ABSTRACT
The British novelist, Martin Amis, has written that at the railway station in Treblinka, ‘the four dimensions were intriguingly disposed. A place without depth. And a place without time.’ If there is a need, as Michael Marrus suggests, ‘to integrate the history of the Holocaust into the general stream of historical consciousness’, it does not imply that the Holocaust can be made explicable by ‘normal’ methods of historical enquiry.1 The Holocaust does not exist outside history, yet its very study challenges many of the basic assumptions of the historical profession; hence the importance of the remarks of Claude Lanzmann that ‘any Work that would do justice to the Holocaust must take as its first principle the shattering of chronology.’2 In terms of the perpetrators, even the most extreme intentionalist interpretation of Nazi policy towards the Jews acknowledges a degree of confusion, opportunism and contradiction in the various stages of persecution and destruction (and especially the significance of local variation in all the bureaucratic processes). The study of the Holocaust (or at least modern perceptions of it) has become too Auschwitz-centred, lending it a deceptively simple chronological framework. For the survivors, it has been suggested that ‘the Holocaust has a different beginning for each victim’. With the massive growth of Holocaust testimony in recent yearswhether on film, paper or tape-it is no longer justifiable to write Holocaust history without reference to the victims and survivors. Yet the inclusion of their voices poses immense problems for historians faced with the task of providing a ‘logical’ framework from which to make sense of these many individual chronologies. To quote Lanzmann again: ‘The chronological account that begins with the boycott in April 1933 and leads us naturally into the gas chambers at Auschwitz or Treblinka is…rather dismally flat and one-dimensional.’3
