59 Winter 2026 Bilsky also claims that there was another difference between the prosecution and Baron. The prosecution’s goal and expectation was that Baron present a Zionistcolored narrative about the decline in Jewish life and livelihood of the European Jewish diaspora before the Shoah. Instead, Baron emphasized the vitality of the Jews and their success in coping with the growing challenges, as well as the considerable success of the emancipation process and of the rising option of Jewish national life through gaining minority rights in the countries of Jewish domicile — a possible option for Jewish life also after the Shoah. His concept was crystallized in the expression “crisis and accommodation” (mashber vehistaggelut in Hebrew; p. 103). Moreover, according to Bilsky the prosecution was essentially interested in emphasizing the physical loss of the Jewish People, while Baron regularly addressed cultural destruction. Bilsky concludes this chapter by stating that “ironically, the expert historian who opened the trial on behalf of the prosecution, proposed a historical narrative which contradicted the prosecution’s frame narrative” (p. 116). Frankly, after being acquainted with the text of Baron’s testimony since the second half of the 1970s, I think that Bilsky pushes the differences between Baron and the prosecution much too far even though she explains some post-facto expressions of disappointment regarding Baron’s testimony by Ben Gurion and Jacob Robinson. When one reads Baron’s entire testimony, one can see that Baron spoke quite freely, not often being interrupted either by attorney Hausner or by the judges. In my view, this shows that the prosecution did not have a sense of uneasiness and did not attempt to stop Baron or channel him into a different path.7 Baron also did not disregard the demographic, numerical, and physical dimension of the Nazi murder campaign. To that end, I never sensed a gap or contradiction between the intentions of the prosecution and Baron. Moreover, Baron used the term “genocide” three times and in the physical sense as provided by the Convention; when he emphasized the cultural loss, he did not refer to the formulation in Lemkin’s original definition. Thus, from a historical point of view, Bilsky doesn’t prove that Baron’s (or the prosecution’s) goal was to promote the more culturecentric concept of genocide provided by Lemkin. The Fourth Chapter illuminates another interesting personality: Rachel Auerbach. Auerbach was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto who was involved in the Ringelblum-led underground Oyneg Shabbes archive. She was also in charge of the testimonies department at Yad Vashem during the first years of its existence after its official establishment by a Knesset Law in 1953. Bilsky emphasizes Auerbach’s commitment to the project of interviewing survivors and assembling survivor testimonies, seeing it as the creation of a “living archive” (pp. 129-130), which is the post-war continuation of wartime Jewish resistance. Bilsky explained that “The testimony was meant to undermine the [perpetrator’s] goal to erase the human character through the preservation of the victim’s human dignity” (p. 134). Testimonies were the personal voices of the victims, and — according to Bilsky — Auerbach wanted to promote this aspect in the Eichmann Trial, thereby granting the testimonies a legal status akin to the documents also presented at trial. Through her own testimony in the trial, Auerbach wanted to emphasize the cultural resilience of the Jews vis-à-vis the Nazi genocidal intent. However, Auerbach’s testimony did not leave an imprint in the records of the trial and in public awareness, and has been considered to be a relative failure. Counter to other explanations about why this happened, Bilsky believes that it was due to Auerbach’s testimony emphasizing cultural genocide while the prosecution emphasized physical genocide and armed resistance. She anchors this interpretation in several post-testimony writings of Auerbach, in which Auerbach herself contemplated the failed impact of her testimony. (She gave additional reasons for that.) 7. The text of the testimony was published by Yad Vashem in an anthology of basic texts on the Shoah: Yisrael Gutman and Livia Rothkirchen (eds.), SHOAT YEHUDEI EIROPA: REKA’ – KOROT – MASHMA’UT. MIVHAR MA’AMARIM [THE HOLOCAUST: BACKGROUND – HISTORY – IMPLICATIONS. SELECTED PAPERS] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1973, Hebrew), pp.143-174. Bilsky does not mention this publication. When compared to this published version, it seems that there are several differences in quotations in Bilsky’s book which are apparently mistakes and typos. One is meaningful: on p. 92, Bilsky quotes Baron as saying: “I have to say once again, that that period was a period of an enormous crisis, a general crisis and a Jewish crisis” [“shuv ‘alay lomar, shehatekufah hahi hayta tekufat mashber gadol, mashber kelali umashber Yehudi”]. However, according to the text in Gutman-Rothkirchen, the relevant word in this sentence was kalkali, meaning: economic, not general. The difference in Hebrew is one character (k). One wonders which version is the correct one.
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