A history he knew he had to share

THERE comes a moment in life when the weight of memory and emotion can lead to action. For Saul Friedlander, that moment arrived when he stumbled upon a misfiled Nazi document in Bonn, during research for a book on U.S.-German relations before World War II.

During 1941, as news of Hitler’s atrocities began spreading, Pope Pius XII had warmly invited the Berlin Opera to perform selections from Wagner at the Vatican, according to a formerly secret telegram that Friedlander read. The faded cable would have riveted any historian probing papal attitudes toward the Nazis, but it struck a nerve in the young scholar: His parents died at Auschwitz, and he was raised by French Catholics as the conflict raged. Fiercely proud of his Jewish roots, his disbelief over Pius XII’s friendly invitation was a transforming moment.

“It shocked me; I was astonished,” said Friedlander, recalling his 1962 discovery. “And I decided then and there that, for me, the right path was to study the history of this event, the Holocaust, so no one would ever forget it. It became my personal fate.”

Today, Friedlander is a preeminent Holocaust historian and UCLA professor who recently published the concluding volume in his sprawling chronicle of Hitler’s final solution, “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945,” (HarperCollins). Recently, he received news that has forced him to revisit many of the burning personal questions that have driven his career: Later this year he will receive the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Friedlander, 74 and soon to retire, views the German honor with a jumble of emotions. What would his parents have thought? He has spent much of his life documenting Nazi crimes, and his new book may be one of the last Holocaust accounts by a major historian who actually experienced these traumatic events. As a new generation of scholars emerges, Friedlander’s crusade to keep history alive is not just a professional imperative. It’s highly personal.

“For me, the biggest question has always been, how was all this possible?” he said by telephone. “How could such unbelievable atrocities take place in the very heart of Europe, in one of the world’s most advanced countries?”

As historians continue to ponder the Holocaust, Friedlander fears this crucial sense of disbelief may fade with time or disappear in endless academic debate. He voices his concern in the introduction to his new book, lamenting that too many scholars run the risk of “domesticating disbelief” as they try to explain unspeakable horrors. When they begin parsing every detail, Friedlander suggested, “there’s a danger this sense of horror will disappear. Soon you’re accustomed to business-as-usual history. You write about these events with the same detachment you’d use to write about the price of grain.”

To combat this erosion of memory, Friedlander set an ambitious -- some would say impossible -- goal for his two-volume history (the first book, “The Years of Persecution,” came out in 1997). He resolved that the best way to tell the story was with a so-called integrated approach, blending the history of the Nazi perpetrators with the personal stories of victims. He also considered the role of bystanders, some of whom rescued Jews, while others did nothing or aided the Nazis.

The voice of Jewish diarists was prominent: Abraham Lewin, a Warsaw resident, recorded his dawning awareness of the terror awaiting those deported from the ghetto in 1942: “When people get out of the train, they are beaten viciously. Then they are driven into huge barracks. For five minutes heart-rending screams are heard, then silence. The bodies that are taken out are swollen horribly. Young men from among the prisoners are the gravediggers, and the next day they too are killed.”

Holocaust scholarship, which took off in the 1960s, has become highly controversial and competitive. As hundreds of books appear each year, debates continue to rage over numerous issues, and they pack an emotional wallop far greater than most academic tiffs: Was Hitler directly responsible for ordering the exterminations, or were they initiated and carried out mostly at lower echelons of the Nazi dictatorship? Was there something uniquely and inevitably German about the Holocaust, or did specific political and economic circumstances conspire to unleash these policies in Germany? Even a historian as respected as Friedlander wades into a minefield every time he writes a book, and the varying reactions to “The Years of Extermination” were no surprise.

Cambridge professor Richard J. Evans, writing in the New York Times, called Friedlander’s new book “a masterpiece that will endure

Asked about these criticisms, Friedlander declined a direct comment. Instead, calling Evans “a great historian,” he added that the Cambridge University scholar is “outside of that closed circle of those in this field who have various axes to grind.”

Sometimes it’s hard to tell friends from critics. Raul Hilberg, author of the widely respected three-volume “The Destruction of the European Jews,” praised Friedlander for exploring the Holocaust through the prisms of psycho-history and biography. But in a telephone interview he also criticized Friedlander’s new book, saying it misrepresented his own work, and noted “it is not new research,” relying heavily on published documents and other materials.

Other scholars, however, champion Friedlander’s work. Deborah Lipstadt, an Emory University professor and respected Holocaust historian, said: “He’s in the upper echelons of this field. He’s made a tremendous contribution, and his decision to integrate all levels of the story is something that all of us should be striving for.” “Most of us could never imagine being the perpetrators of such crimes, and we’d vow never to let ourselves be victimized either,” she said. “But there’s a broad swath of people in the middle who think of themselves as compassionate people. If we saw something horrible happening, we’d want to help. But would we really do so?” The lasting value of Friedlander’s work, Lipstadt concluded, “is that he’s had direct experience of these events. It’s his life. Younger historians cannot duplicate this.”

Surviving the Nazis

BORN in Prague in 1932, Friedlander fled with his parents to Paris seven years later, after the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia. He survived the war in a French boarding school under an assumed Catholic name, but his parents were captured trying to flee to Switzerland. They perished in Auschwitz. In his 1979 memoir, “When Memory Comes,” he told how a priest revealed to him, at age 15, that his parents were dead.

Reconnecting with his Jewish roots, Friedlander later moved to the new state of Israel and fought in the war for independence; he studied in France and Switzerland, received a PhD in history and taught history at Tel Aviv University. He was invited to teach at UCLA in 1988, filling a newly endowed chair for Holocaust studies. Throughout his academic career, he has been praised for adopting an even-handed tone, even in his memoir’s more painful moments. When he wrote a book about Pius XII, the author noted that the controversial Wagner performance never actually took place; he also included a Vatican document challenging the accuracy of the original diplomatic cable.

Beyond his books, Friedlander, who lives in the Laurel Canyon area, founded the journal History and Memory during his years at UCLA, and he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1999. He chaired a panel, appointed by the German media giant Bertelsmann, to probe the company’s wartime connections with Hitler’s Reich. The group’s 2002 report prompted the conglomerate to express “sincere regret” for having misrepresented its actions.

Life in Los Angeles has been generally tranquil, Friedlander said, yet there have been jarring reminders that the work of Holocaust inquiry is not complete. Soon after he began teaching at UCLA, he saw a plane towing an animal rights banner that read: “Stop Animal Auschwitz.” “It’s not just the full history of the Holocaust that we have to preserve,” he said. “It’s the very meaning of the word itself, which can be easily misunderstood, or taken out of historical context. For me, this is something that must never be forgotten.”

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josh.getlin@latimes.com