Auschwitz: A History

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Out of more than 140,000 people investigated, fewer than 6,660 were actually found guilty—and of these, nearly 5,000 received lenient sentences of less than two years. Only 164 were found guilty of the crime of murder” For somebody surviving in hiding, it could be absolutely, terrifyingly difficult, but if you had the fortune to survive, you probably had a sense of a coherent self afterwards, in contrast to the experience Delbo describes of this sharp break with the past. It wasn’t ‘West Germany’ that decided to put Auschwitz on trial in 1963—it was a few committed individuals and particularly Fritz Bauer”

Books on Auschwitz - Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Two Books on Auschwitz - Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust

That aspect of the Holocaust has not lodged in public consciousness in the same way as the Auschwitz story. I think one of the things we have to remember is that the memory of survivors that has come down to us paints a very unique picture of people who are of a particular age group: young at the time, selected largely for slave labour because they were strong and fit to work, and who lived to a ripe old age in which they could communicate their experiences. Durlacher has uncovered that additional variant that doesn’t normally surface: not so severely damaged that you’re in a psychiatric institution, but damaged to the extent that you’re unable to articulate what you went through to the rest of the world. The ways in which survivors have been listened to has, in any event, changed massively over the last half-century. They were more or less ignored in the early post-war years. For a long time, nobody was really interested in them. They couldn’t get publishers, they couldn’t get outlets, they couldn’t get audiences. The one exception was Anne Frank, who of course was a quite different story. I want to begin to confront these questions, in light of constant concern about how little Americans understand of the Nazi genocide, by offering a list of books, 9 of them, written by survivors—Jews and non-Jews, men and women—about their hellish time in the Auschwitz complex. Exemplifying the imperative to witness, these works are much less familiar to audiences in the United States and may contribute to a more substantive historical knowledge of the Third Reich’s crimes.Many survivors have a sense that their ‘authentic self’ died with the family and the friends who perished in the Holocaust, and the person living later is someone completely different” It was really only from the late 1970s onwards that there became this obsession with memoirs and survivor testimonies. In the early years, even into the 1960s and 1970s, people were actually not that interested in what survivors had experienced; the survivors were only of interest as witnesses to the crimes of others, not as testimonies to what the past had done to them.

Books About the Holocaust That Changed My Life - BOOK RIOT The Books About the Holocaust That Changed My Life - BOOK RIOT

A towering book by a towering figure, theorist and critic, Arendt’s most famous work chronicles Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Famous for the coining of the phrase “the banality of evil,” which refers to the moral and emotional detachment Eichmann displayed, this book is so much more: a dense, exploratory treatise on the nature of humanity. Five Chimneys byOlga Lengyel I think another reason why it looms so large is because so much of it remains still and can be seen. It’s close to good transport links; it’s on the tourist trail from Kraków.

People in Auschwitz

With regards to Holocaust literature, the canon has been pretty well established. Seminal texts like Elie Wiesel’s Night, Anne Frank’s diary, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, have been, almost exclusively, informing our notions of what the Holocaust was actually like.