[An American educator and critic, Kutler specializes in Hebrew studies. In the essay below, he discusses autobiographical writing on the Holocaust as a genre, nothing characteristics and themes.]

The assessing of autobiographical writing in the form of memoirs, records of oral interviews, and diaries for the period of the Holocaust is a little like sailing a boat in the fog. Without an eye on the lighthouse, one can easily be distracted and make errors in judgment causing disaster. A sailor's best rule of thumb is to have adequate maps to guide his or her approach toward a safe harbor.

The same situation confronts the historian of the Holocaust. Not enough time has elapsed for a corpus to have formed that can serve the function of history. J. Huizinga, a Dutch historian, has tried to propose a definition of history that can serve our purpose: "History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of the past" ["A Definition of the Concept of History," in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassavier, 1936]. The nature of the "intellectual form" and the accountability factor are the notions that are of the greatest concern. What did Huizinga mean by "intellectual form," and what standard could be meant? To whom are the writers of memoirs, diaries, and interviews accountable? These are some of the questions that need to be addressed before criteria can be established to identify which writings among those who survived and those who did not can be judged to have made a significant contribution to the historiography of the Holocaust.

Thus, like the sailor with maps to guide him or her to safe harbor, the historian needs a set of criteria that will serve as a guide for a proper methodology. Without it, the practitioner of history will steer off course. The following statements are useful in identifying memoirs or diaries that render an account of themselves to the past and serve us as sufficiently historical:

1. Diary and memoir writing is a specific form of tradition.

2. Diaries and memoirs are not concerned primarily with the accurate reporting of events; they also involve apology and self-justification.

3. Diary writing and memoirs concern themselves with causes of events and circumstances. This could be a reflection upon events or a moralizing tendency.

4. Diary and memoir writing will incorporate or reflect upon national consciousness or fate.

Returning briefly to Huizinga's definition, I am confronted with the notion of what constitutes an "intellectual form." Diaries, memoirs, or records of oral interviews qualify as intellectual forms since they are clear forms of individual expression set to paper with the purpose of communicating ideas. The standard of such writings must be tested by the value of the information gained and the place it has in the genre.

To what degree do the writings render account to the past? In order for this question to be answered, the collections have to be assessed in terms of presentation and of judgments of events and individual behavior. But more, the manuscripts should be accountable to the facts. Diary and memoir writing as a specific form of tradition is well accounted for, especially in Jewish tradition. In the worst of times this vulnerable people has responded to oppression by recording events as they unfold in an appeal not to its contemporaries but to the judgment of history. The book of Ecclesiastes is an example from late biblical times. The Wars of the Jews is a written account by Josephus of the wars against Rome presented apologetically to the Roman world. The medieval period saw a continuation of this tradition. Thus we have Moses Maimonides in his Epistle to the Yemenites encouraging these people to remain stolid in the face of persecution, Solomon Bar Samson telling of the Kiddush ha-Shem who were massacred in Mainz in May 1096, and Nathan Hanover recounting the horrors of the Chmielnicki pogroms in his Vale of Tears. On the eve of World War II Polish Jewry's greatest scholar, Simon Dubnow, advised his contemporaries to record everything for posterity. Whether or not they had ever read Dubnow, countless Jews heeded his advice.

Personal observations may be flawed by bias, hearsay, rumor, or outright error. While severe trauma may sharpen the senses momentarily, extended periods of starvation, disease, threats, and shifts from location to location can also result in confusion. As a result, some of those who experienced Elie Wiesel's "other planet" misplaced rivers and camps. Some survivors remember what they think they should remember. In retrospect, some of the jottings seem mundane—concern over food, housing, family—but none of them were unimportant. The diaries humanize the numbers. Six million people become individuals with passions and agonies that we can understand. In Holland a town clerk left a last inscription in the community notebook on December 31, 1942: "For we are left but few of many. We are counted as sheep for the slaughter, to be killed and to perish in misery and shame. May deliverance come to Jews speedily in our days."

About the time Abraham Toncman was pondering the fate of his people in Holland, a little girl who wanted to be a movie star was setting down her most personal thoughts in a journal. From 1942 to August 1944, Anne Frank complained about the crowding and discipline in the annex above her father's store in Amsterdam. But she also expressed hope when the Allies landed at Normandy. A teenager, she was falling in love, and she longed for a world without hate, where she might live as a Jew and Zionist. For many educators, The Diary of Anne Frank is the starting point for making the Holocaust relevant for young people.

Virtually the same aspirations are found in Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary (1972). The eleven-year journal (1933–44) of a young Jewish woman from Budapest contains some of the most moving writing on the Holocaust ever recorded. Older and more mature than Anne Frank, she expressed concern about anti-Semitism in the prewar period. Hannah Senesh steeled herself to racism by becoming an ardent Zionist and emigrating to Palestine. When her homeland was occupied by the Nazis, she volunteered to return to Hungary as a commando. There in November 1944 she was executed by a firing squad. Her poem "Blessed Is the Match" has inspired a book by the same name written by Marie Syrkin and has been incorporated into Reform Judaism's Hanukkah service. But a much more compelling statement is found in her 1941 poem "To Die" written at Nahalal, where Senesh speaks of the contrast between warm, sunny skies and the terrible consequences of war. She concludes, however, that she is willing to sacrifice herself for her home, her land, and her people.

Two other journals merit special mention. Few documents are as poignant as Janusz Korczak's Ghetto Diary (1978). The notes of the gentle pediatrician from Warsaw were published posthumously, Korczak having accompanied 190 orphan children to death at Treblinka in the summer of 1942. Korczak (whose real name was Henryk Goldszmit) wrote of sick and abandoned children who needed to be tended, of reading stories over and over to them, of people lying on the streets dying of starvation, of his own personal torment whether to use euthanasia on his orphans, and of his hope for a world where no child would be barred from playing with any other. As if anticipating those who would deny the facts of Nazi genocide, Korczak concluded thoughtfully, "What matters is that all this did happen."

Korczak, Senesh, and Anne Frank were not professional historians. But Emmanuel Ringelblum was, and his writings, recovered between 1946 and 1950 from milk jars buried during the war, constitute a conscious effort on the part of a trained historian to document what occurred in the Warsaw ghetto. A Labor Zionist who worked for the Jewish Historical Institute before the war, Ringelblum served as the model for the fictional character Noach Levinson in John Hersey's inspirational novel The Wall. Like Levinson, Ringelblum organized intellectual meetings in the ghetto where Peretz and Sholom Aleichem were discussed. Ringelblum's journal, however, transcends Hersey's novel because it is fact. From its masked opening in January 1940, addressed to Ringelblum's father, to the final entries posted in December 1942, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (1958) tracks the progressive dehumanization of the largest concentration of Jews in Europe. The reader learns of expedience that compromised leaders of the Judenrat who though that they were sacrificing a few of their people to save the whole, and of the same expedience that forced overburdened families to turn a deaf ear to the whimpering of children freezing on stoops below. The reader learns how Jewish businessmen like Kohn and Heller and policemen like Jacob Leikin collaborated with the Nazis hoping to emerge richer and unscathed at war's end while volunteers at the Joint Distribution Committee, CENTOS children's aid, and TOZ medical aid worked valiantly in the most primitive conditions to help their fellow Jews. We learn what they were reading in that doomed quarter (the memoirs of Lloyd George, Napoleon, Tolstoy), how they regretted being herded into the ghetto, and how they wondered if the free world truly appreciated their plight.

Neither Ringelblum's notes nor The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (1965) nor The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow (1979) cover the desperate uprising of May 1943. For that the reader should consult Philip Friedman's Martyrs and Fighters (1954), which includes lengthy extracts from Marek Edelman's The Ghetto Fights (1946), Melekh Neustadt's Hurbn un oyfshtand fun di Yidn in Varshe (1948), Tuvya Borzykowski's Tsvishn falndike vent (1949), and SS General Jürgen Stroop's report titled Es gibt keinen judischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr (1943). Ringelblum's notes do not possess the sweep of history; no grand conclusions are offered. They are the words of a man afraid, a family man, who hoped that they would have value for posterity. Just as Anne Frank's diary has achieved epic status in literature, so too Ringelblum's notes merit a special place in historiography.

The postwar reminiscences of Holocaust survivors form an incredibly large corpus. Ever expanding, these works may be broken into individual accounts and collections edited by professional scholars. Among the more notable memoirs that tell the tale of Jews in Poland are Alexander Donat's The Holocaust Kingdom (1963), Leon Wells's The Janowska Road (1963), Bernard Goldstein's The Stars Bear Witness (1949), Oscar Pinkus's House of Ashes (1964), Vladka Meed's On Both Sides of the Wall (1979), Joseph Ziemian's The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square (1975), Sara Zyskind's Stolen Years (1981), Matylda Engleman's End of the Journey (1980), Halina Birenbaum's Hope Is the Last to Die (1971), Jack Eisner's The Survivor (1980), Izaak Goldberg's The Miracle Versus Tyranny (1978), George Topas's The Iron Furnace (1990), and Tadeusz Pankiewicz's The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy (1987). The story of Jews in Hungary is told in Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic's I Cannot Forgive (1968), Georgia Gabor's My Destiny (1982), Livia Jackson's Elli (1980), and Gizelle Hersh and Peggy Mann's Gizelle, Save the Children (1980). For the Ukraine, see Paul Trepman's Among Men and Beasts (1978) and Mel Mermelstein's By Bread Alone (1979). For Latvia, see Gertrude Schneider's Journey into Terror (1980) and Frida Michelson's I Survived Rumboli (1982). The story of Czechoslovakia is told by Hana Demetz in The House on Prague Street (1980) and Saul Friedlander in When Memory Comes (1979). On the Jews of Holland, see Marga Minco's Bitter Herbs (1960), Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life (1984), and Jona Oberski's Childhood (1983). On France, see Joseph Joffo's A Bag of Marbles (1974) and Sim Kessel's Hanged at Auschwitz (1972). Among the more gripping concentration-camp memoirs are Filip Muller's Eyewitness Auschwitz (1979), Kitty Hart's Return to Auschwitz (1981), Eugene Heimler's Concentration Camp (1961), Germaine Tillion's Ravensbrück (1975), Fania Fenelon's Playing for Time (1977), Luba Gurdus's The Death Train (1978), Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz (1973), and Isabella Leitner's Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz (1978). Other recommended works that have a single person's perspective include Elie Cohen's The Abyss (1973), William Perl's The Four-Front War (1979), Peter Schweifert's The Bird Has No Wings (1976), Ilse Koehn's Mischling, Second Degree (1978), Judith Strick Dribben's A Girl Called Judith Strick (1970), and Charlotte Delbo's None of Us Will Return (1968).

A second approach to memoirs is for historians, psychologists, or community leaders to interview a number of survivors for the purpose of making some sense of the Holocaust. A number of these texts stress the heroic response of Jews to the Nazis. They range from the very good (including Yuri Suhl's They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe [1967], Anny Latour's The Jewish Resistance in France (1940–1944) [1981], Marie Syrkin's Blessed Is the Match [1947], and Eric Boehm's We Survived [1949]) to the more pedestrian (Ina Friedman's Escape or Die [1982], Reba Karp's Holocaust Stories: Inspiration for Survival [1986], and Milton Meltzer's Never to Forget [1976]). Some of the works have a clinical orientation, including the excellent Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust (1980) edited by Joel Dimsdale, Sarah Moskovitz's Love Despite Hate: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Adult Lives (1983), Claudine Vegh's I Didn't Say Goodbye: Interviews with Children of the Holocaust (1984), and Shelly Lore's Jewish Holocaust Survivors' Attitudes Toward Contemporary Beliefs About Themselves (1984).

The late 1970s witnessed the appearance of a spate of Holocaust memoirs. For more than a quarter-century, many Holocaust survivors were disinclined to speak about their wartime experiences. They concentrated on rebuilding their lives, and raising children. Once these children were grown and out of the home, the survivors were faced with their own mortality. Now they were eager to talk, and the result was the publication of books like Dorothy Robinowitz's New Lives: Survivors of the Holocaust Living in America (1976), Lucy Steinitz and David Szonyi's Living After the Holocaust: Reflections by the Post-War Generation in America (1976), Isaiah Trunk's Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution (1978), and Helen Epstein's Children of the Holocaust (1979).

Following along these lines in his book The Holocaust, Martin Gilbert attempts to gather testimony from survivors in order to constitute a record of the Holocaust. The book gives a brief historical overview of Hitler's rise to power and continues to the 1945 death marches. The book employs diary accounts to substantiate conditions throughout. Interspersed with events are also memoirs, for example, Zindel Grynzspan recalling October 27, 1938, when he and his family were expelled from Germany, or Eric Luca's account of storm troops defiling a synagogue.

Gilbert also utilizes some of the chronicles from the ghettos. For example, the Lodz chronicle is cited in his chapter "Write and Record," which were Simon Dubnow's last words before being shot in the back in December 1941. Gilbert ends his book with the following rationale: "The survivors tell their story to their children, set it down in memoirs and testimonies, relive it in nightmares…. Each survivor faces the past, and confronts the future with a burden which those who do not go through the torment, cannot measure. 'I may bear indelible scars in body and soul' Cordelia Edvardson has written [in Gilbert's The Holocaust]; 'but I do not intend to reveal them to the world—least of all the Germans. That is the pride of the survivor. Hitler is dead but I am alive.'"

In Voices from the Holocaust Sylvia Rothchild employs a tripartite system of "Life Before the Holocaust," "Life During the Holocaust," and "Life in America." As editor, Rothchild allows survivors to relate their testimonies. She edits 650 hours of conversation in a gripping fashion that conveys to the reader a feeling that he or she, too, is "a kind of survivor." Stories are told by survivors from France, Greece, Hungary, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Yugoslavia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, and the United States. Some have lived in Israel or South America. The preface gives the self-justification of the survivors "to our sons … may they never know the heartaches and agonies their parents suffered during those years except by reading this transcript or listening to the tapes," or "I tell you the only thing that kept me going is the burning desire to tell, to bear witness."

In excerpts from "Life Before the Holocaust," Rothchild offers a precise description of the survivors' place in society. A sense of loss and nostalgia is expressed. These tapes, transcribed in written form, offer impressions of European life in much the same way as other European Jews have related them. They are accounts full of social insights. Life is simplified with statements such as "We loved each other and helped each other. And then the Germans came" or "At my job everything was normal."

The moralizing tendencies of the survivors in this volume take on important messages. "Do not hate! Do not harm! Share with others less fortunate." "Remember the past and learn from it." Rothchild states that they share their painful memories of the dark places in recent history in the hope that things may never be so dark again. Sometimes the survivors reflect upon their experiences and feel strongly toward Israel. Their work in support of Israel may in fact bring about a personal redemption. For Stephen Ross from Dodz, Poland, freedom in America necessitates a state in Israel.

In Amcha: An Oral Testament of the Holocaust, Saul Friedman attempts to fill a lacuna in Holocaust studies. Friedman communicates the story of the mass of Jews who survived the Holocaust, the common folk "who lived on the periphery of colossal events." The book is limited, for the most part, to survivors who were acquaintances of Friedman in Youngstown.

Three themes are evinced in Amcha by the survivors: (1) widespread anti-Semitism, (2) an ingenuous attitude on the part of Jews themselves, and (3) resistance manifested in a variety of ways. The survivors' accounts include accuracies and inaccuracies as to events and places, but these are not the important criteria for this chapter. A search for apology and self-justification, integral themes for our genre, do turn up. Siep Jongeling from Holland expressed the view that "the Germans are not all bad people. I have no objections to Germans as long as they don't want to impose their will on me." Leon Lieberman theorized on survival: "In Buchenwald, you gotta survive. When I came in they [the Germans] noticed my number. They gave me credit for this and gave me a better job."

The book is also filled with reflections on life after the Holocaust. Morris Weinerman, the friendly carpenter from Youngstown, expresses his feelings: "I still have dreams. It has been a long time, and all the time I have been free. But in the dreams right away I am surrounded. All the time I am caught again…. We do not forget." Optimism is expressed by Esther Bittman Shudmak: "I don't think that anything like that would happen again. People now have access to ammunition and guns. People protect themselves more than in those days. I think now people care more about others in general."

Isaac Kowalski's Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945 is a repository of accounts on Jewish resistance by partisans and underground activists. The book contains memoirs, letters, testimonies, biographies, and autobiographies of the resistance movement. This work depicts the Jew as a fighter with a three-fold battle: fighting the Nazi invaders, facing the indigenous population who hated him, and struggling to exist within the partisan movement.

The anthology serves the aim of an apology, that is, to explain the situation of the partisans and their raison d'être to the Western community. To this end, Kowalski attempts to portray the Jewish partisan as a fighting soldier. He seeks to bury the lie that the Jew was not a fighting man. The romantic notion of Ph.D.'s as glamorous fighting warriors, "the new chivalry," is ferreted out in the book time and again.

The volume allows the partisans to speak for themselves, to enable the reader to sense the tension and to recapture the moment. Jewish heroism is paraded in Sobibor, the trenches, the ghettos, and at the front. The tendency to moralize, albeit in a grim fashion, is evinced in the book of Anthon Schmidt: "Every man must die once. One can die as a hangman or as a man helping others. I'd die for helping other men."

Revenge is also a value justification. Norman Salsitz took a machine gun and fired salvo after salvo into the Germans: "Their party was over. At this moment with the gun still hot in my hands I no longer felt like a victim. I had settled my score with the Scharffuhrer and my pact with G-d who had let me down so many times."

In Helen Fein's book Accounting for Genocide, the reader is asked to confront the Holocaust as an event challenging earlier notions of history. "To understand the implications of the Holocaust, the reader must grapple with its success." The book's main interest to us is the part that explores the responses of Jews, drawn from first-person records in Warsaw, the Netherlands, and Hungary. She records Ringelblum's diary on the Warsaw ghetto as well as the diary of Chaim Kaplan.

The section on the Warsaw ghetto employs memoirs and diaries interspersed as a literary device within a running narrative by the author. Fein even goes so far as to use excerpts from novels. Fein's book does not lend itself to the type of literary criterion that we have posed. It is essentially a work for sociologists that uses personal accounts of the victims to reconstruct the social psychology of the camp inmates.

A literary work of merit can be found in Yaffa Eliach's Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust. She utilizes a long tradition of oral story telling circulating among the Hasidic communities and puts these tales and interviews down in print. The original interviews were conducted in nine languages and numerous dialects. The tales fall into four major parts reflecting four stages: ancestors and faith, friendship, the spirit alone, and the Gates of Freedom.

In the first part, "Ancestors and Faith" shows the reaction of the Jew, the innocent victim, when he encounters his executioners. Our first criterion of diary writing being a form of tradition is nowhere so exemplified as in this volume. The Hasidic tale with its themes of love, optimism, and faith in God ultimately triumphs in the world of the Holocaust.

The writing of autobiography, memoirs, and diaries is an enterprise that is essentially reflective. Not only do these authors engage in the task of writing about experience but also offer us their own thoughts of that experience. Thus different attitudes are adopted by these authors, conditioned by the momentous and monstrous experience that they all shared. They are rendering accounts about occurrences (history) while having participated in these events and in turn being shaped by these events. Thus the type of writing described here is not history but the reflective subjective passion of the participant.

The authors share a burning and important question that is rarely evinced: What is this account for? For whom is it intended? The attempts to address these issues are the raison d'être of these authors and are in fact the thread that ties this type of historiography together.

The autobiographers seek an explanation; they seek self-knowledge. In their quest for this gnosis they render an account of human action so that human understanding can profit. The accounts of history in any of the forms studied here are for posterity. They are for the present readers. They make an attempt to reach out across time to an audience so that the audience can be made aware of particular and subjective events. But they are also an exercise in self-awareness. The tension between these two objectives gives genesis to the passion in the literature. The reader then has the task of explaining the connection between the narrative of the individuals and their reason for its rendition.

Historical research can also benefit from the memoirs and diaries cited here. These are in fact statements of eyewitnesses and, as such, contemporary with the events that they attest. Praise is due for these sources because they are not derivative. If they lack the sound judgment and interpretation of historians, they do so because there is a distinction between the two methods. Our authors do not use the tools of the modern historiographer by collecting evidence and evaluating it. Instead, they turn to personal accounts and reflect back on them. The researcher will need to avail himself or herself of the patrimony of memoirs, diaries, and other accounts in order to evaluate the history of this period. This evaluation will allow a "lost" civilization to speak to new generations, render account of itself, and thereby fulfill J. Huizinga's definition of history. The researcher will then have contributed to the understanding of the period known as the Holocaust.