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The Monstrous Organization.

stolidly move on with their lives. Why the silence? Because the new State of Israel needed macho defenders, not confounded defeated processors of the unique Hell they had barely survived. America, in turn, needed to enlist German “smarts” in a newly surfaced Cold War, and it wanted— once the Nuremberg Trials were behind it—to move beyond vexing WWII issues. In their turn, American Jews allegedly found it too hard to hear, or sometimes even to credit, the soul-searing tales some survivors seemed to want to relieve themselves of, the telling of which the latter quickly understood was unwelcomed. This version of the years 1945–61 (up to the Eichmann trial) is regarded by the thirteen essayists as partial at best, and misleading at worst. For it relies on English-language historical material, when most survivors used only Yiddish. It relies primarily on reports written by nonsurvivors. And it places undue emphasis on circulating and repeating “the same old, same old.” Fresh scholarship now makes clear a vibrant “non-silent” culture in the post-liberation camps of Jewish “Displaced Persons” (DPs). This culture included threadbare theater productions strong in airing ghetto and camp experiences. Plays written by survivors for survivors enabled players and audiences alike to explore the nightmare they were struggling to awake from and to try out different value-laden interpretations of past, present, and future—an exercise in anything but silence. Similarly, new scholarly content analysis of DP Yiddish print material (roughhewed leaflets, magazines, newspapers) finds that it sought to help ex-prisoners gain long-denied control over their lives by contemplating new coping mechanisms and life course possibilities. Nothing was taboo, including deep-reaching “questions about God, justice, evil, and meaning,” along with “silences that remain even when they are broken” (140). In fact Yiddish-writing historians, “perhaps the most prolific of all survivors,” started soliciting life histories from several thousand survivors only months away from unbelievable experiences in Auschwitz, Dachau, or the hellish like (including forest encampments and rural and urban hiding places) (55). Eager to end the silence enforced by the Nazis, many provided DP camp researchers with rich material yet to earn an English-language translation. Contrary then, to long-standing opinion, many survivors were anything but tonguetied victims. A never-to-be-known number waged “a battle to reclaim the Jewish heritage, to revive the Jewish soul, and to imagine the Jewish future” (5). Rather than a spasm of attention, say from 1945 through 1948, followed by silence through to the early 1960s, “there was, in fact, a persistent drum beat [from the principals] about the fate of the Jews”—or so claim the contributors to this book (27). Ardent believers in their revisionist interpretation of the past, the essayists are also realists who have no illusions about achieving a swift and sure victory. They know that the staying power of decade-old notions is awesome, even in the face of remarkable contrary material. They also know that much hinges here on one’s definition of “silence” and on how one measures so elusive and subjective a subject. Our grasp of the immediate post-liberation world of the survivors (and that of our counterparts back then) casts a long shadow over today’s Holocaust memorialization realities. All the more important, then, is winning a large and fair-minded readership for this well-written, engaging, and challenging volume.