60 YEARS LATER: LIBERATING AUSCHWITZ

Sixty years ago today the death camp at Auschwitz was liberated.  A year earlier, the bigger part of my maternal grandfather's family was killed there.

My grandfather was held at Mauthausen.  He was among the fortunate few survivors of the assault on European Jewry.

My parents don't really talk about this period in their lives, despite my repeated entreaties.  I realize now I'm unlikely to ever know the details.  I've alluded here previously how I came late to a fuller and meaningful grasp of the intertwined history of Europe and my family.  It was the inspiration of my first short story The Number, and is also the theme of what I hope will be my third novel.

It's a day of quiet reflection for me; of marveling at the narrowness of chance with allows me to write this to you all; of considering family members forever unknown to me; of wondering at the terrible secret histories my parents endured.

Since this is a literary blog, it seemed appropriate to mark the day by noting some titles of note regarding the Holocaust in general and Auschwitz in particular.  Adorno's dictum notwithstanding, the words continue to come, as they clearly must.  Herewith an unscientific and personal sampling of my reading of note on the subject:

Fiction:

Fateless; Kaddish for an Unborn Child; Liquidation, Imre Kertesz.  I haven't yet read this trilogy by the Hungarian Nobel Prize winner but it's sitting on my living room table.  The truth is there's a certain amount of fear and hesitation at what is sure to be a painfully familiar journey (my father, as TEV readers know, is Hungarian, and my mother lived in Budapest).  But any current literary consideration of Auschwitz must surely start here.

Spark of Life, Erich Maria Remarque.  The author best known for All Quiet on the Western Front also wrote this tale of death camp prisoner 509.

The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick.  In this justly celebrated book of short stories, the title story tells of a mother witnessing her baby's death at the hands of camp guards. Another story, "Rose," describes that same mother thirty years later, still haunted by the event.

The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., George Steiner.  Misunderstood and attacked in its inital release, this harrowing and magnificently written novella imagines the capture and terrifying eloquent "trial" of a post-war Hitler, living in a South American jungle.

The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski.  Kosinski, who like Primo Levi later committed suicide, penned "the greatest example of what is coming to be known as a 'second- generation' book: a contemporary report of the hell in which a survivor of the Holocaust must live, one generation after the event." (Thanks to Dave Lull and Lizzie for the quote/correction.)

The Archivist, Martha Cooley.  Told after the fact, as news of the Holocaust becomes known, this deeply moving novel grapples with the question of how to absorb the awful knowledge.

Night, Elie Wiesel.  Perhaps the best known of Holocaust novels.

Non-fiction:

If This is a Man, Primo Levi.   The definitive account of life in Auschwitz.  "Here there is no why."

The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg.  One of the first and, by many accounts, still the definitive overview of the Nazi's systematic extermination plan.

Ordinary Men and The Origins of the Final Solution, Christopher Browning.  Browning is one the preeminent chroniclers of the Holocaust.   His Ordinary Men is one of the most disturbing of Holocaust studies, as it examines the origins of the mobile killing units in the east, and how a group of blue collar middle aged men could become enthusiastic murderers.  (Much of his data was co-opted for Daniel Goldhagen's profoundly flawed Hitler's Willing Executioners.)  His latest book, the massive The Origins of the Final Solution, is a work poised to share the shelf with Hilberg as one of the most comprehensive and thorough reviews of the machinery of the Holocaust.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt. Her controversial New Yorker coverage which gave birth to the much-debated question of the "banality of evil."

Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1, Saul Friedlander.  Probably the best overview and introduction to the subject.

Preempting the Holocaust, Lawrence Langer.  Langer is a controversial chronicler of the Holocaust but his ideas resonate deeply with me and have informed much of my own thinking on the subject.  He suggests, among other things, that it's deeply trivializing to play the "what would I have done" games, and that movies and novels on the Holocaust generally do a deep disservice as they approach the subject from a Triumph of the Spirit angle, which he argues is the wrong narrative. 

Nine Suitcases, Bela Zsolt.   Another Hungarian, this one writing as a memoirist.   I began reading this a few weeks ago but had to set it aside.  It's clear, however, that it's a powerful, monumental work, newly available in this country.

Maus I & II, Art Spiegelman.  The graphic novels that got the world paying attention.  I'm more partial to Maus II but both are unforgettable reads.

I Shall Bear Witness I & II, Victor Klemperer.  The recently published extraordinary daily journal of the rise of the persecution of the Jews, culminating with the firebombing of Dresden.

Finally, you can find many interesting link on the Literature of the Holocaust here.

Not a cheerful reading list, I know, and not one to be taken in one sitting.  But an essential one, to be sure.

Comments

[Old Hag]

Mark, what a nice post. One thing -- I love the painted bird too, but I thought they determined that it was mostly fiction....? (As in, really actually not anywhere near a memoir, since Kosinski was not in fact a Holocaust survivor?) Did that debunking get debunked too?

[Dave Lull]

"Although The Painted Bird may not be directly about the Holocaust, although it may not be based on Kosinski's own experiences during the Holocaust, it is nevertheless an indispensable document of the Holocaust. It is perhaps the greatest example of what is coming to be known as a 'second- generation' book: a contemporary report of the hell in which a survivor of the Holocaust must live, one generation after the event."

From:

A Life Beyond Repair
Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography. By James Park Sloan. Dutton. 505 pp. $27.95.
Reviewed by D. G. Myers

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9610/reviews/myers.html

[Scott]

Mark, are you familiar with Jorge Semprun's 'Literature or Life'? A friend gave it to me years ago in Chicago and its been in my head ever since.

[TEV]

Thanks Dave & Lizzie - brainfarted there, was on autopilot.

Scott, don't know the Semprun but will check it out on your say-so.

[Jimmy Beck]

Lovely post. I'd add Martin Gilbert's big book.

[Dan Green]

What got debunked was Kozinski's claims to have experienced what the protagonist of his novel experiences. As a work of fiction, The Painted Bird still holds up.

[Jessica]

My husband's grandparents never spoke of their pre-U.S. lives, except to mourn those they lost (in Austria and France). We travelled to Vienna last spring and were able to work some historiography voodoo and piece together some of their story. I very much look forward to reading The Number, and the novel.

[Dave Worsley]

Excellent work. Does anyone have any idea if Martha (Archivist) Cooley is coming along on another work of fiction? What a standout book! Again, nicely done, Mark

[MG]

Lovely post, Mark. And what a great list, too.

[TEV]

Thanks for sharing those images, Jessica. And I appreciate the kind words, Laila.

Dave, Martha Cooley's new book, Thirty Three Swoons comes out in May. I have a galley on my desk as we speak, and it's next up after Ian McEwan. I'll also be doing a Q&A with her.

[Jenny D]

Yes, thanks for the list.

A wonderful book that everyone should read is David Weiss Halivni's "The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction."

[Martha]

Great weblog... great list of books... it was nice to see mention of Jorge Semprun in a post.

For those of you who are not familiar with the work of Jorge Semprun, I cannot praise his work highly enough. He is one of Europe's truly great intellectuals, and it is a shame that so little of his work is available in English. Aside from two books written in Spanish, the rest have been written in French. Google him and you will begin to get a sense of who he is. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, where he was a Communist prisoner from the age of 20 to 22, he and Elie Weisel did a broadcast together for French radio which was then reprinted as a monograph: Se Taire Est Impossible. He has written fiction and non-ficiton, and may be best known to English-speakers as the scriptwriter of Alain Renais' La Guerre est Finie,Costa Gavras' Z as well as the films State of Siege and Stavisky. The supremely ironic moment of his life must have been when he, an exile from Franco's Spain, was phoned by Felipe Gonzales, the first democratically elected Socialist Prime Minister of Spain in 1988 who asked Semprun, to become his Minister of Culure, which he did. It's all in the books - and much, much more.

[David]

A very touching post. I too am a child of survivors -- but not of Auschwitz. The literary references are very interesting and I plan to follow up on several of them.