A physician’s assistant, Olga Lengyel was one of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Her memoir is one of the earliest accounts by a survivor we have of that camp. Chicago: Ziff-Davis, 1947. Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Transylvania when she was deported to Auschwitz; she was able to secure work in an infirmary, a job that ultimately saved her life. This 1946 memoir is an unflinching account of her time in that area, her interactions with Dr. Josef Mengeleand her observations of the medical experiments performed on inmates. A deeply uncomfortable read, Lengyel’s memoir is a necessary living, breathing document. King of the Jews byLeslie Epstein At the famous ramp where the selections took place, you could go one way to the gas chambers and you were immediately dead; if you went the other way to slave labour, it was extermination through work. Average life expectancy, if you were selected for slave labour, was precisely three months. So, it’s not exactly a good chance of survival, but nevertheless it was the chance for survival for those who did survive. In the early years, people were actually not that interested in what survivors had experienced; they were only of interest as witnesses to the crimes of others, not as testimonies to what the past had done to them”

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That aspect of the Holocaust has not lodged in public consciousness in the same way as the Auschwitz story. I think one of the things we have to remember is that the memory of survivors that has come down to us paints a very unique picture of people who are of a particular age group: young at the time, selected largely for slave labour because they were strong and fit to work, and who lived to a ripe old age in which they could communicate their experiences. Consequently, it has become commonplace to construe “Auschwitz” as signifying a decisive rupture in the history of humanity. A vast and impressive literature exploring this caesura poses fundamental questions about whole areas of human endeavor “after Auschwitz”—art, architecture, law, education, theology, ethics, and more. In other words, Auschwitz-Birkenau has been utilized by many intellectuals as a symbol or metaphor for the entire Holocaust. She had to sell sexual favours as a young woman would have to do, and she was fortunate that one old Nazi that she actually managed to stay with was syphilitic and impotent, and therefore unable to avail himself of what she had on offer, but liked having her around. There were ruses she and many others used, with stories about lost papers, about being bombed out, taking on false identities. I think what’s interesting about her account is also that she’s a clever woman. She subsequently goes on to be a distinguished academic in East Germany. Her son, Hermann Simon, got her to record her testimony late in her life. He took down a very long interview with her and wrote it up, and it came out in an extraordinarily articulate way. He said he barely needed to edit it to produce the book. We need to understand the machinery of mass extermination that allowed a camp like Auschwitz to be constructed and to function and have all the sub-camps and to have all the involvement of industrialists and employers in slave labour—but we also need to explore why it was that, under some conditions, people who were simply bystanders were actually able to turn into rescuers—and why others chose to remain passive, or were instead complicit, betraying those who tried to hide and those who tried to help. And there were variations in the character of surrounding societies across Europe that affected the capacity of the persecuted to survive in different areas. A towering book by a towering figure, theorist and critic, Arendt’s most famous work chronicles Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Famous for the coining of the phrase “the banality of evil,” which refers to the moral and emotional detachment Eichmann displayed, this book is so much more: a dense, exploratory treatise on the nature of humanity. Five Chimneys byOlga LengyelMelanie: You must be kidding? Is it not obvious that this reader community would have a serious issue with Holocaust-denying books? How much does the politics that still bedevils this whole area of historical enquiry interfere with your work? Does it constrain you in any way? Is it something that you’re constantly dealing with, or is it an inevitable part of the work and something that you’re happy to embrace? The Allies created the International Tracing Service (ITS), now referred to as the Arolsen Archives, to centralize postwar efforts to locate missing persons and help survivors discover the fate of family members in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.

Auschwitz The Imperative to Witness: Memoirs by Survivors of Auschwitz

Themis-Athena wrote: "Also, what am I not remembering about Bel Canto that makes it fit the bill here? Terrorism and hostage taking in South America are quite a stretch from the (or even "a") holocaust as well IMHO ..." The fact that she was a member of a resistance group allowed for a sense of community on returning after the war. They returned singing as well as having entered singing. They could sing, and this was not possible for other survivors. I think she’s in striking contrast to somebody like Gilbert Michlin, for example, who I write about in my book, who was a Jewish French prisoner deported from France to Auschwitz. When he returned to France, he had to keep the fact that he was Jewish quiet and pretend he was just French because the myth of resistance was so big in post-war France and there was still a festering antisemitism. So, his return to France was much more miserable than Delbo’s. Alice☆~ wrote: "I think number 197 needs to be removed as I read it a few years ago and don't recall anything about the holocaust in it but then I do have a poor memory.

For somebody surviving in hiding, it could be absolutely, terrifyingly difficult, but if you had the fortune to survive, you probably had a sense of a coherent self afterwards, in contrast to the experience Delbo describes of this sharp break with the past. What changes then is this terrible period, the 1950s. From the late 1940s onwards, the Cold War takes precedence for the Western Allies. They start seeing former Nazis as useful in the fight against Communism, and West Germany as useful in the fight against Communism. So from then on, Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, and his government prioritized the rehabilitation of former Nazis and granted amnesties, early releases and cut sentences. The Allies—the Americans particularly—and West Germany were wholly of one mind on this.

Books About the Holocaust That Changed My Life - BOOK RIOT The Books About the Holocaust That Changed My Life - BOOK RIOT

What I find most difficult is actually confronting the subject matter. The subject matter itself is so disturbing, so upsetting and incomprehensible. Anyone who’s looked at this—and I’ve spent years and years and years trying to get my head around it—will still, on occasion, find it utterly incomprehensible, despite being able to give an account of it. It’s a very curious paradox. The West Germans chose to resort to the old German criminal law; they didn’t want to adopt the Nuremberg principles. They didn’t want anything that was retroactive, punishing crimes that weren’t defined at the time. But the problem with the West German definition of murder was that it entailed showing individual intent and excess brutality. This meant, effectively, that if you couldn’t show that an individual was subjectively motivated to kill, they couldn’t be convicted of murder.

I Cannot Forgive

What were the sort of compromises that he made that perhaps led to his survival? I know one of the books that didn’t make your shortlist was Filip Müller’s Eyewitness Auschwitz. He actually helped to run the gas chambers. Frankl obviously wasn’t doing that, but does he talk about the moral compromises within the prisoner community that went on in a fight to survive?