Ruth Linn and Rudolf Vrba

If Rudolf Vrba has had a champion, it is the academic Ruth Linn who has fought tirelessly to ensure that he gets his historical due. Linn is the only Israeli scholar who was permitted by Vrba to interview him. She did so from 1998 until his death in 2006. She is credited with making Vrba visible in the Israeli pantheon of heroism and bringing the escape’s legacy to the attention of numerous people in Israel and abroad. In 1998, Linn arranged for the first publication of Vrba’s memoir in the Hebrew language (including the Vrba-Wetzler report) by the University of Haifa Press after she claims it was denied publication by Yad Vashem. [See illustration]

First Edition in Hebrew

Linn further arranged for her university (Haifa) to present Vrba with an honorary doctorate for his heroism during the Holocaust.

Born and raised in Israel, Ruth Linn first became aware of Vrba’s existence when she saw Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah (1985). In response, she became determined to spread awareness of his escape with Wetzler and have the state of Israel honor him as a surviving escapee. “But who is Vrba?” she was repeatedly asked by those she approached in order to make him visible. She says she remained mystified by this “aberration of ignorance.”

“This was very strange to me,” she later told Pat Johnson of the Jewish Independent in 2006. “I read a lot about the Holocaust but I never, ever, read about Vrba in Israeli textbooks in the Hebrew language. Am I the only Israeli who fell asleep in class when we studied this in the Holocaust? Or maybe we never studied it.”

Ruth Linn

For seven years (1987-1994) she kept questioning Israelis within Israel and around the world about the escape while concurrently trying to locate Vrba. In 1994, when Linn arrived in Vancouver to teach in the department of Counseling Psychology at the University of British Columbia, she remained on her quest and coincidentally located Vrba at the very university where she happened to be teaching. This occurred when one of her informants, a former Israeli teacher, confided in Linn she had been informed about the escape by her Vancouver real estate agent who was named Robin Vrba. This turned out to be Rudolf Vrba’s second wife. Linn quickly learned that he had become a professor of biochemistry in the pharmacology department of the medical school of the University of British Columbia. In fact, he was teaching classes in the building that was located next to her office.

After Linn’s fortuitous discovery, the pair met the next day. Having grown wary of researchers and journalists, Vrba gave Linn a copy of his 1963 memoir, in English, originally titled I Cannot Forgive. He was reluctant to engage further. She read it in one seating and immersed herself thereafter in the mystery surrounding its absence in the Israeli Holocaust narrative .

As she later told Johnson: “In terms of literature, Vrba’s memoir [later re-titled I Escaped from Auschwitz] is in the class of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and first-class novelists of the Holocaust. On the book it said ‘First published 1963’ and the year was 1994. I said to myself, ‘Where has this book been for 31 years?’ Now I had an Agatha Christie mission to try and trace what happened to this book. If it was published in London in 1963, why wasn’t it translated into Hebrew? Was there no money? So many other books were translated and this was not a story about some tiny shtetl in Siberia. This is Auschwitz, centre of the Holocaust narrative.”

When she returned to Israel, she noticed that the library of her university carried only a German translation of Vrba’s memoir–not a language common among the students of that country. Hence, Linn was determined to have Vrba’s memoir made accessible to Hebrew readers. She further discovered that a Hebrew version of Vrba’s memoir had been voluntarily translated by a Holocaust survivor of Slavic origin, Yehoshua Ben Ami, in 1997, but it was denied publication by Yad Vashem. Ben Ami showed Linn the letter of rejection.

Ruth Linn’s book Escaping Auschwitz

Determined to have the state of Israel honour Vrba, Linn extended a private invitation to attend, as a keynote speaker, a public conference she arranged in his honour entitled ‘Moral Emotions in Times of War.’ Simultaneously, she arranged for a meeting with the university president, Prof. Yehudah Hayut, who admitted he was not familiar with Vrba. Linn provided the president with some of the writing about Vrba by Sir Martin Gilbert and they agreed it would be appropriate to recognize Vrba with an honorary degree at the University of Haifa during the 50th anniversary year of the state of Israel in 1998.

Upon Vrba’s arrival in Israel on June 1, 1998, some Holocaust historians chose to welcome him by sending defamatory letters about Vrba to the press. Yad Vashem kept silent, presumably because others had done their bidding.

Vrba delivered his conference keynote speech to coincide with an autographing session for the publication of his book in Israel–at long last–by University of Haifa Press. It was a remarkable speech during which tears flowed in the audience. The event received newspaper coverage.

Among those who attended were the Israeli relatives of Vrba’s fellow escapee Wetzler who handed Linn a copy of Wetzler’s memoir and requested her help in having it published in Hebrew. They expressed their frustration that Wetzler’s writings, like Vrba’s, had remained largely unknown in Israel for more than 50 years after the escape.

Linn says she was inundated with calls from enthusiastic Israeli Hebrew readers, many of whom considered the insertion of the escape into the mainstream Holocaust narrative as a breakthrough. The story of how and why Vrba’s and Wetzler’s stories were excluded from the Israeli Holocaust narrative was subsequently analyzed by Linn in her book Escaping Auschwitz – A culture of forgetting (2004).

In the year after Linn’s book was published, the escapees’ names and pictures were made visible in Yad Vashem’s new museum and inserted in some Hebrew-language history texts. Before Vrba died in 2006, Rudolf Vrba forewarned, “They will suppress your book the same way they suppressed mine and will pretend it never happened.”

Ruth Linn and her husband Shai with Yosef Wosk at Rudolf Vrba’s gravesite in 2021. During an extended visit with her grandchildren in Vancouver (2020-2022), Linn became a resident of British Columbia for a second time during the Coronavirus pandemic.

As the former dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa (2001-2006) and an expert in the field of moral psychology, Ruth Linn continues to process and analyze her taped interviews with Vrba and has critically analyzed the representations and misrepresentation of Vrba’s book and life in various media, including the internet (sometimes in conjunction with Robin Vrba). Alleged misrepresentations of Rudolf Vrba in Israeli Holocaust historiography were the focus of a panel discussion for the University of Haifa academic channel and this program was re-broadcast by Channel 2 on Israeli national television.

Linn obtained her doctorate in Education from Boston University in 1981 and she has since been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, the University of Maryland, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the University of British Columbia. In 1990, she received the Erikson Prize of the International Society of Political Psychology, recognizing her pioneering studies on Israeli soldiers who took positions as selective conscientious objectors during wartime (see Not Shooting and Not Crying: A Psychological Inquiry into Moral Disobedience [1989]). Other books by Linn include Conscience at War: The Israeli Soldier as a Moral Critic (1996), Mature Unwed Mothers: Narratives of Moral Resistance (2002) and How Did You Survive (with Dror, 2016).

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Ruth Linn link in English: https://rlinn.edu.haifa.ac.il/

Ruth Linn link in Hebrew: Faculty of Education University of Haifa Department of Counseling and Human Development

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HERE you can read Ruth Linn’s obituary for Vrba that appeared in The Guardian, April 25, 2006.

Below is a letter-to-the-editor in response to Ruth Linn’s obituary in The Guardian. The letter was written by Hilary and Steven Rose, who first met Vrba in the early 1960s when he was working as a biochemist in Carshalton.

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In 2006, Pat Johnson wrote an article called “Israeli Narrative Omits Vrba,” detailing Ruth Linn’s journey to defend the memory of Rudolf Vrba.

You may read the Johnson article here.

Anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of Rudolf Vrba’s role in 20^th century history is best advised to read:

ESCAPING AUSCHWITZ
A culture of forgetting
RUTH LINN
Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London, 2003

Ruth Linn

It takes less than a minute to order a used copy of Escaping Auschwitz from ABEbooks or you can purchase a new copy for $31.95 (U.S.) from Cornell University Press via their website listing at: Cornell University Press

When it was published in 2004, Peter Adler of The Jerusalem Post wrote, “Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting should explode like a multi-megaton bomb among scientists in general and historians in particular, not only in Israel, but all over the world. And it should alarm non-scientific readers, as well, so they start asking uncomfortable questions about people who write their history for them, and how…. Neither the story of the Auschwitz Protocols nor the writings of Rudolf Vrba have ever been made part of any school curricula in Israel, and neither the Auschwitz Protocols or Rudolf Vrba’s writings have been published in Hebrew in Israel until the end of the last century, more than a half of a century after the fact…. Ruth Linn’s Escaping Auschwitz reads like a novel. It must have taken a lot of persistence and courage on her part to break through the establishment barriers, but she did it. And it took a lot of integrity on the part of Cornell University Press to publish this book. It deals with a most unpleasant topic, but it is one that must see the light of day…. Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting should be a must-have book in every school’s and academic establishment’s library, all over the world.”

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In June of 2022, this message was received from Ruth Linn:

I have discovered your educational, non-commercial website about Rudolf Vrba. As it is the most extensive and informative resource on the life and times of Vrba that I have ever encountered, to further awareness and knowledge of Vrba worldwide I hereby grant you my permission to include the contents of my book on your site. To draw attention to its contents in this way, we doubtless improve its chances to remain in print as a book for decades to come. As an author, one is always concerned that one’s book might “fall off the radar” and become overlooked and forgotten. If there were any ongoing and intense efforts being made by the book’s original publisher to generate sales, I might not be making this request. But, as it stands, Rudolf Vrba is simply too important for both world and Jewish history not to provide as much truthful and reliable information about him to the world as we possibly can. — Ruth Linn

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You may download a pdf of the book, “Escaping Auschwitz” here.

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As a further inducement to acquire a copy of “Escaping Auschwitz”, here is that book’s Introduction.

“It is easier to deny entry to a memory than to free oneself from it after it has been recorded.” — Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

Primo Levi. Image credit Mondadori of Getty Images 

On April 7, 1944, Rudolf Vrba managed to escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau with his friend and fellow inmate, Alfred Wetzler. These Jewish prisoners had been deported from Slovakia in the spring of 1942. After a perilous eleven days of walking and hiding, the escapees made it back to their native country, Slovakia. Almost at once, they managed to establish contact with the leaders of the remainder of the Jewish community there (about 25,000 of what had been 88,000 souls). They warned that preparations were being made for the murder of nearly 800,000 Jews from Hungary. They also suspected that 3,000 Czech Jews, in the Auschwitz-Birkenau “family camp” would be gassed within a few months.

For three days Vrba and Wetzler conveyed in detail to the members of the Jewish Council the geographical plan of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the specifics of the Germans’ method of mass murder—tattooing, gassing, and cremation—and the course of events they had witnessed at the camp. They gave an estimate of the number of Jews killed in Auschwitz between June 1942 and April 1944: about 1.75 million. The Vrba-Wetzler report was uncannily thorough in its accuracy and detail.¹ It was carefully examined by the official Jewish leadership of Slovakia.² The escapees were assured that the information it contained would be disseminated without delay to the Western world and, of course, to the potential victims, who at that time were still freely walking the streets of Hungary.

Vrba’s and Wetzler’s predictions were soon confirmed by two other Auschwitz inmates, Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin, who succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz on May 27, 1944, and reached Slovakia on June 6, 1944. They reported that during the month of May 1944 Hungarian Jews were being murdered in Auschwitz at an unprecedented rate and that the expanded facilities were fully in use. Human fat was used to accelerate the burning of the corpses. The Vrba-Wetzler report was the first document about the Auschwitz death camp to reach the free world and to be accepted as credible.³

Its authenticity broke the barrier of skepticism and apathy that had existed up to that point.⁴ It is doubtful, however, that its content reached more than a small number of the prospective victims, though Vrba’s and Wetzler’s critical and alarming assessment was in the hands of Hungarian Jewish leaders as early as April 28 or at least no later than early May, 1944.⁵ Between mid-May and early July 1944, about 437,000 Hungarian Jews boarded in good faith the “resettlement trains” that carried them to the Auschwitz death camps, where most were immediately gassed.⁶ Yet, memoirs by a handful of surviving Hungarian deportees, even of those who arrived in Auschwitz as late as July 8, 1944, reveal their absolute ignorance of their impending fate at the death camp.⁷ Elie Wiesel summarized it as follows: “We were taken just two weeks before D-Day, and we did not know that Auschwitz existed. . . . everyone knew except the victims.”⁸

Whereas the two escapees accurately predicted the fate of the Hungarian Jews,⁹ what they could not have foreseen was that their postwar memoirs and documented report would be kept from the Israeli Hebrew-reading public.¹⁰

In June 1998, fifty years after the escape, I took a poll of 594 students who were either in their third year of undergraduate studies or in their first year of graduate studies at the University of Haifa in Israel.¹¹ They were asked two questions: (1) “Did any Jew ever succeed in escaping from Auschwitz?” and (2) “Who are four Holocaust heroes that you are familiar with?” Ninety-eight percent of the respondents stated that no one had ever escaped from Auschwitz. The few who said they knew that some prisoners had escaped did not know any of their names. The students (half of them prospective teachers) were more knowledgeable about the second question and named Hanna Szenes, Anne Frank, Yanush Korczak, and Mordechai Anilewicz as among their Holocaust heroes. Some also named Oskar Schindler, the recent extracurricular addition from Hollywood.¹²

A few students might have heard about the escape through literature courses discussing the Hebrew version of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy.¹³ In it, Pope Pius XII is accused of callously watching the slaughter without extending a hand to help Jews. The play concerns three exemplary individuals who dared to break the secrecy of the Final Solution: Kurt Gerstein, a Nazi Waffen SS officer who in 1942 tried to inform the world about the horrors in Auschwitz, and Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who escaped in April 1944 in order to tell the world about the Auschwitz death factory. In the play, none of the three was believed. Yet, the lesson of Hochhuth’s play, as well as the general Holocaust lesson taught to my university students, often seems to have been coupled with three predominant narratives: most Jewish victims went “like sheep to the slaughter”; a few succeeded in redeeming Jewish honor by resisting in the Warsaw Ghetto or fighting as partisans; and the world remained silent.¹⁴

Although I am a native Israeli who graduated from a prestigious private high school, I had never heard about the escape from Auschwitz at the numerous Holocaust ceremonies I attended. Nor had I ever read about it in any detail in any of the Hebrew Holocaust textbooks at school in my own time or in those given to my three children.¹⁵ I became acquainted with this event during my adult life, through the non-Israeli “foreign” filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who considered Vrba’s testimony central to the understanding of the Holocaust in his 1987 movie, Shoah.¹⁶ The “presence” of the “absence” of the escape from Auschwitz in Israeli historiography on the one hand and the moral visibility and sanctity of Auschwitz in the country’s hegemonic narrative on the other remained a puzzle for me,¹⁷ and my desire to gain first hand knowledge of the escape stayed with me for many years.

A breakthrough came in 1994, during a stay at the University of British Columbia. It transpired that I did not have to travel far to accomplish my goal: The Auschwitz escapee in Lanzmann’s documentary was my neighbour at the same university, where he worked as Associate Professor of Pharmacology in the Faculty of Medicine. My meeting with him, and my subsequent reading of his book in English, led me to modify my original research question. I was no longer concerned with probing the escape from Auschwitz: I was able to learn about this in vivid detail by reading Vrba’s memoirs, which were originally published in London in 1963¹⁸ and had come out a year later in the United States. But a new and more pressing research question now formed in my mind: Why, fifty years after the Holocaust, should the unique actions and memoirs of the Auschwitz escapees have remained completely unfamiliar to the average Hebrew reader?¹⁹

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Israel, Yehoshua Ben Ami, although having an entirely different history from mine and unknown to me, was asking himself the same questions. Yehoshua was twenty years old when his sisters and parents were sent to Auschwitz from Hungary. After escaping from a labour camp, he joined the underground. None of his family returned after the war. He immigrated to Israel, where he married Irka, an Auschwitz survivor. He studied and began working as a school counselor. The question of whether there had been any way his family could have been saved gave Yehoshua no peace. Upon his retirement he started searching for an answer.

He came across Vrba’s book in English, and from this point on he started making extraordinary efforts to track down the author who proved hesitant to establishing contact with an unknown Israeli. Finally, in 1994 (and with Vrba’s permission), he began to translate the book into Hebrew. Yehoshua and I were not acquainted. We both had come to know Vrba independently, but now we joined forces to have Vrba’s book published in Hebrew. Each of us felt that we should have heard about the escape from Auschwitz long before and found it imperative to pass it on to the younger generations of Hebrew readers. But what we had not taken into account was that no publishing house, including Yad Vashem, would show any interest at all. We were reminded of the case of Hannah Arendt, the well-known German-Jewish philosopher who in 1961 was sent by the New Yorker to cover the Eichmann trial

Hannah Arendt Photo credit: Fred Stein Archive

In Jerusalem. Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,²⁰ first published in 1963, remained inaccessible to the average Hebrew reader for as long as Vrba’s book, also published in 1963.²¹

Without Vrba’s knowledge, I made it my mission to break a thirty-five–year silence. I at once approached Professor Aaron Ben Ze’ev, who, as dean of research at the time, was in charge of Haifa University Press. Although he, too, was unfamiliar with the story, his training in philosophy did much to help us overcome the hurdle of getting Vrba’s book published in Hebrew. But a long battle awaited us in the university’s senate: “If he was indeed a hero,” I was repeatedly approached by some senate members who were ignorant about the case, “why wasn’t he awarded this status long ago by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, whose Holocaust scholars are among those who shape the Holocaust studies in Israel?”

Following the publication of his book in Hebrew, the senate of Haifa University, in June 1998, awarded Dr. Vrba an honorary doctorate in recognition of his heroic escape from Auschwitz and his contribution to Holocaust education. The award ceremony was planned to coincide with the first publication of the book in Hebrew by the Haifa University Press, allowing the author to sign copies for those present. To my surprise, even at this undeniably historic moment, some Israeli scholars, even within my own university, made a desperate last-minute attempt to belittle the hero and his memoirs. This included letters of defamation to the press (the first signed anonymously by “Four Historians”²²), and a number of bizarre phone calls to my home and even to the university president’s office.

No less interesting was the position of “intellectual bystanders” taken up by the Holocaust historians’ establishment in Israel: not one of them publicly protested the campaign against Vrba. It was here that Michael Walzer’s profound question crept into my mind: “What is the use, after all, of a silent intellectual?²³”

But other voices were raised as well. Hanna Horovitz, for example, a retired history teacher living near Jerusalem, wrote to the daily newspaper Ha’aretz; “How is it possible that such a book was not published by the University History Department? . . . Am I to believe that this is accidental?²⁴”

Why is it, in fact, that Vrba’s book and the voice of its author reached the Israeli audience only thirty-five years after its original publication and at the initiative of two individuals whose profession is education, not history?

My primary aim in this book is to rename Vrba in the Israeli “reality.” As Wyschnogrod tells us: “Naming the historical object is a response to the other’s mortality: to name is to make us forget the fact of death, to write over it.”²⁵ In what follows then, I delve into the mystery of Vrba’s disappearance not only from Auschwitz but also from the Israeli textbooks and the Israeli Holocaust narrative.

This book is not a balanced one: No one should expect that suppressors and suppressed will be given equal weight. I have my own absences—I was not there and I can neither a priori nor a posteriori decide who was right and who was wrong. Inevitably, what I present here is my way of understanding the “presence” of the “absence” of Vrba’s tale and the linkage between historical “truth” and the power of naming.

Notes:

 1. See the following works: Bauer, Y. Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Braham, R. L. The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000); Gilbert, M. Auschwitz and the Allies (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1981); Hilberg, R. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: Aaron Asher Books, 1992); Levai, J. Zsidosors europaban (Budapest: Magyar Teka, 1948); Swiebocki, H., ed. London Has Been Informed: Reports by Auschwitz Escapees (Oswiecim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1997); Vrba and Manwell, “Camps: An Inside View,” 2138–2158; Wyman, D. S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). See also: Conway, J. S. “Fruhe Augenzeugenberichte aus Auschwitz, Glaubwurdigkeit und Wirkungsgeschichte.” Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 27 (1979): 260–284; Conway, J. S. “The First Report about Auschwitz.” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 1 (1984): 133–151; Conway, J. S. “Der Holocaust in Ungarn.” Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 32 (1984): 179–212; Conway, J. S. “The Holocaust in Hungary: Recent Controversies and Reconsiderations,” in The Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry: Essays, Documents, Depositions, ed. R. L. Braham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 1–48; Kulka, E. “Five Escapes from Auschwitz,” in They Fought Back, ed. Y. Shul (New York: Schocken Books, 1968/1975), 212–237; Kulka, E. “The Escape of Jewish Prisoners and Their Attempts to Stop the Annihilation,” in The Nazi Concentration Camps: Lectures and Discussions, eds. I. Gutman and A. Saf (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984) (Hebrew).

2. Braham, R. The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Neumann, O. Im Schatten des Todes; ein Tatsachenbericht vom Schicksalskampf des slovakischen Judentums (Tel-Aviv: Edition ‘Olamenu,’ 1956).

3. Braham, R. L. and S. Miller. The Nazis’ Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998); Bauer, Y. “Conclusion: The Holocaust in Hungary—Was rescue possible?” in Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary 1944, ed. D. Cesarani (Oxford; New York: Berg,  notes to pages vii–4 Copyright © 2003 by Cornell University. All Rights Reserved. notes to pages 4–5 1997), 193–209; Bauer, Y. “Anmerkungen zum ‘Auschwitz-Bericht’ von Rudolf Vrba.” Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 45 (1997): 297–307.

4. Lipstadt, D. E. Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986).

5. Bauer, Jews for Sale?; Bauer, Y. “Anmerkungen zum ‘Auschwitz- Bericht’ von Rudolf Vrba,” 297–307; Gutman, I. and R. Rozett, eds. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1990).

6. Bauer, Y. Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); Braham and Pok, Holocaust in Hungary.

7. Fiderkiewicz, A. Brzezinka, Birkenau (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1962); Isaacson, J. M. Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Kertesz, I. Roman Eines Schicksalslosen (Berlin: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996); Langbein, H. Menschen in Auschwitz (Vienna: Europaverl, 1972); Langbein, H. Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1938–1945 (New York: Paragon House, 1994).

8. Quoted in Nicholls, W. Christian Anti-Semitism: A History of Hate (Northvale, N.J.: J. Aronson, 1993), 353.

9. Braham, Politics of Genocide.

10. Linn, R. What Do Our Students Know about Holocaust Heroes? (Unpublished paper, University of Haifa, Israel, 1998).

11. Ibid.

12. Bartov, O. Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Cole, T. Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York: Routledge, 1999).

13. Hochhuth, R. The Deputy (Jerusalem: Shoken, 1964) (Translation to Hebrew).

14. Gutman, I., C. Schatzker, Y. Mais, and I. Sivan. The Holocaust and Its Significance (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, Historical Society of Israel, 1984).

15. Bauer, Y. The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982); Bauer, Y. and N. Eren. A History of the Holocaust (New York: F. Watts, 1982); Keren, N. Sho’ah: masa el ha-zikaron (Tel Aviv: Sifre Tel Aviv, 1999) (Hebrew).

16. See Lanzmann, C. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust—The Complete Text of the Film (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).

17. The phrase comes from Handelman, D. and L. Shamgar-Handelman. “The Presence of the Absence: The Memorialism of National Death in Israel,” Copyright © 2003 by Cornell University. All Rights Reserved. in Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience, eds. E. Ben Ari and Y. Bilu (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

18. Vrba and Bestic, I Cannot Forgive; Vrba and Bestic, Escape from Auschwitz.

 19. See also Ben Ami, Y. Hashtika: Madua lo pursam hameida al Auschwitz bamoed? (Tel-Aviv: Private publication, 1994) (Hebrew). Joffroy, P. “A Spy for God: The Ordeal of Kurt Gerstein.” The Gerstein Report (London: Collin St. James, 1971).

20. Arendt, H. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963).

21. Novick, P. The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 134.

22. Yediot Acharonot, June 2, 1998. For more details, see Linn, R., “The Escape from Auschwitz: Why Weren’t We Told about It in School?” Theory and Criticism 24 (2004) (Hebrew).

23. Walzer, M. The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 148.

24. Ha’aretz, August 19, 1998.

25. Wyschnogrod, E. An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)

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