When it comes to war, the victors get to tell the story. If the Nazis had won World War II, history today would be replete with explanations as to why and how the master race needed to exterminate the Jews. All the Jews. No Jews would have been left to tell their history. I’m Jewish. I have been reflecting on this.
Three years ago this spring, for the Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival, Larry Hott, the Florence-based Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Scott Hartblay, an Elms College professor of social work with expertise in nonviolent leadership, and I led a discussion about “Who Will Write Our History.” That film tells the story of Oyneg Shabes, Yiddish for Joy of the Sabbath, the underground Jewish resistance organization in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation.
Oyneg Shabes surreptitiously collected and saved papers, drawings, diaries, newspaper articles, photos, posters — documents that would tell the story of Nazi horrors. The penalty for possessing such material was death. Members of Oyneg Shabes died so that the story of their people would not die with them. Two of the three caches that members of the organization collected and hid were unearthed in 1946 and 1950 from their tombs under the rubble of the city. Oyneg Shabes had saved some 30,000 documents. They saved their story.
At the film festival, after watching “Who Will Write Our History” for the second time, to my surprise I found myself telling a story that I had not planned to share. It’s this.
In the late 19th century, my grandfather’s family, Ashkenazai Jews, emigrated to this country. In the 1930s, as I recall the murmurings I overheard growing up, my grandfather paid bribes to help distant relatives escape from Nazi Germany. But because my grandfather did not speak of this, I don’t know if this story, or any sliver of it, is true or apocryphal. Whatever actually happened has been lost to time.
The story of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, thanks to Oyneg Shabes, was not lost. The sick, masochistic historical reality is available for all to see. Sadly, despicably, today the Holocaust is being denied, diluted, explained away, ignored or forgotten — all as anti-Semitism spikes in the United States and around the world.
There is, of course, a symbiotic relationship between anti-Semitic incidents and Holocaust denialism. Witness how many Americans accept as unremarkable Donald Trump’s assertion of moral equivalence between white supremacist neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” and the protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. “There were fine people on both sides,” Trump pronounced.
Which brings us back to the importance of an accurate historical record to give ballast to truth. Five or 10 years ago it was — to most of us, anyway — unimaginable that democracy in the United States could readily be washed away by a rising tide of authoritarianism. But the unimaginable has arrived on our shores.
In early 2022, news reports have proliferated about crumpled documents being found in a White House toilet while Donald Trump was president. In addition, we know that Trump absconded with 15 boxes of presidential documents that he was legally obligated to turn over to the National Archives but instead secreted away at Mar a Lago.
The Archives recently repossessed those 15 boxes. A Committee of the House of Representatives is seeking a detailed description of those papers as well as their national security classification. The Justice Department won’t say whether it is investigating. Trump, of course, denies any impropriety.
As Trump transgressions go, violations of the Presidential Records Act at first blush may seem like pretty pedestrian stuff (depending, of course, in whose hands classified national security documents ended up). But this is anything but a trivial matter. Loss of contemporary records, the destruction of historical truth, as Oyneg Shabes’ resistance to fascism proved, matters.
The Trump-supported and organized insurrection of Jan. 6 that came close to dismembering our democracy should bring renewed scrutiny to the wads of paper in White House toilets and to the documents disappearing at Trump’s Florida enclave. In the future this country will need to grapple with how Trump destroyed democracy and should it turn out that he couldn’t or didn’t, what turned the tide against him and his jingoistic authoritarianism. That story is yet to unfold.
And whether the actual story can be told also is unknown. Trump’s destruction of potentially crucial historical records raises two questions — questions that are particularly poignant today given the secrecy of his interactions with Putin and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that is causing a massive number of deaths: what does Trump most want to hide and who will write that history?
Bill Newman, a Northampton-based attorney, hosts a talk show on WHMP radio that is broadcast weekdays at 9 a.m. and rebroadcast at 5 p.m. He writes a monthly column.