HISTORY | LITHUANIA
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OPINION
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by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
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The Holocaust was a unique phenomenon. But its perception is double-faceted, to some degree, in the eyes of some Jews and non-Jews alike, hence my use of the term “split image” to describe the phenomenon.
In July 2010, I was in Paris with David Silberman, Latvian author of И Ты Это Видел, a book of testimony and accounts by Jews mainly from Latvia, originally written in Russian and which we together worked on getting published in French. We met Serge Klarsfeld, the well-known French historian and Holocaust authority in France, also a Nazi-hunter. He succeeded in bringing Klaus Barbie, among others, to trial.
I had noticed he held a copy of a book he had just purchased: The Black Book by Ehrenburg and Grossman. So, I surmised that he wanted to learn about the Holocaust in the Soviet republics. I understood quite well his dilemma because, although I had begun to learn about the Holocaust at the beginning of the 1970s, to me, until September 2009, my only iconic representation of the Holocaust was situated at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which I had already visited twice in 1982 and 2006, its symbols having been the gas chambers and the crematoria.