Prayer to the Living to Forgive Them for Being Alive

You who are passing by
well dressed in all your muscles
clothing which suits you well
or badly
or just about
you who are passing by
full of tumultuous life within your arteries
glued to your skeleton
as you walk with a sprightly step athletic awkward
laughing sullenly, you are all so handsome
so commonplace
so commonplacely like everyone else
so handsome in your commonplaceness
diverse
with this excess of life which keeps you
from feeling your bust following your leg
your hand raised to your hat
your hand upon your heart
your kneecap rolling softly in your knee
how can we forgive you for being alive…

I beg you
do something 
learn a dance step
something to justify your existence
something that gives you the right
to be dressed in your skin in your body hair
learn to walk and to laugh
because it would be too senseless
after all
for so many to have died
while you live
doing nothing with your life.

Delbo, from the book cover

Charlotte Delbo was an incredibly talented French writer who was sent to Auschwitz as a member of the French Resistance. After the war, she wrote Auschwitz and After, a brilliant member comprised of vignettes, poems, and prose poems about her life in Birkenau. (Also, see, I don’t only read Jewish survivors’ works.) I am thinking of using the brilliant first two lines of Part I ‘None of us will return’ in my first chapter when discussing the truth in survivor narratives: Today, I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain it is truthful.

A man unable to follow any longer. The dog lunges at his backside. The man does not stop. He continues walking, followed by the dog walking on its hind legs, its muzzle at the man’s rear end. The man is walking. He has not uttered a sound. Blood stains his trousers’ stripes. It seeps from inside, a stain spreading as though upon a blotter. The man goes on walking with the dog’s fangs in his flesh.

Try to look. Just try and see.^[1]

^[1] Charlotte Delbo, Rosette C. Lamont (trans.), Auschwitz and After (1965; London, 1995), 85.

The opening scene draws you in so well that you are not prepared for what follows and as an audience member you are not sure how to respond to the content being viewed; awkward is a word to sum up the feeling. The loudest most obnoxious ringtone could have come on during this opening scene and still nobody could take lose focus or take their eyes off what takes place on stage.

The audience members were diverse in nationality and even in age; some students of Rowan University were in attendance, some for a class requirements and others for curiosity about the show. The audience members were very respectful of the actors and their performances even though the content was at times very serious.

There is a scene where the youngest member of the concentration camp is telling the audience of how she sees things from her own point of view; Christina Higgins, a 19 year old sophomore and theatre arts major at Rowan University plays Denise, a 16 year old French resistance fighter her perspective is interesting. “None of us realistically can put a play up about a concentration camp none of us have been there,”Higgins said. “It’s a lot about conveying the emotions making a physical art there’s a lot of movement in this production.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwq5K3POe0A

After sitting with the director of the production Anthony Hostetter he shares with me what he really wanted the audience to take away from the show. “There super objective if they’ve done their job as actors and characters of the play the audience will remember these stories word for word,” Hostetter said. “In essence it will be the audience job to carry the word.”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LurWstqyFvY

The show is a must see because it tells you the story of women in concentration camps from the perspective of a women who survived them, the late Charlotte Delbo. The remaining perfomances takes place February 28 and March 1st and 2nd at 7 and 9 pm and March 3rd at 3:00pm in Wesby Hall Studio Theatre at Rowan University. If you’re not busy please take the time and see this production you will not be disappointed.

The plot centers on 20 women sharing a barracks in Auschwitz. Together, they share one goal: keep the strongest of them alive to disclose their story to the public.

The cast members went through various routines to prepare for their roles. The tasks included watching movies such as  “Schindler’s List” and meeting Holocaust survivors such as Manya Frydman Perel, a woman who was imprisoned in several concentration and death camps. To support the show, Perel will be in the audience on opening night.

“I’m ecstatic that Manya, one of the survivors the cast met, will be in the audience on opening night,” said Kaitlin Kemp (Francoise). “Unfortunately, I was unable to hear her story when everyone else did, so I can’t wait to finally see and meet this woman that has left such an imprint on my ‘sisters’ hearts.”

The cast also went through more rigorous routines to get into character. This was executed by the artistic director, Melanie Stewart. To help the actresses feel the emotions of Holocaust victims, Stewart yelled at the actresses to go out into the rain in 40 degree weather and remove their clothing.

“We came to realize that this was a test of what the women went through during the Holocaust,” said Frankie Contino (Madeline), in an interview with The Whit.

Stewart is proud of the cast’s accomplishments.

“They are very prepared as an ensemble – they have worked for months with survivors, in research and in rehearsals,” Stewart said. “It has been hard and very rewarding for all of them.”

Sam Price (Regine) is excited for an audience to see the performance.

“I feel that we have something really special and intriguing here,” Price said. “I just hope people understand that we aren’t trying to make them feel guilty or just sad – we are aiming to show them that there is beauty and hope in even the worst situations.”

Audiences can see if the cast accomplishes that goal when the play premieres on Feb. 21 at 8 p.m. More performances follow on Feb. 22, 23, 28 and March 1 and 2 at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.; February 24 at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.; and March 3 at 3 p.m. Tickets are priced at $15 for general admission and $10 for seniors, non-Rowan students, alumni and staff. Free admission is given to Rowan students with a valid student ID. Advanced ticket purchases and reservations are recommended as there will be limited seating at each performance.

• A preview of “Who Will Carry the Word,” an upcoming performance from the Department of Theatre and Dance. Based upon the true story of Charlotte Delbo, “Who Will Carry the Word” chronicles the lives of 20 women living in the barracks in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Their goal is to keep the strongest person alive to tell their story to the public.
• An interview with John Angeloni, the dramaturge for “Guys and Dolls.” Angeloni wanted to be an actor at one point in time but ended up finding a passion for history. As a dramaturge for “Guys and Dolls,” he found a way to combine both passions.
• A photo essay of the Greek Talent Show co-sponsored by Rowan After Hours and the Inter Greek Council. Greek fraternities and sororities will be showcasing their talent for prizes. Audience members will even receive prizes of their own. The March 7 event will be held from 9 p.m. until 1 a.m. in the Student Center Pit.

I cannot believe how fast the first semester has whizzed by. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan we have been plagued by numerous wind chill, ice, and snow days off from school (six total with one 2 hour delay). While not delighted by the prospect of adding extra days

Snow covered trees in our yard.

on to the school year in June, it is one of the opportunity costs of living in such a wild and beautiful place. I have tried to make the best use of my time away from the classroom to cook, workout, write, read, and reflect. Today is one of those days where reflection has been front and center.

Today my husband Mike is nursing a cold and trying to study for his courses at Northern Michigan University.  His plan was to snow blow when he got home from his evening class tonight (we received over a foot of snow last night and the thermometer plunged to bone chilling temperatures). This afternoon I took a look outside and found our elderly neighbor taking care of our drive way.  Mike stumbled outside to thank him and our neighbor patted Mike’s arm a few times and said, “You always take care of us. We are neighbors, that’s what we do for each other.” It is true that Mike does the snow removal for our neighbors if he can get to it first, as well as other errands that pop up. Throughout the year there are many reciprocal deeds done in our neighborhood. It gave me such a feeling of warmth today to think about how nice it is to live in a small town and have such kind and considerate neighbors who look out for each other. It also was an important reminder of what a big difference the things we do for others can make. Never underestimate the impact of an act of kindness.

My brother Jamie is one of those good guys who makes me remember that chivalry and kindness is still alive and thriving. He is a Service Technician for The Boss snow plow, so obviously, he never complains about harsh winter weather. Secretly, I think it is his fault we have had so many snow days. I imagine he has magic snow day rituals just to make sure that he is busy at work and that his sister has extra days added to the school year. While we may have had our share of sibling quarrels over the years,  Jamie is a very special guy and even though he is five years younger, he has always been my “big brother” and has taken care of me. Jamie has always been wise beyond his years and has a genuine warmth that makes him highly respected by people he comes in contact with. It was no surprise when he recently received this note from his neighbor. Jamie attributes his kind nature to his goal of trying to live up to the man that our grandfather, Lyle Armstrong was when he was alive. Grandpa was always doing kind things for others and I know that he would be proud of the man that Jamie has become.

Jamie shares the same sacred reverence for the Paint River that Grandfather cherished and called home. In his eulogy poem, I wrote that Grandpa had the capacity to repair both carburetors and broken hearts and one look at Jamie’s garage makes you realize he is a chip off the old block. Jamie has given me many pep talks over the years and has soothed me during many late night phone calls.

I talk about my brother often to my students and about how his hard work ethic and engaging, down-to-earth personality have really helped him find success in life. The boys in class love to see photos of his vintage 3-wheelers and hear all about his trophy bucks and the lunker walleyes that he has caught. I always tell them that if Jamie was a student in my English class that he probably would not enjoy writing poetry and reading, The Odyssey or Romeo and Juliet, but he would do so with a huge and generous smile on his face and that he would bring his charm and sense of humor into class discussions. That is the kind of guy that Jamie is — and the reason that I love him so much.

Jamie’s work photo at The Boss. He is in the middle.

Jamie fishing on his boat, “Little Jacki” affectionately named after his fiancé. Photo by : Mike Laitinen

Jamie fishing on The Paint River. I have this photo in my classroom.
Photo by: Mike Laitinen

My students LOVED this photo. Jamie got all his machines out for his daughter, Kristine. There is nothing like prom in the U.P. (at least it was not snowing)

My little, big brother. <3 Photo by: Mike Laitinen

When I think about qualities of kindness, compassion, and cooperation, I also cannot help but think about Heather. For the past twelve years we have been a team on numerous projects and often we take turns doing the leg work. Last night after work, while I white-knuckled it home in a horrible snow storm, Heather stayed on at school to work on our application for a Global Teacher Fellowship. This grant would be an amazing professional development opportunity for us. I will wait to share our proposal topic when it is accepted (fingers crossed). I sent Heather a text at about 8:30 last night because I had a sneaking suspicion that she was still fussing over every word. Yes, I was correct! Even though I had sent her some scattered notes on my ideas for the project, it was her toil that was coaxing our dream into fruition.  At a little after 9:00 she sent me her finished work and I cheered out loud at her brilliant and witty writing. It never ceases to amaze me how lucky I am to have a talented colleague and dear friend like Heather who shares the same passion for education, writing, reading, and travel that I do. We work well together and our ideas mesh as bounce ideas back and forth to create new revelations and brainstorms. Often, I think about how lucky we were to come into each other’s lives at the beginning of our teaching career. Without a doubt, I know that we were destined to be the Hamy educational partnership!

On the last day of January, I still find myself in a state of reflection over 2012. Last year at this time Heather and I were delighted and stunned that we would be traveling to Poland and Israel with a group of Holocaust Educators that we trusted and loved. Heather wrote about this opportunity in a post on March 2, 2012, Walking in survivors’ shoes gets us back to blogging. Our local newspaper, The Mining Journal, ran this article about our experience, Gwinn High School Teachers Visit Concentration Camps.  Heather, I am sure, would agree that we still have not been able to fully comprehend the impact that the trip will have on our classrooms. Nearly a year later and we continue to unpack the lessons we hauled home with us. We continue to try to spread the message of tolerance, the importance of bearing witness, and the images of darkness and light that we witnessed in Poland and Israel with our students. I find myself touched more deeply by moments of kindness and sharing like the one revealed in the note my brother Jamie received, our neighbor’s kind act in snow removal, and Heather’s devotion to her students and our work together.

When I was reflecting today I felt the urge to spread this message of light and love with a new blog piece. When I looked through the Blended Voices dashboard, I realized that I still had a draft for a piece about “Our Responsibility to Bear Witness” that I was working on in May of 2012. A busy schedule hampered me from finishing it. Today I thought was the perfect time to share the video that I created when we got home from Israel. Our superintendent asked if we would do a small presentation about our trip at a school board meeting. We were asked to keep it short, 5-7 minutes. I poured over hundreds of photos and decided that a slide-show would help compare and contrast some of the images that we witnessed and share the emotional journey that we navigated together. Heather and I have future plans to create more detailed digital pieces from our travel journals and the images we captured with our hearts and our cameras. Heather, let us make that happen soon, okay?

Today as I sit in my living room on a cold January afternoon, I vividly remember staring at the buds on the weeping willows at the entrance of Auschwitz and how it was a struggle to imagine life springing forth from the ashes. I wondered, would have the strength to walk through that infamous gate? It soon struck me that it would be easy to put one foot in front of the other, because at any time I had to freedom to walk back out, when during the Holocaust so many did not. I remember the haunting train tracks and walking the great expanse of Birkenau, while making the startling realization that I was walking on a grave with every footstep. I remember hot tears running down my face as we placed stones on memorial tombstones. I remember the weight of darkness and trying to figure out how I could explain the giant, horrifying question mark of the Holocaust to my students.  I remember feeling like a burden was lifted from my shoulders when we touched down in Israel. I remember walking around Jerusalem and seeing churches, synagogues, and mosques closely located to each other. I remember frolicking in the Dead Sea like children and writing feverishly on small pieces of paper to slip into the Western Wall.

Amy and Heather at the Western Wall in Israel

Almost one year later and I feel more grateful than ever to the Memorial Library of New York City for this life-altering experience. How thankful I am to have such a beautiful friend like Heather to walk so many roads with me. As teachers we will continue to seek out new opportunities to enrich our classrooms and our students. We try to share with the precious young lives we are entrusted with that writing can open doors and we attempt to model this reality for them.

I am honored to share this video and I challenge everyone who watches it to remember how much of an impact we can make on the world if we remember that we are all neighbors. Do something special for someone today, tomorrow, and every day after. Practice acts of kindness like my brother Jamie. Love your work fiercely like Heather and Jamie. In the words of Charlotte Delbo, Do something…

This was an admittedly difficult reading experience. Despite my best efforts to be dispassionate, I cannot leave my history behind…as a cultural Jew, as the grandson of Holocaust survivors who themselves were dispossessed tortured and interned in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, whose families were massacred whose relatives sought refuge in Israel in 1948 and had children who had children some of whom served in the Israeli Army during the 6-Day War, the Yom Kippur War and the intifadah, as a privileged white male from Sydney who as a child too young to know imbibed stories of concentration camps at breakfast at dinner and developed a keen but poorly understood sense of social justice who took all those tangled threads and wove them into a meaningful career in human rights law representing the marginalised the persecuted the tortured and grew within him the entangled sense of injustice which the Palestinians endure[d] under a colonising government in a land where I have travelled and unthinkingly hung an IDF-issued machine gun around my neck and made the peace sign with soldiers for a photo and have been welcomed into the home of Arab strangers in a dilapidated Arab town and stood on the border of the Golan Heights where Hamas or Hezbollah have fired rockets at Israeli defensive positions and IDF soldiers have fired different rockets back where I found an old coin in the dirt an Israeli lira which I still carry in my wallet I am unsure why greased equally by two passages of time two histories one between 1948 and 1980 when the lira was still in circulation and the other after the year of my birth 1982 or the year of my birthright 1999 when my own itinerant circulation began – and began.

The essence of this feeling, which remains largely unintegrated, is summarised best for me by the exchange between Ahmad and the priest on 248 (Interlink Ed, 2008):

“But the boy was cracking from the pressure from everyone… “Should I read about the Crusades? Should I read about the  Holocaust and the Nazis and the gas ovens? They drives us crazy with the Nazis and the gas ovens and the Berlin Wall…”

The near-trope “gas ovens” offers a dense linguistic kernel to unpack what I see as a historical entanglement laden with ethical challenges to both sides of the Israel-Palestine issue (which I can only hope to gloss here). “Gas ovens” is a curious conflation of ‘gas chambers’ and ‘crematoria oven’. There were no gas ovens in the concentrationary system; more accurately, the gas chambers and crematoria were designed and connected as part of an industrial exterminatory complex (at Dachau and all the death camps which were subsequently modelled upon it). Here, Khalifeh has elided ‘chamber’ and ‘crematoria’, creating a sense that in Ahmad’s exposure to Holocaust memory, drilled into him to the point of madness, the murdering and the disposing of Jews merge into a single act. Does this imply that to take a life and to erase a history are one and the same for Ahmad? Is this Khalifeh’s broader point when Ahmad interrogates the concept of History in the novel’s denouement (“Do I have a history or no history?” he asks Mira: 269)? And if so, does this enable our understanding of how our human subjectivity is linked to our ability to narrate? What can we make of Ahmad’s judgment that Mira is at the rally “out of concern for human rights” because “we’re the orphans”? (267). Is the solidarity movement guilty of invoking what academic, Paul Gready, has referred to as “the global humanitarian narrative” (185) and what Slavoj Zizek has criticized as being “the ostensible depoliticized politics of human rights” which, with its partner ‘humanitarianism’, “presents itself as something of an anti-politics, a pure defence of the innocent and the powerless against power” (Brown as cited in Zizek 126). Is this Mira in a nutshell?

Khalifeh appears to complicate the links between solidarity, human rights and resistance through the evolving relationship between Mira and Ahmad. Each is attempting to dissociate from their superimposed histories and subject positions: pejorative Jewish oppressor and abject Palestinian terrorist. The cat, Amber, offers a lens for their shifting states of being – although we are not really given any narratorial insight into Mira’s mind other than that projected by Ahmad. In this respect, ‘Jewish conscience’ is largely unremarked, and it falls to us to interpret the etiology of historical parallels between Nazi and Israeli, Jew and Palestinian.

We might ask: Is it significant that there exists a parallel between the Nazi aim to erase Jews from the History of the world (see Himler’s Speech at Posen, 3 October 1943 to high-ranking SS officials) and the Israeli policy of bull-dozing and forestation – the latter being “a common practice to colonize Palestinian land and disguise places where the Israeli authorities had erased Palestinian villages in preparation for independence”? (Isabelle Hesse, “The Nazi who lived as a Jew, the Jew who wrote as a Nazi: Multi-layered Resistance in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur”, unpublished paper, 2012)

Throughout the text, parallels to the Jewish experience of persecution during the Holocaust loom up from the narrative, unspoken. The frequent references to sheep going to the slaughter (eg 205), the passages in which Ahmad both sees and does not see (“I couldn’t open my eyes, and I couldn’t shut them”: 205), or in which Khalifeh uses the voice of Majid to beseech us desperately, equivocally: “you can’t imagine – rather, yes, do that: imagine” (212) – are all mnemonic of passages from Auschwitz and After by French resistance fighter and Holocaust survivor, Charlotte Delbo: “Try to look. Just try and see.”(86 – describing a Jewish woman resisting being dragged to the gas chambers at Auschwitz) and later, the prohibition to the reader: “Do not look.” (with regards to a Jewish dummy used to train SS attack dogs, 89; and 106, AA)

There are other broad parallels, both stylistic and thematic: take for example Khalifeh’s poetic invocations like “O my dear country!” pp198-199, 202 and 225, and Delbo’s fragmented poem which begins “O you who know” (AA 10); or the broad theme of animality, and the correlation between the abject human condition and the loss of senses: “[Ahmad] loses his senses” (see Khalifeh 275), while Delbo writes “We have lost consciousness and feeling.” (AA 35))

Perhaps Khalifeh intentionally embeds these historical hauntings in order to comment on the entanglement – of Jew and Arab, self and other, animal and human, Shoah and Nakba. In these moments I found myself wrenched terribly between a number of unreconciled sympathies: for the “Jews” of the story, all too easily conflated with Israeli oppressors and state apparatus (in fact, the moniker ‘Israeli’ is rarely used) and for the Palestinian characters faced with senseless choices – choices which defy reason and position human dignity in between reductive narratives of martydom or emasculation. Khalifeh is careful to balance the views her characters express in an attempt to raise questions about the nature of the human, without these becoming simply Manichean issues: “Of course the Jews are people” (79) Suad tells Ahmad, which is in contrast to the views expressed by Ahmad’s father, who analogises Israeli-Jewish occupation to animal nature when explaining why the cat will always kill: “ “If we give her enough to eat, she won’t kill.” His father smiled and said compassionately, “But nature, my boy, prevails over nurture.”/ “What do you mean?” / “An animal kills to live, was created to eat, and eats to live.” / “And people?” / “Human beings kill in order rule. What does that mean? That means power, it means politics, it means wretchedness, it means colonization.”/ “Like the Jews?” (83)

Notably, as a child Ahmad is inclined to humanise Amber the cat as a figure of ‘the Jew’ (substituting her for Mira) or the other (“He felt she was like a human being.” 83). But later, after being tortured and witnessing the horrors of the intifadah, this humanising tendency is almost completely snuffed: “I can’t think about anything but killing. I must kill” he tells Umm Suad, who thinks in turn “They killed his mind.” (203) This scene captures the existential death of the human as Cartesian ‘rational animal’. Ahmad moves from subjectivity to abjectivity (“We had no environment and no humanity” 269).

As a reader, I am left feeling dejected, unsettled, dis-integrated – about all the hopeless violence, the endless instrumentalisation of histories of suffering, counter-posed for political gain. Perhaps this unassimilable feeling is what lies at the heart of the aporia of testimony to atrocity, as described by Felman and Laub – the same aporia which marks Palestinian existence, and which the Palestinian subject can only breach through Death: “Death as a visa” – Death: “as testimony” (196).

ANTHONY

via

Charlotte “Delbo describes instances in which reading becomes a matter of life and death. For example, she describes a scene of reading in which the SS find a love note. Lily, a female inmate, had left it in a hiding place for her lover; he, unable to get to the spot because of a change in his work detail, had asked a fellow inmate to get it. The latter dropped it returning to camp, and it was found by the SS. With an obsessively single-minded hermeneutics, they decide that ‘this letter was obviously a coded message to communicate political information – because for the Gestapo everything was coded, and love letters must convey political instructions’. Unable to imagine the possibility of a love letter written from one camp inmate to another, the Gestapo read it through their myopic lens of political opposition. Lily’s poignant comment that ‘We are here like plants full of life and sap, like plants wanting to grow and live, and I cannot help thinking that these plants are not meant to live’ becomes a statement of political sabotage in the distorted hermeneutics of the SS. Lily, the recipient, and the man who dropped the letter are all executed as a result of this mode of reading.”

from Jennifer L. Geddes, “Towards an Ethics of Reading Survivor Testimonies,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 41, no. 2 (Fall 2008), 9.

Watch a video about this book at BBC News Magazine!

In January 1943, two hundred and thirty women of the French Resistance were sent to the death camps by the Nazis who had invaded and occupied their country.

In 1941, Nazi Germany easily defeated France and struck a deal with a well-loved World War I hero, Marshal Philippe Pétain, who would lead the occupied country. In return, the Vichy government would collaborate with the occupiers.

But not every Frenchman—or woman—was as content as Pétain to collaborate with the Nazis, and a Resistance movement sprang up almost immediately. Caroline Moorehead’s impeccably detailed book follows the story of several Frenchwomen in their efforts to stymie the occupiers—and the unimaginable punishment that awaited them.

The French police, for the most part, assisted vigorously in the round-up of their fellow citizens who participated in the Resistance. One man, unsuccessfully fleeing before his execution without trial, cried out as he was caught, “Look what French police are doing to Frenchmen!”

This was a common refrain among resisters, but still their harsh treatment in the hands of their countrymen was shockingly unfettered. One French policeman, Poinsot, tortured his subjects so brutally that the Gestapo would threaten to hand other prisoners over to him if they didn’t cooperate. (At the end of the war, Poinsot was charged for the “death in deportation” of 1,560 Jews and 900 French political prisoners, as well as the execution of 285 men and “for torture so extreme people were ‘literally massacred.’”)

But if few cared about the treatment of French political prisoners, no one seemed to care about the country’s 350,000 Jewish inhabitants:

The country that had so fervently embraced the Rights of Man seemed curiously willing to sit by while one decree after another was enacted against the Jews, watching them debarred from professions, forbidden places of entertainment, relegated to the last carriages on the métro, and now herded on to cattle trucks bound for Poland.

Moorehead notes that the Gestapo had not even asked for the cattle trains; that was established on the initiative of the French railway, which charged the occupiers a set fee per transported individual.

But it is the political dissidents–and women in general–that Moorehead chooses to scrutinize. “To be young and active in France in the 1930s was to care passionately about politics,” Moorehead writes, and indeed, most of the women she focuses on were full of youthful vigor and naïve confidence.

Women in France in the thirties and forties were considered weak, less-than, a second-class citizen. Contraception was made illegal after World War I to replenish a faltering population, and during World War II, punishment for abortionists meant the guillotine. Women did not have the right to vote. But the bright side of the women’s marginalization was that they were treated differently when they were arrested. Only the most ebullient were tortured, as opposed to what seems to be the majority of the men, and Moorehead makes no mention of women being among the hundreds of untried men who were executed every time a German was attacked.

For a time, their femininity saved them. Before long, however, they faced a fate that may have been worse than death: Nazi death camps.

First in Auschwitz, the infamous extermination camp, and then in Ravensbrück, ostensibly a work camp but one in which death ruled supreme, the women faced unimaginable horrors. Of the 230 women who were deported, only 49 survived. Moorehead reports that if a woman lost her shoes—whether they were stolen by another prisoner or sucked into the ubiquitous mud at interminable roll calls—she was immediately sent to the gas chambers, “women being easier to replace than shoes.”

That any of the Frenchwomen survived is surprising. Moorehead describes the horrific treatment of the prisoners in detail, and the images of disease-ridden, rat-bitten corpses sprawled in the mud and babies drowned in barrels are stark. The survivors say that what kept them together was their selfless solidarity; they looked out for each other in ways that few of the other women at the camp did.

Of the 75,721 Jews were deported from France, a mere 3,500 returned. In comparison, nearly half of the deported political prisoners, who were admittedly treated slightly better by the Nazis, survived (40,760 out of 86,827). Possibly because so few Jews returned, they were left out of nearly all of the post-war associations planned by survivors, and for several years, the story of the death camps were written by Communists, not Jews.

Moorehead aptly describes the new pain facing survivors of the death camps:

What each of the survivors was now faced with was the question of how they would remake their lives, and how they would convey to their families what they had been through. Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, as Marie-Claude had remarked, were so extreme, so incomprehensible, so unfamiliar an experience, that the women doubted that they possessed the words to describe them, even if people wanted to hear; which, as it turned out, not many did.

The women who returned were haunted by their fallen comrades even as they tried to make new lives for themselves. Marriages—often with other deportees—were formed and then dissolved; children left behind during the war did not always warm to the strangers calling themselves their mothers.

Though the women were reluctant to speak to their children about their painful memories, they were more willing to talk to their grandchildren about it, after age had put enough distance between them and the horrific events. Yet the women never forgot the experience, and several described the incomparable closeness they still felt with their surviving friends.

In a time of unprecedented brutality and innumerable crimes against humanity, these women knew that the only thing that might allow them to survive would be solidarity. They cared for each other selflessly with little thought to their individual survival, and that, they believe, is why any of them survived the death camps.

At first, the book’s timeline sprawls, moving from one region of France to another as it introduces a seemingly endless cast of characters. But by the end, the book has moved in to focus on a handful of women as they move from prisons to camps.

I would have liked to see better references; there were many quotes, figures, and studies cited in the text that were not backed up by sources in my advanced reader copy. However, Moorehead’s heavy reliance upon interviews with survivors and their relatives gives this overlooked corner of history a new urgency. The book is dark, but rightfully so, and Moorehead somehow imparts an unshakeable faith in the ability of people to help each other survive no matter the circumstances.

Quote of Note:

“I had to hold fast to the end, and die of living.”
-One of the women prisoners

But don’t just take my word for it. Check out what other reviewers on the tour have been saying:

November 8: Unabridged Chick
November 11: Elle Lit.
November 14: Diary of an Eccentric
November 16: Among Stories
November 16: Unabridged Chick (author interview)
November 17: Broken Teepee
November 18: Ted Lehmann’s Bluegrass, Books, and Brainstorms
November 21: Jenny Loves to Read
November 22: Picky Girl
November 23: Books Like Breathing
November 28: Reviews by Lola
November 29: Buried in Print
November 30: Savvy Verse & Wit
December 1: In the Next Room
December 2: Wordsmithonia
December 2: Books and Movies
December 5: Take Me Away

I’ve been thinking about the holocaust a lot lately, and not by choice. I chose to do a subject called “Memory and Memoirs in 20th Century Europe” for my French major, and I apparently had no idea what I was in for.

What else was it going to be about if not the aftermath of World War two, with a bit of Stalin thrown in for good measure?

I am required to read two novels about the holocaust, an anonymous account of life for accused nazi supporters in Berlin at the end of World War two, and then two Gulag-related reads, one by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Sound uplifting? Think again.

Admittedly, I’m a massive fan of war literature. Over the holidays, after seeing Birdsong in the West end, I bought some Ernest Hemimgway (A Farewell to Arms) and some war poetry; followed by All Quiet on the Western Front. The last, especially is an amazing read. It’s especially interesting because it tells the account of a young German soldier; we’re so accustomed to reading tales told to us by the allies. While it seems obvious, it really does make you remember both sides of a war; not simply those who won. Both suffer intense and immeasurable hardship, and I think we all need to be constantly reminded of this. It’s easier to forget this living in a country so far from these ancient conflict zones, and from those we fight in today. And while it seems obvious to state that these German soldiers were young, conflicted and damned men, suffering hardships that equalled those of the allies; we do so often forget that not all of the people who live in the countries we’re fighting in these days are much different. In fact, our troops are probably much better off than them.

If you want to get a taste for the horrifying spoils of war and of conflict, look no further than the brilliant cacophony of holocaust literature. And if you want to feel disarmingly depressed and disillusioned, you’ve found your new favourite genre.

Some people love it, some people hate it. Because some people love to feel horrible, and others don’t like to be reminded that we can be so horrible, or that such horrible things are even possible. But most people read it by choice. I, however, get to delve in the world of the holocaust not by choice, but with the goal of writing a cheery essay at the end of it, and exploring the literary tropes and tools of writers trying to convey their memories.

It’s all very fascinating, but does put a dampener on the day.

The thing that makes the holocaust so unbearably horrible is that it never ends. There is no respite. Yes, it ended, but while it was occurring, everything that it consisted of was unending.

When I visited Sachsenhausen concentration camp just outside Berlin, this was one of the few things that really struck me. We’ve all heard the horrible stories; we’ve all seen the photos, relived the memories of survivors etc etc. But when you choose to go to a camp for several hours, to see where it all took place, you undertake something quite different. Your tour guide keeps reeling off horrifying story after story, and you just want it to end. Or at least to forget about it for ten minutes and then come back. But you can’t. Because within those walls, it doesn’t go away, and you’re left with a heavy stone in your gut, stretching and contorting your insides; pulling your stomach downwards.

I don’t know about you, but when I think about awful experiences, I always consider the best possible situation. For example, maybe if I’d been on the Titanic, I would have been a first class passenger, so it would have been okay; I would have got into a boat. Or, if I’d been in prison, it would have been minimum security, and for a very short amount of time. You always consider the best possible scenario, and then your brain is able to slow and calm, knowing that, okay: you could survive this.

There is no way to make your experience in the holocaust any easier; any less horrible.

As we moved between sections of the camp, I thought, well, this doesn’t sound too bad, maybe you could survive if you were assigned to this work duty. Until it was explained. And then you realised it was worse than the others.

At no point does the memory of the holocaust allow understanding; your brain can’t let you believe that something so impossibly terrible happened to so many people. And after visiting a place where it occurred, and realising these things, they’re constantly in the back of my mind as I read.

I’m currently ploughing through Charlotte Delbo’s memoirs: Auschwitz and After. Fortunately, she has chosen a unique approach in a sea of memoirs than can often end up looking the same. You feel guilty for thinking “Oh no, not another one”, in the same way that we hear about poverty in the third world and dismiss it, because we’ve heard enough. But Delbo mixes poetry, narrative and poetic prose to convey an indescribable memory; an event that defies representation.

The repetition; the ongoing, seemingly never ending chain of days moves on and on like you’re suspended somewhere between purgatory and hell. And Delbo captures this not by simply repeating a series of torrid memories to us. She lets us feel the rhthym of the repetition; encapsulates the over-consuming nature of thirst; the longing for a time that no longer exists; the man she loved who is lost in a distant, time-worn memory.

I know that the reason these testimonies exist is not simply to try and describe or explain an event that does not allow it. It’s mostly so that it isn’t forgotten; so we can’t escape its memory; so we can’t ignore its presence.

Sadly, it does often lie unthought of, mostly because it’s easier for us that way. Life is always easier when we turn a blind eye to the truth of our ridiculously twisted, ruined world.

Just as along as we don’t lie in ruin despairing at the past or present, the memory won’t be wasted. Just as long as we lie to down to see how slow or fast the clouds fly by; how long a day can seem; how far the sky can stretch above us; the memory won’t be wasted.

After all, “what is closer to eternity than a day?”

The entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where more than 1 million people were killed during World War II. Tomorrow marks 64 years since its liberation, and Hans Mommsen's book, From Weimar to Auschwitz, sheds light on the build up to the site of ultimate evil.

Tomorrow marks 64 years since the Russian Army liberated the few survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The view of the train tracks leading up to the red brick building that marked the entrance, the cynical sign on the iron gates with the words, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work Brings Freedom,” the gas chambers where Zyklon B was used to kill more than 1 million people, the chimnies that belched smoke from the crematoria, Dr. Josef Mengele making his selections and conducting experiments on human subjects are all images that have been seared into our collective consciousness.

My great-grandfather, Joseph Lowenstein, our family patriarch and the man for whom  I am named, was one of the victims. 

Since its liberation, Auschwitz has become a worldwide symbol of genocide, evil and hatred. 

It also has been the subject of many books, art and film.

Claude Lanzmann’s epic, nine-plus hour documentary film, Shoah, has shots of trains rumbling up to the camp’s front gates and interviews with survivor Rudolf Vrba.

Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton wrote about the concept of ‘psyching doubling’ by which one creates a separate persona who commits unspeakable atrocities during the day and returns home as a loving father at night in The Nazi Doctors.

Italian chemist Primo Levi wrote about his struggle to make it through his time in the camp in Survival in Auschwitz, while Tadeusz Borowski made his experience there the subject of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. 

Both men killed themselves. 

Poets like Charlotte Delbo have written about the place that many consider the symbol of ultimate evil. 

And Nobel Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, in his memoir Night, a large section of which focuses on his survival at Auschwitz, wrote the following, oft-quoted description:

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for ever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live
as long as God Himself.
Never”

With such a rich collection of sources, it’s hard to imagine an additional work adding much to our undersanding, but I recently read German historian Hans Mommsen’s From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History, published in 1991,  and felt that my knowledge and historical understanding expanded.

Mommsen’s collection of essays takes the reader from late 19th century German through the rise of the Nazis , their ascent to power, dismantling of the fledgling Weimar democracy and gradual move to genocide-a move that is most vividly embodied in Auschwitz.

For many, this is familiar territory, and Mommsen’s work is noteworthy in several regards.  To begin, he begins earlier than many accounts, which start with the Treaty of Versailles, the punitive pact that wrapped up “The War to End All Wars,” later known as World War I. 

From there, the analyses proceed in a chronological direction, with the hyper-inflation that peaked in November, 1923, Hitler’s beer hall putsch in Munich and subsequent nine-month incarceration, during which he dictated what became Mein Kampf, and the Nazi’s growth in popularity following the stock market crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression all playing significant parts.

Mommsen includes these elements, too, but in a much richer  and textured description of the German social and political context than one might find in books like Paul Bookbinder’s Weimar Germany: Republic of the Reasonable. 

In one chapter, Mommsen demonstrates convincingly the generational divide between the Social Democrats and the youth who eventually became a key Nazi constituency by showing the average of the Social Democratic leadership, for example. 

Indeed, Mommsen’s detailed look at internal Nazi party politics is an integral element one of the book’s most enduring contributions: an incisive look at the workings of the Nazi bureaucracy.

This issue has been the subject of intense debate among historians, who have generally fallen into one of two camps. 

The intentionalists, among them the late Lucy Dawidowicz, asserted that Hitler planned the genocide of the Jews from as early as the end of World War I-a 1918 document in which he talks about the need for rational antisemitism is an important one in this formulation-and spent the next 27 years working to carry out his evil plan.

The functionalists paint a different picture.  They talk about ‘the crooked road to Auschwitz,’ a path that was filled with dips and turns and possible directions not taken.  These historians emphasize how there was no central order from Hitler, talk about the conflicting factions within the upper levels of Nazi bureaucracy and note that the killing was carried out on the ground, and cite discussions in top Nazi circles of a forced emigration of Jews to Madagascar as far along as the late 30s for evidence to support their point.

Mommsen is one of the influential functionalists who stresses in his work both the chaotic workings of the Nazi bureaucracy and Hitler’s lack of day-to-day involvement in government action.   

Other historians like Yehuda Bauer have criticized the distinction between intentionalists and functionalists, arguing instead for a synthetic interpretation that includes both elements in the society’s ‘cumulative radicalization.  Bauer has also criticized Mommsen’s work as overstressing the continuity in values and action between the traditional German bureaucracy and the Nazi bureaucracy.  

Bauer’s critiques have some merit, and Mommsen’s contribution to the debate should not be ignored, nor should his courage as a German historian who has been raising these issues within German society for more than 40 years be ignored. 

Mommsen’s emphasis on intra-bureaucratic rivalry may be excessive, and his analysis’ leads to the debatable conclusion of a confluence of factors creating a nearly inevitable outcome.

Still, From Weimar to Auschwitz is a rich collection of essays that push against the idea of a people in the grip of a mad dictator and instead point toward the individuals who carried out transformative evil being accountable for their actions and being able to be judged as such.

With genocide continuing in Darfur and Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga going on trial today at the International Criminal Court for recruiting child soldiers he sent into battle, that’s a thought worth remembering, too.

Anyway, in that spirit I wanted to share an excerpt from a poem by Charlotte Delbo called “Prayer to the Living to Forgive Them for Being Alive” –

I beg you
do something
learn a dance step
something to justify your existence
something that gives you the right
to be dressed in your skin in your body hair
learn to walk and to laugh
because it would be too senseless
after all
for so many to have died
while you live
doing nothing with your life