Auschwitz: A History

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That leads me on very neatly to my next question. How will the memory of the Holocaust and its recollection change as the last survivors die in the next few years? Of course, in that same timeframe, the perpetrators will all be dead as well, which perhaps may be more significant. So although the Holocaust is history, it’s really not so distant. In fact, some survivors are still alive to tell the tale – memoirists like Dr Edith Eger and Eddie Jaku can still recall the horrors with burning clarity. And with the rising tide of antisemitism and fascism around the world, it feels more pertinent than ever to remember those whose lives were stolen (both physically and mentally), to ensure such hatred never seeps so deeply into society again. Not all of them came to the reunion. What becomes very clear is that they all had different ways of dealing with the past. Otto Dov Kulka became a professional historian; he wrote about anything but his personal experiences until his very late memoir. Another one became a painter, another a rabbi. But the miserable man from Queens was not there. He wouldn’t talk. They just had a dreadful dinner in New York and that was it. There was no one in the German Reich in the 1930s who did not know that the Jews were being humiliated, ousted from their professions, ousted from their homes. After Kristallnacht in 1938 it was impossible for Jews to make a life in Germany anymore. And then to just reduce everything to the gas chambers of Auschwitz just seems to me so patently absurd.

I'm not sure I can do a book like this justice in a review other than to say it was an excellent compliment to other readings I've done to this point.Yes. It’s an interesting contrast to Delbo. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He spent very little time in Auschwitz; in fact, he was in Theresienstadt, the supposed ‘model ghetto’ for the Red Cross inspection. Then he was deported to Auschwitz where he spent only a short period of time because he was selected for labour. He spent most of the rest of the war in a sub-camp of Dachau in Bavaria. The generation born just after the Second World War would themselves have been young adults then, and they would have had no personal interest in hiding the crimes of the Third Reich. Killing is easier to do from both a physical and psychological distance. Ideologically, killing is easier when you can convince yourself that the person you are killing is somehow less than human, unworthy of life...or less worthy of life, and/or an immediate threat to your well-being.

A question that had always bothered me was answered: Why didn't the Allies bomb the camp, or the railway lines? From pps. 244-245: 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 Toivi Blatt, a boy sent to Sobibor (a death camp) and spared so he could assist in the killing process by cutting hair, sorting clothes, taking baggage and cleaning camps.

Novels about the Holocaust

Indeed, if there is one general takeaway from this history, it is that only the most strong-willed of individuals can rise above their moral climate. Most people (and I am thinking of perpetrators, not victims here) simply go along with prevailing attitudes. There were plenty of ideologically committed Nazis, such as Höss; and there were probably many Groenings, who just wanted a stable job. But there is no record of a single SS officer deserting or refusing to serve at Auschwitz on moral grounds. Indeed, the most disturbing thing of all is that, without exception, none of the former perpetrators interviewed by Rees feel much, if any, remorse. Groening was finally motivated to speak about his experiences, in his old age, not because of lingering guilt, but because he encountered some Holocaust deniers (he wanted to assure them that it was real). My first exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust occurred in the early ‘60s. My sixth-grade teacher—a Holocaust survivor—told us stories about her confinement and even showed us her tattoo to support her story. Later, as a freshman in college, I had a professor of German language who had escaped from one of the Nazi concentration camps. She told us about her experience walking across the Alps to freedom. Since then, I have read a number of history books that have added to my mental picture of these camps, starting with Jean-François Steiner’s book Treblinka in the late ‘60s. Nevertheless, after reading Laurence Rees’s book Auschwitz: A New History, I discovered that there was still much I did not know about the horror of these extermination camps. 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.

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. It wasn’t ‘West Germany’ that decided to put Auschwitz on trial in 1963—it was a few committed individuals and particularly Fritz Bauer” The West Germans chose to resort to the old German criminal law; they didn’t want to adopt the Nuremberg principles. They didn’t want anything that was retroactive, punishing crimes that weren’t defined at the time. But the problem with the West German definition of murder was that it entailed showing individual intent and excess brutality. This meant, effectively, that if you couldn’t show that an individual was subjectively motivated to kill, they couldn’t be convicted of murder. It is as if, for people like Toivi Blatt, the realization came in the camps that human beings resemble elements that are changeable according to temperature. Just as water only exists as water in a certain temperature range and is steam or ice in others, so human beings can become different people according to extremes of circumstance. Pendas also shows that the way the press reported the trial interacted with a wider ambivalence among the public. You had these younger journalists who thought they were mounting this great crusade to bring Auschwitz to public attention, and a wider public who were unsettled by this and didn’t like it. But the highest percentage of those opposed to the trial were people who were young adults in the Third Reich who’d actually been mobilized to fight for Hitler, who’d been participants in the war. That’s very interesting.In Auschwitz chaos and efficiency were fused together. It was never one thing, not even one camp. It was originally a labour camp for Polish political prisoners and some German criminals; then came the Russian prisoners of war. And it grew and grew. Eventually "Auschwitz" was an area of about 25 square miles. There were two big camps, Auschwitz I and Birkenau, then there were 43 sub-camps which appeared as industries such as I G Farben and Bayer moved in and constructed nearby factories and paid the SS for slave labour. (Bayer is one of the companies I now indirectly work for, it's one of our big pharma clients). Then some low level gassing experiments began, which in time led to huge purpose-built crematoriums with built-in gas chambers being constructed in Birkenau, and we arrive at this summary : Auschwitz prisoners were even ‘sold’ to the Bayer company, part of I.G. Farben, as human guinea pigs for the testing of new drugs. One of the communications from Bayer to the Auschwitz authorities states that: ‘The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price." 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. One of the things I found difficult about choosing books that are still in print is that many don’t convey the experiences of those who never wrote—those who were much less successful, or less literate, or didn’t have the means or the wherewithal to publish. I have always fancied myself an amateur World War II historian. I have been fascinated with that war since I was a child and my grandfather, a WWII veteran himself, would sit me down as a kid and willingly tell me stories about his time in the Pacific. But despite my fascination with the war itself, it was the Holocaust that I gravitated toward. The sadness, torture, horror, and unbelievable loss of life during the Holocaust is something I can never understand. To think something so outrageous could have happened only seventy plus years ago is surreal.