ABSTRACT
If it is difficult to choose a suitable text by one of the perpetrators, it is all the more difficult to pick out an appropriate survivor’s recollection. The number of survivor memoirs published over the years has grown tremendously. The perpetrators, for obvious reasons, rarely wished to write or talk about their experiences after the war. Only a few left behind testimonies, such as the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, who wrote his memoirs just before he was executed, and Franz Stangl, who spoke at length to Gitta Sereny while he was on trial as former commandant of Treblinka. Conversely, the survivors were often motivated by an urgent need to record the events of the past for the sake of the majority who perished and as a warning to posterity. Some memoirs were published, or at least written, very soon after the liberation. But they rarely received much attention, especially when written by “passive” victims, namely innocent Jewish inmates, rather than heroic resistance fighters. This early period was followed by a relative lull, during which survivors tried to pick up the pieces and resume their previous lives, or, in most cases, build new ones. But as of the 1970s we are witnessing a new wave of publications and a tremendous rise in public interest. Survivors who feel that they will soon no longer be able to tell their stories now find a public far more willing to listen than in the past. Obviously, this influx in publications will have a limited duration, as the survivors are rapidly dying out. But it reflects the extent of memory’s reach and potency fifty years after the event, as well as the changing sensibilities of a public, the majority of whom had not even been born at the time.
