Deborah E. Lipstadt sur les falsificateurs

Dans les colonnes du magazine juif de gauche The Forward, l'historienne des religions Deborah Lipstadt publie une courageuse tribune pour dénoncer les falsificateurs de l'holocauste. Un excellent texte à méditer.

A Danger Greater Than Denial

The news that Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir “Angel at the Fence” is a fraud has the press buzzing and the publishing world reeling. The book, which the publisher apparently anticipated would be a best-seller, was pulled right before it was to be shipped to bookstores. No one who has paid close attention to the story, however, has a right to be surprised.

I first heard Rosenblat’s story in June of 2007. I was on a bus headed to Birkenau together with other scholars who study genocide. None of them were Holocaust specialists. One passenger began to read aloud from an e-mail he had received about a boy in Buchenwald who was saved because a young girl threw him an apple over the camp fence every day for seven months. Years later, the two met as adults. He learned that her family had been slave laborers in the nearby town. They were posing as non-Jews. They fell in love, married and recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

Long before my fellow passenger got to the fairy tale ending, I was skeptical. How could a young girl stand at a concentration camp fence without guards noticing? Would a Jewish family passing as Polish non-Jews permit their daughter to wander around near the camp? Could a prisoner go near the fence without being shot? Was the fence low enough for a small girl to throw an apple over?

When the professor finished, I declared, “Fiction. Bad fiction.” Some of the scholars suspected that years of skirmishes with Holocaust deniers had made me a hardened skeptic. After later coming across numerous renditions of the story — which, it turned out, was all over the Internet — and learning that the Rosenblats had appeared on “Oprah,” that a children’s book on the story was already published and that a memoir and film were forthcoming, I felt I could no longer remain silent. On my blog I stated that this story could not be true. The attacks came in quick succession: How could I question Holocaust survivors? Who was I to defame them?

The most vituperative attack came from Harris Salomon, who was making a film based on Rosenblat’s story. In an e-mail to me, he pronounced my opinion “worthless.” He declared that, since he had traveled throughout Eastern Europe doing research, “i may be more of a more of a [sic] holocaust expert then you.” He closed by accusing me of having committed “the greatest sin to the memory of all those perished so long ago.”

In the interim, Michigan State University historian Ken Waltzer, an expert on Buchenwald, had done the research that reporters, publishers and producers did not do. He spoke with historians who knew the layout of this sub-camp and with people who were interned there with Rosenblat. The story was clearly a lie.

The New Republic’s Gabriel Sherman spoke with additional survivors who further confirmed that this was a hoax. Even Rosenblat’s sister-in-law admitted never having heard the story of the girl with the apples, either at the Rosenblats’ wedding or in the 40 years that followed.

In response to the growing scrutiny, Salomon went ballistic. He complained to one of Waltzer’s deans and intimated that he would hold Waltzer “responsible” if Rosenblat’s health suffered because of the questions being raised about his memoir. The publisher, Penguin’s Berkley Books, stonewalled anyone who contacted them.

When Sherman found yet more survivors who contradicted Rosenblat’s story, the whole thing fell apart. The publisher pulled the book. Rosenblat admitted making up the story. Suddenly, Salomon, the great historian, told the press that he was “extremely angry” about being the victim of a scam (although he has said he still plans to make his film, albeit now as an acknowledged work of fiction).

Sadly, Herman Rosenblat overshadowed his genuine Holocaust story with a completely fabricated one. What really happened to him and his family has been lost in his lies.

There are various lessons to be learned from this: Facts about the Holocaust must be checked. Historians should never build their understanding of events based on one story from one person. But Rosenblat had enablers. His publisher, agent and movie producer pounced on his story. Reporters never bothered to check it out. They all seemingly wanted a story that made the Holocaust heartwarming, even though, as Waltzer aptly put it, the “Holocaust experience is not heartwarming, it is heart rending.”

Salomon believed that this kind of “candy-coated message” would reach “Middle America” and “do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done.” Jewish sources also allowed themselves to be co-opted. Aish HaTorah featured the story on its Web site. A Chabad rabbi, whose relatives died in the Holocaust, was swept off his feet by this phony tale and arranged a belated bar mitzvah for Herman, garnering even more publicity for the Rosenblats and himself.

I have spent much of my academic career studying Holocaust denial. But the much greater danger to our collective memory of the event is posed by Holocaust trivialization and romanticization. What the Rosenblats and their enablers did was create yet another obstacle for the remaining survivors to convince others that their stories are true.

Rosenblat claims that all he wanted to do was make people love each other more. The Chabad rabbi probably thought the story would inspire faith. Salomon wanted to teach Middle America about the Holocaust.

These may be worthy goals. But the Holocaust should not be reduced to a means for trying to fulfill these or any other ends. The instrumentalization of the Holocaust, the use of it to fulfill something else, is the ultimate degradation of the event. If Holocaust deniers were smart, they would sit back and let the Rosenblats, Salomons, Berkley Books and the like peddle their wares. Within a short time, no one would know what was truth and what was fiction.

Deborah E. Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. She is the author of “History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving” (Ecco, 2005).

Holocauste et pornographie

Le festival newyorkais Film Forum a mis Stalags à l'affiche jusqu'au 22 avril.

Avec le passage des années, l'horrible expérience qu'ont subie les Juifs dans les camps allemands a progressivement quitté le champ de l'expérience humaine pour acquérir une dimension religieuse déconnectée de l'histoire au sens strict.

Certes, les historiens poursuivent leurs travaux, mais principalement sur la périphérie du phénomène. Le cœur de cet instant tragique de l'histoire humaine est en passe de devenir une terra sancta hors d'atteinte.

Ce ne fut pas toujours ainsi. Quand les rescapés de cette catastrophe étaient assez nombreux, dans la force de l'âge, ils ne considéraient pas leur martyre avec les mêmes yeux que nos contemporains.

Une des manifestations les plus spectaculaires, et les plus dérangeantes pour les générations actuelles, fut la floraison dans le jeune Etat d'Israël de ce qu'on appelle la « pornographie nazie ».

Connue des spécialistes, elle vient de faire l'objet en 2007 de l'excellent documentaire israélien Stalags, écrit et dirigé par Ari Libsker, produit par Barak Heymann

Comme bien souvent, les Israéliens nous donnent des leçons d'objectivité et de liberté d'esprit quand il s'agit d'aborder des sujets délicats. Voici quelques articles qui explorent le sujet :

Par le quotidien Haaretz .

Par le quotidien Haaretz en anglais.

Par le FrankfurterRundschau.

Par le New York Times.

Voici ce qu'écrit le magazine américain Slate :

Un aviateur allié, rarement juif, est capturé et torturé par des gardes « SS » dénudées.

Israel's Nazi-porn problem


Taking their name from the Nazi prison camps in which they were set, Stalags were Israeli pornographic paperbacks featuring Nazi themes.

How do you make a movie about a disreputable and totally defunct literary genre? That question never quite gets answered by Ari Libsker's hour-long documentary "Stalags," but the questions Libsker raises about truth, fiction, sexuality and post-Holocaust Jewish identity are so interesting the film's lack of cinematic sensibility may not matter. For some reason Libsker shot most of "Stalags" on black-and-white video, a distracting and perverse choice given that the Nazi-themed pulp novels of his title sported titillating covers in lurid color. Maybe he wants to dampen the sensationalistic aspect of his subject matter, but there's really no way to do that.

As many older Israelis evidently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early '60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as "Stalags," whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic, voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and murder his captors.

Une iconographie qui s'inspire des modèles en vigueur
aux Etats-Unis à la même époque.

Stalags thrived for a few years and then disappeared, banished to the memory hole as a massive cultural embarrassment. Libsker meets a couple of the dubious characters who collect them; one insists that his face be obscured on camera (like a corporate whistleblower or a child molester on "60 Minutes"), and also appears to believe that the scenarios depicted actually occurred during World War II, or at least could have. (Just in case you're wondering, there were no female SS officers, nor any other women assigned to guard Allied POWs.) Israel's national library appears to contain a trove of them, buried deep in the catalog software and hidden from public view. Yet as some Israelis who were children and teenagers at the time testify, the Stalags provided sexual titillation in a society that repressed it, and also the illicit thrill of accessing a dark, secret recent past their European-born parents never discussed. They offered a Stockholm-syndrome equation of evil with eros and a juvenile revenge fantasy, all rolled into one.

As an outsider to both Judaism and Israeli society, I don't find the existence of the Stalags mysterious in the least. Given the scale of trauma that brought the State of Israel into being, and brought so many of its inhabitants over the sea, some kind of twisted and perverse fantasy reaction was inevitable. As Libsker's film further explains, the televised trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann transfixed Israelis in the early '60s, providing many younger people their first look at the horrific and dramatic events many of their parents had witnessed first hand. The Stalags may be understood as a dream-world, midnight version of the Eichmann revelations.



Libsker tracks down a former Stalags author, who still seems injured that the phenomenon did not bring him massive literary fame, along with a publisher who cheerfully shrugs the whole thing off: We gave the public what they wanted, and who am I to judge? But "Stalags" is most interesting when Libsker explores the deeper significance of this craze, as it reflects Israel's pseudo-pornographic relationship to the past. Many Jews and non-Jews remain fixated on salacious details of the Holocaust, such as the "Night Porter" idea that female camp inmates ensured their survival by sleeping with German officers, or that the Nazis maintained brothels of Jewish women at Auschwitz and other camps. Such things may have happened here and there, but they are not clearly attested, and in any case fade into total insignificance against the scale of the tragedy.

"Stalags" comes with a perfect companion piece, a short film called "Two Women and a Man" by avant-garde Israeli artist Roee Rosen, who has offended audiences worldwide with his interactive exhibition "Live and Die as Eva Braun." I can't tell you much about "Two Women and a Man" without giving Rosen's gambit away, but it purports to be a film about Justine Frank, a rediscovered Belgian Jewish surrealist of the 1930s and '40s whose pornographic and scatological art outraged even her artistic peers by repurposing Jewish themes and images in many distasteful directions. Not to be missed if you're fond of intellectual parlor games.

"Stalags" and "Two Women and a Man" are now playing at Film Forum in New York. Other engagements will follow.

Pour contacter l'équipe du film :

Berak Heymann
Heymann Brothers Films
2 Barzilai St
Tel Aviv 65113
ISRAEL
+972 3 560 2701
Fax: +972 3 560 4082
Courriel : barakheymann@gmail.com

Le phénomène Stalag.

L'éditeur de Stalag raconte son expérience.

Stalag et l'expérience israélienne.

Les vaches sacrées à l'abattoir

La Seconde Guerre mondiale, une tragédie évitable ?
L'entrée du cimetière militaire du mont d'Husines en Normandie.

Le 25 mars dernier, dans un article publié par l'Independent, le journaliste Boyd Tonkin rend compte des ouvrages qui mettent à mal des grands mythes contemporains. Il cite le Livre noir de la Révolution française, ouvrage connu des lecteurs français, mais aussi Human Smoke de Nicholson Baker lequel tente de montrer que la juste guerre de 1939-1945 n'était pas si inévitable que cela et que l'intransigeance de W. Churchill et de F. D. Roosevelt ont eu de lourdes conséquences humaines. L'auteur américain est carrément sacrilège. Il se demande s'il n'aurait pas fallu attendre que les Juifs aient tous quitté l'Allemagne et les pays à risque avant de déclarer la guerre au Reich. selon lui, c'est la guerre et la volonté de capitulation inconditionnelle décidée par les Alliés qui ont réuni les conditions qui ont permis la libération de la folie génocidaire hitlérienne. Une thèse très choquante qui ne manquera pas de mettre vent debout le syndicat des thuriféraires de Winston Churchill.




Vous trouverez ici un intéressant entretien avec Nicholson Baker (antérieurà son dernier livre).

The past that we believe in is to others a myth
Outbreaks of revisionist history are questioning deeply held views

People who argue that nothing should be sacred often stay attached to their own chosen taboos. Secular humanists (and here I'll stand up to be counted) like to tell religious believers that, in an open democracy, the odd squall of outrage and offence is a tiny price to pay for the benefits of freedom.

Fair enough, but many libertarians who look for no gods in the sky remain prone to a modern form of ancestor worship. They tend to revere the historical events and characters that helped secure the liberties and dignities they praise: from Napoleon to the Suffragettes; from the American Revolution to Mahatma Gandhi. How secularists respond when their own ancient idols become the butt of mockery and loathing offers a good test of probity and consistency. Just now, that gauntlet has been flung down on two fronts.

Outbreaks of revisionist history are currently questioning the deepest beliefs about the past of countless citizens in France, Britain and the US.

In France, a compendium of essays entitled The Black Book of the French Revolution has triggered a media avalanche of dismay and disgust with its indictment, not only of the violence of the Terror and the ruinous wars that wracked Europe from 1792 to 1815, but of the revolutionary ideal itself.France, of course, does maintain a state faith: in the Republican virtues of 1789, lauded automatically by left and right alike. To challenge them can feel like a form of blasphemy.

Meanwhile, the maverick American author Nicholson Baker has just published Human Smoke. This documentary-style collage of the events that led up to the Second World War makes the pacifist's – some might say the appeaser's case – against the conflict. It presents Franklin D Roosevelt and, above all, Winston Churchill as racist warmongers, aggressive conspirators, and blood-soaked war criminals. The book suggests that a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany would have prevented more misery than it caused, and comes close to implying that reckless Allied force pushed Hitler towards genocide. Expect a carnival of excoriation when Baker's bombshell reaches these Winston-worshippping shores in May.

In both cases, the threat to orthodoxy comes from rather subtler weapons than the gross lies peddled say by Holocaust deniers. Indeed, plenty of Britons will be far more appalled by the idea that Churchill's ferocious intransigence somehow contributed to the "human smoke" of Auschwitz than by the fantasies of David Irving and his sorry crew.

Baker describes himself as "a non-religious pacifist who is sympathetic to Quaker notions of non-violent resistance". Whatever the effect of Human Smoke, it aims more to rehabilitate the peace-seekers of the 1930s than to justify the losing sides in the conflagration that they proved so powerless to halt. To anyone who sticks – in this instance, if in no other – to the doctrine of the unavoidable "just war", Baker may be more unsettling than a hundred neo-fascist covens.

Across the Channel, the "Black Book" has stirred up some slumbering demons of its own. Enemies of the Revolution of 1789 – monarchists, Catholics, conservatives and regionalists – never really went away. They made up a sometimes formidable bloc in French politics right up until the country's defeat in 1940. Then, because Marshal Petain's collaborationist regime had drawn so heavily on counter-revolutionary principles and personnel, the anti-Jacobins fell decisively from grace at the Liberation in 1944.

Arguments against the sacred uprising became utterly heretical. A sceptical historian such as the great Francois Furet could banish many illusions, but not defeat the myth. Even a revisionist history as fine as Simon Schama's Citizens (which counts the cost of 1789 from a progressive, not a reactionary point of view) failed to find a French publisher. The compilers of the "Black Book" have deepened outrage by borrowing a title and a format from The Black Book of Communism, a French bestseller of the 1990s that sought to show that Marxists in power had claimed almost 100 million victims. One historian, Stephane Courtois, worked on both incendiary devices. Behind the implicit comparison lies the proposition – commonplace in Britain, still shocking in France – that the Revolution ushered in the totalitarian age that Hitler and Stalin would bring to fruition.

A propos of the French Revolution, I can look at the spluttering horror of Fifth Republic orthodoxy with fascination, and not a little relish. When it comes to Nicholson Baker's apologia for appeasing Hitler, then I begin to feel the same foam form upon the lips. No matter: even the most vehement unbeliever treats as holy some kinds of story, myth or hero. And it's precisely these untouchable taboos that ought to be subject to probing and persistent doubt. Those of us who cherish the right to give offence should from time to time enjoy the taste of our own medicine.

b.tonkin@independent.co.uk

La Résistance n’a pas appelé à sauver les Juifs

Lettre d'une Juive internée au camp de Gurs adressée à une parente à New York. Le triste témoignage d'une époque que la télévision française veut oublier.

Dans son édition d'ajourd'hui, le quotidien Libération publie une tribune de l'historien Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac intitulée la Résistance n’a pas appelé à sauver les Juifs dénonçant le révisionnisme de la télévision française qui n'hésite pas à réécrire l'histoire dans un nouvel exemple de la « feel good » attitude.

Comment dire le malaise qu’éprouve l’historien après la diffusion du docu-fiction de mardi soir sur France 2 [la Résistance, «Quand il fallait sauver les Juifs», ndlr] ?

France Télévisions a patronné un film sur le drame des Juifs de France dans les années 1940-1944 et l’a programmé à une heure de grande écoute, alors que la Shoah a été occultée un quart de siècle, bravo !

Les auteurs n’ont pas hésité à souligner l’indignité du gouvernement de Vichy, qui a délibérément mis les Juifs de France hors de la loi commune et qui a participé à la déportation de 76 000 d’entre eux, dont 73 500 allaient être exterminés ; ils ont eu, de surcroît, le mérite de mettre en lumière des héros injustement ignorés : encore bravo !

La réalisation visuelle est remarquable au point de faire passer pour documents d’époque des séquences totalement irréalistes ou dont le tournage aurait été inconcevable dans la clandestinité, comme un long défilé d’enfants juifs cheminant dans la neige vers la frontière suisse. Faut-il dire bravo ? Admettons que ce soit la loi du genre. La méconnaissance de la Résistance dont témoigne ce film est d’autant plus choquante. Non, le salut des Juifs n’était pas un des deux volets majeurs de l’action résistante, comme la programmation de lundi et mardi voudrait le faire croire. Faut-il rappeler que le mot d’ordre «Il faut sauver les Juifs» n’a jamais été lancé ni par le Conseil national de la Résistance, ni par la France libre dans les années 1943-1944, ni par la presse clandestine, mis à part les Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien. Le titre même de l’émission est un faux-semblant.

Certes, c’est grâce au courage de certains Français que la proportion des Juifs qui ont été déportés de France a été moindre qu’aux Pays-Bas, par exemple (grâce aussi à l’existence, jusqu’à 1942, de la zone non occupée et au fait que la France a été le premier pays libéré). La juste perspective eût été de montrer que les initiatives en faveur des Juifs ont été seulement (mais c’était déjà beaucoup) une action de sauvetage dans l’ensemble des actions à l’actif d’une résistance multiforme.

Un train de déportés juifs.

Laisser entendre, comme le fait le commentaire du film durant son dernier quart d’heure, qu’un immense mouvement de solidarité a soulevé la masse des Français, de 1943-1944, en faveur des Juifs, ce qui apparaît comme la leçon à en retenir, est une imposture. C’est vouloir construire une légende. Il va de soi que l’opinion publique n’était plus, en 1944, ce qu’elle avait été au lendemain du désastre : l’approche de la Libération a freiné le zèle répressif et stimulé de beaux dévouements. De là à extrapoler à la nation entière, et même à la Résistance entière, ce qui fut le mérite admirable de quelques mouvements, de quelques groupes ou de quelques individualités, il y a plus qu’une marge.

Un excès de bon vouloir, un désir de bonne conscience patriotique transforment en un film de propagande un film qui devrait s’en tenir aux exigences d’un film d’histoire, dont les noms d’Annette Wieviorka et de Jean-Pierre Azéma figurant au générique semblent cautionner, abusivement, la totale véracité. Dommage.

Nouvelles photos d'Auschwitz

Rebecca Erbelding, une jeune archiviste du musée de l'Holocauste à Washington, a trouvé dans son courrier une enveloppe contenant des photos inédites prises à Auschwitz durant l'été 1944. Il s'agit d'un album photo qui est consacré aux loisirs de la garnison. Le New Yort Times a mis en ligne un court diaporama commenté par l'archiviste qui mérite le détour

L'hebdomadaire allemand Der Spiegel a mis en ligne un autre diaporama, sans commentaires cette fois.