Dante's Polish Inferno

Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camps By Christopher R. Browning W.W. Norton & Co. 2009, $27.95, pp. 400

Christopher Browning is the master historian of the intimate tragedy of interaction among Jews, Germans, Poles and Ukrainians during the Second World War. His Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is at once an exquisitely written and more knowing rendition of Hannah Arendt’s exegesis on the banality of evil, as well as an exposition of how a group of over-the-hill local policemen robustly joined the great and glorious Nazi mission to exterminate the Jews.

His new book, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp, describes in an agony of detail how a tiny number of the Jews in the Polish towns of Wierzbnik and Starachowice survived. Nearly all their fellow citizens died in an ineptly brutal German effort to extract some value, any value, from the Jews they captured alive and forced to work in steel and lumber mills, sewing and repairing German uniforms, and, of course, munitions manufacturing—mainly in enterprises appropriated by Germans and local Poles. Before they died of disease, starvation, beatings or arbitrary murder by those supervising their contributions to the Nazi war machine, the Jews of Wierzbnik/Starachowice displayed the full menu of human traits: heroism, connivance, cunning, loyalty, disloyalty, stubbornness—everything—as they sought to survive, with a shred of grace or some gesture of revenge, at least one more day with tasteless soup for evening food.

Browning, the Frank Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, is the son of a missionary. Hence, I am humbly moved to suggest that Israel add his name to the estimable brigade of Righteous Gentiles. His fierce bewilderment about the Nazis is alloyed with punctilious and relentless scholarship. He has combined a magisterial familiarity with the documentary archives of his specific period (1941-45, to say nothing of before and after) with oral interviews of 292 slave laborers and other archival materials of the Shoah Foundation, among other resources, to weave together the stories of those few who managed to survive, however barely, the nightmare world in which they lived. Browning is careful to question the accuracy of even the most unendurable descriptions—for example, of pregnant women allowed to live, because they could still work, and whose infants were killed at birth. He is forced often to rely on evidence gathered by legal tribunals of Germans charged with crime—tribunals whose standards of evidence were those appropriate or customary in normal civil society and not the Dante’s inferno cauldrons of the slave camps.

The specific source of the bitterness animating this study was a German court’s 1972 acquittal of Walter Becker, a retired policeman in charge of the camps. The stunning verdict was based on misplaced precision regarding corroborated evidence, minor discrepancies about events decades earlier, and other legal niceties appealing to a judge presumably raised in the narrow, keenly preserved culture of the local (often Catholic) communities. Nevertheless, it’s clear that Becker had presided over the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Wierzbnik in which some 4,000 Jews were sent to die in Treblinka. Sixty to eighty were murdered at the site, and another 1,600 victims were transported to three nearby slave labor camps. With zeal and even a sense of bravado, Becker strode about the factories, the railway station and the residential camps in the town with a drawn pistol in one hand and a whip or club in the other.

In exposing the miscarriage of justice in the Becker case, Browning underscores the painful dignity of professional historians who must weigh actual, accepted fact against the empirical demands of trial evidence and public testimony. There can be no more ghastly subject with which to engage these concerns than what grips Browning.

He is sometimes forced by his professional standards to concede that all we know is that something awful happened, not precisely what or what time of day or what so-and-so was wearing. For example, Browning was offered private recollections—but no public ones—of a public rape of a young woman by a German camp officer who forced her helpless neighbors to watch the act of exhibitionist cruelty and communal degradation. Decades later, survivors could not bring themselves to share even with those who were there (italics added) their memories of the event. “As one of the interviewees noted,” Browning reports, “everyone knew about it but no one wanted to discuss it, since the victim was still alive.” Dignified reticence amid all this horror? Remarkable!

Also remarkable is a small and deceptively benign detail that will remain in my mind for a long time. While the communities Browning writes about are gone, the dead bore the names of survivors now living next door and around the world: Blass, Rosenblatt, Waksberg, Wolfowicz, Zucker, Blum, Borman, Naiman, Szachter, Rubinstein, Kozlowski, Kaufman and dozens of others. Their namesakes should applaud Christopher Browning for uncovering their family histories and for being willing and able to stand the sight of a river of historical blood.

Lionel Tiger is professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. His most recent book is The Decline of Males, and his forthcoming book with Michael McGuire, MD, is God’s Brain.