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1. Memories of a Survivor: the Story of Hilde Huppert's Autobiographies

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1. Memories of a Survivor: the Story of Hilde Huppert's Autobiographies 1. Memories of a Survivor: The Story of Hilde Huppert’s Autobiographies I remember her sitting in a single room with the window facing the porch […]. She was writing and crying. Jotting down the words and suffering. Expounding and cursing the Nazis. When she finally finished, quite worn out and drained, she gave the book the title Warum ist das uns geschehen? [Why did it happen to us?] a name which expressed both her searching and her condemnation. (S.Huppert 1990, 161)1 When Jewish Hilde Huppert wrote her autobiography in 1945 she hoped it would be a cathartic act. At the suggestion of those around her, she put down on paper the memories of her persecution under Nazism in an attempt to combat the recurrent nightmares which pervaded her present life in Palestine. However, this attempt to deal with the trauma of her experiences soon gained a different impetus. An imperative to bear witness, to remember on behalf of those who had been murdered, led her to seek the text’s publication. Huppert, the daughter of a wealthy business-owning family, was born on 5 November 1910. She married and gave birth to a son, Tommy, in 1936. The family lived in Teschen, a town on the border between Czechoslovakia and Poland. In 1938 her husband emigrated to Palestine and secured visas for his wife and son to follow him. However, before they could leave, Germany invaded Poland. Huppert and her family fled to a village near Krosno, one of many towns turned into a ghetto by the Nazis. In 1942 they were arrested. The autobiography describes the journey from prison in Krosno, to the Rzesnow ghetto, to prison in Krakau and, finally, to Bergen-Belsen. Of the immediate family who were arrested, only Huppert and her son survived. Following liberation, Huppert travelled with 529 children to Palestine, arriving in July 1945. Given the complexity of the text’s publication history, a short résumé of the text’s various republications is useful before I focus on a reading of the original autobiography and discuss the changes made in later versions. I explore questions about genre, gender, and Jewishness within the different publishing contexts and outline debates about remembering fascism contemporary to the text’s publication in East Germany, West Germany, Israel and unified Germany. An analysis of discourses of antifascism and their intersection with different frameworks of remembering highlights 1 My thanks go to Rabbi Yosi Ives for his verbal translation of this article from Hebrew into English. 16 WOMEN WITHOUT A PAST? many competing hierarchies of remembrance and suggests that different versions of the text have different addressees. When Hilde Huppert composed her autobiography between August and October 1945, three months after her arrival in Palestine, she chose to write in German, even though her native language was Czech. She subsequently asked the well-known author Arnold Zweig to prepare her manuscript for publication.2 Following some initial reservations, he took on the project and began work in 1946. In addition to stylistic changes, he added a preface and a conclusion. The text was first distributed as a duplicated copy in 1947 in Egypt, in a British prisoner-of-war camp for German soldiers, after it was refused by publishers in Palestine and in both the Eastern and Western zones of Germany. Before its dissemination in the camp, Zweig added a second preface addressing these problems of publication. The autobiography was part of a series called “Bausteine der Wahrheit” [Building blocks of truth]. At this stage the title was Engpaß zur Freiheit. Aufzeichnungen der Frau Hilde Hupperts [sic] über ihre Erlebnisse im Nazi-Todesland und ihre wundersame Errettung aus Bergen-Belsen [The narrow pass to freedom. Notes by Hilde Huppert on her experiences in the Nazi land of death and her wondrous deliverance from Bergen-Belsen] (Huppert 1947). In 1949 the text was translated and published in Czechoslovakia (Huppert 1949). A year earlier Zweig had left Palestine for East Germany and the text was published there in 1951 and 1961 under his name (Zweig 1951, 1961). He made several alterations at this stage. Meanwhile Huppert’s son translated the original text into Hebrew, naming it Vehashohet Sahat [The slaughterer slaughtered]. His attempts to get it published in Israel in 1955 failed. Following a radio interview between Huppert and her son in Israel in 1977, Shmuel [Tommy] Huppert began work on a ‘Hebrew version’ of the book. This version was published in 1978 in Tel Aviv, entitled Jad Be Jad Im Tommy [Hand in hand with Tommy] (Huppert 1978). Ten years later this version was translated into German and published in West Germany, along with a preface and epilogue by Shmuel Huppert, entitled Hand in Hand mit Tommy. Ein autobiographischer Bericht 1939-1945 [Hand in hand with Tommy. An autobiographical report 1939-1945] (Huppert 1988). It was translated and published in the Netherlands during the 1980s with the title De dood in de ogen [Face to face with death]. It was 2 Arnold Zweig (1887-1968), a German-Jewish author, emigrated in 1933 and spent the Nazi period in exile in Palestine. He returned to East Berlin in 1948, and between 1950 and 1953 was President of the East German Academy of the Arts. .
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