10 Japanese War Crimes during World War II deeds must be followed by a redefinition of their meaning, lest the memory of the victims monopolize the narrative of the past.”78 It is thus difficult for many victims to come forward with their own witness accounts, especially ­ because many of them would rather forget what had happened to them dur- ing the war. Holocaust survivor Heda Kovály (1919–2010) described the pro­ cess of remembering as follows: I do not want to write. I do not want to remember. My memories are not ­ simple recollections. They are a return to the bottom of an abyss I have to gather up the shattered bones that have lain still for so long, climb back over the crags, and tumble in once more. Only this time I have to do it delib- erately, in slow motion, noticing and examining each wound, each bruise on the way, most of all the ones of which I was least conscious in my first headlong fall.79 Lawrence Langer also further emphasized the prob­lem of the memory of ­those who perished for ­ those who survived victims are frustrated by their “efforts to see survival as a ­ simple chronology of returning from an abnormal to a nor- mal world. Without denying the real­ity or the significance of [a] pres­ent life, [they insist] on the discontinuity between it and [the] past, an unresolved and . . . ​ unresolvable stress that nurtures anxiety.”80 However, ­ there is another prob­lem regarding memories of cruelty and atroc- ity in war and genocide. Primo Levi (1919–1987) emphasized that “[real­ity] slides fatally ­towards simplification and ste­reo­type, a trend against which I would like to erect ­ here a dike. . . . ​It is the task of the historian to bridge this gap, which widens as we get farther away from the events ­ under examina- tion.”81 Therefore, it must be the historian’s task to better understand not only what happened, but how it happened. It is not impor­tant to consider the nationalities of the victims or perpetrators beyond the specific national ­ factors that might play a role in the vio­lence involved. However, it is unproductive to establish a ranking of violent nationalities. The Japa­nese are not inherently more violent than the Germans or the Americans. What must be established is a set of ­ factors that would possibly increase vio­lence in a specific space-­ time continuum and then to prove if in such a continuum the predetermined ­ factors existed or not. The memories of the perpetrators and victims alike are of importance, even if I would argue that none of them can provide the truth ­ behind the events. It is the “historian’s very stock in trade”82 to remember the past, but mem- ories are often far away from the past itself. Although testimonies about the Holocaust, Nanjing, the comfort ­ women system or any other form of geno- cidal vio­lence are considered “acts of re­sis­tance in the face of the systematic destruction of a ­whole ­ people, tradition and culture,”83 they must be treated carefully when examined by the historian. As Levi convincingly argued, “We
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