Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp

Abstract

In his latest book, Christopher R. Browning has again confronted a methodological challenge head on. Almost exclusively based on survivors’ testimonies, he reconstructs the history of a small complex of Nazi forced labour camps for Jewish inmates located in Starachowice in central Poland. Methodologically, Remembering Survival seems to echo Ordinary Men, one of Browning's early landmark studies about a German police battalion perpetrating the Holocaust. On that occasion he mainly used perpetrators’ interviews stemming from judicial procedures. Now he concentrates on a variety of testimonies given by those who survived the living and working conditions in the labour camps: maltreatment, selections, murderous orgies by guards, and finally deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. His study combines a thorough knowledge of the historical background with a balanced synopsis of the narratives, and, as he modestly puts it, ‘the highly subjective intuition of the individual historian’ (p. 9) which in other words is nothing less than the hermeneutic approach. His message is clear: the problems surrounding the sources should not prevent us from writing the necessary history—one simply has to identify the methodological challenges and pitfalls. In his introduction Browning presents a blueprint for this approach.

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