History belongs, they say, to the victors, because history is written by the victors.
Most often, when this maxim is quoted, it’s quoted with cynical undertones. (The line was originally Winston Churchill’s, but has taken on a life of its own.) It suggests that history is unreliable and even tainted by the deeds committed by those victors in order to win – win the battle, win the war, win the struggle between competing religions, cultures or ways of thought.
More, it positions the right to write history as another spoil of war. When you fight, it says, you fight not only to win but for the right to be remembered as you dictate.
The biggest piece of history in the 20th century history, if there can be such a concept as a piece of history, was World War Two, and its defining feature was the Holocaust. The organised murder of six million people morally overshadows even the decision to detonate atomic bombs on civilian cities, according to Raimond Gaita, (1) who distinguishes between the racist thinking that enabled the bombing of Japan from the more immoral genocidal intent of the Third Reich’s death camps.
And technically, the Allied forces of Western Europe, America and the British Empire won WWII. But at a very meaningful level, the Holocaust succeeded. No one would put the argument that the Jews of Europe “won”. The Jewish population and culture of Germany, Austria and Poland all but disappeared, not only through the mass deaths but also through the diaspora of refugees and, after the war, voluntary relocation to Israel.
So how can the losers – the dead and the shattered survivors – write history? Of course the wider world has assisted in documenting the Holocaust and positioning it as a genocidal crime against humanity. In fact, as Gaita notes, it is often the standard against which other such crimes are measured, in the popular mind at least.
That fact in no way transforms the losers into winners, despite their moral authority and the ongoing willingness of the world to listen to their story. What might, though, achieve that transformation in some small way is to comprehensively contradict the thinking that saturated and enabled the Holocaust: the assertion that a class of people were subhuman.


Gaita writes that a crime against humanity is defined by those international laws that are “informed by a sense of the common humanity of all the peoples of the earth.” To paraphrase: a crime against humanity is not a crime against human persons per se, it’s a crime against our underlying, difficult-to-define human natures and dignity.
To allow such crimes to take place, the humanity of the victims is often denied, a point noticed by many writers. German Jew Franz Kafka made the point one way in his 1915 story The Metamorphosis – Gregor Samsa first becomes an insect and then becomes nothing to his family and society, dying unmourned.
In East of Time, the memoir which is the main focus of this essay, Jacob G. Rosenberg makes a similar point, recounting a conversation in which Hitler’s dismissal of Freud as “a louse” is compared to Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, who justifies murder by turning “a fellow human into an insect.” (2)
Rosenberg, one of the few people still alive who survived Auschwitz, has written an “autobiography” that serves a central project of reclaiming the humanity of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust. As such, it interacts with the “official” history in significant ways, serving not just to illuminate the details of history but to change our understanding of it.
At first, East of Time and its sequel, Sunrise West, could be seen as merely products of the urge to record a life before dying, like many other autobiographies written late in life, with only Rosenberg’s lively prose and gripping subject matter to lift them above the pack.
But his preface to East of Time gives a clue to the book’s significance as a work of history. (3)

As for the many individuals who populate this book, most, with one or two exceptions, are now dead, murdered during those years of darkness. Some readers may question my purpose in summoning up all these names, but the need to recall them is strong within me; perhaps it is the scriptural influence, or maybe the voice of my forefathers, to whom the mentioning of names was a sacred duty.

Much of East of Time is given over to short word sketches and vignettes about those “many individuals”. Sometimes there is historical detail, but most of the pieces more often resemble naïve memoir, putting us behind Rosenberg’s eyes as he comes of age in a Jewish community that becomes a wartime ghetto in Poland. There are repeated references to ideological and political issues and the failure of Russia and communism to help the Jews, but these don’t occupy the central place in the reader’s mind after closing the book. What linger instead are images of children playing in the street, craftspeople working in their homes and, after hours, long and complex intellectual discussions between educated, thoughtful, humorous individuals where the debate itself is as important as the outcome. And in case it all seems too perfect, Rosenberg also records adulteries, fights and injustices, not hesitating to label characters as fools or as blinded by ideology.
What Rosenberg doesn’t do here is to write “history”. This is not the official record or even a story presenting itself as “innocent” or “objective”, as Inga Clendinnen has characterised histories of the victor as trying to do. (4)
It is, though, what she calls a “complicated and multiple story.” In this, it insists on its characters’ humanity.
Before going on to discuss how I think a book like this can affect history itself, I’d like to mention another piece of Holocaust life writing, albeit biography rather than autobiography. Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: a search for six of six million focuses on just six of the six million dead. At an event I attended at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum in 2007, he said that the book was in a way an attempt to retun the lives that were taken, to insist that these people existed and did matter. The audience, which included Holocaust survivors, murmured agreement.
There is, I’d argue, a difference between simply recording because “the mentioning of names was a sacred duty”, and the active returning of humanity to victims who had been stripped of it. Their humanity was the central issue of the Holocaust, as much as their very lives. In effect, the Nazis said: “these people are not human; they are insects; they do not deserve to live.” Books like East of Time, The Lost, Maus, The Diary of Anne Frank and The Diary of Petr Ginz, all of which focus on individual lives, never generalising or lumping people into categories insist over and over again that each and every victim was human. They don’t seek to rewrite the history of what happened, but the history of what was thought. As as the last few survivors die of old age, the written, often first-person, record of their lives will become – along with photographs and recordings – the only thing standing against that Nazi assertion.
It’s worth briefly looking at how Rosenberg’s book functions as a work of autobiography compared to other biographies and autobiographies.
It is missing many of the key features we have come to expect in an autobiography, such as a coherent timeline or even a “story” – an explicit narrative arc. Over the course of the book an arc of sorts does emerge – the sense of Rosenberg being drawn towards the inevitable summons to the concentration camp as he recounts the deaths of his fellow ghetto residents in increasing numbers – but there is no narrative pleasure for the reader in this, rather an increased desire to focus on the details, the small glimpses of hope and beauty and individuality that come with each character sketch. Possibly in this we journey alongside Rosenberg, as he shows us what it’s like to have the lights go out one by one, but to try to keep looking at the lights that remain. It’s not as if he is not angry, or capable of deep and bitter sarcasm about German efficiency and the “achievement” of the gas chambers, for instance, but it’s clear that that is Rosenberg the older writer talking, rather than the young Rosenberg who went through the ghetto experience with his family.
Rosenberg’s book purports to take the reader behind his eyes, looking out on the community, and it does this so effectively that he then gets away with “showing” events that he did not witness personally: when that happens, it’s clear that this is going beyond what we think of as autobiography.
In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson offer both a history of autobiography in the West and a suggested taxonomy of 52 types of biography.
Their chapter on history suggests that autobiography has served the project of developing the individual as the key unit in Western society, and that in the process it has given us a convenient record of individual self-image via which to read that development.


In this chapter, the authors argue that autobiography in the West has effectively functioned as a tool to help resolve the tension between our private and public selves, and to work through the discourses that are at play in our lives.
They start with reference to pre-literate forms, like African oral genealogy and Aboriginal songlines, then move in quickly to Western life narrative.
At first, they say, it was mostly written by religious people engaged in both soul-searching and recording their spiritual travels. But during the Renaissance the secular self became a subject for autobiography, introducing a whole new range of themes and categories. Without the question of an external God, writers like Montaigne became extremely self-referential and focussed on the question of who they really were.
Autobiography also began to broaden to include the world the individual lived in, beginning with travel stories like Marco Polo’s.
In the eighteenth century, French and English writers wrote narratives that positioned themselves as being exceptional to the world they saw around them, and were therefore very individualistic and “Western” stories. This model then branched out into concerns of the individual like “lost illusions”, (The Sorrows of Young Werther), and the classic coming-of-age story that often ends with the subject about to enter their real adult life.
In America in the 18th century, life narratives presented the individual as both a distinct person and at the same time completely a product of their environment. Later American autobiography tended to be concerned with what they identify as the very American projects of becoming a self-made man and dominating nature. Even slave stories are classified as being a form of coming-of-age story as the slaves insist on their sense of self in very adverse circumstances.
Finally, Smith and Watson say that autobiography in the 20th century was a way of creating meaning as new kinds of individual subjects: for instance immigrant identity, prisoner’s stories, coming-out narratives, stories about illness and the branding exercise of celebrity or sportsman/woman autobiography.
What they fail to do is to ask why the individual matters. In East of Time, Rosenberg moves beyond this academic analysis of what an individual is and shows us why individual lives are important.
By recording a history of WWII that is not about troop movements, battles, bombings or the lives of leaders and generals, he has changed history, if history is what was said and thought about the murdered Jews, a body of thought that now includes his sympathetic words and thoughts. That history is, in the view of this book, not about facts, but about people.
In the course of doing so, he has almost accidentally achieved the autobiographical effect of showing us Jacob G. Rosenberg: what matters to him and how he deals with such horrendous events, a test of character beyond all others.
While Smith and Watson offer a list of types of life writing, * East of Time does not fit neatly into any of them.
As a “trauma narrative” it does not concern itself with the effects of the trauma on the narrator. “Witnessing” is a possible category, but Smith and Watson’s definition calls for the possibility of response, whereas it seems to me that the events in this book are simply being added to history in a way analogous to a catalyst being added to a chemical mix; with this in existence, the meaning of other histories of the Polish ghetto and Auschwitz are changed.
This is life writing – the recording of the individual life – as antidote to the underlying poison of racism, which is that it turns people into categorised objects which are then subject to reclassification as less than human: as, say, insects.
In that, East of Time is a historical document actively arguing with the Nazis not about what they did, but what they said: and winning.