That’s an intriguing point you make about the interest in survivors’ memoirs and survivors’ testimony only taking off in the 1970s. What was it that changed around that time? We remember this—probably quite rightly—as an almost uniquely horrific crime in human history, and yet in the immediate aftermath of the war, it doesn’t seem to have registered in the way that one would have expected it to . . . There was no one in the German Reich in the 1930s who did not know that the Jews were being humiliated, ousted from their professions, ousted from their homes. After Kristallnacht in 1938 it was impossible for Jews to make a life in Germany anymore. And then to just reduce everything to the gas chambers of Auschwitz just seems to me so patently absurd. 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. I chose this for several reasons. She was a quite remarkable female resistance fighter in France, who was transported to Auschwitz after having to witness the murder of her husband. (The men were shot; the women were taken to Auschwitz.) She was on a convoy of 230 women sent there. They entered the camp supposedly singing the Marseillaise.

Holocaust Auschwitz Books - Goodreads

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? 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

Smoke Over Birkenau 

Around 8,200 people had been employed at Auschwitz. A few, including former camp commandant Rudolf Höss, had already been sentenced to death in Poland; others had been convicted on an individual basis in Allied trials. In the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, there were initially 22 defendants, two of whom dropped out due to illness. Ultimately, three were acquitted; one was given a youth sentence; ten received custodial sentences ranging from three and a half to fourteen years; and only six were given life sentences. The overwhelming majority of people who had worked at Auschwitz were never brought to court at all. 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. 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.” Successful in the sense that she managed to make both selves authentic. I’ve heard survivors completely break down in interviews because they feel the present isn’t their real life. I think Delbo was more stable. But this leads to another thing which I think is important about this account: she wasn’t Jewish. She makes it very clear how dreadful it was even for non-Jewish prisoners, and yet registers that it was even worse for Jewish prisoners.

Fifteen essential books about the Holocaust - Pan Macmillan

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. 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. 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. 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?

Smoke Over Birkenau

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. 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? 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 There is much that one could dispute about this gradual but steady process of foregrounding “Auschwitz.” Does the elevation of the latter mean a diminution of the history of the other extermination camps? If we confine ourselves to only Jewish victims, can the industrial annihilation which transpired at Auschwitz-Birkenau actually occlude understanding of what happened to Jews who succumbed to starvation and illness in the Nazi-organized ghettos of Eastern Europe, or who were savagely murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and their auxiliaries in the Soviet Union? What of the toll taken on Jewish inmates compelled to undertake the death marches in 1945?

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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. 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:

At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

Few names in any language prompt a sense of horror as does “Auschwitz.” When a person says “Auschwitz,” they rarely have to explain the reference; a chain of associations, images, and feelings—all of them dreadful—are borne with its utterance. Rarely does a word inflict such sharp, immediate, and lingering effects on listeners. She had to sell sexual favours as a young woman would have to do, and she was fortunate that one old Nazi that she actually managed to stay with was syphilitic and impotent, and therefore unable to avail himself of what she had on offer, but liked having her around. There were ruses she and many others used, with stories about lost papers, about being bombed out, taking on false identities. I think what’s interesting about her account is also that she’s a clever woman. She subsequently goes on to be a distinguished academic in East Germany. Her son, Hermann Simon, got her to record her testimony late in her life. He took down a very long interview with her and wrote it up, and it came out in an extraordinarily articulate way. He said he barely needed to edit it to produce the book. 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.