Of the Holocaust and National Identities : ONE, BY ONE, BY ONE Facing the Holocaust <i> by Judith Miller (Simon & Schuster: $22.95; 283 pp.; 0-671- 64472-6) </i>

On April 12, 1990, East Germany installed its first democratic government. Immediately the Parliament issued an apology. Admitting responsibility “for the humiliation, expulsion and murder of Jewish women, men and children,” it reversed 40 years of East German denial of responsibility for the Holocaust, the Third Reich’s genocidal “Final Solution,” which annihilated nearly 6 million Jews.

These days, books cannot keep up with history, and Judith Miller’s went to press before she could appraise the East German confession. This searching report, well crafted by a skillful journalist for the New York Times, is nevertheless the most moving and detailed account to date of the multiple ways in which national identities remain affected by the world’s worst genocide.

Focused on six nations--Germany (primarily the West), Austria, the Netherlands, France, the Soviet Union and the United States--Miller’s adroit interplay between personal experience and historical analysis makes this book fascinating, disturbing, and insightful. Consider, for example, the three enlarged photographs she saw in a Minsk war museum. In October, 1941, a German photographer documented the execution of three Soviet partisans--two men and a teen-aged girl. The museum display identifies the men by name, but the girl remains unknown. Miller tracks how that “official” account reflects a Soviet identity conflict over the Holocaust. The “unknown” girl, hanged by the Nazis for resisting, not only has a name, Masha Bruskina, but also she was Jewish.

Soviet, as well as East German, history is being rewritten, and Masha Bruskina may yet receive the recognition she deserves. To be complete, however, that outcome would entail an almost unthinkable re-evaluation in a society whose long record of anti-Semitism has been supplemented by repression of the Holocaust’s Jewish particularity. Historical revision, moreover, informs Soviet statecraft. History changes with those in power. If greater honesty typifies the Gorbachev era, Miller chooses an apt epigraph for her chapter on facing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union: “The hardest thing about being a Communist,” wrote Milovan Djilas in September, 1988, “is trying to predict the past.”

Despite her qualms, Miller credits the Soviet Union for making headway in “confronting its wartime experiences squarely and facing unpleasant truths about itself.” With qualifications of another kind, she gives similar marks to West Germany and the United States.

West Germany poses the risk that concern for national rehabilitation, now coupled with the surprising prospect of German reunification, may marginalize memory of the Holocaust. The good news, however, is that “perhaps no country has explored its past as intensively as the Federal Republic of Germany.” Another of Miller’s personal discoveries epitomizes the ambiguity and tension between acknowledgment of national wrongdoing and desire to put the past behind. “The name of the town of Dachau,” she observes, “was not changed after the concentration camp nearby was destroyed, but pregnant women sometimes go to hospitals in neighboring towns so that their children’s birth certificates will not bear its name.”

Problems about facing the Holocaust also riddle the United States. Miller concentrates partly on American wartime policy, which entailed, in the words of historian David S. Wyman, “the abandonment of the Jews.” Mainly, however, she targets an intense debate over how the Holocaust should be commemorated in the United States.

The country’s large Jewish population--including many Holocaust survivors--its close ties to Israel, its long-standing idealism about human rights and cultural pluralism, as well as the influence of Hollywood, are among the factors that have institutionalized substantial concern about the Holocaust. Miller finds much to applaud about these American approaches to Auschwitz, including, for example, work being done by the Washington-based United States Holocaust Memorial Council and the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. But she also deplores the infighting, rivalry, and publicity-grabbing that she locates within or among the diverse groups that strive to keep memory of the Holocaust alive. By contrast, her highest praise goes to efforts that preserve the oral histories of Holocaust survivors. She finds those histories invaluable to combat memory’s most virulent enemy--abstraction.

If abstraction is the most virulent, it is not memory’s only enemy. Miller’s accounts of France, Austria and the Netherlands testify to that. Although in different ways, each pictures itself as a Nazi victim. Miller’s evidence questions the credibility of those images.

France remains divided by those who resisted and those who collaborated with Hitler, among the latter many who took particularly punitive actions toward Jews. Miller judges that “the silence of indifference” is the price that France is prepared to pay for domestic tranquility.

Austria elected Kurt Waldheim President after knowing that this native son had lied about his Nazi past, which involved knowledge of wartime atrocities committed by his army unit in the Balkans. That action suggests to Miller that Austria is hardly the Nazi victim it claims to be. Mincing no words, she claims that Austria symbolizes “unrepentant political cowardice, pragmatic anti-Semitism, and evasion of responsibility for the past.” Her view is further reinforced by Waldheim, who, according to Miller, “told Austrians that he, and by implication they, had only done their duty in yielding so willingly to the Third Reich.”

Miller’s chapter on the Netherlands is brief but telling. Amsterdam’s Anne Frank recapitulates the story. During the Holocaust, Dutch people helped that Jewish girl to hide, and the Netherlands capitalizes on this image. But Dutch people also betrayed her. As far as the Holocaust is concerned, Miller contends, “in no western European nation has there been as large and enduring a gap between popular image and historical reality.” If the overwhelming majority in Holland did not collaborate with the Nazis, Miller reckons, they did obey German orders and go along. The Dutch know this, she believes, and many feel guilty. Yet the nation as a whole has not come to terms with its past.

Temptations to suppress Holocaust memory by denial, shifting blame, rationalization, and relativization may be powerful enough to keep all six of these nations from a thorough facing of the Holocaust. In that light, Miller might have devoted more attention to East Germany and added other nations to her list as well, especially Poland and World War II “neutrals” such as Switzerland, Spain and Sweden. Realistically, she does not think that facing the Holocaust guarantees prevention of genocide. “But,” she rightly insists, “ignorance of history or suppression of memory removes the surest defense we have, however inadequate, against such gigantic cruelty and indifference.”

Accurate teaching and sensitive writing about the Holocaust, films and docudramas, commemorations, judicial proceedings--all of these are essential, if imperfect, vehicles for keeping memory alive. In the long run, Miller argues, nothing is likely to be more effective than survivor testimony, particularly as it is preserved and made available in places such as the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. These testimonies battle generalization and abstraction. Their particularity encourages empathy instead.

“Empathy,” writes Miller, “counts for much.” In the Holocaust, millions died, but they died, as her title says, one, by one, by one. Miller challenges individuals and nations alike to face the Holocaust with that recognition. “Only in understanding that civilized people must defend the one, by one, by one,” she concludes, “can the Holocaust, the incomprehensible, be given meaning.”