Auschwitz: A History

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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. One of the reasons Auschwitz has loomed so large in the public imagination is because there are so many survivors from all across Europe writing memoirs in all European languages and representing quite different communities—whether the French Resistance or the Polish resistance or Greek Jews or Hungarian Jews. There were many, many different communities who could subsequently identify with survivors after the war and who provided audiences for their memoirs and publications and accounts. A massive extermination system, Auschwitz-Birkenau, or “Auschwitz II,” was installed by the SS as part of the systematic, continent-wide genocide of European Jews which began in late 1941-early 1942. With its apparatus of gas chambers (made to look like showering facilities) and four crematoria, Auschwitz II could literally murder 15,000 people per day.

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Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. It correlates with the student revolts of the 1960s—the beginning of an extra-parliamentary opposition that emerged in the 1960s, fed up with the Adenauer era. Adenauer ceases to be Chancellor in 1963. There’s a lot of student unrest developing in the 1960s; these are people in their 20s, born in the 1940s, suddenly exposed to the full horror of the crimes of their elders (and supposed betters), then galvanized into that generational conflict summarised as “1968”. In the early years, people were actually not that interested in what survivors had experienced; they were only of interest as witnesses to the crimes of others, not as testimonies to what the past had done to them” That this gripping story of memory and tragedy won both the 1996 National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award should clue you in to how extraordinary this book is. What begins, familiarly, as the story of a young boy learning about the tragic but mysterious fate of his relatives in the Holocaust, ends in a continent-spanning labyrinth, a sad and seductive tale of near mythic proportions. The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. by George Steiner There is much that one could dispute about this gradual but steady process of foregrounding “Auschwitz.” Does the elevation of the latter mean a diminution of the history of the other extermination camps? If we confine ourselves to only Jewish victims, can the industrial annihilation which transpired at Auschwitz-Birkenau actually occlude understanding of what happened to Jews who succumbed to starvation and illness in the Nazi-organized ghettos of Eastern Europe, or who were savagely murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and their auxiliaries in the Soviet Union? What of the toll taken on Jewish inmates compelled to undertake the death marches in 1945?It’s a highly contentious account because he is held to have been somewhat complicit. To what extent is not at all clear, but he certainly made compromises and survived through both his medical expertise and the privileged positions that he was able to hold. What’s interesting about his account, which I found absolutely fascinating, is the way he explores the importance of meaning in life as the key to survival. Well, I was supposed to find five books on Auschwitz. I’m wilfully choosing one which isn’t about Auschwitz, but rather about evading it. In some of the interview testimonies gathered by the different foundations that are collecting them, you get a similar sort of reflection, where some people say that the self that lived on afterwards is not their ‘real’ self. They 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, though they may appear to be alive and have a new family and a new life and so on. I think Charlotte Delbo was particularly successful in the way that she negotiated that. Filip Müller was a Slovakian Jew deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Miraculously surviving three years in that hell, he is most familiar to Americans from the interviews he did with Claude Lanzmann for the 1985 film Shoah. Translated by Helmut Freitag and Susanne Flatauer. New York: Stein & Day, 1979. Introduced to the American public in the early 1960s by Philip Roth, Borowski’s spellbinding short story collection was based on the writer’s two-year incarceration at Auschwitz as a political prisoner. Borowski, who was a non-Jewish Polish journalist, provides a perspective on camp life quite different from the more common survivor narratives. Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi GermanybyMarie Jalowicz Simon

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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. The overwhelming majority of people who had worked at Auschwitz were never brought to court at all” Top image is of the entrance to Auschwitz, 1945, courtesy of Bundesarchiv B 285 Bild-04413, KZ Auschwitz, Einfahrt. Only in West Germany did they refuse to adopt Nuremburg principles. In East Germany, they adopted a much broader definition which had to do with the fact that somebody was dead at the end of a process. In East Germany, former Nazis were six or seven times more likely to be prosecuted and convicted as in West Germany. Jarmila wrote: "Hi,can anyone recommend me the books that are dealing with the problem of post traumatic stress of holocaust survivor? tx"A 65 rating and he is positioned at #30! It's impossible! this guy is a notorious spammer of list." 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” The fact that she was a member of a resistance group allowed for a sense of community on returning after the war. They returned singing as well as having entered singing. They could sing, and this was not possible for other survivors. I think she’s in striking contrast to somebody like Gilbert Michlin, for example, who I write about in my book, who was a Jewish French prisoner deported from France to Auschwitz. When he returned to France, he had to keep the fact that he was Jewish quiet and pretend he was just French because the myth of resistance was so big in post-war France and there was still a festering antisemitism. So, his return to France was much more miserable than Delbo’s. There was also “Auschwitz III,” the concentration camp at Monowitz (Polish Monowice), sometimes designated the Buna subcamp, four miles from the main camp. I.G. Farben, the chemical conglomerate, operated, in conjunction with the SS, a gigantic and brutal forced-labor network there. 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.