Concentration Camp Experience Research Articles

Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading by Leona Toker

Reviewed by: Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading by Leona Toker Benjamin Paloff Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading. By Leona Toker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 281 pages. $40.00 (paper). The ways in which we read the literature that emerged from the experience of concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, on the one hand, and the texts that arose from the Soviet Gulag system, on the other, will be markedly different in the twenty-first century from what they were in the twentieth. So broad a generalization is justified by its actualization already in progress: those who have known the spaces to which these texts refer are passing quickly from this life, and those who are currently being born into it will be more likely to respond to the similarities between a Gulag novel and a Holocaust novel than to default immediately to the theoretical and political arguments that have long striven to treat these bodies of work as separate. Those of us who teach this material to undergraduates know that doing so requires an ever-increasing amount of contextualization that just a few years ago might have been assumed to be common knowledge. At the same time, the separation we have carefully maintained between the stories of survival in Nazi camps and Soviet penal colonies are starting to seem more and more trivial to readers encountering them for the first time. [End Page 204] This is because the insistence that these phenomena—and, indeed, any experience of collective and forced detention, confinement, depravation, labor, and torture—are irreconcilably distinct from each other is driven more by ideological exceptionalism than by fundamental differences in institutions or their representation. On the contrary, the institution of the concentration camp is broadly comparable across the Nazi and Soviet contexts (and a great many others besides, both historical and contemporary), and the texts that have emerged from these places are generically so similar that insisting on their strict separation risks a kind of interpretive malpractice. This is not to reject the argument that the Nazi genocide perpetrated against European Jewry created a special inflection of the camp experience, since one inevitably experiences the camp differently, and the reader reads that experience differently in turn, when one's entire race or ethnic group has been marked for extinction. Nor is it to assume that the peculiarities of the Soviet penal system are not significant in themselves, from the system's endurance across generations to its eagerness to absorb those who, even in their internment, viewed themselves as true believers in the system that was persecuting them. But the sequestration that had separated "Gulag literature" from "the literature of Nazi camps" while scholars working on these corpuses were still defining their respective subfields in the 1960s and 1970s has long since calcified into a taboo, one that refuses an otherwise self-evident comparative field at the outset. The handful of more expansive treatments that Leona Toker mentions in a footnote to Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Concentration Camps—most notable among them, Terrence Des Pres's The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976) and Tzvetan Todorov's Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1991; English translation, 2000)—are the exceptions that prove the rule. The cumbersome title of Toker's new study is symptomatic of this circumstance. And, in the interest of laying a strong foundation for future comparison, Toker is at pains to avoid weighing in on the exceptionalist position by stating, for instance, that concentration camp literature can or should be treated as a unified genre. Instead, [End Page 205] she emphasizes that her method is "intercontextual." In this way, she effectively does an end-run around the exceptionalism dilemma simply by treating the Nazi and Soviet systems as parallels of each other that are likewise mirrored in literary artifacts, focusing "on those cases where the two bodies of literature about concentration camps provide helpful contexts for each other—where what is clear in one literary corpus sheds light on what is obscure in the other" (9). By presenting Nazi concentration camps and...

Durchfall, Auschwitz’s Unwritten Story: Filth and Excremental Violence in Tadeusz Borowski’s Postwar Fiction

Abstract As an author central to postwar literature on the concentration and death camp experience, Tadeusz Borowski chose to depict the relatively taboo subject of excremental violence. Borowski’s documentary fiction depicted an aspect of history that was, especially in 1946 after his own incarceration and survival, both raw and controversial. Writing in Polish as part of a collective work, Borowski was intent on speaking in his native language to a shattered Polish nation. This article analyzes how Borowski drew attention to human rights violations by writing about excremental violence. It further examines how Borowski eschewed oversimplified postwar categories of perpetrators, victims, and resisters. Instead, drawing upon his own experiences in Auschwitz, Dautmergen, and Dachau, his works articulate the powerlessness of those in the camps and the dehumanizing conditions they faced, thus challenging any misleading narratives regarding heroic agency.

Translating the Memory of the Holocaust: Thomas Geve’s Memoir

This paper explores the most significant challenges of translating the memory of the Holocaust, focusing on the difficulties of transferring a survivor’s testimonial account to a different linguistic and cultural system. Because the concentration camp experience is inherently multicultural, and survivors have chosen to pen their ordeal in several languages, translation epitomizes a discipline that intertwines directly with the construction of universal collective memory. Consequently, translating Holocaust memoirs poses challenging questions on hermeneutics and deontology. Throughout the following pages, I will critically analyze my own Spanish rendition of Thomas Geve’s memoir, Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust (1987), so as to delve into the ethical commitments borne by a translator, and into the formal and stylistic complexities inherent to the translation of concentrationary literature.

ÁFRICA: das diferenças, dos limites e os avanços das ações de resistência

Neste trabalho discutirei como se processaram as estratégias colonialistas e os debates que se seguiram. Desde o final do século XIX, a África sofreu uma série de políticas intervencionistas, resultando numa era de catástrofe. As reações enquadravam-se entre três soluções: a submissão, a aliança e o confronto. Devemos observar que a resistência sob a ótica do político, da economia e da religião precisa ser reconsiderada. Para isso, trouxe os exemplos de Kimpa Vita e de Rainha Jinga, no período pré-colonial, para nos ajudar a compreender o fenômeno da resistência na longa duração. Descreverei a resistência de Menelik II contra a empreitada italiana na Etiópia e a ocupação da Namíbia pelas forças alemãs, caracterizada como a primeira grande experiência de campo de concentração e extermínio. Concluirei com a resistência em Moçâmedes, lugar de confronto entre portugueses e nativos liderados pelos sobas. Palavras-chave: África. Colonização. Resistência.

Fases psicológicas e sentido da vida em tempos de isolamento social pela pandemia de COVID-19 uma reflexão a luz de Viktor Frankl

Introdução: O isolamento social é uma das medidas de prevenção durante as pandemias para reduzir a transmissão de novos vírus, mas que pode trazer graves repercussões psicológicas. Nessa perspectiva, este artigo tem como objetivo refletir acerca das fases psicológicas e o sentido da vida desvelados por Viktor Frankl a partir da própria experiência nos campos de concentração, relacionando-os ao momento atual de isolamento social devido à COVID-19. Método: Descritivo reflexivo, com embasamento fenomenológico-existencial de Viktor Frankl e seu livro “Em Busca de Sentido: um psicólogo nos campos de concentração”, assim como literatura correlata nacional e internacional. Resultados: Como reflexão sobre a experiência de Frankl e as reações atuais das pessoas em isolamento social, as três fases psicológicas a discutir são: (1) o Estado de Choque: Uma Pandemia em um mundo globalizado?; (2) Apatia, adaptação e sentido da vida nos campos: Desvelando o sentido em tempos escuros; e (3) Terceira: Depois de libertados: O que esperar ou o que fazer? Considerações finais: Este estudo permitiu verificar que as reações psicológicas e comportamentais em estado de confinamento foram similares entre os campos de concentração e o atual isolamento social. A experiência vivida por Frankl de encontrar um sentido na vida em tempos de sofrimento é um exemplo de superação e sobrevivência para as pessoas que passam por isolamento social em tempos de pandemia.

"My Trieste address": The ethno-cultural self-identification in the conditions of the Slovenian-Italian borderlands

In the focus of the attention are the problems of the creative work of an outstanding writer from Trieste, a representative of the Slovenian national minority in Italy Boris Pahor. This Slovenian, who celebrated his 105 th birthday in 2018, was born in the multinational and multicultural Trieste at the time when the city was still a part of Austria-Hungary, then survived three European dictators of the 20 th century: Mussolini, Hitler and Tito. During his long creative life (Pahor’s literary debut took place in 1948, the last novel was published in 2012), the writer has created a collective image of the Trieste Slovenian, making extensive use of his autobiographical motifs. The heroes of his works, representatives of the Slovenian diaspora in Trieste, have different names and professions, but all of them defend their right to freedom and ethno-cultural originality. The experience of concentration camps was the basis of his autobiographical novel “Necropolis” (1967). This work is ranked with the works by A. Solzhenitsyn, P. Levi, J. Semprun and I. Kertész. This is one of the most vivid literary evidence about the Nazi death factory in the time of World War II in the modern European prose. In the context of the Slovenian literary paradigm, Pahor’s creative individuality is es- pecially unique, because his poetics is not connected with the national literary tradition, he was guided by Italian neorealists, first of all V. Pratolini, as well as by E. Hemingway, J. Dos Passos, and W. Saroyan.

THIS IS HELL NOR AM I OUT OF IT: RAVENHILL’S PLAYS THE EXPERIMENT AND THE CUT

This paper analyses two of Mark Ravenhill’s plays, The Experiment and The Cut, the former dealing with the subjectivity and unreliability of truth, ironically used to justify scientific experiments, and the latter with an unspecified operation, the cut, as allegedly the only way out of a dystopian society. The introductory part offers an overview of the impact of society on one’s personality through the experience of concentration camps as a kind of experiment by V. Frankl, P. Levi and B. Bettelheim. The secret experiments done by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as a continuation of what started in the 1940s, and, although not so well camouflaged by higher purposes, as precursors to modern experiments, were similarly financed by governments and with asimilarly profound toll. The aim is to draw attention to a Ravenhill’s warning of how dangerous the absence of moral values, awareness and responsibility can be, and his belief that there are ethical choices both on stage and in life.

Polska literatura obozowa. Kilka pytań o syntezę, której nie ma

The author of the paper wonders why nobody so far has attempted a historical-literary synthesis of Polish literature concerning the concentration camp experience in general, and the labour camp experience in particular, as the latter has an obvious potential for a proto-synthesis. The question is followed by subjective answers that build upon the significance of Tadeusz Borowski’s prose, the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and differences between the records of the camp experience in Poland and abroad. In its central part, the paper points to a certain possibility at our disposal to – irrespective of almost insurmountable obstacles – at least start the aforementioned synthesis. This can be done by the application of the external criteria: historical-geographical (what camps, when and where) and historical-literary, which would include such perspectives and categories as periodization, literary genres and comparative studies.

3. Primo Levi et le difficile rapport avec la population italienne

For Italians, Primo Levi remains the witness of the camps. He was always aware that his books were viewed by his countrymen as “collective books.” Over the years, Italy recognized his role as the public narrator of the concentration camp experience. To reconstruct and deconstruct Levi’s evolution in the Italian public arena is to reflect the period of the Italian recollection of the deportation. Continuing along these lines, the article is divided into three sections. Firstly, the article studies the difficulties surrounding the publication of If This Is a Man, which were typical of postwar Italy. Despite these difficulties, a publisher was found in 1947 and the Einaudi edition came out in 1958. If This Is a Man brought to light the underlying challenges in building a public narrative on the deportation. The second section of the article examines the complex relationship between the recognition of Levi the author and the reality that was revealed to Levi the witness. One can imagine a dialogue that unfolds despite the witness’ solitude and the superficiality of a society that is inclined to forget its own past. Lastly, the article looks at the construction of Levi as an icon, posthumously perfected and designed to make it possible to “digest” the words of “the man with the good memory.”

Koncepcja „nieuświadomionego Boga” — rozważania po Holocauście Victora Frankla

IDEA OF „THE UNCONSCIOUS GOD” — AFTER THE HOLOCAUST CONSIDER OF VICTOR FRANKLThe article presents an idea of „the unconscious God” of V. Frankl 1905–1997, a psychoana­lyst and afounder of so called „third Vienesse school”. Frankl, a prisoner of Auschwitz no. 119104 and Dachau, analyzes a modern World as a doctor psychiatrist and a philosopher. The author shows how experience of concentration camps 1942–1945 influences his moral philosophy. In his, avictim of the Holocaust, opinion, modern society is endlessly in crisis, which appears to begin in modern Europe. Frankl, in a book „The Unconscious God”, gives an option to modern human and also discusses on the one hand a pessimistic vision of „death of God” in Auschwitz M. Buber, H.  Jonas, and on the other optimistic vision of neopsychoanalysis E. Fromm.

‘Stories That Find their Place’: Retelling the Protest at Brandfort, 1901–1949

This paper concerns eight women's testimonies produced over a period of some 50 years, which describe a protest about meat rations at Brandfort concentration camp in November 1901, during the 1899–1902 South African War. The focus here is not the ‘event itself’, which cannot now be recovered except in its archival or documentary forms, but on the subsequent re/telling of this incident, and on the politicised, (proto-) nationalist content and tone of the Brandfort protest testimonies. While proto-nationalism is present from the earliest extant testimony, the development of this is traced over time, showing how the later testimonies evince a strongly triumphalist nationalist tone. The retrospectively inscribed testimonies of the protest are examined to show how, over time, the story of the Brandfort protest became universalised, retold well away from specificities of time and place. If nationalism depends on the creation of ‘stories that find their place’, then it was partly through the construction and repetition of what Van Heyningen has called ‘costly mythologies’ about women's concentration camp experiences that Afrikaner national unity was achieved. This also supports Bradford’s important claim that the 1899–1902 war regendered Afrikaner nationalism.

The Perception of One Another in the Construction of the Self. Case Study

The paper examines how language builds an ethnic and artistic identity before, during and after the concentration camp experience, in the book having an autobiographical content, The Story of a Life by Aharon Appelfeld.His childhood languages-German (native language), Yiddish (his grandparents language), Ukrainian sprinkled with Romanian words(official languages of social environment, especially the city of Czernowits) are the stable roots looking for a new assumed identity in Israel through the Hebrew language learned in a cultural context.

Hybrid Testimony and Moral Indictment: A Survivor's Poetic Response to the Mauthausen Nazi Concentration Camp Experience

Poetry is rarely accorded the same testimonial and documentary status as diaries and memoirs, which have been largely accepted as subjective forms of historical accounts. The author of this article argues that more traditional forms of Holocaust survivor testimony and poetic forms do not have to be viewed as belonging to mutually exclusive categories. A close reading of Mauthausen concentration camp survivor Otto Hoffmann’s 1945 collection of poems reveals the testimonial character of poetry, and attests to the survivor’s effort to establish authority as a “moral witness.”

(Sobre)vidas: objetos, memorias e identidades en la transmisión de experiencias concentracionarias

El presente artículo busca dar cuenta, desde una perspectiva antropológica, de la relación entre objetos, memorias e identidades en el marco de experiencias concentracionarias. El mismo se enmarca en la investigación realizada para el montaje de la muestra (Sobre)VIDAS -que integra el museo de Sitio del ex CCDTyE “La Perla”- en la cual se abordan diferentes temas relacionados con la experiencia concentracionaria a partir de objetos sacados del Campo por algunos sobrevivientes. El artículo analiza el papel de los objetos como marcos sociales de la memoria, y su potencial para la transmisión de estas experiencias tanto en el contexto judicial como en el museográfico. Finalmente, esboza líneas para el debate acerca de los desafíos (éticos, estéticos y políticos) que supone la exhibición de objetos relacionados con el exterminio, estableciendo comparaciones sobre los significados que adquieren este tipo de dispositivos museográficos en diferentes contextos nacionales.

REPRESENTANDO O IRREPRESENTÁVEL: O TESTEMUNHO DA GUERRA NO “MANUSCRITO CUERVO” DE MAX AUB

Abstract: The literature of testimony has been subject of numerous investigative works both in literary studies as in other areas of knowledge. This kind of literary production, closely related to history, presents itself in the attempt tore present and recover the memory of traumatic experiences in situations that can be termed as catastrophic, for example, those related to the Holocaust. Dealing specifically with Spanish literature, one can say that there are some authors, among them Max Aub, who wrote testimonial works of strongly tone, representing not only the experiences of World War II, but also those related to the Spanish civil war or Franco’s dictatorship. In Manuscrito Cuervo: historia de Jacobo, Max Aub uses literature as an art, to represent the testimony of the experiences that thousands of people in Nazi concentration camps of World War II have undergone. In this report, endowed with irony and built in a very peculiar way, Aub develops a narrative in which the focus from where the horror of concentration camps is seen far from the human, so it is in an inhuman context, the reader is presented a narrator who is not a man but a crow. From these considerations, it can be said that the aim of this work is to develop a reading of the Manuscrito Cuervo that note show the structure of the text helps to represent the unrepresentable, in other words, it tends to observe how the literary art is used to represent the trauma resulting from concentration camp experiences. KEYWORDS: testimony, memory, Spanish literature

Adventures of Language. Representation in Marian Pankowskiʼs Prose Works

This article attempts to position the work of Marian Pankowski onto the background of the phenomenon called the crisis of mimesis. The author focuses on the relationship between the literary text and painting, as well as other iconic means of expression. Moreover, the paperʼs aim is to analyse the narrative structure of selected works and point out other important questions within the area of the issues it addresses: the question of autobiographical writing and literary representation of the concentration camp experience.

„Ein Farbfilm von Gesichtern …“. Die ehrliche Kunst des einfachen Erzählens. Zur Poetologie Fred Wanders.

Fred Wander worked in his prose with a concept of language, which is influenced by the dictate using only simple and distinct elements of language after Auschwitz. over decades he devised a narration in which the diachrone timestructure represents the most important element. In his work as a photographer he developed criteria of a humane and truthfully portrayal of individuals. This and the conception of his prose allowed him to express his memories of exile, deportation and the experience of the concentration camps.

Madness to the method? Using a narrative methodology to analyse large-scale complex social phenomena

Building on earlier research, two related narrative inquiry projects were conducted, concerned with Boer (later, Afrikaner) women's testimonies of their wartime and concentration camp experiences, and with commemoration of the people who died in these camps. Putting the design into practice, and the advantages and disadvantages of the approach, are both discussed. Overall, using a narrative inquiry approach for investigating large-scale complex social phenomena, in this case connected with the rise of proto-nationalism in South Africa and women's role in it, was methodologically and analytically problematic although interesting and instructive.

Haroldo Quinteros: la forma-Diario y los tiempos del testimonio

The text focuses on Diario de un preso politico chileno (Haroldo Quinteros) and his way of bearing witness of his experience of prison and concentration camps. Specifically, the author focuses on the textual structure of the “diary” and his double experience of time.

Günter Grass and the Secret

There were a lot of secrets in postwar Germany. There still are. For some it was a matter of incriminating knowledge of crimes and fear of prosecution. But many people who witnessed Nazism kept silent because there were no words for what they had seen. What they saw was as far removed from everyday normalcy as the earth is from the moon. Hannah Arendt described the experience of the concentration camps as "life on the moon." But the horror of the war could also remain lodged in the synapses. Later generations did not always ask questions, and among them were many who didn't want to know what truly had transpired. Best to leave the burden of the past and memory to those who passed through its inferno. Many of us, but not all, are within the folds of that secret.