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
·
Ordinary Men;
Christopher R. Browning, HarperCollins 1992
·
The Jews of Warsaw ,
1939-1943; Ysrael
Gutman , Indiana
·
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 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.
When we remember the Holocaust, we should also hold onto this.
