Auschwitz: A History

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I think another reason why it looms so large is because so much of it remains still and can be seen. It’s close to good transport links; it’s on the tourist trail from Kraków. Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. By signing up you agree to our terms of use All But My Life: A Memoir by Gerda Weissman Klein

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Introduced to the American public in the early 1960s by Philip Roth, Borowski’s spellbinding short story collection was based on the writer’s two-year incarceration at Auschwitz as a political prisoner. Borowski, who was a non-Jewish Polish journalist, provides a perspective on camp life quite different from the more common survivor narratives. Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi GermanybyMarie Jalowicz Simon I have always fancied myself an amateur World War II historian. I have been fascinated with that war since I was a child and my grandfather, a WWII veteran himself, would sit me down as a kid and willingly tell me stories about his time in the Pacific. But despite my fascination with the war itself, it was the Holocaust that I gravitated toward. The sadness, torture, horror, and unbelievable loss of life during the Holocaust is something I can never understand. To think something so outrageous could have happened only seventy plus years ago is surreal. One of the reasons why it’s become so incredibly significant in the public imagination is that it was the largest single camp that combined both an extermination camp and a labour camp. It had the largest single number of murders in the Holocaust—more than a million people were murdered there—but also an enormous number of survivors, because of this huge complex of labour camps and subcamps that it ran. So it combined the two functions. It’s worth thinking about what risks they were taking. Why were they doing it? Very often you find it’s basic compassion and a sense of humanity. They think they just have to do it, even though many who were discovered were put to death. Tens of thousands of people are involved here, and I think that’s worth remembering. Some were willing to be duped, to be misled, to pretend they believed the story that someone had been bombed out and had lost their papers or whatever. Others were willing to help actively in forging papers and passing people on and getting people out and I think that’s a really interesting area to explore.

The generation born just after the Second World War would themselves have been young adults then, and they would have had no personal interest in hiding the crimes of the Third Reich. It correlates with the student revolts of the 1960s—the beginning of an extra-parliamentary opposition that emerged in the 1960s, fed up with the Adenauer era. Adenauer ceases to be Chancellor in 1963. There’s a lot of student unrest developing in the 1960s; these are people in their 20s, born in the 1940s, suddenly exposed to the full horror of the crimes of their elders (and supposed betters), then galvanized into that generational conflict summarised as “1968”. One of the reasons Auschwitz has loomed so large in the public imagination is because there are so many survivors from all across Europe writing memoirs in all European languages and representing quite different communities—whether the French Resistance or the Polish resistance or Greek Jews or Hungarian Jews. There were many, many different communities who could subsequently identify with survivors after the war and who provided audiences for their memoirs and publications and accounts. We have many stories of ghettos, but even there, we sometimes see a kind of implicit hierarchy of suffering or heroism. We also have an implicit view of ‘survivor’, meaning someone who survived the camps. But I think we have to try to understand the full range and impact of experiences of Nazi persecution, including for those who managed to get out before the war. Sadly, too few were able to emigrate in time.

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In the end, out of more than 140,000 people investigated in the Federal Republic, 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 actually found guilty of the crime of murder. A lot of the West German public didn’t follow the trial at all, and even those who followed it were pretty hostile to it. But I think that it was terribly important in bringing the issue so vividly to public attention that it could no longer be ignored. It galvanized a younger generation into feeling that there was a generational fight that they had to take on. One of the things I found difficult about choosing books that are still in print is that many don’t convey the experiences of those who never wrote—those who were much less successful, or less literate, or didn’t have the means or the wherewithal to publish. At the same time, the political parties in Austria were concerned to rehabilitate and integrate former Nazis. A lot of political pressure was put on judges, prosecutors and defence attorneys to ensure acquittals. From 1955 onwards, there were very few cases indeed in Austria. Those that were brought tended to end in acquittals; then from the mid-1970s the trials simply dried up entirely. Yes, there’s another book that I could have put in, Rebecca Wittmann’s book on the Auschwitz trial, Beyond Justice. Both, in different ways, point up that the West German choice to use the ordinary criminal law definition of murder was totally inappropriate for trying people who had been involved in a genocide. Collective violence is different from individual violence.

Auschwitz and After 

Let’s move on to sociologist Gerhard Durlacher’s The Search: The Birkenau Boys. He was a child during Auschwitz and wrote this book in the 1980s. It’s a search for the other boys who were taken there with him, right?

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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. Durlacher has uncovered that additional variant that doesn’t normally surface: not so severely damaged that you’re in a psychiatric institution, but damaged to the extent that you’re unable to articulate what you went through to the rest of the world.

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 Yes, it’s a good read. I think it’s an important read. What it also brings out well is the public reactions to, and the wider significance of, the Auschwitz trial. We’ve made a big deal of it and that’s in part because there was massive media coverage, largely because of the way Fritz Bauer mounted the trial. Bauer was determined to ensure there was media coverage. He was determined to ensure that victims and survivors were brought from all around the world to give evidence, a bit like the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. 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? First in your selection of books on Auschwitz, we have Charlotte Delbo. Tell me a bit about her story and why you chose her trilogy, Auschwitz and After.