Auschwitz: A History

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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: 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 Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.

I’ve got an issue with the predominant focus on Auschwitz because I think that, important though it is and horrifying though it is, it may inadvertently serve to displace attention from the multiplicity of other experiences and contexts. The Auschwitz story of arrival on the train and selection on the ramp for the gas chambers or slave labour has become the patterned narrative that we expect from a survivor. We don’t expect the miserable homosexual emerging after the war, too ashamed to talk about it. We don’t know the stories of those who are just shot into a mass grave outside their village in Eastern Europe. That’s one aspect that I think is extraordinary and extremely powerful: this very raw experience, particularly in the first part of the trilogy, which she wrote very soon after the war. The other thing I find fascinating is the way in which she tries to develop a notion of two selves: the disassociation of her post-war self from the Auschwitz-self, a complete disconnect (or attempted disconnect) between the self who experienced and lived through Auschwitz, and the self who survived and was recounting it. That captures what a lot of survivors try to convey in one form or another: this complete caesura in their lives between what they went through and how they live later. Different people deal with it in different ways, and come to terms with it in different ways.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.

The overwhelming majority of people who had worked at Auschwitz were never brought to court at all” That the Germans killed so many people like 10,000 per day. This coined the term Death Factories. It is really barbaric and I could not put down the book and sleep at the height of anger. I ended up light headed in the office for a couple of days because of few hours of sleep. Out of more than 140,000 people investigated, fewer than 6,660 were actually found guilty—and of these, nearly 5,000 received lenient sentences of less than two years. Only 164 were found guilty of the crime of murder”Auschwitz prisoners were even "sold" to the Bayer company, part of the I.G. Farben, as human guinea pigs for the testing of new drugs. One of the communications from Bayer to the Auschwitz authorities states that "The transport of 150 women arrived in good conditions. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price."

Let’s move on to the one history book you’ve chosen, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-65 by Devin O Pendas. We’ve talked about this already a bit, but can you tell me how the trial came about? How was it received and what were the “limits of the law” mentioned in the subtitle? There was a hierarchy of prisoners. At the bottom were the Jews considered unfit for work. They were killed. In the middle were the Jews, Russians and Poles who were considered fit for being worked to death. At the top were kapos and German prisoners who had specialist jobs. For these, Hoess set up a brothel in August 1943. The deniers have jumped on this bizarre fact – a death camp with a brothel? Come off it. Proves it was an okay place really. There were no gas chambers. And so on.I think this book should be essential reading for all, especially if one is interested in learning more about The Holocaust. The West Germans chose to resort to the old German criminal law; they didn’t want to adopt the Nuremberg principles. They didn’t want anything that was retroactive, punishing crimes that weren’t defined at the time. But the problem with the West German definition of murder was that it entailed showing individual intent and excess brutality. This meant, effectively, that if you couldn’t show that an individual was subjectively motivated to kill, they couldn’t be convicted of murder.