Auschwitz Survivor Research Articles

Auschwitz Survivor and Nobel Prize of Peace, Élie Wiesel as Theologian

Abstract This article examines the life and work of Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), a Francophone writer of Romanian origin, Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor, American citizen, Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1986. It specifically explores Wiesel’s complex engagement with the divine and the faith, which remained a central concern throughout his life, following his return from the Nazi extermination camps. This is most evident in his seminal book, Night, where he recounts the experience of God’s death in the death camps. Despite such profound crisis of faith, Wiesel remained a deeply religious Jew till the end. On the 16 July 2006, Oprah Winfrey dedicated her Book Club to The Night and called it “one of the greatest books of the century”. More than 3 million copies were sold in a few weeks in the United States. This study proposes that Wiesel’s confrontation with the divine can be best understood through his response to mysticism, expressed as a spiritual song of a fervent yet torn soul. It further suggests that his rejection of Nietzsche’s proclamation of “God’s death” and his alignment with Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav’s idea of a “broken faith” underscores his profound spiritual resilience.

Navigating Second Generation Memory and Auto/ biography in Home Video. A Video Collection of Hojda Stojka, Son of Artist and Survivor of the Porajmos Ceija Stojka

This paper investigates home videos made by Hojda Stojka, the son of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), artist and survivor of Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen. Based on a close reading of significant video sequences, a narrative interview with the videographer, and Ceija Stojka’s publications and films, it analyses how the auto/biographical videos relate to the persecution of the parents’ generation. The paper focuses on the importance of spaces like kitchens, cars and stages, on the value assigned to auto/biographical audiovisual recordings, and the recontextualization and integration of photographs and television recordings into the family memory.

Jordanna Bailkin. Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain.

Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a survivor of Auschwitz, called the twentieth century “the century of the refugee.” In Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain, Jordanna Bailkin demonstrates that in Britain it was the century of the refugee camp. These camps are at the center of her fine study, which sets them in the wider context of the history of encampment and its colonial origins and traces their history from the Belgian refugee camps of the First World War through to the camps for Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s. The voices of refugees thread their way through the book, speaking from the camps or speaking about them after moving on. Sometimes, as these voices testify, moving on—at least initially—was to another camp, and some refugees never moved on. This is a thought-provoking book that raises many questions—about the role of empire in this history, the freedom of refugees, the blurring of boundaries between refuge and detention and between migrants, citizens, and refugees at different moments, and who counted—or counted themselves—as a refugee. It challenges the pervasive forgettings of refugee camps in Britain and the tendency to remember only those aspects of this history that reflect well on the British. Organized thematically, it covers the physical structure of camps and their widespread locations, the organization of mass feeding, the impact camps had on people’s ethnic, religious, and gender identities and on their family life, refugees’ activism—from petitions through refusal to accept the label “refugee” to violence—and the mixing of people of different religions, ethnicities, and social class.

Saint Hershele

History pursues the truth through facts; fiction juices those facts until it is possible to extract their truthfulness. The story of Henry Eisenberg Glantz (1959–2020), alias El Santo Judío, a Mexican Jew whose life is the stuff of myth on the US-Mexican border, is surrounded in controversy. An idiot savant, “Hershele” was the child of an Auschwitz survivor and the grandchild of an important Yiddish poet. Obsessed with urban planning, he was particularly interested in the role traffic lights might play in easing vehicular fluency. He coined the now-ubiquitous term “vialidad,” a metaphor for metropolitan dynamism. After entering and abruptly exiting Mexico City’s political establishment, Hershele moved to Tijuana, where he became a successful radio host. In time, he metamorphosed into an associate of the Sinaloa Cartel with influence to commit crimes whose ultimate goal was, in his words, “to bring justice to earth.” As this false profile suggests, at the core of Hershele’s quest was the redemption of the “caged” children of Central American immigrants imprisoned in warehouses by the Trump Administration—“‘los pequeños que los nazis siguen acribillando,’ the little people the Nazis are still massacring.” There is a petition to beatify Hershele being considered by the Vatican.

Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory by Victoria Aarons

Reviewed by: Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory by Victoria Aarons Beth B. Cohen Victoria Aarons. Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory. Rutgers UP, 2019. vii + 241 pp. In her work on creativity and trauma, psychoanalyst and Auschwitz survivor Anna Ornstein grappled with the role of art and literature in preserving the memory of the Holocaust. How, she wondered, can artistic representations, especially by second-hand witnesses, authentically and responsibly interpret and transmit the Shoah to future generations? How can artistic representations by second-hand witnesses authentically and responsibly interpret and transmit the Shoah to future generations? Victoria Aarons addresses this question, and more, in Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory, in which she convincingly argues that graphic narratives are a compelling, even ideal genre for furthering Holocaust memory. Moreover, because of their unique structure, the author posits that these works can serve to combat "Holocaust fatigue" (6) in a world increasingly exposed to all "things Holocaust." The publication of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986, followed by Maus II in 1991, furthered the graphic novel genre in general and Holocaust graphic novels in particular. With Maus's widespread critical and popular acclaim, the genre has continued to evolve and take its rightful place as serious literature deserving scholarly attention. Indeed, Maus has spawned a large body of critical literary analysis. For this reason, Aarons begins her study in the post-Maus era. She recognizes Spiegelman's ground-breaking work, but it is not her focus. Rather, she throws a spotlight on what has happened since Maus; how other artists have interpreted and visualized their own relationship to the Holocaust. Choosing five graphic narratives that are a product of the twenty-first century, she analyzes how these books function as both personal and collective memorial pieces. [End Page 570] Aarons largely concentrates on works by individuals who have a familial connection to the events they write about, that is, individuals who are Holocaust survivors or children or grandchildren of survivors and identify as either the second or third generation. There are two exceptions; one is by Joe Kubert, whose Polish-Jewish parents immigrated to the US in 1926 but lost numerous family members during the war, and the other is a comic book created in the mid-1950s by EC Comics, one of the first US Holocaust-related comics drawn in the postwar era. Aarons proposes that, due to the complexity of the subject, Holocaust literature in its myriad forms, including the graphic narrative, belongs in its own category; the genre of rupture, which she locates in the nexus of two Jewish literary traditions; midrash and lamentations. Thus, she explores the graphic narrative as a sacred text, and the deeper analysis of them as midrashic, looking to fill in and interpret the fissures. Moreover, because of the hybrid, disruptive, and unconventional nature of graphic narratives, she contends, the genre parallels, in a sense, the struggle to plumb the depths of comprehending the unimaginable. Aarons argues persuasively that the graphic narrative is particularly conducive to personal retelling of Holocaust memory. Its very structure, designed around gaps, provides a natural ability to visually portray absence and loss. Some artists play with the gaps where empty or darkened pages confront the reader with the rupture and dislocation that was part of the Holocaust on both an individual and a meta level. Similarly, as Aarons observes, the authors' limited use of color is significant. While most of the artists' texts and drawings are composed in black and white or gray, some use color to contrast or even shock. For example, Katin's book in black and white includes a few pages in color that highlight a shift in time, signifying her life as a young mother in the safety of postwar America. Their pleasant sketches are a dramatic contrast to the darkly drawn past while serving as a stark reminder of the persistence of traumatic memory, even for child survivors like Katin who lived most of her life after the war. Aarons also calls the reader's attention to Kubert's startling and only use of color on the cover of Yossel: April 19, 1943. As Aarons points out, grappling with...

Social Trauma and Testimony: A Reading of Maryan S. Maryan's Notebooks Inspired by Sándor Ferenczi.

The purpose of this paper is to present the relational dimension of trauma according to Sándor Ferenczi, illustrating it by using the testimonial material produced during the analysis of Maryan S. Maryan, a visual artist, survivor of Auschwitz. Furthermore, a few formulations are proposed on being witness to traumatic experiences in psychoanalytic practice, as well as what can be considered as ethics and politics in psychoanalysis when facing situations of social trauma and violence.

Animals and Animality in Primo Levi's Work

Animals and Animality in Primo Levi's Work

Le témoignage de Menahem Isaac Cohen, rescapé d’Auschwitz, devant la justice bulgare en mars 1945

During a trial held in Bulgaria in March-April 1945 to prosecute anti-Semitic crimes, a Greek Jew, Menahem Isaac Cohen, a native of Thessaloniki and a survivor of Auschwitz, was invited to testify in court. This testimony is exceptional in several respects. First of all, it is one of the very first testimonies before a court of law to describe how the Auschwitz camp operated, including the selection process, the use of gas chambers and crematoria for extermination purposes, and the conduct of medical experiments on prisoners. This testimony also stands out because of the court before which it was presented, namely Chamber 7 of the Bulgarian People’s Court, the first jurisdiction in Europe exclusively dedicated to the examination of anti-Semitic crimes. This record reveals the state of knowledge of Bulgarian judges about the Holocaust, as well as their difficulty in creating a space for speech that was commensurate with the crimes related by the witness. Translated from Bulgarian and annotated and presented by Nadège Ragaru, Menahem Isaac Cohen’s deposition contributes to our knowledge of the destruction of the Jews of Thessaloniki, the great Jewish metropolis of the Balkans.

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’sAusterlitz

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’s<i>Austerlitz</i>

Witnessing the witnesses: Responding to the testimonial spaces of the camp

AbstractThe significance of testimony as a means of investigating camp spaces is indicated by the extensive literature analysing the eyewitness accounts of Nazi camp survivors. This paper builds on ongoing methodological debates in geographies of the Holocaust to suggest that witness testimony provides a valuable and multifaceted resource for investigating diverse aspects of camp spatiality. After offering an overview of the kinds of camp spaces emergent in camp survivor testimony, the paper draws on the writings of Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo in order to describe and illustrate two methodological approaches to witness accounts. The first is based on the irreplaceable value of survivor testimony as a source of first‐hand observational data, with Delbo's unconventional descriptions of camp spaces and spatialities connecting with numerous core themes in geographical work on the Nazi regime and camp spatialities more generally. The second focuses instead on the capacity of witnessing to disturb the incorporation of testimonial descriptions into academic narratives, and in turn provoke new geographical questions and imaginaries in response to the singular act of testimony.

“Die Grenzen des Sagbaren”: H. G. Adler (on) Writing Literature after the Holocaust

Taking the next step in our understanding of the testimony of Holocaust literature involves taking a step back to recuperate a theoretical approach that does not cede all human attempts at knowledge to skepticism. At odds with Theodor Adorno about the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz, Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, transformed his experiences into fiction. In his novel, Eine Reise, published in 1962, and in his 1965 essay on “Die Grenzen des Sagbaren,” or the limits of the sayable, Adler addresses these dilemmas. While Adorno collapses traditions of value into barbarity, Adler struggles to maintain, describe and explain the possibility of human resistance to evil. I examine Adler’s nuanced use of language in these two works and show that the rage and epistemological uncertainty that dominate the post-Holocaust world do not necessarily lead to the destruction of all traditional forms of meaning.

Dream and Fantasy in Shutter Island: Trauma, Historical Guilt, and Ethics

ABSTRACT This article proposes an historical reading of Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010) that weaves a complex and puzzling narrative, swaying between the protagonist's dreams and memories (his involvement as an American soldier in the liberation of Dachau and the reprisals carried out there) and his concocted fantasy of revenge and heroism as a US Marshal. The purpose of this fantasy is to veil the enormity of the trauma he suffered while encountering the dead victims of Dachau and the guilty conscience that stemmed from it. Through dreams, the film renders its protagonist's personal tragedy—a chain of events involving the death of his family, for which he feels guilty—and exploits his subjectivity to disquiet public consciousness regarding the United States' resistance to saving the Jews from their horrific and tragic fate under the Nazi regime. The protagonist's dreams and recollections of the Dachau reprisals are rendered as a sort of going back in time to remember, reflect, and wish that the US had acted differently, that US soldiers had arrived in time to save those who needed saving. This going back in time, employing every possible visual and aural device analogous to the dream work, or to a distorted memory, establishes an ethics that resonates with the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis according to which the subject must acknowledge her or his own desire to be able to make a free choice, and with the ethics of resentment à la resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry, which opposes any kind of reconciliation, forgiveness, atonement, or even revenge. By criticizing historical and social indifference to the horrors of the Holocaust, the film also resists every ploy of narrative war films that center on themes of heroism, salvation, and redemption.

Dizygotic Twin Infants: Controversial Case Study Series/Twin Research Reviews: Twin and Non-twin ICSI Conceptions; Emory University Twin Study; Labor in Multiple Pregnancy After Previous C-Section Delivery; Cell-Free DNA Fetal Fraction in Twin Pregnancies/News Reports: Twin Survivor of Auschwitz; Twins Trading Places; Identical Twin Foals; Twins Born in Different Decades; Twins Ambulette Service.

This article describes a 1930s case study series involving dizygotic female twin infants. The twins' development was evaluated following periods of intentionally restricted practice and minimal social stimulation. In the opinion of the author of the current article, the study is very unsettling and unacceptable, despite the lack of institutional review boards at that time. This discussion is followed by twin research reviews of recent papers concerning twin and non-twin intracytoplasmic sperm injection conceptions, the Emory University Twin Study of cardiac and brain functions, labor trials in multiple pregnancies after previous C-section delivery and cell-free DNA fetal fraction in twin pregnancies. The article concludes with news items of a twin survivor of Auschwitz, a situation in which twins traded places, the rare birth of identical twin foals, the novel delivery of co-twins in different decades and the Twins Ambulette Service.

(Re)Claiming Motherhood in the Wake of the Holocaust in Chava Rosenfarb’s ‘Little Red Bird’ and Valentine Goby’s Kinderzimmer

ABSTRACTWhile saving women and children first is standard practice at times of historical upheaval, during the Holocaust women and children were often killed first, and pregnant mothers and small children were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival at the Nazi camps. This fundamental reversal of traditional values has not yet been granted enough attention, which is why this study examines two narratives that tell the survivor's story through the lens of motherhood and the woman's body. Valentine Goby's Kinderzimmer (2013) draws on archives and survivors' testimonies about a 'children's room' located in Ravensbrück between September 1944 and March 1945. Goby's narrator is modeled on Madeleine Roubenne, a French survivor, yet, interestingly, Goby rewrites Roubenne's story into a more 'successful' version of motherhood. The short story 'Little Red Bird' (2004), written in Yiddish by Jewish-Canadian author, Chava Rosenfarb, who is a Holocaust survivor herself, alludes to the Little Red Riding Hood and follows an Auschwitz survivor obsessed by her inability to bear children, which she attributes to being haunted by the ghost of her five-year-old daughter killed in Auschwitz. The story stages the destructiveness of PTSD through Manya's obsession with motherhood that results in her fantasy of stealing a baby from a maternity ward and her failure to assist her dying husband. Both narratives thus testify to the intrinsically gendered character of Holocaust experience and problematize gender in the context of Holocaust through examinations of (non-)motherhood and the female body. While for Rosenfarb's narrator, surviving means to counter the effects of Nazi policies that specifically targeted women for their reproductive capacities, for Goby's narrator foster motherhood enables survival. Both texts are thus read here in the light of the complicated re-gendering and cathartic/pathological aspects of motherhood brought about by Holocaust trauma.

Retroactive Continuity, Holocaust Testimony, and X-Men’s Magneto

ABSTRACTThis article examines retroactive continuity (or retcon), a fundamental feature of serialized comics, in which a character’s backstory can be effectively rewritten, in order to shed light on the complex question of testimonial production and reception. Specifically, I analyze how the Jewish identity of X- Men villain Magneto has been overwritten. While Magneto first appeared in Uncanny X-Men 1 (1963), his origins as a survivor of Auschwitz were only written into the story much later, in Uncanny X-Men 150 (1981). More recently, Greg Pak’s X-Men: Magneto Testament (2008), a five-issue origin story, confirmed Magneto’s Jewish background. Retconning reveals how comics are constantly reinvented to meet new market demands, but it is also a feature that challenges the internal logic of a text while being an extension of it. Magneto is repeatedly retconned (i.e. the number on his arm tattoo, his given name), as is Holocaust discourse at large. How, then, are we to read (into) his pasts? In the case of Magneto, retroactive continuity calls attention to the relations between the character, the story world, and cultural and political contexts by generating multiple, parallel stories. Rather than undermining or deforming the ‘truth,’ to read retroactive continuity back into testimony is to allow for the relations that necessarily condition the ‘truth’ in the first place to come to the fore.

Translation and the language of testimony: Filip Müller’s testimony at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial

ABSTRACT This paper examines the interaction between the Auschwitz survivor Filip Müller, the interpreter Otto Stegmann, and the Presiding Judge Hans Hofmeyer during Müller’s cross-examination during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. A close reading of testimony, made possible by the audio recordings, allows us to show how Müller’s decision to speak German, as opposed to his native Slovak or Czech, led to an interesting dynamic between the participants: Müller’s testimony arises out of their interaction and the moments of conflict and collaboration that characterized it. In particular, this essay explores the role of the interpreter in enabling Müller to make his testimony, and shows how translation processes help to shape the way that the testimony is formulated.

Jean Améry. Entre la razón crítica y la desesperanza

Este artículo indaga sobre la escritura de Jean Améry (Austria, 1912-1978), sobreviviente de Auschwitz, quien desde la ficción o el ensayo autorreferencial exploró la catástrofe del mundo contemporáneo. Los elementos autobiográficos constituyen la materia real que Améry convirtió en un “ensayo contemplativo”. Él no creía en las virtudes terapéuticas de la memoria, sino en la propia experiencia y el resentimiento —este último entendido a partir de Frantz Fanon— comopuntos de quiebre y promontorios desde los que podía observar los más aciagos acontecimientos del pasado.

Introduction

Introduction Jim Hicks SIGMUND FREUD ONCE offered an outline of the relations between poets and their dream-worlds. Unlike much of his work, his words on this subject still seem as rich and insightful as they must have appeared in December of 1907. For this issue, which celebrates our magazine's sixtieth year of publication, the psychoanalyst's observations are particularly relevant. The influence of history on the poetic imagination, Freud comments, "hovers, as it were, between three times—the three moments of time which our ideation involves." First, the imagination encounters "some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present"; from there, he notes, "it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience"; and finally,"it now creates a situation relating to the future." He concludes, "Thus past, present, and future are strung together, as it were, along the thread of the wish that runs through them." I'm fairly sure our founding editors never anticipated that their magazine would live to salute the third decade of this third millennium. I happen to have achieved the same age as our publication (a sum of years neither of my parents exceeded), and I certainly never expected to be around this long. And yet, for sixty years, the "thread of the wish" this magazine represents has never wavered: we promote social justice and equality, along with great art. We aim to provoke debate, inspire action, and expand understanding of the world around us. That's why, to celebrate our sixtieth anniversary, we decided to take Freud's words literally. We begin this issue with a "provoking occasion": major voices from two of the world's many hot spots. Looking across the globe today, one might well wonder where fires are not burning; in any case, Serhiy Zhadan's poetic dispatch from Ukraine, brought to us by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, much like Xu Xi's reflections on Hong Kong past and present, are surely not to be missed. After that, we've put together, not simply "the memory of an earlier experience," but a full, complex series of reflections on how we engage with memory and history, even in our most traumatic moments. Over the past half century or more, groundbreaking work on this subject has been done under the aegis of Holocaust Studies, and in this issue we bring you not only contributions from Laura Levitt and James Young, two key theorists of Holocaust and Jewish Studies, but also an essay by Ghislaine Dunant, Charlotte Delbo's biographer, which [End Page 584] discusses the unique contribution of the Auschwitz survivor's writing. To conclude this section, Patricia Chu applies the work of Holocaust studies to post–World War II literature by Asian American writers, and Peter Chametzky describes the implicit redefinition of citizenship that immigrant artists are bringing to contemporary Germany. The art of Anna Schuleit Haber resonates with each of the preceding arguments, capping this section perfectly. To complete its work, Freud notes, the poetic imagination must also "create a situation relating to the future"; in planning this issue, our editors realized that if we looked only to the past, our celebration would remain incomplete. Instead we invited a cohort of favorite writers from our past decade—winners of our Halley Prize for poetry as well as the authors of some of our favorite stories—to nominate emerging writers we hadn't yet published, authors whose work they felt belonged in our pages. Our friends, old and new, responded to our call, and we quickly faced an embarrassment of riches. As a result, the bulk of this anniversary issue—some eighteen poets and five writers of prose—looks out on the future, welcoming it here and now. We end our sixtieth year, and our sixtieth volume year, by reprinting a selection of work that first appeared online in a blog series launched in November 2016. For reasons obvious to all, during that moment of political crisis, we offered space to writers who would confront the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, the catastrophic social and environmental policies that, though the roots are surely deeper, have so thoroughly infested our public sphere during these past two years. From this series...

The journey of a child survivor of Auschwitz: A single case narrative.

The journey of a child survivor of Auschwitz: A single case narrative.