Christopher Browning's Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp is a vivid, moving, and convincing contribution to the history of the Holocaust. The book is a "micro-history" of the Jews of Wierzbnik and Starachowice, neighboring towns in the Radom district of Poland. Lacking documentary sources, Browning built the history almost entirely on the basis of survivors' accounts. Though the ghetto and slave-labor camp were relatively small, eyewitness accounts from 292 survivors were available (p.5): a few immediate post-war interviews; many German judicial records from post-war trials (1962-8); and testimonies recorded in Yad Vashem, the Shoah Foundation archives, and a number of other collections (4-5).
In general, Browning has succeeded at reconstructing a convincing narrative from retrospective testimony, often delivered long after the events. Multiple accounts are cited and carefully collated to support his reconstruction of events. Conflicts between different witnesses are not glossed over, but explored. See especially the extended discussion (210-218) of numerous accounts of an attack on a German officer by a Jewish woman, desperate at imminent deportation as the Starachowice camps were being closed. Multiple survivors reported the incident, with numerous variations; the woman herself, who survived despite being shot by the officer she attacked, provided seven not entirely consistent accounts over 40 years (213ff.) Browning carefully sorts through the different versions, identifying commonalities and assembling a version of events in which we can have some confidence.
Browning is conscious of the difficulties in working with these sources: Remembering Survival is about both events and how they are remembered. Memories shift with time: in assessing his evidence, Browning recognizes the impact of widespread cultural images of the Holocaust on survivors' memories (e.g, p.216). But the passage of time also frees survivors to speak about what would once have been taboo. Browning notes that his own interviews collected multiple accounts of the public rape of a Jewish woman by a German officer that went unmentioned in testimonies recorded while the victim was still alive (191). His witnesses also indicate that members of the Jewish elite in the camp were probably killed by other Jews in a closely packed box car en route to Auschwitz (228-33), but "survivors were obviously reluctant to confirm in front of German investigators [in the 1960s] a story that would shift blame for at least some Jewish deaths from the Germans to fellow Jews...."(229-30).
Using survivor testimony, Browning is able to paint a detailed picture of Jewish survival strategies. Hoping that work in an arms factory would prove a ticket to survival, Jews from elsewhere deliberately made their way to Wierzbnik. Wierzbnik Jews used any means they could - family relationships, bribery, friendships - to obtain precious work documents that could keep them and their families working in the factories, thus valuable to the Nazis. Local Jews had advantages over immigrants: cohesive family groups could work together for survival, and they could draw on property hidden in the town or left with Polish neighbors to buy food, bribe guards, and work for survival.
The reliance on eyewitness testimony does more than support a vivid narrative. The detailed, fine-grained narrative breaks down generalizations about the behavior of different groups of participants. Divisions among the Jewish community, between rich and poor, local and immigrant, were prominent: Lubliners arriving from Majdanek in early 1944 were shocked by the inequalities among the Jews in Starachowice and immediately demanded more equitable distribution of food (203-4). A fight between the Lubliners and the former camp elite may have been responsible for the deaths of the latter en route to Auschwitz (232-3).
Non-Jewish Poles, too, do not form a homogeneous group. Most survivors Browning interviewed owed their lives to Polish help. Local Polish friends sheltered children, held property for Jewish neighbors that could be used to aid their survival, and were often reliable in these roles. But Jews (and those Poles willing to help them) feared Polish betrayal: escape from the loosely guarded camp was rare because Jews feared they would be turned over to the Germans. Escapees were often rejected, and sometimes robbed or murdered, by partisan units. After the war, survivors who attempted to return home were driven away by the hostile reaction of Poles, extending even to murder.
Browning similarly traces variation among the Germans at the camp -- the "dangerous", the corruptible, and the decent(294ff) - and among Ukrainian guards.
Browning's willingness to differentiate (or accept survivors' differentiation) between the dangerous, the corruptible, and the decent among Germans does nothing to soften his chapter on the trial and acquittal of Walther Becker, the ranking officer in the Sicherheitspolizei at Starachowice. After describing the systematic bias of the West German court against testimony from Jewish survivors, Browning is unqualified in his condemnation: "...never have I studied a case in detail and encountered a verdict that represented such a miscarriage of justice and disgrace to the German judicial system as that in the trial of Walther Becker."(287-8) He then goes one step further: careful research shows that the presiding judge had applied for SS membership, but had been turned down for having non-Aryan ancestors.(290).
The only disappointing aspect of the book is the difficulty of tracing individual stories and even more of hearing individual voices. Individual survivors' stories are spread across pages and chapters, making them difficult to follow from end to end. And the focus on constructing a coherent narrative from multiple testimonies means that only rarely do we hear extended testimony from an individual that would enable us to understand how he or she understood the story Browning tells.
