A Submarine, Some Suitcases, and Salvation: On Increasingly Inaccessible Testimony and the Perfection of the Dunera Story

 https://www.academia.edu/48906680/A_Submarine_Some_Suitcases_and_Salvation_On_Increasingly_Inaccessible_Testimony_and_the_Perfection_of_the_Dunera_Story

According to a story that is popular in religious Jewish circles, the HMT Dunera, transporting Germanspeaking Jewish internees to Australia in the summer of 1940, was miraculously saved from destruction because the captain of a German submarine discontinued his torpedo attack on the ship. He did so because he inferred, from German-language materials in suitcases floating in the sea behind the Dunera, that the ship was full of German POWs. In fact, however, the ship was full of Jewish internees, whose suitcases had been thrown overboard by corrupt and cruel British guards. Thus, the story illustrates the wondrous ways of divine providence and, accordingly, man's inability to judge God's administration of events, for what the internees perceived as a catastrophe, namely the loss of their property, was in fact the instrument of their salvation. This study of the story's origin, and of its growth and perfection over time, focuses on two points: (1) over time, the authority claimed for the story has become less and less susceptible to corroboration (and, hence, to refutation); (2) those who tell the story are not liars,

However, it seems that we should also recognise that among those who tell the story, for many or perhaps even most, the question of historical truth is not a central one, for they are involved in teaching another type of truth, which Christian theologians aptly term ‘kerygmatic truth’ – the type of truth that is ‘proclaimed’ (Greek: kēryssō) by religion.85 Namely, just as many Dunera Boys  were starting to give up on the story, it wandered – on the basis  of the impetus afforded by Patkin’s 1979 volume – into the centres of ultra-Orthodoxy in New York and Israel. For writers in those contexts, what was important for the story is what beliefs  it preaches, not its historical truth

The case of the Dunera suitcase-salvation story thus seems to be similar to the one sensitively reconstructed by Baumel and Schacter in their study of a much better-known Holocaust story –that of the 93 Bais Yaakov martyrs of Cracow, young women who committed suicide to avoid enslavement in a Nazi brothel. That story too, which they are, in the end, unable to confirm or to deny, but which they tend to doubt as history, is one that is believed and circulated because it fulfils an edifying function and corresponds to other great stories of the Jewish past – and so it is disseminated by those who believe it and repeat it. In that case the story contributes to fitting the Holocaust into a long tradition of Jewish martyrdom; in ours – into a long tradition of salvation stories, of stories of miraculous reversals, of blessings in disguise. In both cases, to call those who disseminate the stories ‘liars’ is not only to assert more certainty about the stories’ historical untruth, and about the storytellers’ awareness of that, than is actually warranted. It also amounts to mixing categories improperly, for what they really claim for the story is kerygmatic truth. Historical truth might be taken for granted, but is not the point.

Here too, finally, the same distinction between historical truth and kerygmatic truth applies. How many people who watch the Aish HaTorah movie, for example, would assert that it is historically true? To assume that numerous viewers would make that assertion, we would have to assume that they would uncritically accept the blatantly vague report that ‘in approximately 1980 somebody opened the German navy archives from the Nazi era, and somebody was able to find the handwritten diary [of] a German submarine commander in the English Channel [sic] in July of 1940’ – but how many of them would depend on such vague statements in making any decisions about their own lives or businesses? Presumably, very few. And even if they were happy to believe the story, would they be willing to testify to its truth, or to invest money on the premise that it is true? Perhaps some would. But probably many more would respond with something like ‘I really don’t know, but “they” say it is true, and as far as I know it hasn’t been disproven; anyway, “se non è vero, è ben trovato”, by which I mean that even if it didn’t happen, it could have happened. What is important, for me, is that the lesson it teaches – that even in the face of tragedy we should remain optimistic and retain our faith in a providential God – is one that we believe is true and important to disseminate.’