If we restrict our focus to the Auschwitz complex, what is the most ethical and rigorous way to guarantee the stories of non-Jewish victims (Poles, Soviet POWs, Roma) are not lost? Do US educators rely too much on a small selection of texts by survivors of Auschwitz, principally Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, as powerful as these writings are? 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. It wasn’t ‘West Germany’ that decided to put Auschwitz on trial in 1963—it was a few committed individuals and particularly Fritz Bauer” 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.

Books About the Holocaust That Changed My Life - BOOK RIOT The Books About the Holocaust That Changed My Life - BOOK RIOT

In the early years, people were actually not that interested in what survivors had experienced; they were only of interest as witnesses to the crimes of others, not as testimonies to what the past had done to them” 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” Only in West Germany did they refuse to adopt Nuremburg principles. In East Germany, they adopted a much broader definition which had to do with the fact that somebody was dead at the end of a process. In East Germany, former Nazis were six or seven times more likely to be prosecuted and convicted as in West Germany. I don’t think it’s possible to be dispassionate, actually. This does really challenge notions of historical objectivity. I simply don’t think it’s possible, for all sorts of reasons which include the selection of examples and the style of writing, as well as the arguments developed. It is possible to be historically accurate, writing an account that is true to and commensurate with the evidence, and yet at the same time be personally engaged with the material. History-writing is as much a creative act as an intellectual outcome of scholarly research. 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.It doesn’t make sense to use the individual crime of murder as the basis for prosecution when what you’re dealing with is mass murder, which is part of a system of collective violence.” How much does the politics that still bedevils this whole area of historical enquiry interfere with your work? Does it constrain you in any way? Is it something that you’re constantly dealing with, or is it an inevitable part of the work and something that you’re happy to embrace? 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. 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. What were the sort of compromises that he made that perhaps led to his survival? I know one of the books that didn’t make your shortlist was Filip Müller’s Eyewitness Auschwitz. He actually helped to run the gas chambers. Frankl obviously wasn’t doing that, but does he talk about the moral compromises within the prisoner community that went on in a fight to survive?

Fifteen essential books about the Holocaust - Pan Macmillan

The other thing to add about Bauer is that he was the guy who gave Mossad, the Israeli secret service, the tip-off on the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann so that they could kidnap him and bring him to Jerusalem for trial. Fritz Bauer didn’t trust the West German government to give Eichmann a decent trial and an appropriate sentence, so Bauer tipped off Mossad to ensure that Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem and not in West Germany. 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”. Finally, let’s move on to Marie Jalowicz-Simon’s Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany. I’d never heard of her, but this is probably the most extraordinary story of all the ones that you’ve mentioned. Tell us about it. 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. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.A towering book by a towering figure, theorist and critic, Arendt’s most famous work chronicles Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Famous for the coining of the phrase “the banality of evil,” which refers to the moral and emotional detachment Eichmann displayed, this book is so much more: a dense, exploratory treatise on the nature of humanity. Five Chimneys byOlga Lengyel One of the great Hebrew novels, Badenheim 1939 was beloved writer Appelfeld’s first novel to be published in English in 1980. It revolves around a fictional, mostly Jewish resort town in Austria, in which the Nazis, never explicitly mentioned, are disguised in the abstract as the “Sanitation Department,” a specter that drives the Jewish vacationers to distraction. Appelfeld was a survivor himself — and every word he wrote rings true. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

Auschwitz: The Shocking True Story of the I Escaped from Auschwitz: The Shocking True Story of the

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. What I find most difficult is actually confronting the subject matter. The subject matter itself is so disturbing, so upsetting and incomprehensible. Anyone who’s looked at this—and I’ve spent years and years and years trying to get my head around it—will still, on occasion, find it utterly incomprehensible, despite being able to give an account of it. It’s a very curious paradox.

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” 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:

Books on Auschwitz - Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Two Books on Auschwitz - Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust

Before we get into detail discussing your book choices, I think it might be helpful to understand exactly what Auschwitz was. It wasn’t just one camp, but a group of camps—is that right? 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. Before the war, he had been an academic specialist in suicide. His main practice had been helping people who were contemplating and at risk of committing suicide, trying to work with them to find ways of giving their life meaning, so they didn’t kill themselves. And he’d been quite successful in some of the techniques he used.In East Germany, former Nazis were six or seven times more likely to be prosecuted and convicted as in West Germany” In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Allies and other governments—the Polish state for example—sought to bring perpetrators to trial. In the late 1940s, you can find a lot of perpetrators on trial and get a comprehensive view of the horrific scale of the atrocities and the multiplicity of different organizations that were involved in making this machinery of mass murder possible. So, there was a very distinctive attempt to deal with it in a judicial way in the late 1940s. 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. It is effectively an alibi for so many Germans who pretend they “never knew anything about it”. And in one of my previous books, A Small Town Near Auschwitz, I explore the Nazi administrator of a nearby county, just 26 miles north of Auschwitz, who reduces the “it” to just the gas chambers. And there he was organizing the ghettoization, humiliation, degradation and starvation of more than 30,000 Jews in the town, making it easier for them to be rounded up by the Gestapo and the SS. And then, after the war, like so many others, he went on to a successful post-war career in the Federal Republic as a civil servant, and he “never knew anything about it” because he reduces the evil to just the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But it was all part of an enormous system of persecution across the Reich. 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.