Auschwitz: A History

Product Information

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: Many survivors 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”

What the East Germans point out about the Adenauer government is quite true. Adenauer’s chief aide in his Chancellery, Hans Globke, had been the official legal commentator on the Nuremberg laws for Hitler in the mid-1930s. Theodor Oberländer—who was Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War under Adenauer—knew all about refugees and expellees from Eastern Europe precisely because he’d been concerned with “population planning” and involved in “anti-partisan” warfare under the Nazi regime, alongside the Einsatzgruppen, and potentially compromised in this way. It’s absolutely disgusting, actually, the number of former Nazis that Adenauer had in his government. East Germany was goading West Germany, if you like, to make a move. Canada" is that place where some chosen women work by sorting out the valuables of the Jews after they are gassed out. Working in "Canada" is a privilege as there are foods and roof above their heads but they are also tortured and raped by the Kapos. Requests to bomb Auschwitz were also reaching London. When Churchill heard about them on July 7, he wrote to his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, saying - now famously- 'Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.' The Air Ministry examine Now let’s move on to the books, which I found fascinating. You gave me a longer list initially, which I’m glad about because the ones you left off seem equally worthy of attention. I can see why you had trouble getting it down to five.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. When it comes to complex topics like the Holocaust, I think it's helpful to read from a number of sources. And often, the best books are those that offer us something new, either by presenting a piece of the puzzle that was missing or perhaps adding additional perspective that affords us a new way of looking at an old piece, allowing us to better place it. The ways in which survivors have been listened to has, in any event, changed massively over the last half-century. They were more or less ignored in the early post-war years. For a long time, nobody was really interested in them. They couldn’t get publishers, they couldn’t get outlets, they couldn’t get audiences. The one exception was Anne Frank, who of course was a quite different story.

Leslie Epstein’s greatest novel, this 1979 book gives a fictional account of Chaim Rumkowski, the Polish Jew appointed by the Nazis as the head of the Council of Elders (known as the Judenrat) in the Łódź Ghetto during the occupation of Poland. Rumkowski was seen as a villain, famous for his role in delivering children to the Nazis for extermination. Ponary Diary, 1941-1943 by Kazimierz Sakowicz When German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he meant that there was no way aesthetics—or art—could live up to the barbarism of the Holocaust. Maybe he was right. But here are 10 lesser-known texts that can, at the very least, increase our understanding—and our empathy. Badenheim 1939by Aharon Appelfeld Durlacher, like Otto Dov Kulka, talks about seeing the American airplanes flying across the blue skies above Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 . . . both boys saw them almost like little toys in the air” I learned many things about Auschwitz I didn't know before. Well written, intensely researched, intricately detailed, I learned about concentration camps, work camps, and death camps. I saw how European countries were culpable in the detention and transport of Jews to Auschwitz, and how many (not all) looked on as their neighbors were taken away. I thought perhaps Germans, Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, French, etc., really weren't aware of the mass extermination of human beings, and I found out that I was wrong. Everyone knew. I see now how it happened, and given the political climate in the U.S., I can see it happening again.

How to Vote

Not that I was happy to do it--but I did it. I never had to drink before to make myself enthusiastic--I was always enthusiastic enough. I'm not saying that I was indifferent, but I was calm and quiet and I did my work. You can compare me perhaps even to the Germans themselves who did it, because they also did their work. 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. Revenge is a dish best not served. If a victim's only sense of justice comes from victimizing his perpetrator it only perpetuates the cycle. The Germans felt victimized by the Jews in World War I (whether justified or not). If in the process of killing the monster you have to become one, have your really won? 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. 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 . . .

What changes then is this terrible period, the 1950s. From the late 1940s onwards, the Cold War takes precedence for the Western Allies. They start seeing former Nazis as useful in the fight against Communism, and West Germany as useful in the fight against Communism. So from then on, Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, and his government prioritized the rehabilitation of former Nazis and granted amnesties, early releases and cut sentences. The Allies—the Americans particularly—and West Germany were wholly of one mind on this. That leads me on very neatly to my next question. How will the memory of the Holocaust and its recollection change as the last survivors die in the next few years? Of course, in that same timeframe, the perpetrators will all be dead as well, which perhaps may be more significant. First and foremost, the forces that drove the Holocaust aren't so different from the forces that caused other atrocities throughout the world's history and the Germans aren't the only ones who have something to apologize for. 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 There’s a memoir called Prisoners of Fearby another survivor from Vienna, Ella Lingens-Reiner, who was a medical doctor imprisoned for trying to save Jews. She talks very much about just being in a more privileged position: not having her hair shaved, not having a number tattooed on her arm, not being so fully dehumanized, having slightly better rations, being respected for her intellectual and technical expertise as a medical doctor. She comments on how Eastern European Jews who had lived very hard lives as peasants were able to withstand the ordeal better than Western European Jews who’d had bourgeois existences and didn’t have the same kind of survival skills. There are many, many other things going on, but I find Victor Frankl’s account very fascinating.The Washington Post has this to say about the British Award Winning author and filmmaker Laurence Rees on his book "Auschwitz:" 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. There was no one in the German Reich in the 1930s who did not know that the Jews were being humiliated, ousted from their professions, ousted from their homes. After Kristallnacht in 1938 it was impossible for Jews to make a life in Germany anymore. And then to just reduce everything to the gas chambers of Auschwitz just seems to me so patently absurd.

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. 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. Another issue that I think is really, really important and can’t be emphasized enough is that it wasn’t ‘West Germany’ that decided to put Auschwitz on trial in 1963—it was a few committed individuals and particularly Fritz Bauer, the district attorney of the State of Hessen, who was himself Jewish and a socialist and had to flee into exile to escape Nazi persecution. Yes. It’s an interesting contrast to Delbo. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He spent very little time in Auschwitz; in fact, he was in Theresienstadt, the supposed ‘model ghetto’ for the Red Cross inspection. Then he was deported to Auschwitz where he spent only a short period of time because he was selected for labour. He spent most of the rest of the war in a sub-camp of Dachau in Bavaria.Laurence Rees με σεβασμό, ευαισθησία, αμεροληψία, εντιμότητα και έχοντας κάνει μια άρτια επιστημονική έρευνα, αναλύει ένα από τα πιο ειδεχθή εγκλήματα της ανθρωπότητας, μια μάυρη κηλίδα της ανθρώπινης ιστορίας.