Reading the Holocaust

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, the Wall Street Journal asked Robert Rozett, director of the Yad Vashem Library in Jerusalem, to pick “five best” books on the Holocaust.

In case the link doesn’t work, Rozett lists:

·         Nazi Germany and the Jews; Saul Friedländer, HarperCollins, 1997, 2007

·         Ordinary Men; Christopher R. Browning, HarperCollins 1992

·         The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943; Ysrael Gutman, Indiana University, 1982

·         If this Is [a] Man; Primo Levi, Orion Press, 1959

·         The Lost; Daniel Mendelsohn, HarperCollins, 2006

It’s hard to argue with the director of Yad Vashem’s library, but I didn’t get that expensive liberal arts education for nothing. So a few thoughts:

Perhaps the difficulty is in the restriction to only five (WSJ’s weekly snapshot into literature and culture). Interesting that he left out Elie Wiesel’s Night; but perhaps he decided to limit the experiences at Auschwitz to Levi’s memoir. That may also account for the omission of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Yet, as powerful as Night and If this Is a Man are, Frankl’s study of why some inmates in the death camps lived and others didn’t helps us understand the works of those who did survive. It can also help us make sense of and find a path through our own chaotic world. (and no, I am not comparing corporate America with Treblinka; Natzweiler, maybe.)

Briefly put, Frankl concluded: “If a prisoner felt that he could no longer endure the realities of camp life, he found a way out in his mental life - an invaluable opportunity to dwell in the spiritual domain, the one that the SS were unable to destroy. Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and thereby improved his chances of survival.”

One prisoner painstakingly reconstructed his interrupted doctoral thesis in his mind; another stayed alive through the hope and expectation that he would reunite with his fiancée and build a future. Where everything else was equal—malnutrition, brutal guards, backbreaking forced labor—those who focused on a reason to live, survived; those who didn’t, died. It’s that old forest-trees thing, and it’s entirely within our individual capability.

If you don’t want the experience of 1933-1945 to be nothing more than a testimony to the capacity of men to commit evil in multiple permutations, I highly recommend Man’s Search for Meaning.

To further round out Rozett’s list, a few titles:

Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. It’s essentially the same subject matter as the Browning book recommended by Rozett. In case you ever think that Einsatzgruppen are a uniquely Nazi phenomenon, read either of these books. Frankly, I think Goldhagen carries on long after his point was made, but he’s an academic, so what are you going to do?

Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi War; Lynn H. Nicholas; and Witnesses of War, Nicholas Stargardt. Both on the same subject. Not strictly Holocaust, but children (especially Jewish and Slavic) were targets of Nazi policies in ways that are difficult to understand. Neither of these is an easy read in terms of subject matter; I wouldn’t do what I did, which was read them one after the other.

Some of these childhood experiences are captured in Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust, Thomas Geve; and …I Never Saw another Butterfly… The former was in the bibliography of Nicholas’s book; the latter I discovered when working at the Children’s Room of the Pasadena Public Library in high school. Guns & Barbed Wire is Geve’s illustrated memoir of life at Auschwitz; he was 13 years old when he arrived there. Butterfly is a collection of drawings and poems from children at the Terezín camp, most of whom died at Terezín or were murdered at Auschwitz.

Terezín was the Nazis’ Potemkin lager—a transit camp-cum-ghetto for Jews removed first from Prague, then from other areas of the Reich. Built on the old Hapsburg town of Theresienstadt (pre-war population around 5000), it housed tens of thousands in ghetto conditions, although it was considered posh enough to show to visiting Red Cross officials as an example of benign treatment of Jews. Of those who didn’t die of starvation, disease or brutality at Terezín, most were killed at Auschwitz.

There are other books to emerge from this camp; two I recommend:

Terezín Requiem, Josef Bor; out of print, but may be available at your library. There was a high proportion of creative professionals at Terezín. A young conductor, Raphael Schacter, decided to put on a performance of Verdi’s Requiem, not the easiest of works to perform under any circumstances. Schacter had to contend with the arrival and disappearance of performers, both musicians and singers, as he ran through rehearsals. Everyone was acutely aware of the symbolism of Jewish performers under a death sentence singing a Catholic mass for the dead. An added irony: Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, was a featured guest at the performance. You won’t be able to listen to the Requiem in the same way after reading this. 

In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin, Cara De Silva. A collection of recipes from the starving women at Terezín, it represents how these women reconstructed their lives, using the metaphor of cookery, which was a major component of their pre-war world. The recipes connected them to the comfort of plenty (even if only relatively speaking), when food was available; there was fuel for cooking; dishes, linen and cutlery had been handed down through the family. The recipes also connected them to the occasions of meals—Shabbats, visiting guests, birthdays, Seders; when families congregated to celebrate and the whole truly was more than the sum of the parts.

It may occur to us that writing down instructions for meals impossible to produce in the circumstances for people no longer around was the ultimate in building castles in the air, but it’s not about culinary accuracy or even reality. It’s about the capacity—the charge—to transcend circumstances.

One more item for Holocaust remembrance: Paper Clips, video/DVD. Related book, Six Million Paper Clips: The Making of a Children’s Holocaust Memorial, Peter W. Schroeder. A rural, predominantly white Protestant middle school in Whitwell, Tenn., was studying the intolerance; their principal used the Holocaust as the ultimate example of the concept. The kids were having a hard time grasping the magnitude of the numbers involved: how much is six million? They decided to collect six million paper clips, to put a comprehensible bracket around the number. The project takes years and involves participants from around the world. 

Requiem, Memory’s Kitchen and Paper Clips all embody what Frankl speaks about—it is in trying to understand our world, to find sense in our experiences, that we transcend the hells we find (and make) here.

When we remember the Holocaust, we should also hold onto this.