Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel might be surprised to learn that his 1988 criminal trial for spreading false news was the catalyst for what is now one of the world’s largest collections of survivor testimonials.
Dr. Alain Goldschläger
As a member of the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada, University of Western Ontario French professor Dr. Alain Goldschläger was brought in to help the prosecution research team.
“I quickly realized how important testimonials were, because historians couldn’t be part of the court proceedings. History is hearsay,” he explained. “It was the survivors who were the substance of the prosecution.”
But when Goldschläger wanted to look at a bibliography of Holocaust testimonials, he discovered there weren’t any. And so he began his quest to systematically collect and catalogue survivors’ stories.
Today, Goldschläger’s Holocaust Literature Research Institute is the second-largest collection of testimonials outside of Israel. More than 4,000 books written in 29 languages take up most of his UWO office, and Goldschläger has done his best to read them all.
There are wartime journals published by clandestine presses, books written in Yiddish in postwar Buenos Aires and even an account of the Shanghai ghetto told in Chinese.
“Right from the beginning, Jews had the consciousness that this was something of a new magnitude, and they had to record it,” Goldschläger said.
Wartime documents provide a detailed record of day-to-day life in Nazi Europe, but offer no larger perspective or explanation.
As time passed, the nature of the testimonials began to change. In fact, Goldschläger has defined five distinct periods of writing.
The majority of Holocaust memoirs come from the second period (1945 to 1951).
“These stories are an outburst – a crie de coeur,” Goldschläger said. “It’s a disorganized narrative, with little outside perspective.”
Production dropped dramatically between 1952 and 1979, although this period saw the mass publication of famous memoirs such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man.
After 1980, survivors realized that their stories might be lost if they were not recorded.
“This fourth period is a reaction to the negation of the revisionists. Suddenly a lot of survivors said, ‘It cannot be denied, I have to give my testimony,’” Goldschläger explained.
These memoirs often take a somewhat pedagogical approach as survivors write for children and grandchildren who may have limited knowledge about the war.
“The perspective is also very different,” Goldschläger observed. “It’s about what a human being can survive and how they can rebuild their lives. They are very positive to a certain extent, because the outcome is positive.”
Goldschläger believes the time of true testimonial ended in 2000. Since then, he said, most memoirs have been collaborative efforts or produced in special writing workshops.
“People think once they publish a book, their memories are safe. But if it’s only 200 copies distributed to family and friends, it can be lost,” he said.
That’s what drives him to scour second-hand bookstores and online booksellers for new additions to his collection.
“You can study and learn a lot through historical textbooks, but there are things, small personal events, that can only be found in testimony,” he said.
So would someone such as Zündel be swayed by the sheer number of survivors’ stories on Goldschläger’s shelves?
“No, you will never convince Zündel,” Goldschläger said with a sad smile. “But what we can do is stop revisionism from spreading.”
For more information on the Holocaust Literature Research Institute, visit www.hlri.ca.
