What Will Happen to the Holocaust Memoir?
In Part Two of Who Gets to Tell the Story of the Holocaust, meet the publisher dedicated to keeping their words -- and memory -- alive.
(This section is part of my memoir in progress, that for now I’m dubbing The Bubbe Tapes. It follows my research into my grandmother’s story, the legacy of the Holocaust on descendants and what it will mean for the next generation. Read Part 1 of “Who Gets to Tell The Story of the Holocaust” here.)
Liesbeth Heenk is a 60-year-old art historian in the Netherlands with a doctorate focusing on Van Gogh. She is also the unlikely safeguard of first-person Holocaust memoirs, and to some degree, the story of the Holocaust.
Heenk stumbled into the role by accident over 10 years ago, when she began publishing e-books on Amazon, through her company, Amsterdam Publishers. She started with Van Gogh, her speciality, but began publishing other manuscripts she found interesting that came her way.
Among them were two Holocaust memoirs, including one by Manny Steinberg, a survivor of four Nazi camps. Through the process of editing his work, Heenk and Steinberg grew close. She ended up accompanying him and his family on a trip from Los Angeles to Dachau, after being invited by the German government. Dachau was one of the first concentration camps built by Nazi Germany.
The entire experience rocked her.
“I saw what an enormous impact it had on a survivor to be acknowledged by what he went through,” Heenk said.
She explained that after Steinberg’s experience in the various concentration camps, he moved to a displaced person camp and then to the United States, where he felt no one wanted to hear about it, or even believe it. That was the trend in the early days after the war: few wanted to dwell on the recent tragedy. Still, Heenk observed, to have his experiences recognized late in life, offered Steinberg much needed peace.
“It was such a big deal for him that he even took the book I published for him to his grave.”
At that point, Heenk —who is not Jewish and has no personal connection to the Holocaust — decided if she can do this service for one survivor, why not for others? From then on, Amsterdam Publishers focused exclusively on Holocaust memoirs. The Holocaust ended 78 years ago, though, and the number of survivors, and first-person submissions Heenk receives, are dwindling.
“I started too late,” Heenk lamented, publishing only 16 books by actual survivors. As survivors grew older and passed away, she moved on to second generation memoirs and then third.
“I believe in the power of the word, I believe in stories, I want to impact people and the ones with the most impact are survivor stories.”
Heenk touches on something important — the power of survivor’s stories served as a backbone of Holocaust literature for a long time. Elie Wiesel’s Night. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and even Maus by Art Spiegelman. Second and third generation memoirs have filled a gap and I expect that to continue.
The question is, in terms of Holocaust literature, what comes next?
That’s an important question for Jews — a Pew report showed that a whopping 73 percent of American Jews say that remembering the Holocaust is key to their Jewish identity — a term I’ve come to define as Holocaust Jews, but more on that later.
The simple answer to what comes next is fiction. Arguably, fictionalized accounts have done more for the memory of the Holocaust in popular culture than anything else, but how far do we allow fiction to fill a gap and at what point does fiction supersede fact?
Omar Bartov, an Israeli-born historian and the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies at Brown University, is one of several tapping into this trend of mixing fact and fiction.
His new novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, published by Amsterdam Publishers, follows an Israeli woman and British man of Ukrainian descent who try to uncover how their families were implicated in a crime that took place during the Holocaust. The novel is based on testimonies, diaries and letters — Bartov fills in the gap with fiction where his research falls short.
As one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of genocide, this hybrid mix of fact and fiction remains in safe hands — but it remains to be seen how the fictional representation will change in the generations to come.
As for Heenk, she spends her ad dollars making sure those 16 first-person memoirs remain top of mind for buyers. She has also published 31 memoirs by second-generation survivors. As for 3G survivors, Heenk appears less interested. “The third-generation memoirs write less about their grandparents’ stories and more about how it affected them.” So far she’s published two.
“Invariably I now get manuscripts from descendants, mainly third generation. I don’t get any from fourth generation, they are probably too young. But I don’t think there will be a fourth generation telling the story,” said Heenk.
The Holocaust memoir ends here.
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The Village at the End of the World
Wow. This is amazing. I’m married to a second generation survivor and have heard many first account stories from my FIL. He was only a child in Budapest when the war and hatred infiltrated his life.