As Americans, we respond to stories of assimilated Western European Jews who are gradually shut out of their country’s life, like that of the German diarist Victor Klemperer. Inevitably, however, we tend to create a generic Holocaust narrative out of the tales we hear most often, and find most easy to identify with. All these stories had a similar ending-but then, so do all human stories, and the monotony of death does not annul the immense multiplicity of life.
The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis came from every part of Europe, from every social class and profession and age group, from every point on the spectrum of Jewish life between militant atheism and traditional piety. WRITING THE STORY of the Holocaust is a futile ambition-not because the events of 1939 to 1945 are too horrible to be told, but because they are too various to be compressed into one definitive or representative story.
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