Holocaust Literature
By Jonathan Berohn
With the observation of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, this seems like a good time to revisit Holocaust literature.
With the upswing in far right politics, Holocaust deniers, and just plain complacency, I personally think it’s always a good time revisit Holocaust literature, but that’s another story. What makes this genre so compelling is obviously the tragedy, but more that that it is about the strength of the authors who each, in their own way, ensured that their lives and their stories would not be extinguished.
The Diaries
Anne Frank
When you’re talking about Holocaust literature, it only makes sense to start with The Diary of Anne Frank. This is certainly the best-known first person account of the Holocaust, and you could do far worse than to read this book. If you don’t know that Anne Frank was a Dutch girl who hid from the Nazi’s with her family until they were betrayed and sent to Auschwitz, you really ought to move out of the barn you’ve been living in.
Anne Frank’s story is the story of a teenager trying to make sense of growing up in a world where her heritage means death. What makes Anne Frank’s work enduring is that at the same time she both sees things with insights of someone far beyond her years and sees things as an ordinary girl caught up in a whirlwind of terror which she can neither understand nor resist.
Victor Klemperer
If Anne Frank’s diary is the most well-known holocaust diary, Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness is probably the most important. Where there is a certain charm and tragic pull to Anne Frank’s youthful innocence, Kelemperer’s discerning and trained eye (he was a professor at the University of Dresden before Hitler’s discriminatory racial laws forced him out) lay bare the full horror of the oppression of living in Germany. From the slightly protected position of being a Jew married to a non-Jew, Klemperer was able to escape deportation and live out the war within Germany. His status did not prevent him, though, from being evicted from his house, barred from the streets, arrested and jailed, and living constantly in fear of the knock on the door that would mean deportation despite his wife’s status.
There has been no better description to date of what it was like to live in Nazi Germany as a Jew, what horrors Jews faced there, and how—even in the deepest darkness—there is some hope to be found within humanity. Klemperer’s diary should be on the short list of anyone who truly wants to try to understand the Holocaust.
While the diaries listed can help open the door to the chilling pall of living under constant and total oppressive fear, you have to move on to the death camp memoirs to truly begin to understand the surreal horror that awaited Nazi victims at the death camps.
The Camp Survivors
From the wrenching experience of being cast out of your home and life in the ghettos of Eastern Europe to the mind-addling claustrophobia of the cattle car train ride and the arbitrary selection process of death or slavery—the experience of the survivors is one everyone ought to be familiar with. As you might imagine, this literature is very powerful. Much of it is also very well written.
Perhaps the best three of these works are Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, and Imre Kertesz’s Fateless. While all three books share the common experience of condemnation to Auschwitz, each sheds light on different aspects of the experience and approaches the horror from different perspectives.
Levi, for example was one of the relatively small number of Italians who found themselves exiled to the camps. As a chemist, he ultimately managed to work his way into a job in a lab, which helped him survive.
Wiesel, on the other hand, served as an ordinary laborer and struggled to keep both himself and his father—the last members of his family—alive. Not only do we share in Wiesel’s desperation, but we also have to suffer with him when his father finally succumbs mere days from ultimate rescue by advancing Soviet forces.
Kertesz chose to deal with his Holocaust experience through the novel form, although his novel is, in fact, a thinly veiled memoir. Kertesz, whose novel won the Nobel Prize for literature, was deported from his native Hungary when he was still a teenager. As such, Fateless represents not only a struggle against death, but also a struggle to come of age while wallowing in the omnipresence of death. It is truly a important and moving book.
The Polish Perspective
Tadeusz Borowski is perhaps the least known of all the important Holocaust writers. He was a member of the Polish resistance and, as such, sent to Auschwitz for political “crimes” rather than racial “impurity.” As such, he was afforded the “opportunity” by the Nazi’s to save himself by helping man the extermination machinery.
In his collection of Short Stories This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, Borowski not only lets us in on the horrors of living through Auschwitz but also on the unbearable guilt he took away from it for having acquiesced in some small way and—more importantly—having survived.
Ultimately, this guilt proved too much for Borowski, and he committed suicide shortly after the war. His short stories paint a unique picture of how the Holocaust never let some of its victims out of its grasp even after they were freed.
For More Information:
You can buy these Diaries and more from the Preferred Consumer Store:
