Auschwitz: A History

Product Information

I wanted to say that all of these details and stories, from the revolt at Sobibor (one of the three death camps) led by Slovakian POWs, to the way Jews of Denmark were transported across a body of water in the dead of night to Sweden, and mostly escaped the horrors that met Jews in many other countries - are all larger contextual details and information that have relevance to this thorough and accessible account of Aushwitz. There were gruesome stories of the roundups, the one from Izbica in Poland where Janek denounces his friend Toivi saying "He's a Jew. Take him." Janek then said goodbye to me in a way that is difficult even now for me to repeat...he said, "Goodbye Toivi. I will see you on a shelf in a soap store." (p. 255). One needs to realize that the remains of cremated prisoners were not actually used for soap, but they were used as fertilizer and the ash fell in the river, so the Nazis were eating and drinking the dead Jews quite literally. That in addition to sleeping on mattresses filled with Jewish women's hair, wearing clothes woven from that same hair, etc. etc. The industrial nature of converting literally millions of humans into compost and industrial products is just appalling and terrifying in this reader's view.

What I find most difficult is actually confronting the subject matter. The subject matter itself is so disturbing, so upsetting and incomprehensible. Anyone who’s looked at this—and I’ve spent years and years and years trying to get my head around it—will still, on occasion, find it utterly incomprehensible, despite being able to give an account of it. It’s a very curious paradox. It’s easy enough to think that the Holocaust is simply a relic of the past; that it belongs only in history textbooks or in museum displays. Yet, the devastation and destruction it caused lives on today, which is why remembering it is so important. First and foremost, the forces that drove the Holocaust aren't so different from the forces that caused other atrocities throughout the world's history and the Germans aren't the only ones who have something to apologize for. Hitler and his henchmen were likely a product of their environment. The Germans weren't alone in their anti-semantic policies and the Holocaust couldn't have taken place on the same scale without the complicity of other nations and tens of thousands of individuals who either cooperated with the lunacy (willingly or through coercion) or turned their heads the other way.Previously, my only knowledge about Holocaust was those from watching Schindler's List and The Pianist and reading Anne Frank and Victor Klemperer (read in April of this year). This book, however, Auschwitz: A New History, gives a more details on what happened not only in Auschwitz but also in the other lesser-known death camps like Birkenau, Sobibor, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, etc. The idea of a superior race was not exclusive to the Germans. History is replete with examples of cultures who suffer from delusions of supremacy and seem to feel justified in efforts to segregate or "save" the world from the undesirables. I think it's also relevant that at that time in history the idea of eugenics had gained the interest and support of the scientific community. One of the reasons why it’s become so incredibly significant in the public imagination is that it was the largest single camp that combined both an extermination camp and a labour camp. It had the largest single number of murders in the Holocaust—more than a million people were murdered there—but also an enormous number of survivors, because of this huge complex of labour camps and subcamps that it ran. So it combined the two functions. 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.

She had to sell sexual favours as a young woman would have to do, and she was fortunate that one old Nazi that she actually managed to stay with was syphilitic and impotent, and therefore unable to avail himself of what she had on offer, but liked having her around. There were ruses she and many others used, with stories about lost papers, about being bombed out, taking on false identities. I think what’s interesting about her account is also that she’s a clever woman. She subsequently goes on to be a distinguished academic in East Germany. Her son, Hermann Simon, got her to record her testimony late in her life. He took down a very long interview with her and wrote it up, and it came out in an extraordinarily articulate way. He said he barely needed to edit it to produce the book. That the Germans killed so many people like 10,000 per day. This coined the term Death Factories. It is really barbaric and I could not put down the book and sleep at the height of anger. I ended up light headed in the office for a couple of days because of few hours of sleep.

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. One of the great Hebrew novels, Badenheim 1939 was beloved writer Appelfeld’s first novel to be published in English in 1980. It revolves around a fictional, mostly Jewish resort town in Austria, in which the Nazis, never explicitly mentioned, are disguised in the abstract as the “Sanitation Department,” a specter that drives the Jewish vacationers to distraction. Appelfeld was a survivor himself — and every word he wrote rings true. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder I just wanted to add that. It is important, I feel, to get a larger view of the factors and decisions that resulted in so many people to be removed from their homes, their countries, and their families, leading them to Aushwitz, Sorbibo, Treblinka and Belzec, and these facts should not be forgotten from history, or disregarded as unimportant. None of us really knows that monster that lives within us. The "what ifs" are almost impossible to predict. The idea that only innately evil/bad people are capable of doing evil/bad things is naive and simplistic. Beliefs dictate our morality and thus draw the only lines in the sand that matter.