Managing Our Past, Managing Our Future: Is there a “Right” Way of Remembrance?

In the spring of 1944, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death factory was still a top secret of the Third Reich and the Nazis used numerous ploys to entice their prospective victims into it. On April 7, 1944, two Slovak Jewish prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler managed to escape Auschwitz-Birkenau and reveal its secrets. They further warned that specific arrangements had been made in the camp for the annihilation of the Hungarian Jews. The precious information was disseminated without delay to the Western world. It is not clear whether it reached the prospective victims: All boarded in good faith the “resettlement trains” that carried them to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where most were immediately gassed. This specific story has been missing from most Israeli history textbooks in Hebrew. Following Winter’s (2006) thesis, this paper tries to trace some of the official manipulation that were made in shaping the “right” form of remembrance.