Rescuing the Holocaust from distortion and cliche

NEW YORK: “The Holocaust teaches us nothing”: It’s a surprising declaration to encounter in the early pages of “The Holocaust: An Unfinished History,” not least because its author, Dan Stone, also happens to be the director of the Holocaust Research Institute at the University of London. But Stone is doing what a conscientious historian does, countering platitudes with demystification.

One reason the Holocaust teaches us nothing is that we have a warped understanding of what actually happened. Pop-cultural depictions in books and films have often elided discomfiting complexity in favor of what one sociologist has called “trauma drama.” The result is a paradox: “An increased awareness of the Holocaust has led to it being banalised and exploited,” Stone writes. His argument happens to be especially timely. Prominent historians have decried the misuse of “Holocaust memory” by politicians to justify Israel’s bombing of Gaza after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks. But Stone’s book was first published in Britain in January of last year — too early to include events from the last few months. And aside from a concluding chapter about the present, it is primarily about the past.

Stone wants to rescue the hard facts of historical research from the blur of common cliches. He challenges the preoccupation with “industrial genocide,” which has become a central part of the “prevailing narrative.” The information he presents won’t be new to historians, or even to readers well versed in the literature; Stone’s book is presumably intended for those whose knowledge of the Holocaust is derived mainly from movies like “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” or “Schindler’s List.” Or perhaps it’s for the 20 percent of Americans under 30 who, according to a poll by The Economist, believe that the Holocaust is a “myth.”

To that end, he offers a concise and accessible history that extends beyond the death camps. Nearly half of the Holocaust’s six million victims died of starvation in the ghettos or in “face-to-face” shootings in the east. Before Kristallnacht, in November 1938, Jews had not yet been subjected to large-scale physical violence in Germany. Stone notes that Nazi directives for the pogrom showed a “curious adherence to petit bourgeois morality,” with one high-ranking official primly decreeing that “places of business and apartments belonging to Jews may be destroyed but not looted.”

Such bureaucratic pettiness is another part of the story Stone tells. Having been stripped of German citizenship in 1935, the country’s Jews were constrained by a profusion of demeaning legislation. They were forbidden to keep typewriters, musical instruments, bicycles and even pets. The sheer variety of persecution was bewildering. It was also chillingly deceptive, persuading some law-abiding Jews that survival was a matter of falling into line. Stone quotes the wrenching letter of a woman reassuring her loved one that getting transported to Theresienstadt, in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, might be better than living in Germany. “My future place of residence represents a sort of ghetto,” she explained. “It has the advantage that, if one obeys all the rules, one lives in some ways without the restrictions one has here.”