Auschwitz: A History

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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 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

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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. 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.

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That’s an intriguing point you make about the interest in survivors’ memoirs and survivors’ testimony only taking off in the 1970s. What was it that changed around that time? We remember this—probably quite rightly—as an almost uniquely horrific crime in human history, and yet in the immediate aftermath of the war, it doesn’t seem to have registered in the way that one would have expected it to . . .

10 Holocaust Books You Should Read | My Jewish Learning 10 Holocaust Books You Should Read | My Jewish Learning

The overwhelming majority of people who had worked at Auschwitz were never brought to court at all” 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.

Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers

I don’t think it’s possible to be dispassionate, actually. This does really challenge notions of historical objectivity. I simply don’t think it’s possible, for all sorts of reasons which include the selection of examples and the style of writing, as well as the arguments developed. It is possible to be historically accurate, writing an account that is true to and commensurate with the evidence, and yet at the same time be personally engaged with the material. History-writing is as much a creative act as an intellectual outcome of scholarly research. 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. That’s one aspect that I think is extraordinary and extremely powerful: this very raw experience, particularly in the first part of the trilogy, which she wrote very soon after the war. The other thing I find fascinating is the way in which she tries to develop a notion of two selves: the disassociation of her post-war self from the Auschwitz-self, a complete disconnect (or attempted disconnect) between the self who experienced and lived through Auschwitz, and the self who survived and was recounting it. That captures what a lot of survivors try to convey in one form or another: this complete caesura in their lives between what they went through and how they live later. Different people deal with it in different ways, and come to terms with it in different ways. We need to understand the machinery of mass extermination that allowed a camp like Auschwitz to be constructed and to function and have all the sub-camps and to have all the involvement of industrialists and employers in slave labour—but we also need to explore why it was that, under some conditions, people who were simply bystanders were actually able to turn into rescuers—and why others chose to remain passive, or were instead complicit, betraying those who tried to hide and those who tried to help. And there were variations in the character of surrounding societies across Europe that affected the capacity of the persecuted to survive in different areas. Yes, there’s another book that I could have put in, Rebecca Wittmann’s book on the Auschwitz trial, Beyond Justice. Both, in different ways, point up that the West German choice to use the ordinary criminal law definition of murder was totally inappropriate for trying people who had been involved in a genocide. Collective violence is different from individual violence.