention, along with the acts of selection and recombination of material, as forming fictionality, see Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthopology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 4–12.

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tendencies form a tension in the response to typifying stories. On the one hand, as noted above, the Soviet audience had been conditioned to perceive the events that formed realistic fictional plots as largely “typical” (typical of “ordinary people in ordinary circumstances”) – hence the angry Soviet ideological critiques (in the Writers’ Union and in editorial offices) of literary works that seemed to highlight the ideologically wrong estimates of social developments. On the other hand, extraordinary events whetted and held the attention of the reading public: striking coincidences would take the place of the inadmissible supernatural. Two extraordinary events are collocated in Shalamov’s 1964 story “A Piece of Meat.” This is a demonstratively fictional(ized) story: the protagonist is not the anonymous first-person narrator, as in many of Shalamov’s other stories – that is, not the kind of narrator who may be easily imagined as autobiographical. “A Piece of Meat” is a third-person narrative of what happens to a political prisoner by the name of Golubev in the 24 hours he spends in a camp hospital:5 there are the classical unities of time and place, but the unity of action is replaced by an accidental collocation of two extraordinary events. In view of the non-identity of the protagonist and the author, the story does not offer the reader what Philippe Lejeune calls the autobiographical pact,6 in which the name in the author-line is also the name of the protagonist. Insights into the mind of a third-person protagonist, one who is not the author, is one of the prominent signposts of fictionality.7 Golubev has managed to survive long years in the murderous gold-mining camps of Kolyma; now he apparently holds a menial but life-saving job in a camp hospital. This is December, end of the calendar year, when camp-region authorities are prone to send commissions to different locations in order to have achievements that they could list in annual reports. One of the main purposes of the commissions is to make sure that prisoners sentenced under article 58 of the

 The name is derived from the Russian for “dove,” golub’, and therefore is inescapably symbolic. On the naming of Shalamov’s protagonists see Franziszek Apanowicz, 2002. “Soshestvie v ad (Obraz troitsy v Kolymskikh rasskazakh).” Shalamovskii sbornik III, ed. V. V. Esipov (Vologda: Grifon), 129–143; Elena Mikhailik, Nezakonnaia kometa. Varlam Shalamov: Opyt medlennogo chteniia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018), 136–137; Leona Toker, “Name Change and Author Avatars in Primo Levi and Varlam Shalamov,” in Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature, ed. Markku Lehtimäki, Laura Karttunen, and Maria Mäkelä (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 227–237; and Sarah J. Young, “Recalling the Dead: Repetition, Identity, and the Witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy.” Slavic Review 70.2 (2011): 353–372.  Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary; ed. Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989), 4, 8–13.  On this and other “signposts of fictionality,” see Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 109–32.

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penal code (the political article) are employed only on hard physical labor. Golubev knows that he will appear in their list for deportation to remote gold-digging camps, which will now mean death for him. Recollecting an off-hand remark made by the camp surgeon when a friend of his was thus deported on one of the previous occasions, “It’s his own fault. All he needed was an attack of acute appendicitis and he could have stayed.”8 Golubev decides to sacrifice “a pound of flesh,” or else throw a piece of meat to the Cerberus guarding his prison-hospital paradise:9 when ordered to prepare for deportation he instantly decides to feign appendicitis. The surgeon is not slow in pretending to diagnose this condition, and Golubev is immediately sent to the operating room, where a totally healthy appendix is removed, with insufficient local anesthesia. This is a transformed version of the theme of self-mutilation, sacrificing a part to save the whole, that runs through the whole of the Gulag corpus and tellingly distinguishes it from the corpus of Holocaust narratives, where invalidism is generally tantamount to a death verdict: in the Gulag, amputees, if not retried for sabotage, were usually exempt from hard labor, though likely to die of slow starvation on “invalid rations.” In Shalamov’s poem “The Wish” this theme is further transformed: the speaker wants to be an armless and legless amputee so that he might have the courage to spit at the “beauty,” at pictures of the obnoxious snout of the oppressor, “at its godlike image, so that a person who remembers faces of the invalids should not pray to it”10 – if man has been made in God’s image, the faces of the  Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (London: Penguin, 1994), 225. All further parenthetic references are to this edition, pp. 222–231. Shalamov’s stories have been retranslated; that new edition – Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories, trans. Donald Rayfield (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2018) – has the virtue of including the whole of Kolyma Tales (whereas the 1994 volume is selective), but in many cases I disagree with the translator’s lexical choices.  In one of his last poems, the 1981 “I Will Not Walk the Dogs” (“Ne budu ya progulivat’ sobak”), Shalamov returned to the theme of appeasing the guard dogs of the other world by a part of his flesh – this time, as in The Merchant of Venice, a piece of his heart: “In the paradise I chose the brightest corner / with willows / I threw my heart – he sniffed, and carried it off, /my cerberus” (“В раю я выбрал самый светлый уголок, / Где верба. / Я сердце бросил – он понюхал, уволок, / Мой цербер”). Varlam Shalamov, Sobraniye sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, ed. I. P. Sirotinskaia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura/Vagrius, 1998), III: 447.  Я б собрал слюну во рту, Я бы плюнул в красоту, В омерзительную рожу. На ее подобье Божье Не молился б человек, Помнящий лицо калек . . . (Shalamov, Sobraniye sochinenii, III: 191).

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invalids would not allow the beholder to deify the tyrant responsible for their plight. In “A Piece of Meat,” after the operation is over, Golubev feels happy in the recovery ward – he has escaped death: The exertion of the will and the nervous upheaval were fading away, and the pleasant sense of a duty accomplished filled Golubev’s entire body. Each cell of his body sang and purred something pleasant. For the time being he was free from the threat of being sent off to an unknown convict fate. (227)

Unlike the 1938 execution of a depleted prisoner in the story “An Individual Assignment,” this event in the first half of “A Piece of Meat” is not typical, not serial: the surgeon transgresses the major medical principle, not to harm – “In primum, non nocere” (though this transgression, like many others in camp life, may protect the patient from a greater harm); the surgeon himself is energetic and likes to display his skill and courage; the assistant surgeon, a free-employee intern, is sympathetic and not likely to denounce his prisoner-colleague; Golubev himself has the courage to sacrifice a part for the whole. Clearly, however, it is only camp conditions that lead to this surrender of a pound of flesh and departure from standard medical ethics. Moreover, the narrative evokes the possibility of the event launching a series: the assistant asks the surgeon to summon him in every case when something like that is to be done. Yet the second half of the story raises the ghost of Viktor Frankl’s parable of “Death in Teheran”: a man runs as far as Teheran in order to escape Death only to encounter Death in the street of that town.11 There having been few operations in the hospital, the recovery room accommodates not only post-surgery patients but also regular ones; in one of the two current inmates Golubev recognizes the professional criminal Kononenko whom he had met in a transit prison. Kononenko is a cold-blooded murderer, known for strangling chance people with a towel in order to be tried again and kept in prison or prison hospital instead of being sent to remote hard-labor camps. Golubev’s happiness on having escaped deportation is over: he calculates that Kononenko is about to be released from the hospital, so it is time for him to commit another murder in order to avoid the

See discussion in Franziska Thun-Hohenstein. “‘A Grudge-holding Body’: Body and Memory in the Works of Varlam Shalamov,” in The Gulag in the Writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, ed. Fabian Heffermehl and Irina Karlsohn (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 162–164.  Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, trans. Ilse Lasch (Boston: Beacon, 1962), 54–56.

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mining camps. Now Golubev has a fifty percent chance of survival: Kononenko may choose either him or the other patient in the room, the malingerer Podosenov, who has been mixing blood from a self-inflicting wound into his urine in order to continue being kept in the hospital. But then the orderly, who brings Kononenko a letter, calls him Kazakov, and Golubev realizes that he is the next victim because he knows that Kazakov is not the criminal’s real name but probably the assumed identity stolen from one of his victims – and that Kononenko is aware of this. Having escaped a prolonged agony at digging for gold in a mine, he has now fallen into the arms of a swift death. Yet events work out otherwise. The letter that Kononenko has received is summons to the camps, where the so called “bitch war” is raging: professional criminals who abide by the complicated criminal code, which prominently includes refusal to collaborate with the authorities, now fight to death with the “bitches,” that is, criminals who have “sold out” to the authorities.12 A faithful member of the criminal culture, Kononenko cannot fail to obey the command to join his own in the camps. There is now no need for him to kill Golubev, for whom he has already been preparing a towel. Both the probability of falling into the hands of a serial murderer in a hospital and the probability of the last-minute rescue are minuscule, a statistical insanity. The event is by no means typical, but it is typifying in the sense that it can only happen in the camps and during “the war of the bitches.” Of course, the Gulag system was so vast and lasted such a long time that all kinds of extraordinary events and convergences could take place in it. How can a fictional story of two extraordinary events in a row double as testimony to features of the Gulag society? Apart from our sense that events of this kind could only occur in the Gulag or similar structures, the sample convention, which, as noted above, neutralizes the as-if convention of fictional narratives, is evoked by the attendant circumstances of the plot. The horror of the Northern hard-labor camps, and the horror of returning to them after having once or twice survived them, are conveyed through Golubev’s readiness to sacrifice the “piece  Shalamov devotes a long essay, “The War of the ‘Bitches’” (“Suchia voina”) in his collection Sketches of the Criminal World (Ocherki prestupnogo mira, composition dated 1959) to this gory and game-changing post-WWII conflict; see Varlam Shalamov, Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories, trans. Donald Rayfield (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2020), 59–81. For a discussion of this and other sketches in the story cycle, see Leona Toker, “Varlam Shalamov’s Sketches of the Criminal World,” in Born to be Criminal: The Discouirse on Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Union, ed. Ricardo Nicolosi and Anne Hartmann (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017), 233–45. The representation of criminal underworld in Gulag literature is discussed in Renate Lachmann’s article “Criminals in Gulag Accounts,” 199–232, in the same collection of essays.

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of meat” from his body; it is enhanced by the criminal’s readiness to sacrifice the life of another’s body in order to avoid those camps and to face milder trials instead: Kononenko’s agenda thus supports Golubev’s motivation – there is, as it were, the evidence of two. Moreover, after the reflections on the contemporaneity of the Shakespearean “pound of flesh” in the first paragraph (“Life repeats Shakespearean themes more often that we think. Did Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and King Claudius exist only in the Middle Ages? Shylock wanted to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the merchant of Venice. Is that a fairy tale?” 22213), the story lowers the level of generality by explaining the reasons why commissions raid camp hospitals and similar professional institutions at the end of the year, to purge them of “the 58th”: the ensuing account of Golubev’s fake appendicitis is then perceived as an exemplification of these regularities: an extraordinary form of typical events. The impression of the seriality of the events may also be associated with immediate contexts: to readers who are at least minimally familiar with the sociology of the criminal subculture in the camps and at large, Kononenko’s abandoning his modus operandi upon receiving his cohorts’ summons to the camps is an exemplification of the professional criminals’ blind obedience to their shared codes, especially when under attack from “the bitches.” Moreover, what is extraordinary in the present may launch a pattern: the civilian assistant surgeon’s request to the prisoner-surgeon, “If you have anything else like this, be sure to send for me” (226), suggests that this kind of para-Hippocratic sacrifice of a piece of meat has the potential to become a serial event – perhaps until someone denounces both the doctors and the patients. Paradoxically, the testimonial weight of this story of the untypical but typifying is enhanced by its fictionality. Had the story been formatted as a directly factographic narrative, referring to a specific day in the life of a specific documented person, the reader would not have been at liberty to inquire into the meaning of the collocation of its two plot events: they would be presented in temporal proximity because, as it were, they would have been supposed to have actually happened one after the other. The fictionalized mode of the story, by contrast, actually invites us to ask about the meaning of the conjunction of the two events, and the answer to that question foregrounds a number of serial regularities of which these events

 In his Shakespearean sonnet (3 quatrains and a couplet) titled “A Translation from English” (“Perevod s angliiskogo,” Shalamov, Sobranie sochinenii, III: 96–97), Shalamov’s speaker is reading a Shakespeare volume out loud in the hut of an Old Believer exiled to Siberia with his unmarried daughter: the hut in Kuban’ has been kept by Goneril; the humps of camel-like clouds are swaying over the nonconformist old Lear on the “Danish” land. The reference to Denmark suggests that what the speaker is reading in the house of a peasant King Lear is Boris Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet, published in 1941.

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are then perceived as consequences, epiphenomena, or samples. The testimonial force of the story is also strengthened by its proximity to directly factographic materials: in the cycle “The Left Bank” of Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales this text is immediately followed by the story “My Trial,”14 an autobiographical account, with the firstperson narrator being addressed as “Shalamov,” of the pseud-legal process which in 1943 had led to Shalamov’s new ten-year sentence (instead of being released in 1942, he was kept in the camps “until the end of the war,” and because of the 1943 trial was released only in 1951, yet the new charges were lighter than those of his 1937 five-year sentence for “Counter-Revolutionary Terrorist Activity,” and this helped to save his life by allowing him to hold lighter jobs, enroll in medics’ courses, and work as a camp medic). In reading the autobiographical “My Trial” we have to ponder the causal and semiotic connections between the different consecutive events that it represents, but because of the placement of that narrative among the fictionalized or semi-fictionalized stories we can also ask about the symbolic or emblematic meanings of its events or about the force and the generality with which they testify to collective rather than individual experiences. “A Piece of Meat,” by contrast, belongs to those of Shalamov’s stories (including, for instance, “An Individual Assignment,” “Condensed Milk,” “A Day Off,” “Serafim,” “The Artist of the Spade,” and “Lida”) which we are invited to read as testimony but not without asking of them the questions that one usually asks of fiction – questions about symbolism, the meaning of recurrent motifs, the form of narrative progression, and so on. What distinguishes this story (as well as, for instance, “Serafim”) from the bulk of that group is that it focuses on the typifying rather than the typical, on exceptions that strengthen our sense of the regularities. The answers that we find to the questions raised by the collocations of the story may be multiple – they may, for instance, indirectly pertain to the generally applicable phenomena hinted at by the metaliterary opening of the story, yet the dominant burden of those answers is testimony regarding the moral consequences of the victimization, in particular the unnatural enslavement of great numbers of people by a despotic regime and their treatment as expendable. Shalamov both invites a broader humanistic reading of his testimony and limits its scope, so that broader contexts might not lead to neglect of their immediate testimonial function. It remains to be decided to what extent the sample convention, whether representing the typical or evoked by the details of the typifying, may play a similar testimonial role in fictionalized stories outside Gulag literature, fictionalized survivor

 Shalamov devised the sequence of the stories in each cycle himself and insisted that this sequence be maintained.

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narratives about other systems of oppression, atrocities, or natural disasters. In each case, the nature and the limits of the attesting function of such narratives is likely to be affected not only by the content of the testimony and the individuality of the author but also by the history of their target audiences’ reading conventions and horizons of expectation.

Bibliography Apanowicz, Franziszek. “Soshestvie v ad (Obraz troitsy v Kolymskikh rasskazakh).” Shalamovskii Sbornik III, edited by V. V. Esipov, 129–43. Vologda: Grifon, 2002. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, translated by Ilse Lasch. Boston: Beacon 1962. Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Geller, Mikhail. Kontsentratsionnyi mir i sovetskaia literatura. London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1974. Lachmann, Renate. 2017. “Criminals in Gulag Accounts.” In Born to be Criminal: The Discourse on Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Union, edited by Ricardo Nicolosi and Anne Hartmann, 199–232. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography, translated by Katherine Leary; edited by Paul John Eakin. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989. Mikhailik, Elena. Nezakonnaia kometa. Varlam Shalamov: Opyt medlennogo chteniia. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018. Shalamov, Varlam. Kolyma Stories, translated by Donald Rayfield (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2018). Shalamov, Varlam. Kolyma Tales, translated by John Glad. London: Penguin, 1994. Shalamov, Varlam. Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories, translated by Donald Rayfield (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2020). Shalamov, Varlam. Sobraniye sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, edited by I. P. Sirotinskaia. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura/Vagrius, 1998. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, vol. 2, translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Tempest, Richard. Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Fictive Worlds. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019. Thun-Hohenstein, Franziska. “‘A Grudge-holding Body’: Body and Memory in the Works of Varlam Shalamov.” In The Gulag in the Writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, edited by Fabian Heffermehl and Irina Karlsohn, 142–176. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Toker, Leona. Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Toker, Leona. “Name Change and Author Avatars in Primo Levi and Varlam Shalamov.” In Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature, edited by Markku Lehtimäki, Laura Karttunen, and Maria Mäkelä, 227–237. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012.

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Toker, Leona. Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Toker, Leona. “The Sample Convention, or, When Fictionalized Narratives Can Double as Historical Testimony.” In Narration as Argument, edited by Paula Olmos, 123–140. Heidelberg: Springer, 2017. Toker, Leona. 2017b. “Varlam Shalamov’s Sketches of the Criminal World.” In Born to be Criminal: The Discourse on Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Union, ed. Ricardo Nicolosi and Anne Hartmann, 233–245. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017. Tolczyk, Dariusz. See No Evil: Literary Cover-ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Young, Sarah J. “Recalling the Dead: Repetition, Identity, and the Witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy.” Slavic Review, 70 no. 2 (2011): 353–372.

Martina Weisz

Witnessing as Counter-Power: Testimony and Crimes against Humanity in the Argentinian Province of Jujuy In the speech he delivered in Stockholm on December 8, 1982, on the occasion of being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Gabriel García Márquez pointed at the limitations of the rational mind when trying to make sense of Latin American reality: Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.1

As reflected in the work of this author, and of other renowned Latin American writers such as Juan Rulfo, Jorge Amado, and Isabel Allende, one of the most distinctive features of Latin America life is the close, conscious relationship between the living and the spirits of their loved ones who have already crossed the threshold of this world. In this chapter, the “magical realism” that made Latin American literature famous is taken beyond the limits of artistic expression as a tool for exploring the role of witnessing as a specific form of counter-power. Focusing on the case of trials for crimes against humanity that took place in recent years in the Argentine province of Jujuy, this text demonstrates how, thanks to the oral and public nature of these hearings, the testimonies issued in this framework convey to some extent the presence of those people whose bodies were made “disappear”2 during the southern country’s most recent dictatorship. Through the act of witnessing, the physical absence of the desaparecidos is transmuted into a subtle yet potent counter-power at the individual, social and political levels.

 Gabriel García Márquez, “The solitude of Latin America,” December 8, 1982. Accessed October 17, 2021. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/lecture/  I am referring here to the assassinations followed by the concealment of the corpses. In Spanish these people are referred to as desaparecidos, ‘the disappeared.’ Martina Weisz, Research Fellow, The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-013

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The Día de las Almas in Guerrero On November 1 and 2, 2020, as every year, ceremonies commemorating the Día de las Almas were held in numerous households in the Argentine province of Jujuy. During those days, many families prepared to host the souls of their loved ones who had passed away, whom they believed had set out for a long journey back to the world of the living to celebrate an encounter with family and friends. These rituals, rooted in pre-Columbian American cultures, survived the Spanish conquest and colonization owing to their adaptation to the Catholic Christian commemoration of All Souls’ Day. According to the official site of the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs of Argentina, this ceremony not only reinforces the cultural identity of the native peoples, but also plays a fundamental role in keeping alive their connection with their ancestors.3 In a modest house in the town of Guerrero, located in the Argentinian province of Jujuy, the traditional offerings assumed unusual forms. To the drinks, flowers, and breads in the shape of animals, people, or ladders, were added baked dough in the shape of the handkerchiefs of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, as well as circles bearing the word Justicia ‘justice’ or the inscription “30,000 compañeros desaparecidos presentes” ‘30,000 activists desaparecidos activists are present.’4 These contemporary additions to the secular symbols of the Día de las Almas make an unequivocal reference to the demands for Memory, Truth and Justice that arose within the human rights activism campaigns during the last Argentinian dictatorship (1976–1983), and which continue to this day. During that de facto government, the Argentinian state committed acts of terrorism against its own citizens. Despite the fact that the exact numbers of human rights violations remain uncertain due to the deliberate concealment of evidence, it is estimated that during that period about 500 clandestine centers for detention, torture, and death (clandestine detention camps – CDC) were established in the country, leading to the forced disappearance of some 30,000 people.5  “Día de las almas: una ceremonia de encuentro con los seres queridos que ya no están.” Accessed February 9, 2021. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/dia-de-las-almas-una-ceremoniade-encuentro-con-los-seres-queridos-que-ya-no-estan  Eva Arroyo, “1 y 2 de noviembre: desde el alma y para las almas.” Accessed February 9, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/notes/juan-sinmiedo/1-y-2-de-noviembre-desde-el-alma-y-para-lasalmas/2548510622046382/  M. A. Salerno, A. Zarankin and M. C. Perosino, “Arqueologías de la clandestinidad. Una revisión de los trabajos efectuados en los centros de detención clandestinos de la última dictadura militar en Argentina,” Revista Universitaria De Historia Militar, 1 no. 2 (2015): 52. See also Marina Franco, “Testimoniar e informar: exiliados argentinos en París (1976–1983),” Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire. Les Cahiers ALHIM, 8 (2004). Accessed October 25, 2021. https://journals.openedition.org/alhim/414

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Claudia Goyochea, the person responsible for this original tribute, was not directly affected by the crimes committed more than 40 years ago. One reason why she decided to incorporate these symbols associated with the struggle for Memory, Truth and Justice is the proximity of her home to what used to be one of the most important CDCs in the province. Since her childhood, she had heard of the screaming and excruciating lamentations which, according to the neighbors, emanated from that building where those people kidnapped by the security forces were subjected to lengthy torture, and in some cases even murdered and made to “disappear.” According to Claudia, her neighbors’ complaints intensified when a decision was taken to commemorate March 24, the day on which the coup d’état that initiated the last dictatorship took place, at the site of the Guerrero CDC. Significantly, during the approximately 12 years that Claudia spent as an activist in the Asociación de Trabajadores Desocupados ‘Association of Unemployed Workers,’ one of the organizers of the commemorations, the March 24 commemoration (established by law in 2002 as the National Day of Memory, Truth and Justice)6 grew from a small gathering of about 30–40 people to a mass event attended by militants from different places in the province and filling about 10 buses. Claudia recalls how, during the initial years, some people living close to the Guerrero CDC would complain because, according to them, the commemorations “woke up” the souls of the people who were killed there. The screaming, wailing and other noises coming from the site were louder and more intense than usual.7 She took the decision to honor those murdered in the CDC whose bodies were posteriorly made “disappear” -desaparecidos- by incorporating them into the celebrations of the “Day of Souls.” Since the Dia de las Almas is dedicated to the dead, she thought that the inclusion of the desaparecidos into this special ritual of remembrance could bring some solace to their tormented souls. Thus it was that some seven or eight years ago, Claudia decided to incorporate the desaparecidos from Guerrero – and through them, all 30,000 detainees disappeared by the last Argentinian dictatorship – into her family’s ceremony of the Día de las Almas: because of my culture, I think and believe that the compañeros ‘fellow activists’ are there, that they are always there, and they are there in pain because . . . that’s how we say it, that they never left because [their captors] didn’t let them go in peace, because of the way they

 See the official website of the Argentinian Ministry of Education. Accessed February 22, 2021. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/educacion/efemerides/24-marzo-memoria  Original in Spanish, translated by the author. Interview with Claudia Goyochea, February 12, 2021.

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died, the way they were tortured, they will stay there until justice is done. So we decided to make them offerings [during the Día de las Almas], to set the table and wait for them, because in addition to waiting for my family, [I] was waiting for them . . .8

During the ceremony, the souls of the victims of the dictatorship are honored along with those of Claudia’s father, uncle, and other deceased relatives. A festive table is set where the favorite dishes of the deceased and other special provisions are laid next to the holy water. Standing around the table, the Goyochea family and their hosts dedicate prayers to the souls they believe have come visit them from the other side of the veil. All this takes place in a celebratory atmosphere: [The feeling during the ceremony] is not a feeling of fear – because most people are afraid of the dead, that is, it is nice to know that they are there with us, that they left their body but remained with us in spirit, they are like a little light out there in space, and every time you invoke them, because every time we do the Pachamama ceremony [indigenous ceremony of homage to Mother Earth] we invoke them, when we do the martes de chaya ceremony [indigenous ceremony] we invoke them, every time we go out to the fields, they also accompany us, they are always there [with us]. So in one way or another they guide you . . . [emphasis added]9

By welcoming the souls of the detenidos-desaparecidos into her family, Claudia blurs, to a certain extent, the boundaries between public and private, consciously establishing her household as a space of political and social militancy. As recalled by Claudia, the traditional visits from neighbors, family and friends during the Día de las Almas, were often the occasion for people who were not completely aware of what occurred during the dictatorship, or who were still afraid to talk about what happened during those years, to talk openly about that silenced part of their own history.10 Also, during these days, Claudia usually invites members of different civil society organizations committed to human rights and other people whose work has a social impact such as researchers from the Consejo National de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas ‘National Scientific and Technical Research Council,’ to take part in the ceremony.11 This intertwining between public and private memory occupies a central place in Claudia’s life and is also apparent in the lives of many other social activists.12 From her point of view, the detenidos-desaparecidos were persecuted and

 Original in Spanish, translated by the author. Interview with Claudia Goyochea, February 12, 2021.  Original in Spanish, translated by the author. Interview with Claudia Goyochea, February 12, 2021.  Original in Spanish, translated by the author. Interview with Claudia Goyochea, February 12, 2021.  Eva Arroyo, “1 y 2 de noviembre: desde el alma y para las almas.”  See, for instance, Iris Ortiz’s words during the ceremony. Arroyo, “1 y 2 de noviembre.”

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martyred because of an activism which she shares today: “. . . they were just like us, I mean, since I am still fighting for justice, for equality for all, that I am like them, I am one of them, continuing the fight they initiated.”13 This community of meaning with the desaparecidos is experienced by Claudia as a source of both strength and joy, particularly during the commemorations of the National Day of Memory, Truth and Justice: For example, when you go on the 24th [of March, to the commemorations], you don’t get that feeling of exhaustion you usually experience at the end of other demonstrations. [There] you feel like something lifts you up, gives you strength and then you get a sensation that you did something good, that they [the desaparecidos] were there with you.14

While the concrete effects of the offerings, the affection, and the blessings granted to the “souls in pain” elude rational scrutiny, after her inclusion of the desaparecidos into her family’s ceremony, Claudia’s neighbors reported that “they no longer hear the noises [from the desaparecidos from Guerrero]”; it is “like [they] are calmer.”15 Thanks to Claudia and her compañeros, the lives of the social activists who were made to “disappear” in Guerrero are intertwined with those of the living activists who share the dreams and values for which they were martyred.

Corporate Responsibility in Crimes against Humanity According to Claudia Goyochea, the Guerrero CDC had been a regular playground for her since her childhood until she attended the trials for crimes against humanity perpetrated in Jujuy. The testimonies she heard in that specific framework led her to realize the atrocities that had taken place at the site of her joyful childhood memories. It was through the words of the witnesses that Claudia learned that the crimes committed in that place were the response of the local elites to the success of the social, cultural, and political struggles in which the people detained in the CDC were involved, directly or indirectly.16

 Original in Spanish, translated by the author. Interview to Claudia Goyochea, February 12, 2021.  Original in Spanish, translated by the author. Interview to Claudia Goyochea, February 12, 2021.  Original in Spanish, translated by the author. Interview to Claudia Goyochea, February 12, 2021.  Original in Spanish, translated by the author. Interview to Claudia Goyochea, February 12, 2021.

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The first trial for crimes against humanity of Jujuy begun in July 2012. It represented a turning point in the history of the province, commonly referred to as the “capital of impunity.”17 The constitution of the court was an integral part of a long process that began in 1985, when the authorities of the three military juntas that ruled the country during the dictatorship were put to trial and condemned for their crimes.18 In Jujuy, these trials assumed special relevance due to the accusations made in this context against executives of Ledesma SAAI, a company “directly committed to the military coup and local repression, which in the province of Jujuy has historically represented economic and political power.”19 In Jujuy, as in the rest of the country, the state terrorism policies implemented by the dictatorial government were the response of the economic elites and their allies to the consolidation of independent workers’ organizations and their fight for the redistribution of the country’s economic and cultural resources. As shown in recent investigations, the responsibility of large companies for the design and implementation of the crimes against humanity was as crucial as that of the army or the police.20 Even though the declared enemy of the military juntas was leftist terrorism, the fact that the different armed organizations were virtually dismantled at the time of the coup sheds light on the true objective of the dictatorship: to eradicate those political and cultural groups struggling to prevent the implementation of economic policies that went against the interests of the weaker segments of society. As stated by the Secretary of Treasury who served under the de facto president Jorge Rafael Videla, one of the main objectives of the military government

 Gabriela Alejandra Karasik and Elizabeth Lidia Gómez, “La empresa Ledesma y la represión en la década de 1970. Conocimiento, verdad jurídica y poder en los juicios de lesa humanidad,” Clepsidra. Revista Interdisciplinaria De Estudios Sobre Memoria, 2 no. 3 (2015): 115.  This process also included the promulgation of two amnesty laws by President Raúl Alfonsín during the years 1986–7; presidential pardons to former members of the military junta by President Carlos Menem in 1990; the annulment of the amnesty laws in 2003 by the Argentine parliament, and the Supreme Court declaration in 2007 that these laws were unconstitutional. In August 2010, the Supreme Court of Justice ratified the sentences handed down by lower courts, declaring unconstitutional the presidential pardons of the former military chiefs by President Menem. The Court based its ruling on the imprescriptible nature of human rights.  Karasik and Gómez, “La empresa Ledesma y la represión en la década de 1970,” 112.  Victoria Basualdo et al., Responsabilidad empresarial en delitos de lesa humanidad: represión a trabajadores durante el terrorismo de Estado (Buenos Aires, Editorial Ministerio de Justicia y Derechos Humanos de la Nación, 2016); Esteban F. Klor, Sebastian Saiegh, and Shanker Satyanath, “Cronyism in State Violence: Evidence from Labor Repression During Argentina’s Last Dictatorship,” Journal of the European Economic Association, 19 no. 3 (June 2021): 1439–1487; and Daniel Cieza, “Aportes sobre el componente antisindical del genocidio argentino. Cronología de 50 dirigentes asesinados o desaparecidos,” Controversia 198 (June 2012): 221–249.

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was “. . . to weaken the enormous power of the unions, which was one of the country’s biggest problems.”21 This objective was visibly reflected in the repressive scheme put into practice by the dictatorship. According to the trade unionist Víctor De Gennaro, former Secretary General of the Central of Argentine Workers: “67% of the desaparecidos are workers, the main aim [of the dictatorship] was to destroy the activists, representatives, and some general secretaries [from the worker’s unions] (. . .).”22 The case of Ledesma is emblematic in this regard. Since the early 1970s, the workers had reached significant levels of mobilization that resulted, among others achievements, in a sustained increase in their wages.23 Yet towards the middle of the decade a repressive policy focusing on union activism was launched, which also affected “political and social activists from territory under their [the Ledesma company’s] influence” and their relatives.24 This repression had a direct impact on the workers’ income level, which fell sharply during the years following the coup, as well as on the levels of political and social mobilization. The politics of state terrorism implemented by the dictatorship overturned the successful experiences of popular empowerment, and particularly in Jujuy – the “capital of impunity” – the militarycorporate-ecclesiastical alliance seemed indestructible. It took until the second decade of the twentyfirst century for the work of human rights organizations to break the apparent invulnerability of these de facto powers, with the institution of the first trials for crimes against humanity in the province. It should be noted that for many years, the struggle to bring the criminals responsible for the political terror instituted by the dictatorship to justice assumed a quixotic character, given the apparent invulnerability of the criminals. However, this demand, which at first lacked of any significant political representation, succeeded with time not only to have wide repercussions at the international level – particularly in the field of International Law – but also to fill a central role in the Argentinian public scene with the multiplication of trials for crimes against humanity and

 Martin Edwin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War” (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993).  Original in Spanish, translation by the author. Victoria Basualdo et al., “La clase trabajadora durante la última dictadura militar argentina, 1976–1983. Apuntes para una discusión sobre la resistencia obrera,” Memoria en las Aulas, dossier núm. 13 (Buenos Aires: Comisión Provincial por la Memoria, 2010) 4.  “El jornal básico del obrero de ingenio venía creciendo desde 1970 hasta llegar al máximo entre 1973–1975; en 1976 cayó abruptamente, los valores mínimos se alcanzaron en 1979.” In Karasik and Gómez, “La empresa Ledesma y la represión en la década de 1970,” 122.  Karasik and Gómez, “La empresa Ledesma y la represión en la década de 1970,” 119–120. See also pages 124–125. Original in Spanish, translation by the author.

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the declaration of March 24 as the National Day of Memory, Truth and Justice.25 As pointed out by Alejandro Moreira, these achievements were reached despite the fact that according to the usual indicators of what is “politically feasible,” the struggles against impunity were doomed to failure.26 The figure of the desaparecido, in its inconceivability, forces the witnesses of these crimes to inhabit an impossible, groundless place, precisely because forced disappearance was implemented as a political weapon with the aim of causing unbearable psychological distress to the relatives, friends and compañeros of the victims. Nevertheless, the significant political and cultural effects that the struggle for Memory, Truth and Justice has had on both the local and international levels demonstrate the existence of an ethical, social, and political power directly associated with the witnessing of these crimes.

Crimes Against Humanity and Global Structures of Coloniality The local economic elite and some international corporations were not the only allies of the dictators.27 Despite the declared anti-communism of the juntas, the former Soviet Union was an important supporter of the regime in the international sphere. However, the most powerful international proponents of the dictatorship were the US military and business community. In fact, the political and military justifications for the terrorist practices implemented by the military

 On the influence of the figure of the Argentinian detenido-desaparecido in international law and its relationship with the formation of new transnational communities in the Hispanic world see Silvana Mandolessi and Mariana Eva Perez, “The Disappeared as a Transnational Figure or How to Deal with the Vain Yesterday,” European Review, 22 no. 4 (2014): 603–612.  “No obstante aquellos indicadores que habitualmente determinan lo que es ‘políticamente factible’, la lucha contra la impunidad pudo sobrellevar todas las adversidades a lo largo de un cuarto de siglo; más bien se diría que dichos indicadores la vuelven ilegible: a esas reivindicaciones nadie las vota, nadie las representa, no pueden incluirse dentro de lo que es estatalmente practicable.” In Alejandro Moreira, “La historia perdida. Lecturas de los años setenta en la Argentina contemporánea,” Boletín Hispánico Helvético, 13–14 (2009): 8.  Victoria Basualdo, “Complicidad patronal-militar en la última dictadura militar. Los casos de Acindar, Astarsa, Dálmine Siderca, Ford, Ledesma y Mercedes Benz,” Revista Engranajes de la Federación de Trabajadores de la Industria y Afines (FETIA) 5 (March 2006). Accessed 27 October, 2021. http://archivo.cta.org.ar/Engranajes-Edicion-Especial.html.

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junta were based on both the counter-insurgency doctrines designed and disseminated by US military and intelligence agencies beginning in John F. Kennedy’s presidency (doctrines often inspired in Nazi political “techniques”), and on theories developed by the French army during its colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria.28 As for the American business community, its alliance with corrupt and authoritarian Latin American elites had been forged beginning in the early nineteenth century in parallel with the aggressive and ethnocentric policies of the United States towards the sub-continent.29 This confluence of interests was epitomized, in the case of the last Argentinian dictatorship, by the open support given by the prominent North American businessman and politician David Rockefeller to the dictatorial government, especially after the exposition of the dictatorship’s crimes and the repudiation this provoked in public opinion around the world. In November 1977, Rockefeller declared to a group of bankers in New York, during the projection of a promotional film about Argentina “I have the impression that finally Argentina has a regime which understands the private enterprise system . . . Not since the Second World War has Argentina been presented with a combination of advantageous circumstances as it has now.”30 Significantly, today the Center for Latin American Studies at the prestigious Harvard University in the United States bears his name. Although the victims of the crimes against humanity committed in Jujuy were of different ethnic origins, the violence systematically exercised by the Argentine state against the Ledesma workers and their leaders (as well as against those from the El Aguilar mine) indicates the persistence of important elements of continuity with the ethno-economic structures established by the Spanish conquest and colonization of the American continent. Despite the triumph of the independence struggles against the Spanish Empire, the consolidation during the nineteenth century of a republic inspired by the values of the Enlightenment, and the country’s progress in matters of human rights, to this day the Argentinian state has not been able to guarantee the fundamental rights of its indigenous populations.31  Martina Libertad Weisz, “Argentina durante la dictadura de 1976–1983: antisemitismo, autoritarismo y política internacional,” Indice 24 (2007): 11–24.  See for example Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).  Christopher Knowles, “Strike wave grips Argentina,” Guardian, New York (November 16, 1977), quoted in Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Thirds World Fascism. The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. 1 (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 266. See also Andersen, Dossier Secreto, 250.  It is important to clarify that in 1994 the rights of the indigenous peoples were granted constitutional status. However, to this day a large part of these rights, particularly those related to land tenure, have not been ensured de facto. See Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS),

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Significantly, the years 1880–1910, considered by the local historiography as the period of consolidation of the Argentinian nation-state, were characterized by military interventions led by the government, with the objective of annihilating the aboriginal populations and seizing their lands for the benefit of families of European origin who constituted the local power structures.32 Following the consolidation of the nation-state, the Argentine government played a central role in the Jujuy province in the establishment of the sugar industry, which was rooted in a colonial division of labor and land. These colonial structures allowed families of European origin who were connected to the local power structure to achieve ownership of those lands where indigenous populations had been established and from which they had been forcibly dispossessed. Moreover, these privileged elites took advantage of the situation of vulnerability into which the indigenous populations were thrown and forced them into regimes of extreme labor exploitation.33 In Ledesma, the extreme exploitation of labor was still in force when the 1976 military coup took place: The daily workday of more than 12 hours [. . .], insufficient salaries, paid not with money but with company credit papers, the lack of adequate medical care and the precarious housing conditions in town, in force both in the 1970s and today, constitute the context of the repressive policy.34

Evaluación sobre el cumplimiento del Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y Políticos en Argentina en el marco de la presentación del quinto informe periódico ante el comité de Derechos Humanos 9 (Buenos Aires, 2016). Accessed October 27, 2021. https://www.cels.org.ar/web/wpcontent/ uploads/2016/07/InformeConjuntoDerechosPueblosIndigenas.pdf. [PLEASE CHECK WEBSITE REFERENCE] See also Elva Roulet, “La Constitución Nacional y los Pueblos Originarios,” Télam, December 10, 2017. Accessed October 27, 2021. https://www.telam.com.ar/notas/201712/230544-laconstitucion-nacional-y-los-pueblos-originarios.html; and Darío Aranda, “Denuncian un cuarto de siglo de derechos indígenas incumplidos,” Página 12 (online), August 20, 2019. Accessed October 27, 2021. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/213127-denuncian-un-cuarto-de-siglo-de-derechos-indi genas-incumplid.  Gastón Gordillo, “Después de los ingenios: La mecanización de la zafra saltojujeña y sus efectos sobre los indígenas del Chaco Centro-Occidental,” Desarrollo Económico 35, 137 (April– June 1995): 105–126.  Carlos E. Reboratti, “Migración estacional en el noroeste argentino y su repercusión en la estructura agraria,” Demografía y Economía 10, 2 (1976): 235–53; see also Gustavo L. Paz, “Las bases agrarias de la dominación de la élite: Tenencia de tierras y sociedad en Jujuy a mediados del siglo XIX,” Anuario IEHS 19 (2004): 419–442.  Original in Spanish, translation by the author. Victoria Basualdo, “Complicidad patronalmilitar en la última dictadura argentina,” 17.

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Indeed, the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force (following Max Weber’s famous definition) enjoyed by the state was used to preserve the interests of the sugar company owners at least until the end of the last century: Throughout the entire 20th century [. . .] there is evidence of the support of the public force, which includes the joint intervention of the army and police of the province, to control worker’s discontent in Ledesma and other sugar mills.35

During the military-economic-ecclesiastical dictatorship, the persistence of global structures of coloniality made their full force felt, particularly in the province of Jujuy.36 According to Federico Finchelstein, during that period it was the “union of the cross and the sword, inherited from the imperial Spain of the Catholic Monarchs and adapted to the Argentine circumstances by national-Catholic ideologues, who assumed power.37 In the case of Ledesma, this “sacred” union played a key role in the brutal repression destined to uproot any attempt to democratize the neocolonial power structures that ruled the region’s political, economic, and cultural life. Significantly, one of the clandestine detention centers (CDC) where the people kidnapped during the last military dictatorship were brutally tortured, served as one of the headquarters of the Gendarmería Nacional (National Gendarmerie) and was located inside the property of the Ledesma Company.38 This section of the National Gendarmerie was established in 1966 within the domains of the private company to defend its interests in the context of redistributive economic struggles.39 As in the period of the Spanish Empire, the leaders of the Catholic Church played a central role in the disciplining and extreme exploitation of the aboriginals and other marginalized groups. According to witnesses, the then Bishop of Jujuy, José Miguel Medina, was a regular visitor to the Guerrero CDC, where he not only provided spiritual legitimation for the crimes against humanity committed there,

 Original in Spanish, translation by the author. Quoted in Karasik and Gómez, “La Empresa Ledesma y la represión en la década de 1970,” 124. See also Ludmila da Silva Catela, “De memorias largas y cortas: Poder local y violencia en el Noroeste argentino,” Interseções 19, 2 (December 2017): 429.  Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, Eurocentrismo y América Latina,” in Cuestiones y horizontes: de la dependencia histórico-estructural a la colonialidad/descolonialidad del poder, ed. Aníbal Quijano (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2020), 861–920.  Federico Finchelstein, La Argentina fascista. Los orígenes ideológicos de la dictadura (Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 2008), 148–181.  Basualdo, “Complicidad patronal-militar en la última dictadura argentina,” 17.  Karasik and Gómez, “La empresa Ledesma y la represión en la década de 1970,” 118.

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but also boasted in front of the detainees of his being the one who decided on their life or death.40 According to René Rodríguez’s testimony: There is no worse torture than waiting for one’s number, I had [been given the number] 33, but they said 5, 14 or 22, it was terrible. At one point, when they called my number, they took me to a place, blindfolded, and someone said: I want a name, a name. I am Monsignor Medina, the representative of God on earth and it depends on me who stays and who goes . . .41

Despite the active collaboration of Bishop Medina with the crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship, which were officially denounced by Eublogia Cordero in her testimony during the trial of the military heads of the de facto government in 1985 (after the restoration of democracy), the prelate officiated as military bishop for the armed forces of the nation until his death in 1990, a post to which he was appointed by Pope John Paul II in March 1982.42 Far from being an exception, this attitude is consistent with the open support of many ecclesiastical authorities for the task of “purification” undertaken by the military juntas, as a “sacred” task which also included the killing of some outstanding members of the Church who had made an apostolic choice in favor of the “Church of the poor.”43 It is in this context that the witnesses of crimes against humanity committed during the last Argentinian dictatorship gave their testimony in Jujuy. We can hardly imagine systematic torture, murder, and enforced disappearances being used to weaken the power of popular movements in places like the United States or Western Europe during those years. If this was possible in South America, it was because the hegemonic forces of that time, based on global structures with colonial roots, had previously prepared the ground.44  See for instance Reynaldo Castro, Con vida los llevaron: Memorias de Madres y Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos de San Salvador de Jujuy (Buenos Aires, La rosa blindada, 2004), 243.  Original in Spanish, translation by the author. Cited in Eva Arroyo and Rodrigo Zapana, Inspección en el centro clandestino de Guerrero: Un lugar donde hay almas que no reposan. Accessed September 1, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/notes/3640493405970132/  See the official site of Jujuy’s bishopric. Accessed September 1, 2021. https://www.obispadode jujuy.com/nosotros/historia/. See also Boletín Oficial de la Conferencia Episcopal Argentina 1 (La Conferencia: Buenos Aires, January 1990), 25.  This is for example the case of the Bishop Enrique Angelelli, assassinated during the dictatorship and beatified by Pope Francis in 2018. According to Emilio Mignone: “la Iglesia fue instrumentada por la dictadura militar para el logro de sus fines políticos y socioeconómicos. El episcopado se dejó instrumentar, lo que implica un acuerdo táctico en el cual uno de los aliados se pone al servicio del otro.” In Emilio Mignone, Iglesia y Dictadura: el papel de la iglesia a la luz de sus relaciones con el régimen militar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Colihue SRL, 2006), 208.  For a more detailed analysis of the impact that the conquest and colonization of Latin America have had on the articulation of a globalized world, see: Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, Eurocentrismo y América Latina.”

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Testimonies, from Literature to the Courtroom The opportunity to testify in a trial sanctioned by the same state that committed the crimes for which responsibility is sought was an important achievement of the local movement for human rights and its allies in the global community. As a matter of fact, witnessing is a collective fact in two concrete senses: on the one hand, it is the result of a common effort, the fruit of local and international solidarity; on the other, the voices of the witnesses transcend strictly individual experiences in order to convey, in some particular ways, many other long-silenced voices. Through the witnesses, we can hear the voices of many other people who have been subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment because the structures of power at both the local and global levels had previously put them in a place of special vulnerability. These voices have been powerless for a long time in the face of crimes and abuses implemented from the centers of power. There is an important line of continuity between the literary genre called “testimonio” and the testimonies issued in the context of trials for crimes against humanity.45 In literature, testimonio is defined by John Beverly as a novel or novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet (that is, printed as opposed to acoustic) form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness or the event he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a “life” or a significant life experience.46 Despite having very ancient origins, this literary genre took shape and developed from the 1960s on as an intrinsic part of national liberation movements and of what Barbara Harlow called “resistance literature.” As such, it aspires to being the expression of entire social groups which for a long time have remained on the fringes of the written word. In social contexts where literature is a class privilege, testimonio opens the doors to voices long silenced by iniquitous power structures, even though the authors often find themselves subject to the intermediation (or “representation”) of professional writers.47 In testimonio, the narratives are both personal and social: “Each individual testimonio evokes an absent polyphony of other voices, other possible lives and experiences.”48 Particularly when written in Latin America, testimonio as a literary genre has raised awareness among the most educated sectors of the Western world about the crimes to which historically marginalized populations have

 Significantly, the terms “testimonio” (when referring to the literary genre) and “desaparecido” are both usually used in the original Spanish even in the context of other languages.  John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 30–31.  John Beverley, Testimonio, 31–35.  John Beverley, Testimonio, 34.

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been subjected in the sub-continent, contributing to create a climate favorable to the opening of trials for crimes against humanity.

Witnessing and Presence: Word and Transcendence Unlike testimonio as a literary genre, where the author is free to define the conditions of truth and representation of her own work, within the framework of a trial testimonies are only effective as far as they abide to the empirical notions of truth recognized as valid by the local legal systems. However, the exceptional nature of these trials, where the witnesses denounce crimes against humanity committed by actors with enormous levels of power, reinforces the religious or mystical aspect of the act of witnessing.49 In these contexts, the courtrooms are filled with the spirit of the prophetic traditions common to the three great monotheistic religions, where the power iniquitously exercised by the privileged is denounced and condemned in the name of an almighty God. Significantly, in 2014, in the framework of one of the trials for crimes against humanity which took place in Jujuy, the judges decided to take a recess during the proceedings to take down a crucifix hanging behind their backs. This deeply symbolic act was carried out at the request of some victim-witnesses, to whom the crucifix represented a “symbol of torture in a place where torture is being judged.”50 The suffering of the victims of the dictatorship, martyred for their struggle for social justice, was associated in the eyes of the witnesses with the torture suffered by Jesus on the cross. Furthermore, the fact of taking down this symbol of Christianity present in most Argentinian courtrooms was also a form of condemning the leading role played by ecclesiastical authorities such as Monsignor Medina in the crimes against humanity committed in the region. Yet the prophetic tradition is not the only spiritual force present in the courtroom. The trials for crimes against humanity are an integral part of the reparatory policies undertaken by the state in order to amend the atrocities committed

 For a broader analysis of the secular and religious aspects of the testimonies of genocide or crimes against humanity see Carolyn J. Dean, The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2019), 17–21.  Asociación Pensamiento Penal, El tribunal que se animó a frenar un juicio para descolgar el crucifijo del estrado, April 27, 2014. Accessed October 10, 2021. https://www.pensamientopenal.org/ el-tribunal-que-se-animo-a-frenar-un-juicio-para-descolgar-el-crucifijo-del-estrado/

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in its name, and they were conceived as both oral and public with the objective of amplifying their social impact. During the sessions, the surviving witnesses of the repression often become a kind of secular priest celebrating a Eucharist. If words are inescapably unable to describe the horrors of crimes against humanity, the witnesses may operate some sort of mystery by which the very presence of the persons who were forcibly “disappeared” becomes tangible. And with each and every one of them, the presence of the other 30,000 (the estimated number of victims of forced disappearance) is also conveyed. As noted by Javier Alejandro Lifschitz, there are some striking similarities between the witnesses’ testimonies, through which the voices of the desaparecidos are sometimes heard, and the opening scenes of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the tragedy, the specter of the murdered king returns to speak out about what has been omitted, to talk about the circumstances of his death and about family ties. Hamlet’s father comes back from the realm of the dead to talk about justice, and about the ethical standards that should be demanded from those who are still alive. Indeed, witnesses of crimes against humanity have changed the political landscape of their country. They triggered what Lifschitz called an espectralización de la política ‘spectralization of Argentinian politics,’ synthesized in the claim for Memory, Truth and Justice, as the common motto of the local human rights organizations.51 Through their testimony, the witnesses conveyed their personal, intimate relation with the victims from the private to the public sphere. Since, particularly in the case of close relatives of the desaparecidos, the surviving witnesses constantly carry the trace of the victim within their bodies (in Catherine Coquio’s words: “Il y a toujours un reste en la personne du témoin survivant”),52 the sort of civic Eucharist performed when they make tangible the presence of the desaparecido before a tribunal has a lasting impact in Argentina’s public space. Today, the phrase “30,000 desaparecidos presentes, ahora y siempre,” indicating that the 30,000 desaparecidos are present among us, and will always be, has become a powerful moral and political call. One illustration of this is the reaction to Argentina’s Supreme Court decision in favor of the reduction of the sentences of those found guilty of crimes against humanity, issued in May 2017. This decision was perceived as a direct attack on the principles of Memory, Truth and Justice, and was rejected through massive demonstrations which took place throughout  Javier Alejandro Lifschitz, “Los espectros de las dictaduras militares en América Latina,” Estudios Ibero-Americanos, Porto Alegre 44, 2 (May-August 2018): 344.  Catherine Coquio, “À propos d’un nihilisme contemporain: négation, déni, témoignage,” L’Histoire trouée: négation et témoignage, ed. Catherine Coquio (Nantes, L’Atalante, 2003), 34.

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the country. In Buenos Aires, more than 500,000 people gathered at the historic Plaza de Mayo. At the closing of the demonstration, the organizers asked the participants to hold up white handkerchiefs, the symbol historically used by the mothers of the desaparecidos. (When they began their human rights activism at the height of the dictatorial period, the Madres ‘mothers’ decided to wear white handkerchiefs over their heads as a symbol of the diapers they used with their daughters and sons, the desaparecidos, when they were babies). At the closure of the event, the public unanimously voiced the already traditional “30,000 desaparecidos presentes, ahora y siempre,” stirring powerful emotions. In the end, public pressure led the Argentinian congress to repeal the law on which the ruling was based, forcing the Supreme Court to reverse its decision. In the case of the trials for crimes against humanity committed in Jujuy, an additional element was incorporated into this secular rite of witnessing. In this Argentinian province, the extreme violence exerted against the workers’ leaders and their allies is part of a much longer history of dispossession and extreme exploitation of the local indigenous populations. As shown above, during the last dictatorship, the Argentinian state put its armed forces at the service of neocolonial systems of land and labor exploitation. That is why the voices of the witnesses have a different tone in Jujuy than in other parts of the country: they often bring to life the memories of entire indigenous populations that for generations have been condemned to a life of violence and powerlessness by global forms of production based upon elements of coloniality. Particularly enlightening in this context is the work of Ludmila da Silva Catela on local power and violence in the Jujuy towns of Tumbaya and Calilegua. Da Silva Catela shows how in these places, the violence exerted during the last military dictatorship is perceived as one more episode in the long history of violence and dehumanization that indigenous people have suffered in the hands of the state, which has historically acted as a disciplining force, ensuring working conditions of extreme exploitation at local companies such as Ledesma and El Aguilar.53 Despite the (justified) fears that their statements could be considered as “unstable” and “insecure” by a justice system permeated by a “naive positivism,”54 and notwithstanding the terror that pervades their lives, many of the bearers of this long memory of colonial and neocolonial violence in Argentina stand up as witnesses of crimes against humanity. Overcoming the many obstacles in their way, these peoples of oral tradition, excluded from the writing of history perceived as a book and from a classical anthropology which defined them as

 Da Silva Catela, “De memorias largas y cortas,” 434.  Da Silva Catela, “De memorias largas y cortas,” 439.

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“peoples without history,”55 get up in the courtroom and speak with a polyphony of new and ancient voices. Following Michael Rothberg, the legitimacy obtained by the “short memory” of state terrorism, focused on Buenos Aires as the epicenter and inheritor of a centralized colonial power, assumed a multidimensional facet by opening spaces for the ancestral memory of violence and oppression of the indigenous populations in the Argentinian north-west.56 Through the voices of the witnesses an imperceptible, extremely subtle form of power is slowly but steadily shaking the structures of contemporary Argentina and having broader repercussions around the world.

Bibliography Arroyo, Eva, “1 y 2 de noviembre: desde el alma y para las almas.” H.I.J.O.S. Jujuy. Accessed February 9, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/notes/juan-sinmiedo/1-y-2-de-noviembre-desdeel-alma-y-para-las-almas/2548510622046382/ Arroyo, Eva and Rodrigo Zapana. Inspección en el centro clandestino de Guerrero: Un lugar donde hay almas que no reposan. Accessed September 1, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/notes/ 3640493405970132/ Andersen, Martin Edwin. Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War.” Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993. Aranda, Darío, “Denuncian un cuarto de siglo de derechos indígenas incumplidos,” Página 12 (online version). August 20, 2019. Accessed October 11, 2021. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/213127denuncian-un-cuarto-de-siglo-de-derechos-indigenas-incumplid Basualdo, Victoria et al., Responsabilidad empresarial en delitos de lesa humanidad: represión a trabajadores durante el terrorismo de Estado. Buenos Aires: Editorial Ministerio de Justicia y Derechos Humanos de la Nación, 2016. Basualdo, Victoria et al., ʺLa clase trabajadora durante la última dictadura militar argentina, 1976–1983. Apuntes para una discusión sobre la resistencia obreraʺ. Memoria en las Aulas, dossier 13. Buenos Aires: Comisión Provincial por la Memoria, 2010. Basualdo, Victoria, “Complicidad patronal-militar en la última dictadura militar. Los casos de Acindar, Astarsa, Dálmine Siderca, Ford, Ledesma y Mercedes Benz.” Special Suplement, Revista Engranajes de la Federación de Trabajadores de la Industria y Afines (FETIA) 5, March 2006. Burgos, Elizabeth. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia. México D.F.: Siglo XXI editores, 1985. Broder, John M., “Clinton Offers His Apologies to Guatemala.” The New York Times, March 11, 1999, section A, p. 1. Beverley, John, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

 Elizabeth Jelin, Los trabajos de la memoria (Madrid, Siglo XXI de España Editores, 2002), 23.  Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009).

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Boletín Oficial de la Conferencia Episcopal Argentina 1. La Conferencia: Buenos Aires, January 1990. Castro, Reynaldo. Con vida los llevaron: Memorias de Madres y Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos de San Salvador de Jujuy. Buenos Aires: La rosa blindada, 2004. Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS), Evaluación sobre el cumplimiento del Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y Políticos en Argentina en el marco de la presentación del quinto informe periódico ante el comité de Derechos Humanos. CELS: Buenos Aires, 2016. Chomsky, Noam and Edward S. Herman. The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. 1. Boston: South End Press, 1979. Cieza, Daniel, “Aportes sobre el componente antisindical del genocidio argentino. Cronología de 50 dirigentes asesinados o desaparecidos.” In Controversia 198 (June 2012): 221–249. Catherine Coquio, “À propos d’un nihilisme contemporain: négation, déni, témoignage.” In L’Histoire trouée: négation et témoignage, ed. Catherine Coquio. Nantes: L’Atalante, 2003. Da Silva Catela, Ludmila. “De memorias largas y cortas: Poder local y violencia en el Noroeste argentino.” In Interseções 19, 2 (December 2017): 426–442 Dean, Carolyn J. The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Finchelstein, Federico. La Argentina fascista. Los orígenes ideológicos de la dictadura. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2008. Franco, Marina, “Testimoniar e informar: exiliados argentinos en París (1976–1983).” In Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire. Les Cahiers ALHIM 8 (2004). https://doi.org/10.4000/alhim.414 García Márquez, Gabriel. La soledad de América Latina. December 8, 1982. Accessed January 12, 2021. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/25603-gabriel-garcia-marqueznobel-lecture-1982/ Gordillo, Gastón. “Después de los ingenios: La mecanización de la zafra saltojujeña y sus efectos sobre los indígenas del Chaco Centro-Occidental.” In Desarrollo Económico, 35 no. 137 (April – June, 1995): 105–126. Jelin, Elizabeth, Los trabajos de la memoria. Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores, 2002. Karasik, Gabriela Alejandra and Elizabeth Lidia Gómez, “La Empresa Ledesma Y La Represión En La Década De 1970. Conocimiento, Verdad Jurídica Y Poder En Los Juicios De Lesa Humanidad/ Ledesma Company and Political Violence in the 1970 Decade. Knowledge, Judicial Truth and Power in Prosecution of Crimes against Humanity.” In Clepsidra. Revista Interdisciplinaria De Estudios Sobre Memoria 2 no. 3 (2015): 110–131. Klor, Esteban F., Sebastian Saiegh and Shanker Satyanath, “Cronyism in State Violence: Evidence from Labor Repression During Argentina’s Last Dictatorship.” In Journal of the European Economic Association, 19 no. 3 (June 2021): 1439–1487. Lifschitz, Javier Alejandro. “Los espectros de las dictaduras militares en América Latina.” In Estudios Ibero-Americanos, 44 no. 2 (May-August 2018): 340–353. Mandolessi, S. and M. Perez. “The Disappeared as a Transnational Figure or How to Deal with the Vain Yesterday.” In European Review, 22 no. 4 (2014): 603–612. Mignone, Emilio. Iglesia y Dictadura: el papel de la iglesia a la luz de sus relaciones con el régimen militar. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Colihue SRL, 2006. Moreira, Alejandro. “La historia perdida. Lecturas de los años setenta enla Argentina contemporánea.” In Boletín Hispánico Helvético 13–14 (Spring – Autumn 2009): 7–23. Paz, Gustavo L. “Las bases agrarias de la dominación de la élite: Tenencia de tierras y sociedad en Jujuy a mediados del siglo XIX.” In Anuario IEHS 19 (2004): 419–442.

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Index A Piece of Meat (Varlam Shamalov) 239–246 Agamben, Giorgio 1, 2 All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Remarque) 33 amnesia 7, 167, 171, 181, 183, 186–194 antisemitism 3, 21–24, 79–110 – see also Eichmann, Holocaust, Levi, pogrom, racial laws audience in witnessing 3–5, 9–11, 16, 17, 22, 27, 51, 119, 120, 123, 142, 149, 161, 165, 170, 176, 241, 247 Arendt, Hannah 16, 147 Argentina, atrocities in 10, 249–268 Armenia 16–28 atrocities 4, 7–9, 11, 13, 16, 17, 20, 22, 23, 25, 31, 35, 50, 52, 71, 82, 83, 100, 159, 181–195, 217–238, 247, 253, 262 – redaction of atrocities from history 62, 73, 95, 108, 137, 129–156, 167, 181–194, 202, 252, 263–265 – see also crimes against humanity Call of the Wild (Jack London) 46 camp as site of atrocities 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 26, 33–48, 63, 69, 86, 111, 115, 145, 146, 160–170, 221, 232–234, 239–247 Cercas, Javier 7, 157–179 China 7, 8, 49–74 – Maoist atrocities 181–195 Cold War 5, 11, 72, 92, 98, 104, 116, 117, 204, 218, 220, 224, 235 Communism 4, 5, 7, 8, 45, 59, 62–67, 73, 82, 117, 164, 170, 181, 185, 187, 189–193, 217, 218, 225, 234, 239, 256 Cultural Revolution 7, 182–194 conscience see human conscience crimes against humanity 9, 153, 221, 225–227, 235, 249–267 desaparecidos 249–267 the “disappeared” 249–267 Día de las Almas 250–2

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110771381-014

Eichmann, Adolf 2, 6, 7, 14, 129–156 – concern with “truth” 129–156 empathy 6, 112, 119–123, 147, 174, 181–195, 210 fake history 157–179 Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (Binjamin Wilkomirski) 6, 160 forced disappearance 249–265 free will 16, 18, 21, 45, 142 Gate of the Sun (Elias Khoury) 197–199, 205, 208, 213 genocide 13–30, 129–56, 217–238 – Armenian 3, 16–21, 25–28 – Holocaust survivor as “witness to genocide” 15 – Jean-Paul Sartre “On Genocide” 229, 230 – origin of term 13 – redefining 228–230 – relationship to Holocaust 14–16 – representation of genocide in museums 111–128 – witnessing of modern genocide 13–31 – see also Holocaust Goyochea, Claudia 251–253 Grosjean, Bruno (Binjamin Wilkomirski) 6, 160, 161 guilt 35, 36, 91, 92, 129–146, 175, 177, 187, 189, 263 – legal guilt 19, 22, 35, 132, 152, 177, 235 – national guilt 39, 235 – survivor’s guilt 36 Gulag (Soviet) 9, 239–248 Halbwachs, Maurice 51, 74, 139 Hoaxes (Curtis McDougall) 175 Holocaust 2, 7, 13–29, 31–49, 111, 114–117, 121, 125, 129–155, 157, 159–162, 169, 181–195, 201–214, 219, 220, 228–230, 234, 242 – see also genocide humanity, crisis of 33, 35–37, 40, 73, 107, 121, 124, 213, 217 human conscience 3, 15, 17, 21, 26, 27, 123, 137, 143, 188, 189, 193 human suffering mostly unwitnessed 74

270

Index

I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Rigoberta Menchú) 160 Ich bin Enric Marco (Santiago Fillol and Lucas Vermal) identity 1, 13, 14, 27, 66, 68, 92, 97, 117, 119, 126, 132, 157–9, 161, 203, 209, 213, 244, 250 If this is a man (Primo Levi) 31–48 imposture in witnessing 6, 157–177 In memory. Per una memoria europea dei crimini nazisti (Conference, Arezzo, 1994) 81 inhumanity 52, 153, 221 Indochina 8, 9 Israel 6, 8, 115, 129–156, 181, 183, 193, 198, 200–214 Italy 4, 31–49, 79–110 Japan, witnessing of atrocities by Japan 49–78 Judgement 2, 36, 222, 223 – see also justice June 4th Massacre (Tiananmen Square) 190, 192 justice 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 17, 20, 24, 25, 50–52, 62–64, 69–71, 73, 130, 134, 144, 148, 150, 166, 217, 220, 224, 227, 250–253, 255, 262–263

memory 2, 5–8, 26, 50, 51, 52, 62, 64, 73, 81, 92, 95, 104, 113–127, 139, 185, 190, 208, 212 – unreliability of memory 79–110, 111–128, 129–156 Memory of the Holocaust (Enric Marco) 162 memory politics 95 Memory, Truth, and Justice 250–263 Men in the Sun (Ghassan Kanafani) 199 Muselmänner 31, 34, 45, 47 museum 5, 8, 38, 111–113, 117, 118, 120, 122, 124–126, 129, 184, 188–191 My Name is Adam: Children of the Ghetto (Elias Khoury) 197–215 Nakba 197–216 narrative 3, 5, 6, 11, 13–28, 33, 41, 46, 52, 81–85, 91, 94–97, 102, 107, 117–127, 129–153, 162, 165–167, 170–175, 186, 188, 206, 208, 209, 219, 219, 228, 240–247, 261 Narrative as Argument (Paula Olmos) 240 Nishimura, Takuma 61–63, 67 Nuremberg trials 8, 9, 218, 22, 224–228

Khoury, Elias 197–215 Lager, life in the 33–35, 38–45 L’Armadio della vergogna (Franco Giustolisi) 104 Le sentiment d’imposture (Belinda Cannone) Lemkin, Raphael 13–17, 26 Levi, Primo 3, 4, 31–48 Lingua Tertii Imperii (Victor Klemperer) 130 listening and witnessing 3, 4, 9, 11, 47, 72, 91, 105, 114, 181, 182, 187, 188, 192–194, 200, 202 magic realism in testimony 249–265 Marco, Enric as fake witness 6, 161–178 Malay Peninsula, scene of Chinese massacres 49–78 Maoism, atrocities under 181–215 Márquez, Gabriel García 266 massacres – by Japanese 4, 49–78 – Chinese victims of 4, 49–78 – by fascists in Italy 79–110 – see also genocide

oath, judicial 134–144 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn) 9, 213, 239 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 1–2 Palestine 197–216 partisan war against fascism in Italy 79–110 pogrom 3, 16, 17, 21–25, 56, 205 racial laws 33, 34, 36, 40, 105, 116 racism 4, 8, 14, 16, 24, 33, 34, 36, 40, 53, 56–57, 61, 66–68, 70, 105, 116, 119, 125–127, 182, 226, 234 Red Guards 182–189 Remarque, Erich Maria 33, 34, 37 representation 28, 33, 34, 37, 113, 116, 120, 124, 164, 240, 246 Sartre, Jean-Paul 211–230 secondary witnessing 111–128 Shamalov, Varlam 239–248 shame 26, 35, 41, 104, 105, 164, 177

Index

silence 4, 11, 32, 34–35, 37, 40, 47, 90, 102, 103, 131, 138, 162–163, 186, 190, 192, 197–216 – “crimes of silence” 233 Soldiers of Salamis (Javier Cercas) 165–168, 170, 175 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 9, 213, 240 Soviet atrocities 9, 239–248 Spain 6, 7, 157–178 Stalin, Joseph 217, 239 – see Gulag Stella Maris (Elias Khoury) 206, 211, 212 Summation on Genocide (Lelio Basso) 233, 235 survivor testimony 4, 5, 9, 10, 14–17, 23, 26–28, 31–48 Talaat, Pasha 3 Tehlirian, Soghomon 17–21 testimony 6, 7, 10, 13–17, 31–48, 79–110, 157–180, 239–248 The Drowned and the Saved (Primo Levi) 42, 114 The Imposter (Javier Cercas) 165–177 The Last Days of the Reich Chancellery (Gerhard Boldt) 133 The Last Spark (Der Funke Leben) (Erich Remarque) 33 The World Turned Upside Down (Yang Jisheng) 186, 187 The War that Will End War (H. G. Wells) 28 Time for Telling Truth is Running Out (Vera Schwarcz) testimonio 10, 159, 261, 262 Tiananmen Square 7, 188, 190, 192, 194 Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven) (1990) 120, 121 trial 1–4, 6, 8–10, 15–17, 17–21, 21–24, 25–28, 63–66, 67–69, 217–238 – Tokyo Trials 64–67 – see Nuremberg Trials tribunals for atrocity trials 2, 8, 9, 67, 68, 217–238, 262, 263 – see also trial Tombstone: The Great Famine of 1958–1962 (Yang Jisheng) 186 Tomoyuki Yamashita 62–67 Toynbee, Arnold 13 truth 7, 9, 11, 33, 105, 106, 109, 129–153, 162–177, 192–193, 262, 263 – see Memory, Truth, and Justice

271

Ukraine 23, 24,28 Uomini e no (Vittorini Elio) 31 vengeance 2, 17, 21, 24, 25, 54, 57, 60, 66, 179 Vercors (Jean Bruller) 36–39, 42, 43 verdict 1, 16, 25, 52, 64, 137, 170, 227, 235, 242 victim testimony 14–17, 91, 148, 262 Videla, Raphael 10, 254 Vietnam 217–238 voices 4, 15, 81, 84, 94, 97, 103, 181, 183 war crimes 8, 9, 26, 62, 64, 66, 68, 107, 209, 217, 203, 225, 227, 228, 230, 234, 235 Warsaw Ghetto 140, 203, 205, 207–210, 213, 220 witness – accused witness 132–4 – “era of the witness” 2, 14 – “good witness” 6 – historical witness 130, 131, 136, 142, 143, 149–151 – importance of bearing witness 7, 45, 95, 220–21 – “late witnesses” 79 – living witness 5, 114 – role in memory landscape 6 – moral witness 16, 17, 131, 128, 219 – in trials 1–10 – of genocide 13–29 – victim-witness 91, 91, 148, 262 witnessing – alternative narratives in 6 – and amnesia 193 – and existential meaning 14–16, 32, 34, 85, 107, 150, 187, 243, 253 – and literary fiction 9 – and mass murder 3 – as counter-power 249–268 – as making present 5, 11, 35, 38, 85, 113, 114, 125, 126, 130, 138, 149, 222, 250, 263 – avatars in prosthetic memory 11–113 – bearing witness to survive 44 – complex dynamics of 10, 11 – empathy as precondition for witnessing 187 – false/fake witnessing 6, 7, 11, 23, 37, 40, 71, 79, 113, 119, 157–180

272

Index

– fallacy of “good witness” in 6 – need for critical thinking 6, 122, 123 – need for effective narrative 3, 9 – oral history in witnessing 49–77, 79–109, 182–193, 249–267

– secondary 5, 9, 113–117 – state suppression of witnessing 7, 49–78, 181–196, 197–216, 249–267 Wieviorka, Annette 2 Wilkomirski, Binjamin 6, 7