Harry Reicher believes that
when we speak of memory, we speak of a phenomenon that pertains
neither to the concrete nor to the tangible. Yet memory is a core
element of our beings, no less than the heart, head, or body. Memory
is a fundamental part of who and what we are. It represents a historical
aggregate of our senses, feelings, and thoughts, coalescing at the
very center of what defines us.
Memories
surrounding the Holocaust have long been repressed. Intensely personal,
they have often not even been shared with loved ones, but have remained silenced
by trauma, shame, and a desire to leave the past behind.
A slow unbottling
of these memories has occurred over the years, as is witnessed by the
publication of such autobio-
graphical works as Elie Wiesel's Night (1956),
Nechama Tec's Dry
Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1975), and Hans Ludwig Reiss's My
Middle Name is Israel: A Wartime Memoir of Berlin, London and Shanghai (2001).
We are enriched by these memories: they help us to empathize
with the form and intensity
that human suffering took and awaken in us an ambition to avoid a repetition
of this dark chapter in the history of humankind.
The greatest strength
of memory is also its greatest weakness: it is the product of the human
psyche and, therefore, subject to human imperfection
and frailties.
The passing of time may erode memory or render it all the more vivid;
beliefs about what we see, read, or hear may elide into memory or render
memory
all the more distinct. These inconsistencies demonstrate the degree to
which
memory may
be said to be a strange, rather elusive, yet powerful, phenomenon.
Reicher
argues that memory has played a critical role in the aftermath of the
Holocaust, and outlines five central contexts in which it has
most come
to
bear:
1. Criminal prosecutions in which the
oral testimony of witnesses has been accepted
as important evidence in identifying the defendant and establishing
facts and events in which the defendant was allegedly involved.
2. Quasi-criminal
cases in which like testimony played a significant
part in deportation proceedings.
3. Administrative processes in which memory impeded
consistency and
precision
in reporting the details of personal experience necessary to
the successful filing of a claim for reparations and compensation;
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4. The writing
of history,
produced through the analysis of recollections and testimony.
5. The denying of history, which
often seizes on the discrepancies, contradictions, and gaps in memory
which are a hallmark
of its imperfect nature.
A survey of scientific
work on memory provides a set of principles that may be applied to
each of these contexts. Most generally, there is no such thing as a perfect
memory. Given this, it is difficult and even dangerous to generalize
about memory; every manifestation of memory must be assessed on its
own
merits. Likewise, no single factor affects memory in a
consistent way; age, intensity of trauma, disease, malnutrition, weight
loss, and belief attained from other sources may or may not affect
memory.
Studies show that, in particular, the passing of time
does not categorically
debilitate a survivor's capacity to remember events with remarkable
detail and consistency, although retention of core facts is superior
to recollection
of the peripheral. All of these principles underscore the malleable
nature of memory, yet do not present any inherent reason why memory
cannot be
objectively true.
Reicher revisits his five contexts to examine how
these principles may be seen to be at work in each. For the first two,
in both criminal
and quasi-criminal cases, the
law's "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden of proof allows for the
smallest tolerable level of doubt produced by the inherently imperfect memory
of a necessarily
imperfect witness. For the third, in administrative proceedings, the civil
standard of doubt is relaxed to a balance of probabilities, allowing for greater
departures
from
absolute certainties. For the fourth, in the writing of history, historians
are authorized to rely on survivor testimony in whatever form it may take,
having
been trained
to resolve inevitable discrepancies. And, for the fifth, the denying of history,
at the opposite extreme, sets an impossibly and inhumanly high standard for
establishing
historical
accuracy, and condemns even the slightest departure from that standard as evidence
of false collective memory.
In short, these contexts represent a continuum with
respect to the treatment of memory in relation to the Holocaust, with rigid
justice at one extreme and
the unmitigated compassion, or lack thereof, for victims at the other.
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