Effective Representation of the Holocaust

            There is no doubt that the Holocaust is representable.  Various texts, both historical and fiction, as well as film, art, music, and other expressive medium, have all been employed in attempts to represent the Holocaust.  Aside from active portrayals, numerous sources also document the tragic events, and represent the Holocaust in more indirect manners.  The success of all representations should be explored, not in terms of complex overall depiction , but for their ability to effect some level of understanding.  Evaluation requires answers to some key questions: What was the original purpose of the representation?  What aspects of the Holocaust do we gain a greater understanding of?  How does the audience react? Numerous analyses can reveal the effectiveness of a Holocaust representation.  Focusing, however, on the three questions posed above, application of them to the various forms of portrayal studied in class will reveal that each once deserves to be called a representation.

            Our discussion began with a study of the history of racism.  Reading early works by Blumenbach, and Lavater, one may begin to understand how a group of people could acquire a common reputation.  While Blumenbach stressed environment as the cause of racial differences, he still pointed out these “differences.”  His specific references to Jews gave them a universal facial configuration.  Lavater went on to become the “father of physiognomy,” a questionable science studying physical characteristics and gestures.  He claimed that a person could be read by their facial features.  Combine Blumenbach’s Jewish face with Lavater’s character analysis, and the conclusion is obvious:  Jews all share a common set of character traits.  Once these great “scientists” had revealed this “truth,” it was a simple step to assign the Jewish traits.

            Reading Martin Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies (1523) , we observe that many ideas about Jews had already been circulating for a long time.  Throughout a European history of crusade, reformation, schism, and constant religious evolution, the Jews were seen as an obstinate, unchanging people, refusing to face overwhelming persuasion: “even though they have heard for fifteen hundred years, and still hear,…they still stuff their ears shut like serpents….” (Luther, pg. 289)   This remaining outside and apart made the Jews easy targets of false accusation.  Four centuries after Luther, when “experts” validate the hereditary nature of Jewish separateness, racial science becomes all the rage.  Not surprisingly, those who embrace physiognomy’s tenants cite their own race as most superior.  This is not merely a German phenomenon.  Galton’s Hereditary Genius gives English judges top billing on the race ladder.  The profusion of German racial science can be attributed to a Post-WWI atmosphere which insisted on reasserting their stripped national pride.  Inventing an “Aryan” race, unique to their culture and country, and superior to all others was a tremendously uplifting pursuit.  The tragedy of the Holocaust seems to result, according to the study of racism history, from the promotion of one “race” at the expense of another.  The Jews, a historical underdog group, were a convenient scapegoat for German fears.

            How effective are these texts in representing the Holocaust?  We have already explored which aspect of the Holocaust to which they lend understanding – the beliefs of racial inferiority of the Jews.  Next we address the question of purpose.  These texts were obviously not written as historical analyses of the Holocaust – the extermination of Jews had not yet taken place.  They were articles in scholarly journals, or books circulated by notable publishers.  Their purpose was not to document the racial thinking of their time, but to develop it.  Does this detract from the effectiveness of racial science and physiognomy texts in representing the Holocaust? This question can be answered by looking at the reactions of those who read the works.  It is indubitable that the Nazi policies for and final extermination of the Jews is the result of superiorist race thinking.  In this light, the documents which led to such flagrant atrocities can definitely be called upon to represent them.  By doing so, they remind us of how such seemingly ridiculous ideas can realize themselves into one of the most horrifying displays of human abuse.

            Nazi documents of the events leading up to, and culminating in, the final solution, are crucial to the study of the Holocaust.  Are these documents representative of the malignancies they mandate?  The dry and often euphemistic accounts of ghetto life, work camp conditions, and death camp quotas cannot give a reader a true perspective of the events that transpired.  They do, however, provide a deeper understanding of how a person could commit such deeds.  By first examining Anti-Jewish legislation, we glimpse the extent to which fear played a role in the Jewish oppression.  The Nazis were so obsessed with keeping their gene pool “clean” of Jewish influence, they pass the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, Sept. 15, 1935.  This law not only forbids intermarriage and intercourse between Jews and “Germans,” it prohibits the employment of German females under 45 by Jews!  This is no longer a scientific journal, but a government policy.  The first orders to Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen further reflect this fear, the “concentration of the Jews from the countryside into the larger cities,” to establish “as few concentration points as possible”  (Dawidowics, pg. 60). Heydrich calls this a preparation for the “final aim,” but the move certainly reflects the fears of the “superior” race.  Heydrich is so seized by Jewish threat of “infection” that he has them separated completely from the "German” people, all the while claiming orders from higher up the chain of command.  Unlike the promulgated laws, Heydrich’s orders are signed with his own name, just as the personal undertaking of orders by those below him are carried out, in the final reckoning, alone. Responsibility for the life and death of an entire people is too much weight for a person to bear.  Even the overall management as decided at the Wannsee Conference was split: “primary responsibility for the handling of the final solution of the Jewish question…is to lie centrally…with the Reichsführer SS and the Chief of the German Police” (Dawidowics, pg.74). 

In a seemingly very different document, Paul Kremer, a Nazi doctor experimenting at Auschwitz kept a memoir of his time there.  From the start, he called his involvement in such procedures “special actions,” and mentioned them in passing between lengthy descriptions of prisoner concerts and delicious dinners.  He not only euphemized the experiments, but his role in them as well.  Kremer did not “experiment,” or even “participate,” but was merely passively “present at a special action” (Kremer, pg.214). 

            Where the racial science documents reason, the Nazi laws, orders, and accounts show us how human beings can carry out those scholarly conclusions.  They employed euphemisms to no end, avoided blame by “following orders,” and dissociated themselves from the horrors, focusing instead on the mundane trivialities of daily life.  Where other representations of the Holocaust relate what transpired, the Nazi documents lend insight into how.  Whether intended for public promulgation, confidential orders, or personal journals, all of the Nazi documents demonstrate fear, superiority, and lack of a personal sense of responsibility.  The reader may find comfort in the human inability to fully embrace the evil he or she may commit, or conversely may be horrified that a person could so casually participate in the atrocities of the Holocaust.  Whatever the reader’s reaction, the Nazi documents are invaluable Holocaust representations for their effectiveness in demonstrating the position of the transgressors.

            Jewish documents from the Holocaust are powerful testaments to the actual victimization of Jews.  The memoirs, survivor stories, and even ghetto administration minutes flesh out the sketches drawn by Nazi euphemisms.  The Judenräte, German-appointed administrative committees of Jewish ghettos provide insight into the abuse suffered by themselves and their contingents.  Adam Czerniaków kept a diary of his ordeals as head of the Warsaw Judenrat.  He struggled “coming to terms with God and with [him]self,”  (Dawidowics, pg.424)  and suffered constant headaches, lack of sleep, and a bad heart, demonstrating the tremendous pressure exerted upon the Jewish community by the Germans.  His earlier leadership of community activities was forced into administrative wrangling, vain attempts to provide food and care for thousands of starving people, all the while feeling the hot breath of the SS down his neck.

            Josef Zelcowicz’s account, “Days of Nightmare,” provides an eyewitness narration of the harrowing deportations from the Lotz ghetto in September 1942.  A Yiddish journalist and essayist, Zelcowicz is detailed and psychologically observant.  He recounts his desperation over the latest development – extermination.  “There is simply no word, no power, no art able to transmit the moods, the laments, and the turmoil prevailing in the ghetto…” (Dawidowicz,  pg. 299).  With his very words, Zelcowicz denies the ability to represent the horrors of the Holocaust, and yet the unspeakable nature of the Holocaust experience is key to understanding just how terrible the abuses were.

            Testimony from survivors of the Holocaust are some of the most powerful means of understanding the ordeals inflicted by the Nazis.  Every story is different, and each more horrifying than the next.  Even the manufacturing-line style executions at the death camps could not have been experienced the same by any two victims.  Human beings are not only individually unique in their physical makeup, but in their experience of life as well.  When Mr. Ebner visited our class to recount his own story, the extreme poverty forced upon Jewish slaves was driven home when he found a treasure in the pump room at Trzebinia – a rag with which to wrap his frozen feet.  No photographs of starving prisoners, no weather reports accompanied with facts about prisoner clothing, nor the stark numbers of food rations per slave per week could express the utter inadequacies of work camp life like Mr. Ebner’s simple testimony. 

            Eyewitness accounts of Jewish ordeals are an essential ingredient to Holocaust representation.  Those who were never there will never truly know, but these accounts are necessary for understanding even a small fraction of what the victims experienced.  Unlike the Nazi documents, most Jewish accounts of the Holocaust are intended to capture, for future recollections, the events that actually transpired in a personal way.  The reader or listener may feel even more distant from the experience afterwards, but will understand that this type of representation is not so much a matter of grasping wholly as sharing some of the pain and tragedy of the Holocaust.

            Fictional writing on the Holocaust is a great medium for both the writers and the readers of the works.  Fiction gives the writer a method of expressing his or her experience through a less threatening means, perhaps, than an absolute divulgence.  For the reader, fiction opens the realm of experience from “him” to “me.”  How many times have we picked up a book, and found irresistible the pull of the following page?  A fictional character can grip us and relate to us in ways that other testimonies cannot.  In Aharon Applefield’s short story “Kitty,” the girl’s curiosity and mystique over her developing body bring life to a person who never existed.  The reader can feel Kitty’s language barrier frustrations: “French words…emerged with only the greatest effort, twittering syllables which took on meaning only by virtue of the voice…” (Raphael, pg.32). As she hides in the cellar from the Nazis, we can smell the beets fermenting in jars.  These are the kinds of connections that bring the reader actually into the character, and into the experience of the Holocaust. 

            In Arnošt Lustig’s “The Lemon,” we can actually understand how a child could remove a tooth from his dead father’s mouth just for the hope of a piece of fruit.  Isaiah Spiegel demonstrates how cruel the simple confiscation of an animal can be in “A Ghetto Dog” when “the compulsory surrender of her dog had come as such a shock to the widow that at first…she had clutched her head with her withered fingers and had remained still for several minutes” (Raphael, pg. 242).  These accounts reach the reader in a way that simple story-telling cannot.  The little details of life are what evoke our deepest sensibilities, and are key to gaining an understanding of something as hard to grasp as the Holocaust. 

            Racial “science” texts demonstrate the way that human beings could reach such a tragic point in history.  Nazi documents provide insight into the ability of the perpetrators to carry out such acts.  Jewish accounts of the Holocaust provide crucial information on the actual events, as well as a more personal approach.  Finally, works of fiction evoke the most intimate connections with the experiences of the Holocaust.  All of these mediums represent the Holocaust in some way.  Each one is effective in garnishing an understanding of some unique aspect that no other medium can accomplish.  The best comprehension possible for those who did not experience the Holocaust requires exposure to numerous forms of representation.