The alarmed vision: Social suffering and Holocaust atrocity

Daedalus

Volumn 125, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 47-65

  Langer, Lawrence L ^a  

^a SIMMONS COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CRIME; EUROPE; GERMANY; HISTORY; HUMAN; JEW; PAIN; POLITICAL SYSTEM; PRISON; PUBLIC OPINION;

CONCENTRATION CAMPS; EUROPE; GERMANY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HOLOCAUST; HUMANS; JEWS; PAIN; POLITICAL SYSTEMS; PUBLIC OPINION;

EID: 0029680870     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. The translation is mine. For another version of this poem, as well as others by Dan Pagis, see Points of Departure, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981).
2. A main thrust of Pagis's poem is what Harold Bloom calls the "anxiety of influence." Hebrew literature of catastrophe continues to shape subsequent writing in that tradition, but the Holocaust and the "deportation" of Abel and Eve forces on the literary imagination a re-visioning and hence a revisioning of Scripture. Holocaust and Scripture now conspire to alter each other's texts.
3. This episode is recounted in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah by one of the two survivors of the Chelmno death camp. Similar narratives may be found in Martin Gilbert, Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985);
4. Charlotte Delbo's trilogy, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), esp. vol. I;
5. and Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991).
6. A comprehensive history of the Auschwitz death camp is Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994).
7. For further details about the killing facilities, see Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987).
8. The full story of the Riegner telegram and the US State Department's response may be found in David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). In addition to the failure to imagine the disaster threatening European Jewry, Wyman lists Roosevelt's fear of alienating non-Jewish supporters as well as anti-Semitism among higher echelons of State Department officials as reasons for the sluggish response to the Jewish situation. The public, too, including parts of the American Jewish community, did not view with enthusiasm an expanded immigration policy during years of lingering economic depression.
9. See Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's "Final Solution" (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1981)
10. and Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman, Breaking the Silence (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). Of course, even if Riegner could have provided intimate details of atrocity to convey the visceral horrors of the Final Solution, his more precise reports still might have been translated by the bureaucracy in Washington into technical memos shuffled from office to office, as was done with his original telegrams. The mentality prevailing in the State Department seemed more interested in managing the story than in responding to it with some form of prompt action.
11. Karski tells part of his story in Lanzmann's film Shoah. The full narrative appears (well before the end of World War II, it should be noted) in Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1944).
12. Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. Antony Polonsky, trans. Christopher Hutton (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 236-37. These questions are dated 9 January 1943, one week before the last entry in the diary, when Lewin and his daughter were presumably rounded up and deported to their deaths in Treblinka. Haim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) was the leading poet of the modern Hebrew revival. His "In the Town [or City] of Slaughter" was a response to the Kishinev pogrom in tsarist Russia in 1903, when forty-nine Jews were killed.
13. Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, Ibid., 81.
14. Perhaps the greatest threat of all to the stage on which we enact our existence is that behind the curtain nothing exists. But few of us are willing to contend with the possibility of meaninglessness in our lives.
15. For a detailed discussion of the influence of traditional Jewish catastrophe writings on later Holocaust literature, see David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Roskies argues that a direct line leads from one to the other, allowing for no permanent ideational rupture between, for example, depictions of pogroms and depictions of the destruction of European Jewry during World War II. All such efforts have common roots in a literature of lamentation.
16. For an alternate point of view, see Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975).
17. The question of "survivor guilt" continues to haunt us. The psychological community, especially in America, has made the idea an unchallenged premise about the survival experience. But in an unpublished paper presented at a conference sponsored by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Research Center in December 1993, Norwegian psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Leo Eitinger argued that "most survivors had the same self-reproaches one can hear in all cases of losses: 'If I had done this or that or if I had not done this or that, perhaps he or she would have lived today.'" Such "guilt," which Eitinger prefers to call self-reproach, is not specific to survivors but represents a common human response. Psychiatrist Anna Ornstein, also a Holocaust survivor, shrewdly refines this idea: "The frequently cited guilt in survivors, I believe, may not be related to having survived while others had died, but rather to the survivors' difficulty in reconciling their behavior and moral conduct during the Holocaust with their conduct and behavior under civilized conditions." See Anna Ornstein, "The Holocaust: Reconstruction and the Establishment of Psychic Continuity," in The Reconstruction of Trauma: Its Significance in Clinical Work, ed. Arnold Rothstein (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1986), 184-85.
18. Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony, Yale University, composite tape A-67, testimony of Bessie K. and Jacob K.
19. For a detailed discussion of the uniqueness of the Holocaust as an epistemological event (rather than as an illustration of comparative suffering), see Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context (Volume One): The Holocaust and Mass Death Before the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The concept of having missed one's "intended destiny" is born of the German intention to murder every living Jew with no exceptions, an intention that distinguishes the Holocaust from other atrocities, such as the ones in Cambodia and Rwanda. As Katz argues, the distinction is between historical events, not the quality or quantity of the suffering.
20. Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony, Yale University, tape T-1879, testimony of Judith G.
21. Ibid., tape 938, testimony of George S.
22. See Timothy W. Ryback, "A Reporter at Large: Evidence of Evil," The New Yorker, 15 November 1993, 78.