Auschwitz: A History

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Melanie wrote: "Does anyone else have an issue with Holocaust-denial books being included in this list?"

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

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. 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. Not at all. There were more trials of people who’d been involved in Auschwitz in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and there were several other major concentration camp trials in the 1960s and 1970s, going through to the Majdanek trial of 1975-1981 in West Germany. But all of them were bedevilled by this need to show subjective intent and excess brutality.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” At the famous ramp where the selections took place, you could go one way to the gas chambers and you were immediately dead; if you went the other way to slave labour, it was extermination through work. Average life expectancy, if you were selected for slave labour, was precisely three months. So, it’s not exactly a good chance of survival, but nevertheless it was the chance for survival for those who did survive. 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. KL Auschwitz seen by the SS - This volume contains reminiscences and a diary by three members of the SS: Rudolf Höss, the first camp commandant, Pery Broad, an SS non-commissioned officer in the camp Gestapo, and the SS physician Johann Paul Kremer. 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?

Well-Written Holocaust Books (848 books) - Goodreads Well-Written Holocaust Books (848 books) - Goodreads

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”.

People in Auschwitz

It’s easy enough to think that the Holocaust is simply a relic of the past; that it belongs only in history textbooks or in museum displays. Yet, the devastation and destruction it caused lives on today, which is why remembering it is so important. 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.

10 Holocaust Books You Should Read | My Jewish Learning 10 Holocaust Books You Should Read | My Jewish Learning

Hiding Abigail. The Girl with the Yellow Star. : An absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking WW2 historical novel 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: 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” 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.

Smoke Over Birkenau 

In October 1943, SS leader Heinrich Himmler gave two speeches, showing the full depravity of the exterminationist mindset.

Best Holocaust Survivor Novels (45 books) - Goodreads Best Holocaust Survivor Novels (45 books) - Goodreads

Told with a fairytale-like lyricism, this is a fable of family and redemption set against the horrors of the Holocaust. A poor woodcutter and his wife lived in a forest. Despite their poverty and the war raging around them, the wife prays that they will be blessed with a child. Filip Müller was a Slovakian Jew deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Miraculously surviving three years in that hell, he is most familiar to Americans from the interviews he did with Claude Lanzmann for the 1985 film Shoah. Translated by Helmut Freitag and Susanne Flatauer. New York: Stein & Day, 1979. 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. We need to understand the machinery of mass extermination that allowed a camp like Auschwitz to be constructed and to function and have all the sub-camps and to have all the involvement of industrialists and employers in slave labour—but we also need to explore why it was that, under some conditions, people who were simply bystanders were actually able to turn into rescuers—and why others chose to remain passive, or were instead complicit, betraying those who tried to hide and those who tried to help. And there were variations in the character of surrounding societies across Europe that affected the capacity of the persecuted to survive in different areas.

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It’s a highly contentious account because he is held to have been somewhat complicit. To what extent is not at all clear, but he certainly made compromises and survived through both his medical expertise and the privileged positions that he was able to hold. What’s interesting about his account, which I found absolutely fascinating, is the way he explores the importance of meaning in life as the key to survival. 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. Wanda wrote: "While a superbly written book, The Cellist of Sarajevo may not be appropriate for this list unless one is speaking about the Bosnian Holocaust of 1992-1995." Marking the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, The National WWII Museum connects two instances of remorse for Nazi criminality by leading German politicians. The Tobacconist tells a deeply moving story of ordinary lives profoundly affected by the Third Reich. Seventeen-year-old Franz accepts an apprenticeship with elderly tobacconist Otto Trsnyek and is soon supplying the great and good of Vienna with their newspapers and cigarettes.