In recent decades considerable resources have been invested in the collection and preservation of videotaped testimony by survivors of the Holocaust. The Fortunoff video archive, based at Yale University, collected recorded testimony from more than four thousand survivors during the 1980s. During the following decade, a project funded by filmmaker Steven Spielberg gathered material on a much larger scale, resulting in an archive of 52,000 testimonies, which have been preserved, indexed, and made available for research through the Shoah Foundation Institute of the University of Southern California. Even as these collections were being built, it was not clear to many historians whether the testimonies would be able to serve any significant scholarly purpose. While some specialists harbored fundamental doubts about the reliability of memories recorded decades after the events of the Holocaust, others expressed criticisms about the credentials of the interviewers and the methods they used, while still others wondered whether a large number of videotaped testimonies could ever be cataloged and indexed in a way that would make them useful for serious research.

Remembering Survival by Christopher R. Browning puts any such doubts to rest. Although previous works of scholarship have made use of videotaped survivor testimony, none has done so on the scale of Browning's work or with its level of methodological rigor. It accomplishes several tasks simultaneously. Most directly, it narrates the history of the Nazi slave-labor camp for Jewish prisoners located in Starachowice, Poland. Through this microhistory of a single camp, Browning makes an essential contribution to a dimension of the Holocaust that has remained under-researched. Second, the book serves as a model for a critical and nuanced assessment of survivor testimony as historical source material. Although Browning also made use of contemporaneous German documentation as well as testimony from trials conducted soon after the war, his reconstruction of the history of Starachowice is based primarily on some 200-plus taped testimonies from survivors of the camp. Rather than relegating source criticism to the endnotes, Browning skillfully integrates it into his narrative, explaining why one testimony might be more reliable than another or how divergent memories have been shaped by factors such as ideology, repression, or a yearning to infuse events with meaning. The book's third main achievement is to provide a set of concepts and categories that will prove beneficial to historians of the Holocaust as they learn how to use, understand, and interpret the survivor testimonies. Browning's explanation of the differences among various types of memory—individual, communal, repressed, secret, and public—is refreshingly free of the jargon and tendency toward abstraction that have plagued many works in the genre of memory studies, and will therefore have the salutary effect of getting more historians to take such questions seriously.

Some of the book's conclusions will come as no surprise to readers who are familiar with the history of Jewish life and death in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, but they are presented with the precision, nuance, lucidity, and mastery of sources that are the hallmarks of Browning's scholarship. Jewish slave-labor society was complex and multilayered, consisting of Jews from a variety of cultural, religious, and economic backgrounds. Those with money and connections obtained work-cards more easily than those without. Bribery was widespread, although Jews who promoted corruption, favoritism, and nepotism were resented by their fellow prisoners. Women, the very young, and the elderly were less likely to survive through labor than were men. Although the Germans were in charge, Ukrainian guards served as enforcers, and there were constant reminders of antisemitism endemic in the local Polish population. At the same time, members of all three groups engaged in acts of kindness and generosity toward Jews. Because for the Jewish prisoners survival often depended on a keen awareness of personality and behavior differences among camp officials and guards, their postwar testimonies contain a wealth of information about such individuals. The book shows that survivor testimony, when used carefully, can serve as a valuable source for writing the history of the perpetrators.

Even as Browning critically assesses the reliability of survivor testimony, he shows empathy and respect for the survivors and their individual and collective memories of horrendous events. He validates the basic reliability and historical utility of the testimony, not by ignoring inaccuracies and distortions, but rather by shedding light on the psychological and cultural mechanisms that produced them. While the authorial voice of the scholar is prominent, it is the voice of the survivors themselves that dominates the narrative. In Remembering Survival, Browning has bridged the gap between memory and history. The book will most certainly serve as a foundation and a model for future scholarship.