Auschwitz: A History

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Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. By signing up you agree to our terms of use All But My Life: A Memoir by Gerda Weissman Klein How much does the politics that still bedevils this whole area of historical enquiry interfere with your work? Does it constrain you in any way? Is it something that you’re constantly dealing with, or is it an inevitable part of the work and something that you’re happy to embrace?

Holocaust Auschwitz Books - Goodreads

Now let’s move on to the books, which I found fascinating. You gave me a longer list initially, which I’m glad about because the ones you left off seem equally worthy of attention. I can see why you had trouble getting it down to five. 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. 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.You asked about the issue of putting perpetrators on trial this late—but not too late—that Germany mounted. That really came about as a result of a change in the law that took effect with the conviction of John Demjanjuk in 2011 (when the former concentration camp guard was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for acting as an accessory to murder, although he died while his appeal was still pending). The effect was to establish that working in a place, the primary purpose of which was putting people to death, was by itself sufficient to prove that individual to be an accessory to murder. Had they done that in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, we could have put a vast number of perpetrators on trial, but they didn’t. Austria is also a very significant comparison. There, it wasn’t the law that was a problem, it was the public culture. The law would have permitted prosecutions and convictions in a much broader way than in West Germany. The problem was that juries tended to acquit former Nazis and it was becoming embarrassing even to put them on trial, so they simply ceased prosecuting after too many embarrassing acquittals. 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. When German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he meant that there was no way aesthetics—or art—could live up to the barbarism of the Holocaust. Maybe he was right. But here are 10 lesser-known texts that can, at the very least, increase our understanding—and our empathy. Badenheim 1939by Aharon Appelfeld Melanie wrote: "Does anyone else have an issue with Holocaust-denial books being included in this list?"

Auschwitz The Imperative to Witness: Memoirs by Survivors of Auschwitz

What the East Germans point out about the Adenauer government is quite true. Adenauer’s chief aide in his Chancellery, Hans Globke, had been the official legal commentator on the Nuremberg laws for Hitler in the mid-1930s. Theodor Oberländer—who was Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War under Adenauer—knew all about refugees and expellees from Eastern Europe precisely because he’d been concerned with “population planning” and involved in “anti-partisan” warfare under the Nazi regime, alongside the Einsatzgruppen, and potentially compromised in this way. It’s absolutely disgusting, actually, the number of former Nazis that Adenauer had in his government. East Germany was goading West Germany, if you like, to make a move. Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Transylvania when she was deported to Auschwitz; she was able to secure work in an infirmary, a job that ultimately saved her life. This 1946 memoir is an unflinching account of her time in that area, her interactions with Dr. Josef Mengeleand her observations of the medical experiments performed on inmates. A deeply uncomfortable read, Lengyel’s memoir is a necessary living, breathing document. King of the Jews byLeslie Epstein 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.What changes then is this terrible period, the 1950s. From the late 1940s onwards, the Cold War takes precedence for the Western Allies. They start seeing former Nazis as useful in the fight against Communism, and West Germany as useful in the fight against Communism. So from then on, Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, and his government prioritized the rehabilitation of former Nazis and granted amnesties, early releases and cut sentences. The Allies—the Americans particularly—and West Germany were wholly of one mind on this. Cindy wrote: "How is And Then There Were None or On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet about the holocaust? Just because it's set during World War II doesn't make it a holocaust book. It needs to be about the Jews or Germany or the concentration camps."

Best Holocaust Novels (183 books) - Goodreads

Themis-Athena wrote: "Also, what am I not remembering about Bel Canto that makes it fit the bill here? Terrorism and hostage taking in South America are quite a stretch from the (or even "a") holocaust as well IMHO ..." Seweryna Szmaglewska was a Polish Catholic who produced one of the initial first-hand accounts of the extermination process at Auschwitz. Translated by Jadwiga Rynas. New York: H. Holt, 1947. He returned to Germany after the war and was determined to mount the Auschwitz trial as a full-blown explication of the crimes of the Nazis, in the face of massive opposition. Most people in high places in West Germany in the late 1950s when he began this attempt, through the early and mid-1960s while he mounted the trial, were opposed to the process. It wasn’t West Germany facing up to its past. It was Bauer pushing it through against significant political opposition. 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. 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.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. Frankl looks more at the inner life and how the use of your mind can give meaning to life and give you a ray of hope in the darkness. He talks about, for example, the way in which he holds mental conversations with his young wife, who would have just turned 24 on the day after his arrival in Auschwitz. She didn’t survive, but through the rest of the war he didn’t know that. He had imagined conversations with her and mentally he took himself to another place. He took pleasure in what he could, like a ray of sunshine coming through the clouds, or thinking about light in the darkness and then suddenly seeing a farm house’s lights turn on as they were returning from work. He’s looking at how the inner life could assist in survival, which I think is extraordinarily interesting, although it’s not a sufficient explanation by any means.