I.

ONE OF THE MOST persistent challenges for scholars who research and teach about the Holocaust is the question of how to balance the voices, perspectives, and narratives of the victims and survivors with those of the perpetrators. Historians in particular, whose accounts of the Holocaust have until relatively recently relied chiefly on the prolific documents, narratives, and interpretive frames of the Nazi perpetrators, have recognized this as a recurrent dilemma attendant to their inquiry. As Mark Roseman writes, “history (outside Israel) has been particularly slow as a discipline to take the Nazi victims seriously as sources of information, and has tended to focus much more heavily on the records left behind by the perpetrators.” Jeffrey C. Blutinger attributes the bias toward perpetrators’ accounts to the nature of contemporary historiography, which tends, “particularly in classroom teaching, to focus on historical actors” and which “leads us into a false dichotomy between oppression and resistance, implicitly disparaging those who for whatever reason did not resist but who suffered and died nonetheless.” In recent years, historians of the Holocaust have made earnest and fruitful efforts to correct their partiality toward the voices of the perpetrators, as demonstrated by deliberate attempts on the part of scholars such as Christopher Browning and Saul Friedländer to write history based on Jewish testimony and collective experience. However, as Browning acknowledges, the recent historiographical turn toward the victim and survivor still presents persistent challenges: