September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 23

By DAVID PATTERSON

Among Holocaust historians Martin Gilbert stands out as perhaps the -most profoundly human. He has a deep understanding of what the Nazis set out to accomplish: the systematic extermination of the sanctity of person as affirmed in the millennial testimony of the Jewish people. Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg said as much when he insisted that the German spirit was poisoned not merely by Jewish blood but by Judaism.¹

What distinguishes Martin Gilbert’s histories of the Holocaust is that, far beyond recounting the events, they recover a trace of the human sanctity the Nazis targeted for annihilation. Two things provide him with that distinction: historical method and humanitarian outlook.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

Some historians claim that when writing Holocaust history one must never use the diaries or the memoirs of the victims because they could not see the “big picture.” These chroniclers view history from an overarching God’s-eye perspective. If, for example, the killing units went into operation with the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, it was, in part, because the situation in Europe was well in hand; if, however, a survivor recalls that in the Kovno Ghetto “before our eyes our children fell,” as Sir Martin relates,² it is irrelevant to history. No one provides a more thoroughly researched view of history than Gilbert.

In addition to the macrocosm, however, he sounds the depths of the human dimension as no other. Drawing upon diaries and memoirs, he bares the face of the human beings whose souls came under assault.

The outcry of the witness resounds throughout Sir Martin’s seminal study Kristallnacht. A skilled storyteller, he draws upon eye-witness testimony to the devastation that was the prelude to extermination. He allows the voices of those who were there to speak, from the British Consuls in Vienna and Frankfurt to the eyewitnesses Laurie Lowenthal and Max Kopfstein. The testimonies convey Kristallnacht’s horror, making it palpable, thus driving home its reality. Detailing the destruction of synagogues, Sir Martin demonstrates ridding the world of Jews also involved ridding the world of Judaism. On the question of why more Jews did not leave Germany, he analyzes the refusal of representatives at the July 1938 Evian Conference on the “refugee problem.”³ Their inaction gave Hitler the green light to proceed with genocide.

In Auschwitz and the Allies Sir Martin explores the question of “how the most terrible crimes could be committed with scarcely any effort being made to halt them.”⁴ Although in 1941 and 1942 it was difficult for the Allies “to do anything but issue warnings and declarations,” policymakers feared “the ‘danger’ of ‘flooding’ Palestine, and indeed Britain, with Jews”; many “were also wary of what they regarded as a parallel ‘danger’ of falling for what one of them referred to as Jewish ‘sob-stuff.’”⁵ As for Auschwitz, news of what was happening did reach the West but did not make any impact.⁶

Although Churchill had ordered feasibility studies for air strikes on Auschwitz, the RAF not only did nothing, but passed the buck to the Americans, who followed suit.⁷ This demonstration of the rest of humanity’s complicity in the assault on the very meaning of “human being” implicates anyone who reads it.

The same dictum applies to Martin’s study The Righteous. In the course of writing this book he came face to face with people from Norway to Greece, from the Atlantic to the Baltic, whose acts of courage provided a beacon and an example in a time of deep darkness. Coming from all walks of life, their actions transcended the usual social, cultural, or religious profiles. “The story of the Righteous,” he writes, “is the story of men and women who risked their lives and those of their families to help save Jewish lives: people who, in the words of Si Frumkin, a survivor of the Kovno ghetto, ‘ignored the law, opposed popular opinion, and dared to do what was right.’”⁸ He follows these words with an invocation of the Talmudic dictum that “he who saves a single life saves the entire world”—words that demonstrate what is Jewish about this historian.

Martin Gilbert’s declaration to humanity—“Here I am for you!”—even pervades what might seem to be an impersonal project: his Atlas of the Holocaust. Consisting of 333 maps, that book provides the graphic history of the extermination campaign from the organization of ghettos to the establishment of death camps. It also includes more than 200 instances of Jewish revolt and partisan risings. Putting a face to the horror he cites names of the dead, such as Charlotte Salomon and Janusz Korczak.⁹ In addition to maps of ghettos, deportations, and death camps, he includes singular maps like one showing the fate of a single family, the Hirschprungs of Belgium and the Netherlands.¹⁰ Emphasizing his humanitarian concern, the Atlas includes photographs of the murdered, faces that ask the question put to the first human being: “Where are you?”

This haunting question lurks between every line of Sir Martin’s Final Journey, as though it represents the last words of those swallowed up in the maelstrom. “On their own, the statistics are powerful and terrible,” Martin writes. “But the story of the Nazi attempt to murder the Jews of Europe concerned individual people: people with names, families, careers and futures, for millions of whom no one survived to mourn, or to remember.”¹¹ More than a history, this account of the last days of millions is a memorial to the names and the faces of the forgotten. Martin’s book contains chapters devoted to countries, cities, ghettos, single transports, single individuals. Here, as throughout his work, we discover in Martin Gilbert not only a historian who chronicles events but a human being who remembers lost humanity.

The only thing that Martin Gilbert cares more about than the past is the future, as evidenced in Holocaust Journey. That book is based on a fourteen-day trip he made with his students to the sites of destruction. It demonstrates his uncanny ability to merge geography and history, to transmit not only what happened, but why it matters. An hour-to-hour chronicle, Holocaust Journey exudes Sir Martin’s devotion to his subject and his students. “There seems to be a story for every place we go,” he writes,¹² and so there is: the human relation to each place lies in the story it relates, a story of the past, for the sake of the future. The volume contains the words of the dead and the words of his students, now transformed into witnesses. In the end, after he and his students have peered into the essence of the event, they collide with the question that transcends the abstractions of history: Did the murderers not have children?¹³

As a Holocaust historian, Sir Martin Gilbert exemplifies a tedious attention to detail and the gathering of evidence. Far more than that, he tells us what is required of humanity: a certain understanding of history itself. Future generations will study not only his encyclopedic accomplishment as a chronicler who informs the field. They will, I think, study Sir Martin himself, to learn what our history has to do with our humanity.

Dr. Patterson is Hillel Feinberg Chair in Holocaust Studies at the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas.

Endnotes

1. Alfred Rosenberg, Race and Race History and Other Essays, (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 131-32.

2. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: Collins, 1986), 162.

3. Martin Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 119.

4. Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (New York: Holt, 1990), viii.

5. Ibid., 339.

6. Ibid., 340.

7. Ibid., 341.

8. Martin Gilbert, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), xx-xxi.

9. Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 10.

10. Ibid., 120.

11. Martin Gilbert, Final Journey: The Fate of the Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: Mayflower Books, 1979), 7.

12. Martin Gilbert, Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997), 11.

13. Ibid., 401.