Auschwitz: A History

Product Information

This is truly an essential book on the most horrific incident in human history. One of many horrific events. One wonders whether humans will ever evolve beyond this kind of brutality, but the rise of Nazism in the 21st century seems to give rise to skepticism in that regard. Let’s move on to Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. He was a highly educated man, an academic psychoanalyst. Tell us a bit about this book—it’s a combination between a memoir of Auschwitz and also a work of psychoanalysis.

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. I chose this for several reasons. She was a quite remarkable female resistance fighter in France, who was transported to Auschwitz after having to witness the murder of her husband. (The men were shot; the women were taken to Auschwitz.) She was on a convoy of 230 women sent there. They entered the camp supposedly singing the Marseillaise. 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. 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 . . . 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.

to move very cautiously about offering to take all the Jews out of a country – if we do that then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar efforts in Poland and Germany. Hitler may well take us up on any such offer and there are simply not enough ships and means of transportation to handle them. (p312) I think this book should be essential reading for all, especially if one is interested in learning more about The Holocaust. 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. 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. In East Germany, former Nazis were six or seven times more likely to be prosecuted and convicted as in West Germany”

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. One of the most disturbing aspects of this analysis is, in my experience, that it is one shared by many perpetrators. I remember one former dedicated member of the Nazi party saying to me in an exasperated manner, after I pressed him on why so many went along with the horrors of the regimes, "The trouble with the world today is that people who have never been tested go around making judgments about people who have."Rees is equally critical of the nations that the German's occupied during the war such as Poland, Slovakia, France, and Hungary, none of which made any concerted effort to prevent the Germans from removing the Jews, even if like Hungary and Vichy France, they had definite government control. The only country that Rees applauds is Denmark, where a concerted effort by government, police, and citizens allowed the death toll for Denmark's Jews to be under 100 out of an estimated 8000 living in the country at the start of the occupation. The above book makes brief mention of the important topic that Jarmila raised: PTSD affecting Holocaust survivors. The author mentions it when he describes the day of his liberation at the end of a 12-day Hunger March. Here is the quote: 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 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.