Holocaust literature

Writing about the Holocaust entails numerous innate inconsistencies and antithetical viewpoints. On one hand, many point towards the universal nature of Holocaust (Z. Nałkowska: “people brought this fate upon people”), while others emphasise the unprecedented and exclusively Jewish nature of these events (H. Grynberg: „“people brought this fate upon Jews”). The fundamental lack of certainty whether the Holocaust can at all be framed in the categories of rational discourse and using traditional forms of literary expression is accompanied by the conviction that this experience above all others must be put into words so that others may learn about it.

One must make a distinction between the works made at a time when the extermination of Jews was still in progress and the works written after the war came to an end. The former are a description of the reality of the present day – one that is constantly closing in, consuming everything in its path; the latter use various means to somehow come to terms with the traumatic past. The wartime events and experiences, written down in the heat of the moment, are presented from the perspective of a victim – trapped and condemned, with no chance of escaping.

On the other hand, recollections of the past are made from a survivor’s perspective, yet no survivor is ever safe, for he or she still bears the scars of memory – scars that can never heal. For writers who recorded the events there and then, the individual feeling of danger transforms into the realisation of a catastrophe that befalls the entire community – a genocide which unravels right before the world’s indifferent eyes. In these circumstances, writing becomes a moral obligation to bear testimony, a mission the aim of which is to alert the world to all those horrors and to literally send shock waves through the conscience of the world; in addition, it also constitutes an overt act of defiance against the impending doom, a manifestation of the desire to leave a lasting trace of both one’s own existence and of a nation wiped off the face of the earth.

The works written during the Holocaust tell of the horrors of those times and, at the same time, remain a part of those times themselves, like the artifacts which have survived the ravages of war. In these writings, the truth of the testimony and the truth of the records are becoming an inseparable whole. The most striking examples of such works are the handwritten notes of Sonderkommando prisoners, found among the ashes of the crematory in the Brzezinka concentration camp (Wśród koszmarnej zbrodni – Surrounded by a Heinous Crime), the Ringelblum Archive recovered from underneath the rubble of the city of Warsaw as well as many journals and diaries written behind the ghetto walls or in secrecy, on the so-called Aryan side of those walls.

Poetry devoted to the Holocaust have been collected in Z Otchłani (From the Abyss), an anthology published illegally during the war, edited by T. Sarnecki; after the war, M.M. Borwicz collected these poems in the tome entitled Pieśń ujdzie cało. Antologia wierszy o Żydach pod okupacją niemiecką (The Song Shall Remain – An Anthology of Poems About Jews under German Occupation). The works of Władysław Szlengel – the most eminent poet of the Warsaw Ghetto – is collected in the tome of poetry entitled Co Czytałem Umarłym (What I Have Read to the Dead), published by I. Maciejewska.

Eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust are both examples of the broadly understood biographical literature (diaries, journals, memoirs) and of the so-called belles-lettres (poetry, prose fiction or, to a lesser extent, drama). The question of how to describe a world that is beyond description presents the writer with an artistic dilemma, yet for anyone who decides to write about the Holocaust, this dilemma is, first and foremost, of a moral nature. One of the attempts to solve this dilemma has been the extension of the boundaries of literary expression and striving towards a form with a greater capacity, so that it may encompass the truth contained in both individual and collective experiences – a truth of which death and suffering are the ultimate proof. Another option is to try and abandon the realm of art altogether in favour of a direct testimony and the authentic description of the facts which simply do not lend themselves to any form of literary embellishment.

Writing memoirs and diaries serves as a therapy intended to heal memory itself; apart from bearing testimony, it is also intended to release us from a psychological nightmare, as is the case with the memoirs of Adina Blady-Szwajger entitled I Remember Nothing More, written by a doctor from the Warsaw Ghetto fourty years after the Holocaust, or with another retrospective reconstruction of the traces of a childhood spent in the confines of the ghetto made half a century later by Michał Głowiński in The Black Seasons.

Narrative prose evokes the nightmare of the Holocaust using a variety of storytelling strategies. In these works, a child proves to be a remarkably insightful narrator, for in its eyes the terror of the Holocaust reveals itself with a particularly devastating force. It is this type of Jewish narrative that appears in Grynberg’s Jewish War, in Bread Thrown to the Dead by B. Wojdowski or in God’s Horse by Wilhelm Dichter. The narrator in The Black Stream by L. Buczkowski is unable to control the world around him, and the unleashed fury of destruction and slaughter causes the very structure of the novel to collapse, for the horror of the Holocaust simply cannot be described in a systematic way. The stories by A. Rudnicki, S. Wygodzki and I. Fink are a proof of the confidence they placed in traditional literary forms.

Their power of expression confirms that a short narrative which places an emphasis on the specificity of the reality depicted by the authors as well as on the fragmentary nature thereof can encapsulate the experiences associated with Holocaust more efficiently than the classic novel, with its multi-layered structure and omniscient narrator. A detached view of the depicted world characteristic of more extensive narrative forms as well as the drive towards a comprehensive approach and interpretation thereof remain in stark contrast to the innate darkness of the Holocaust.

This dissonance is particularly acute in the lengthy novel by M. Tomkiewicz entitled Of Bombs and Mice as well as in Yom Kippur by K. Traciewicz. Works which deal with Holocaust themes often cannot be framed within the traditional typology of literary genres. In her collections of short forms such as Hypnosis, Dancing at Someone Else's Wedding, Evidence of Existence and There is No River There Anymore, Hanna Krall weaves together stories that one could term documentary fables, listening to the voices of survivors and meticulously collecting the tiniest traces of memories, impressing her own emotions, imagination and her struggle to achieve understanding on the stories of others. The evolution of Grynberg’s narrative form leads from the expression of his own, individual experience to a story of many individual fates that coalesce to form the fate of the entire community (Drohobych, Drohobych).

Having first remained firmly anchored in the autobiographical novel genre, he subsequently begins to back away from literature in favour of a collage of archival documents: the stories told by Jewish children taken away from Russia by Anders' Army (The Children of Zion) and the chronicle of the Łódź ghetto (The Chronicle). Other works of a documentary nature are the publications containing records of conversations: from the literary reconstruction of the talks between K. Moczarski and general J. Stroop at a Stalinist prison (Conversations with an Executioner) to the authentic records contained in In a Circle(?). Conversations with Jewish Soldiers by A. Grupińska or On a Meadow of Ashes. Survivors of the Holocaust by B. Engelking.

Another related genre is the so-called reconstructed diary, in which the author writes down a Holocaust survivor’s story on his behalf (M. Czapska, The Star of David. A Story of One Family, J. Wiszniewicz And Yet Sometimes I Still Dream). Umschlagplatz by J.M. Rymkiewicz – a cross between an essay and a piece of narrative prose – and The Border Stone by P. Matywiecki – which fuses philosophical and religious meditation and an anthology of voices from the Warsaw Ghetto supplemented by the author’s commentary – form a genre of their own among the other hybrid literary forms created over the years. Holocaust literature features a number of dominant core themes.

Numerous works which explore the theme of the ghetto expound the experience of people trapped behind the walls: their suffering and death, their humiliation and degradation, their spiritual resistance and their struggle for dignity. The so-called Aryan side – the world behind the walls – remains a separate theme, representing both a chance of salvation and a deadly trap, a place where Jews went through the ordeal of living in hiding and the terror of blackmail, experiencing both kindness and treachery. All these themes can be found, among others, in the works of Grynberg and Rudnicki, in Samson by K. Brandys and in The Beginning by A. Szczypiorski. In his novella entitled Run to the Hills, Stanisław Wygodzki, created a deeply moving study of the relations between an entangled trio of characters: a Jew living in hiding, a Polish woman who granted him shelter and her neighbour, obsessed with the desire to track down the concealed fugitive.

Another, separate sub-genre is made up of those works which tell not of the Holocaust per se but of the landscape that remained in its wake. The very title of a collection of stories by I. Amiel, Scorched, constitutes an apt metaphor of the fate of those condemned to salvation. The existential state of those who were scorched by the fires of the Holocaust involves its indelible presence even after it has ended – a memory of the Holocaust that overshadows one’s everyday life as well as the terrifying heritage that passes on the children of those who survived. One of the writers that tackles these themes is S. Benski (the author of the stories The Most Vital Particle and The Imperial Waltz, as well as of the novel The Survivors); Bogdan Wojdowski devoted his collection of short stories called Job’s Holiday and his novel The Other Side to these themes, which were subsequently also approached by the writers of the young generation: R. Gren (A Landscape with a Child) and Z. Rudzka (The Mikveh). H. Krall and H. Grynberg are persistent in their attempts to track down the traces of Holocaust in their writings.

Yet the theme of the Holocaust was not only approached by Jews who survived their ordeal, but also by the Poles, who stood on the other side of the wall. In this way, the language of literature becomes a place where the voices of the victims and the witnesses meet. This gives rise to a tangible tension between the internal and the external perspectives, between Polish literature and the Jewish apocalypse. The vision of Holocaust presented by non-Jewish witnesses finds an expression in the poetry of Czesław Miłosz, inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Campo di Fiori, A Poor Christian Looking at the Ghetto and in a short story by J. Andrzejewski called The Holy Week as well as in the prison camp prose by S. Szmaglewska and T. Borowski, the poetry of J. Ficowski, characterised by its heartrending degree of empathy (Reading the Ashes) or in the poems by T. Różewicz, poignant in their intentional austerity (including both the earlier works such as As the Living Died, Pigtail, The Slaughter of Boys and his latest efforts such as The Professor’s Knife); he also approached these themes in a number of his short stories (The Branch, A Trip to the Museum).

Witness hearings during the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961) have allowed the world to be confronted with the immense scale of the Nazi crime for the very first time and have also underscored the fundamental difficulty which artists must face when attempting to express the experiences they describe in an adequate manner. The problem of the capability of literature to convey the experience of the Holocaust and the boundaries of expression faced in this regard when faced with the failure of fundamental values upon which European culture was founded as well as with the collapse of the language which it was based upon has now revealed itself to the full extent.

The question posed by Th. Adorno on whether one can still write poetry after Auschwitz leads the philosopher to the conclusion that art must now remain silent, rendered speechless in the light of all that the word “Auschwitz” implies. An example of such “mute” literature is the poetry of P. Celan; in the 1960s, G. Steiner wrote a series of essays (Language and Silence, 1990) on Celan’s poetry, being one of those who attempted to interpret his works in the context of the crisis of the language as such following the horrors of the Holocaust. Later on, J. Derrida performed a deconstructivist analysys of Celan’s works in his book A Shibboleth for Paul Celan (1986, published in Poland in 2000).

Celan’s vision of the black morning milk from the famous Fugue of Death is perhaps one of the most accurate metaphors which express all that is ineffable with respect to the Holocaust and exposing the inevitable collision between hope and despair. No language can ever describe this unimaginable horror and its blackness can only illuminate the white void of silence for a mere moment. Many of those who survived continued to attempt to face the challenge of describing a world that, in a way, was already beyond description. The narrative prose and essays by E. Weisel and P. Levy – both of them survivors of the Auschwitz death camp – constitute a testimony of the highest epistemic and moral order, revealing the destructive power of evil and hatred.

Despite the numerous attempts to seek new forms of expression, many authors have refused to stray beyond the field of literature, publishing their memoirs, short stories, novels and poetry; the most eminent of these authors include A. Appenfeld, Ch. Delbo, N. Sachs, Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (writing under the pseudonym Y. DeNura), Sz. Wiesenthal. A Painted Bird, a novel by J. Kosiński, does not directly reference Holocaust itself, and yet it constitutes a metaphorical vision thereof, replete with drastic details, woven around the story of a wandering child, carrying the stigma of strangeness, tortured and persecuted in a hostile environment inhabited by simple-minded peasants.

An author who has decided to delve beyond the word of conventional literature is A. Spiegelmann, who relayed the story of his father, a Holocaust survivor, in the form of a two-part comic book Maus (part I of which was published in Poland in 2001), in which Jews are depicted as mice, the Germans – as cats, and Poles – as pigs. This highly controversial comic book is an attempt to harness the language of mass culture for the purposes of describing the Holocaust, which results in a feeling of shock and alienation in the reader – who has already become accustomed to the conventional images of the Holocaust – thereby making it possible to express the very essence of this experience.

Research into Holocaust literature is constantly developing, having already produced an immense bibliography. One of the pioneering studies on this subject is the book by M. Borwicz entitled Écrits des condamnés à mort sous l’occupation allemande (1939–1945). Étude sociologique (1954). L.L. Langer, in his work entitled The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975) examines the manner in which literature is able to express liminal experiences, while E. Young’s Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust. Narrative and the Interpretation (1988) is devoted to the analysis of various types of witness accounts of the Holocaust, presenting the reader with the multitude of narrative strategies and genres and exposing the tensions between retelling past events on one hand and creative literary work on the other, between the role of a witness and that of a novelist who creates a sui generis documentary fiction.

A.H. Rosenfeld (A Double Dying. Reflections on Holocaust Literature 1988) sees the Holocaust literature as a testimony of a twofold catastrophe – the death of man and the death of the ideal of man; the author then proceeds to reflect upon whether and how can literature be created and interpreted after the Holocaust. In his work Bearing the Unbearable. Yiddish and Polish Poetry in Ghettos and Concentration Camps (1990), F.W. Aron extends the scope of his analysis to include a broad interpretation of sources in the Polish language.

There is also another strand of discussion which involves the use of Holocaust themes for ideological purposes wherein the said themes are incorporated into official propaganda and converted into an instrument meant to achieve political ends. In his book The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (1994), T. Segev describes the Israeli public debate on the role of the Holocaust for official ideology, demonstrates that the Holocaust remains the core component of the civic religion of Jews in Israel and emphasizes that their attitude towards the Holocaust has become an integral part of their identity. In The Holocaust in American Life (1999), P. Novick tells of the way the subject of the Holocaust is being manipulated in American public debate as well as of its place in the various rituals of mass culture and of its role for modelling the collective imagination.

Bibliography

Męczeństwo i zagłada Żydów w zapisach literatury polskiej (The Martyrdom and Extermination of Jews in Polish Literature), compilation and introduction by I. Maciejewska, Warsaw 1988;
J. Leociak Tekst wobec zagłady. (O relacjach z getta warszawskiego) [Writing about the Holocaust (On the Reports from the Warsaw Ghetto)], Wrocław 1997.
Anthology of Holocaust Literature, eds. J. Glatstein, I. Knox, S. Margoshes, Philadelphia 1969;
The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe, ed. D. Roskies, Philadelphia 1988;
Images from the Holocaust. A Literature Anthology, eds. J.E. Brown, E.C. Stephens, J.E. Rubin, Lincolnwood 1997;
Out of the Whirlwind. A Reader of Holocaust Literaturee, ed. A.H. Friedlander, New York 1999.