The Cultural Representation of the Holocaust in

Fiction and Other Genres

Alan David Polak

Thesis submitted to the University of Sheffield in partial fulfilment of the

requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English Literature
September 2004

ABSTRACT
This thesis evaluates representations of the Holocaust in fiction and other genres and
emphasises the relationship between the texts examined and the historical events they
represent.
The first three chapters are focussed on the victims.
Chapter 1 considers representations of the death camp Treblinka in Jean-Franois
Steiners novel Treblinka and Ian MacMillans novel Village of a Million Spirits.
Questions of ideological bias and historical accuracy in works of fiction are examined.
Chapter 2 considers works produced by writers who were inside the Warsaw ghetto.
Readings of the diaries of Chaim Kaplan, Emmanuel Ringelblum and Adam
Czerniakow, and of Bread for the Departed, a novel by Bogdan Wojdowski, assess how
they add to understanding of the events they describe.
Chapter 3 considers novels about the Warsaw ghetto by authors who were not
personally involved: The Wall by John Hersey, The Final Station Umschlagplatz by
Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz and The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman by Andrzej Szczypiorski. The
potential for ideological distortion of the events is examined.
The final two chapters are focussed on the perpetrators.
Chapter 4 examines the role of Nazi ideology in the Holocaust, and the question of
German guilt and responsibility, including the contributions of Eberhard Jckel, Karl
Jaspers and Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. Examples of the impact of the
Holocaust on the second generation are considered, including several books of
interviews with children of leading Nazis, as well as Niklas Franks book condemning
his father Hans.
Chapter 5 examines fictional representations of the Holocaust by German authors:
Death in Rome by Wolfgang Koeppen, Alfred Anderschs Efraims Book, Bernhard
Schlinks The Reader and Flights of Love, Rachel Seifferts The Dark Room, and
Gnter Grasss The Tin Drum, From the Diary of a Snail and Crabwalk. These novels
are considered in the light of connections between postwar Germany and the
perpetrators of the Holocaust.
The thesis confirms the importance of historical fact, and of the nationality and ethnicity
of authors, in Holocaust representation.

CONTENTS

Abstract
Introduction
1 Representations of Treblinka
2 Representations of the Warsaw Ghetto: The Insiders Stories
3 Representations of the Warsaw Ghetto: The Outsiders Stories
4 Nazi Ideology, German Guilt and the Second Generation
5 Responses to the Holocaust by German Writers
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix: Correspondence with Ian MacMillan

2
4
14
59
97
128
173
228
231
244

INTRODUCTION
I was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Liverpool in 1950, my
grandparents having left Poland and the Ukraine in the 1890s and 1900s. The origins of
this thesis lie in the mystification of the Holocaust which was common in my childhood.
When the Holocaust was referred to at home or in the synagogue, it was as a horrible
catastrophe inflicted on the Jewish people. There was an unspoken element of shame
involved in identification with the victims by a community which was becoming
increasingly integrated into British society, but was still wary of the Gentiles among
whom it lived. The victims were considered holy martyrs, the latest to suffer in the
never-ending history of the persecution of the Jewish people. There was no question of
understanding the Holocaust from anything but this Jewish perspective, and certainly
not as a historical event which might be studied like any other and might have a
significance beyond the confines of Jewish martyrology. Unwilling to be confined by
the notion that the Holocaust should only be viewed through the lens of Jewish history,
I decided to embark on an investigation of a series of questions about Holocaust
representation, ranging from the possibility or otherwise of fictionalising the deathcamps, to the presence of the Holocaust in postwar German fiction.
Inga Clendinnen, in her Reading the Holocaust, challenges an exclusively
Jewish perspective: The Holocaust was a Jewish tragedy. . . . It is nonetheless the
Gentiles crime and the Gentiles problem, because Gentiles conceived it, and Gentiles
carried it out.1 This is an important insight because, for the innocent victim of a violent
crime, the event is usually meaningless. This is because the perpetrators motives,
insofar as they are known, seem to be devoid of reason. For the victims of the Holocaust
this is compounded by the Nazis policy to try and keep them unaware of their fate until
the last possible moment. It is a mistake to jump from the fact that the Holocaust was
senseless to most of its victims to the conclusion that it was devoid of any meaning at
all. As Raul Hilberg put it, the Holocaust was brought into being because it had
1. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.10.

meaning to its perpetrators.2 Clendinnen is therefore right to conclude that, If we want

to understand the extremes of human capability we must turn not to the victims but to
the dark territory of the Nazi leaders motives and understanding.3 This is not to
suggest that the focus should just be on the Nazis, but rather that a viewpoint that is not
focussed exclusively on the victims is necessary if understanding is the aim. The
implication of a victim-based perspective of the Holocaust is that the only possible and
proper stance for the observer is one of awed incomprehension, but the crimes of the
Holocaust occurred because men and women willed them and were able to implement
their will, so, as Clendinnen bluntly concludes, we would be fools not to try to
understand as precisely as we are able how that situation came about.4 We must go
beyond the position of survivors like Wiesel whose only interest is in the victims: . . .
the murderers did not interest me; only the victims.5
This, I would argue, effectively disposes of that blind alley in writing about the
Holocaust, represented by a disparate group including Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann and
Jean-Franois Lyotard, which would like to enforce two overlapping prohibitions
relating to the Holocaust: against understanding and against representation.6 These
prohibitions are connected with the claim that the Holocaust is ineffable. This is so
widespread that it has become almost a trope of Holocaust writing, even a truth claim.
Those making this type of assertion usually go on to write at great length about the
2. Raul Hilberg, The Nature of the Process, in Joel L. Dimsdale, ed., Survivors, Victims, and
Perpetrators (Washington, New York and London: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1980), pp.5-54,
p.5.
3. Clendinnen, Reading The Holocaust, p.83.
4. Ibid., pp.21, 54.
5. Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run To The Sea: Memoirs Volume One 1928-1969 (London: HarperCollins,
1997), p.88.
6. According to Wiesel, Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized. . . . [The] Holocaust
transcends history. Lanzmann, in a typically hyperbolic statement, declares any attempt to understand
the event obscene. Quoted (unreferenced) in Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of
Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p.5. In his criticism of
Steven Spielbergs Schindlers List Lanzmann argues that he cannot see how deportees, sick with fear
after months and years of misfortune, humiliation and misery can be played by actors, and that: Fiction
is a transgression. . . . there are some things that cannot and should not be represented. Lanzmann, Why
Spielberg has distorted the truth, Guardian Weekly, 3 April 1994, 14. Lyotard refers to the problem of
expressing shame and anger over the explanations and interpretationsas sophisticated as they may
beby thinkers who claim to have found sense to this shit in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans.
Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p.98.

Holocaust. Such claims are often themselves figures of speechhyperbole or metaphor

underscoring the moral and historical enormity of the event.7 To the extent that claims
that the Holocaust is ineffable are meant to be taken literally they tell us nothing about
the nature of the Holocaust, but rather amount to an admission of a failure to
communicate: When . . . we say that language cannot deal with the Holocaust, we
really have in mind, or perhaps are covering up for, our inadequacies of thought and
feeling.8 It is not my intention to discuss positions of this type except in passing, but to
assume that attempts to understand and to represent the Holocaust are in principle both
possible and worthwhile (which is not to deny that many representations are in practice
of questionable value).
As a necessary premise to the assumption that understanding the Holocaust is
possible, I will also be assuming that there is a significant distinction between discourse
and realitybetween the events that occurred during the Holocaust (for example the
murder by carbon monoxide poisoning of hundreds of thousands of Jews at Treblinka)
and what has been written about them (words on paper or computer media).9 The idea
that the past does not exist outside of its representations is rejected as an empty
tautology.10 It is after all a logical as well as an empirical truth that we cannot
experience the past directly. Although they are not discussed, it can be assumed that I
reject arguments which depend on a refusal to acknowledge the distinction between
discourse and reality. These include the claim by Lyotard and others that it is impossible
to subsume disparate discourses under a comprehensive grand narrative. Such a position
leads to the unacceptable conclusion that there is no way of showing that those
7. Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore and
London: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), p.5.
8. Irving Howe, Writing and the Holocaust in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York and
London: Holmes and Meier, 1988), pp.175-199, p.187.
9. Terry Eagleton makes this point in his polemic against Postmodernism, where he attacks those who
would deny that there is any significant distinction between discourse and reality, between practising
genocide and talking about it. The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1996), p.18.
10. Lang puts this argument succinctly: Does anyone really believe, or act as if he believed, that whether
the Holocaust occurred or not depends on what the historians say about the question? It is in this sense
that the possibility of misrepresenting the Holocaust is a condition of representing itwith both of these
dependent on a referent that is more than only a representation. Lang, Holocaust Representation, p.92.

historians who deny that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz or the very existence
of Treblinka are not respecting the cognitive rules for the establishment of historical
reality.11 I will attempt to show how the discourse of the perpetrators was not
incommensurate with the discourse of the victims, but rather, in the case of the
prisoners at Treblinka, how the Nazis discourse infected that of the prisoners to the
extent that they became virtually indistinguishable.
Although the central concern here is with literary-cultural representations of the
Holocaust, the intention, nevertheless, is to keep the focus, as much as possible, on the
past event. The relationship between texts and the reality of the Holocaust is considered
primarily to discover whether texts add to our understanding of the event, and only
secondarily to see what they have to tell us about their contemporary context. I am
concerned with the meaning of the Holocaust for postwar societies to the extent that this
illuminates their relationship with that particular past, and this applies especially to
Germany. This emphasis on the particularity of the Holocaust results in an antipathy to
writers with universalising tendencies, who attempt to draw political or moral lessons
from the Holocaust by proposing analogies which result in a distorted representation of
the events of the Holocaust, for example by equating Nazism with Zionism,
communism or capitalism, or the Nazi camps with the Gulag. The notion of a distorted
representation does not require a belief in a singular truth, just that certain
representations of the Holocaust, such as David Irvings or Ernst Noltes, incorporate
empirical falsehoods in support of their dubious ideologies, while others distort the truth
of the Holocaust so that it seems to support their contemporary concerns.
In the analysis of novels, aesthetic considerations are treated as much less
significant than the relationship between the texts and the historical reality they
represent. This is a consequence of accepting Berel Langs argument for the primacy of
historical representations of the Holocaust compared to works of the imagination, and
11. See Michael Lwy, The horrors of history, Radical Philosophy 78 (1996), 38-40. Lwy derives his
argument from Alex Callinicos, Theories and Reflections on the Philosophy of History (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1995).

the view that there are moral, rather than literary, grounds for arguing that the exercise
of the imagination should be dependent on following the contours of what the event
was and how it came to be.12 While historical investigation is acknowledged as the
primary means for understanding the Holocaust, novels, I will argue, can deepen that
understanding. I argue from the premise that to call attention to the writing in writing
about the Holocaust must have the effect of distancing readers from the subject, and that
what is central to this thesis are issues raised by the event, not the manner of its
representation. This is not to say that it would be unproductive to subject Holocaust
novels to formalist criticism, but rather that this type of literary analysis focuses more
on the text as a work of art than on the historical event represented by the text, which is
my main concern here. In this connection, Sem Dresden distinguishes between the
ordinary reader who will always be interested in the content of the work he or she is
reading, and the literary-critical approach which concentrates on formal problems. In
the latter, despite the widespread acceptance that form and content cannot and should
not be separated, The composition of the work, style, technique take a central position,
and the content is considered of secondary importance.13
This emphasis on the event represented rather than on the text as a work of art
might be considered an unconventional approach for a doctoral thesis in a Department
of English Literature.14 Despite the inroads made into conventional attitudes to
Literature by the various forms of literary theory, there still remains a common, if
undeclared, assumption in academic literary circles that Literature transcends History,
and that bringing them together undermines Literature, because it proposes a
relationship between the transcendent (Literature) and the contingent (History).
Conversely, many historians have a disparaging attitude towards (unscientific or
fictional) literary works which claim to have anything important to say about
12. Lang, Holocaust Representation, p.11.
13. Sem Dresden, Persecution, Extermination, Literature, trans. Henry G. Schogt (Toronto, Buffalo and
London: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p.14.
14. From another perspective, it is anomalous, and symptomatic of a tendency to marginalise the study of
the Holocaust, that the study of Holocaust literature should find a home as a specialist subject in such a
department, despite the fact that only a small minority of the texts were originally written in English.

historical events.15 The area where fact and fiction overlap is murky and contested.
There is a kind of fiction which is specifically literary and more interested in its own
literariness than in anything about the wider world. This type of novel is more about its
own relationship with the works of other authors than with events in the real world.
However many, perhaps most, great novels have been interested in questions of fact.
The factual inaccuracies in War and Peace, for example, were controversial when the
book was first published.16 Joyce hoped that if Dublin were destroyed it could be rebuilt
from scratch from Ulysses.
I examine whether novels can add anything to an understanding of the Holocaust
beyond that provided by testimony or by historical accounts, and what criteria should be
used to evaluate these novels, and, in particular, whether the standard by which they
should be judged should be history as it sets limits for representations of the
Holocaust.17 This involves an attempt to define the borderline between artistic licence
and historical distortion,18 as well as considering the related question of whether writers
of Holocaust texts have any authorial responsibilities peculiar to this subject as a
limiting case. The approach adopted is multi-perspectival, using texts produced during
the whole period from the time of the Holocaust up to the present day, and written by
15. For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the
thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined. Hilary Mantel, review of Robespierre, eds.
Colin Haydon and William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), London Review of
Books, 30 March 2000, 3-8, 7.
16. John Lanchester quotes from an unreferenced contemporary review of War and Peace: One
continually got the impression that a narrow-minded but garrulous corporal was boasting of his exploits in
some remote hamlet to a group of gawping hicks. Lanchester, Nothing but the truth, The Guardian
Review, 2 August 2003, 22.
17. Lang, Holocaust Representation, p.32.
18. Lanchester, himself a novelist, refers to the absence of rules to guide writers in the use of fact in
works of fiction. He proposes a simple rule: If a character in a novel borrows the name of a real person,
the external attributes of the persons life have to be adhered to as closely as possible. . . . The same with
place names, dates and the rest of the furniture of the real. But if your novel draws on real people in order
to depart from them . . . then you signal the change by using a new name. . . . A new name means you are
free to make up anything you like. Lanchester, Nothing but the truth, 22.
This rule could be applied to Holocaust novels, but, as we shall see, providing a new name in Holocaust
literature can either be a means of protecting the privacy of those connected to victims or survivors, or, at
the other extreme, of claiming characters as the product of literary imagination when in fact most, if not
all, of the biographical details have been appropriated from real people. In either case it is highly
questionable whether providing a new name means a writer should make up anything they want. On the
other hand, the idea that using real names for people or places obligates writers to stick to the facts as
closely as possible, could be applied to works of fiction which misrepresent important elements of the
Holocaust (such as Ingrid Pitts representation of the death camp Treblinka discussed in Chapter 1).

authors from a range of national and ethnic backgrounds, but the aim is not synthesis.
The first three chapters are concerned with representations of the death camp
Treblinka and of the Warsaw ghetto, and are mostly focussed on the victims. Treblinka
was chosen because it lies at the centre of the Holocaust, being a death camp which,
unlike Auschwitz, did not have the additional functions of providing slave labour for
war production.19 The Warsaw ghetto was chosen because of its direct link with
Treblinka where most of its inhabitants were murdered, and because of the availability
of a significant number of ghetto diaries and of novels about the ghetto. Diaries from
the Warsaw ghetto (primarily those written by Chaim Kaplan, Emmanuel Ringelblum
and Adam Czerniakow) are examined to discover how those who became victims
interpreted what was happening to them, and whether their varied representations of the
ghetto add to our understanding of the Holocaust. The writers whose novels about
Treblinka and the Warsaw ghetto are considered cover a wide spread of differing
biographical/racial positions. They include a survivor (Bogdan Wojdowski) and the
child of a victim (Jean-Franois Steiner), as well as non-Jewish Poles (Andrzej
Szczypiorski and Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz), and Americans (John Hersey and Ian
MacMillan), writing in a number of generic forms.
The last two chapters are concerned with how Germans have dealt with (or
failed to deal with) their connection to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. They include
consideration of the role of Nazi ideology in the Holocaust; the connection between
German antisemitism and the Holocaust; the question of German guilt and
responsibility analysing both Karl Jaspers philosophical approach in his postwar
19. The use of Auschwitz as a synecdoche for the Holocaust is a regrettable development. In many
ways Auschwitz was not typical of the Holocaust, and using it to represent the Holocaust has the effect of
diverting attention away from the fate of Jews at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno and Maidanek, and
from the mass shootings in the East. It is also partly responsible for an over-emphasis on the modern
aspects of the Holocaust. The killing process in the Operation Reinhard death camps was much cruder
than at Auschwitz, using unreliable captured Russian tank or submarine engines to provide the poison
gas. The only modern feature of the killing was in the planning process and especially the use of trains
to transport the victims to the camps, but this was in practice not particularly efficient because many
thousands of the victims were dead on arrival. The genocide in Rwanda has proved that it is possible to
kill large numbers of people in a short period of time using the most primitive of methods such as
machetes.

10

lectures and the influential psychological work of Alexander and Margarete

Mitscherlich. These, important in their own right, are also necessary preliminaries to the
examination of a number of studies of the children of perpetrators, whose various ways
of coping are treated as a paradigm for German responses to association with the
perpetrators, and an analysis of representations of the perpetrators by several German
writers. The latter are all novels with the exception of Niklas Franks book about his
father Hans Frank. The works considered cover writing from the early 1950s up to the
present day, and represent the viewpoints of different generations. The generation who
were adults under the Nazis is represented by Wolfgang Koeppen and Alfred Andersch,
the second generation by Gnter Grass (although he is old enough to have served in the
Wehrmacht at the end of the war), Niklas Frank and Bernhard Schlink, and the third by
Rachel Seiffert. As well as being chosen so as to provide novels representative of the
different generations, these works were selected to provide a representative range of
responses by German authors in dealing with the Nazi past in general and the Holocaust
in particular, ranging from courageous confrontation to blatant evasiveness. The East
German state consistently failed to accept the particularity of the murder of the Jews by
the Nazis, but rather conflated the victims of the Holocaust with all other victims of the
Nazis. It saw itself ipso facto as inimical to fascism and hence under no obligation to
acknowledge its own Nazi past, and this is reflected in East German literature (Christa
Wolf being a notable exception); consequently the pre-unification works selected are all
by authors based in the former West Germany.
In this subject area the definition of key terms is especially important. I will
mostly be using the word Holocaust because it has a wider currency than Shoah,
Churban, or Judeocide, because its Greek etymology is irrelevant to most people,
and because its referent is as clear as any term of this type can be. However, for the
purpose of this thesis it is used strictly as equivalent to the Nazis Final Solution, i.e.
the mass killing of Jews which started shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union in
mid-1941, and not to the persecution of Jews before that time.

11

This leads on to the thornier problem of defining the victims and the
perpetrators. When I refer to victims I shall be referring to people who died and not to
survivors. This is not to denigrate the survivors, but to recognise that the Nazi project
was to kill all the Jews under their control, and that the victims of that project were
those they succeeded in killing, whereas the survivors, however damaged, represent the
partial failure of the Nazis plans. The victims include all those who died because the
Nazis defined them as Jews. They include many who were not Jews according to the
definitions used by the Jewish religious authorities, including many, especially converts
to Christianity of long-standing, who did not consider themselves to be Jews. This
much-neglected aspect of the Holocaust serves to confirm that it needs to be kept in
mind that the Holocaust was a Nazi project which happened to the Jews, as defined by
the Nazis. The prejudice against converts exhibited by many orthodox Jews in the
Warsaw ghetto was of no interest to the Nazis when they made the decision to kill them
all the orthodox, the secular and the converts.20
The definition of the perpetrators is just as difficult. I will mostly refer to the
Nazis, but, as it was common for the Jews at that time to refer to their persecutors and
murderers as the Germans, I have also used this term when appropriate. Although it
might be argued that this involves the assumption of a national stereotype, it is not
intended to imply like Goldhagen that all Germans were equally responsible for the
Holocaust, nor is it intended to diminish in any way the responsibility of members of
other nationalities as major participants in the killings.21
My approach in the readings of literary and cultural texts in this thesis is reliant
on the findings of historical research. So, when considering writings about Treblinka in
20. Not all Jews who died while under the authority of the Third Reich can be considered Holocaust
victims. While there is a strong case for including those who committed suicide, there seems little
justification for including those who died from natural causes not associated with the malnutrition and
disease which resulted from ghettoisation. Nor would it make much sense to include those who died as a
result of the war, such as those who were killed in allied air raids, or died fighting with partisans or in
general uprisings like that in Warsaw in 1944, when many Warsaw Jews who had survived in hiding on
the Aryan side died in the fighting or were killed by renegade antisemitic Poles.
21. Notably Austrians, Romanians (who needed little or no prompting from the Germans to start their
own state-organised mass killings), Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Croats and Slovaks.

12

the first chapter, the benchmark of historical accuracy is the pioneering work of the
historian Yitzhak Arad.22 However, it is not the identification of historical errors and
distortions in the texts examined which is central to this thesis. Rather, historical
distortions and misrepresentations are shown to arise primarily from the nationality and
ethnicity of the authors, and their personal connections to the victims or to the
perpetrators.

22. Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999).

13

CHAPTER ONE
REPRESENTATIONS OF TREBLINKA
A novel about Treblinka is either not a novel or not about Treblinka.23
Treblinka was a primitive but efficient production line of death.24
[W]e were the workers in the Treblinka factory, and our lives depended
on the whole manufacturing process, that is, the slaughtering process at
Treblinka.25
The Holocaust has served as an extreme, and often illuminating, test case for
examining the value and the limits of historiographical and literary representation. The
extermination camp Treblinka provides an even more extreme, but less complex, case,
lying as it does at the core of the Final Solution. Representations of Treblinka, unlike
those of Auschwitz and the concentration camps, have no need to take into account the
complications which arise from the use of prisoners as slave labour contributing to war
production. The camps sole purpose was to be a production line of death, and, when
it was working efficiently, its almost exclusively Jewish victims spent only about two
hours there before being killed. There were relatively few Jewish prisoners (about 1,000
at any one time; reduced to 840 at the time of the uprising of 2 August 1943, of whom
no more than 70 survived the war), and they were used for tasks related, with varying
degrees of closeness, to the extermination process. There were about 80 Ukrainian
guards, and 40 SS men, only 20 of whom were stationed there at any time. There is an
almost total lack of contemporary German documentary evidencethere was, for
example, no official report on the revolt, and all the SS personnel files were destroyed.26
In a comment about film and the Holocaust, which is also relevant in the context
23. Elie Wiesel, The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration, in Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at
Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University, 1977), 5-19, 7.
24. Former SS Unterscharfhrer Franz Suchomel in Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1995), p.52.
25. Richard Glazar, in ibid., p.137.
26. See Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 40, 294, 363, and Gitta Sereny, Into That
Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London: Pimlico, 1995), pp. 166, 247, 250. Hereinafter
referred to as Arad and Sereny respectively within the text.

14

of writing, Anton Kaes makes the apparently obvious but nevertheless important
observation that Past reality is absent and not repeatable; it cannot be visited like a
foreign country.27 If a representation were to be wholly at one with what it depicts, it
would cease to be a representation. There can be no representation without separation.
The most that words can do is to create what Henry James called the air of reality.28
In the case of Treblinka, this is just as well. No one in their right mind would want to
experience directly, even as an invisible witness, the reality of the death camp, where
about 900,000 Jews (estimates vary from 600,000 to 1,200,000; the figure of 900,000
was the official estimate used by the West German prosecutors at Franz Stangls trial)
and about 2,000 Gypsies were exterminated in the 13 months from 23 July 1942 to 19
August 1943.
Writers with a variety of different perspectives and motives have represented
Treblinka in their works, in the sense of describing the camp, and what happened there,
in a realistic manner. They can be divided into the three broad categories: survivors of
the uprising; historians; and novelists (although Gitta Serenys Into That Darkness and
Jean-Franois Steiners Treblinka are not easily classified using this scheme). As we
shall see, the boundaries between the texts of the three groups, and their relationships to
reality, are problematic and unstable.
As indicated above, accepting that the relationship between texts and reality is
problematic does not prevent my adoption of the basic premise that there is a significant
distinction between discourse and reality, between the events that occurred at Treblinka
and what has been written about them. The discussions below which refer to the
historical truth of a novel like Ian MacMillans Village of a Million Spirits, and to the
limits on the freedom of fictional characters to act in a specific historical context,
assume that there are basic facts about Treblinka which are beyond doubt. These would
27. Anton Kaes, Holocaust and the End of History: Postmodern Historiography in Cinema, in Saul
Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge,
Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp.206-222, p.210.
28. Henry James, The Art of Fiction, Longmans Magazine 4 (September 1884), reprinted in Partial
Portraits (1888), http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/novel/james-fiction.pdf, pp.1-12, p.6.

15

include the fact that several hundred thousand men, women and children were murdered
there in 1942/3 as part of a Nazi project to exterminate the Jewish people.
Testimony: Does it provide the facts?
The testimonies of Treblinka survivors are not chronicles consisting of
unformed raw material. The basic facts, such as that about 900,000 people were
exterminated, or that there was an uprising on 2 August 1943 as a result of which 100
out of the 840 inmates got clear of the camp, are insufficient to enable interpretation. It
is the plot of these testimonies that imposes a meaning on what in reality was a
chaotic and incoherent series of events. Different historians reading the same
testimonies do not produce or agree upon an identical set of facts (beyond an
elementary and uninterpretable minimum), out of which a narrative of events at
Treblinka, like the uprising, is created. There are no distinct and separate categories of
attestable fact on the one hand and pure interpretation on the other. There is rather a
continuum.
The testimonies of Treblinka survivors present difficulties of interpretation that
go beyond those that arise in the majority of other Holocaust testimonies, because
Treblinka was a death camp and because the survivors were involved in the
extermination process. The survivors of Treblinka, inevitably, give partial and
unrepresentative accounts of the experience of Jews transported to Treblinka, over 99%
of whom were killed shortly after arrival. As the representations of Treblinka by
historians, novelists, and others rely heavily on these survivor accounts, which make the
first-person narrator the primary observing consciousness of both the story and the
events, they distort the reality of the camp by over-emphasising the experiences of the
prisoners at the expense of the experiences of those who were killed shortly after arrival
(with the partial, but honourable, exception of Ian MacMillan29). As Inga Clendinnen
29. Ian MacMillan, Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the Treblinka Uprising (South Royalston,
Vermont: Steerforth Press, 1999), pp.11-24 and 43-52. Hereinafter referred to as MacMillan within the
text.

16

says, in the context of the Holocaust, any good outcome, any act of dignity or defiance,
appears as a falsification or sentimentalisation of the general condition, and the huge
contextual fact of the death of the multitude must trivialise the fate of the fortunate
few.30 This is not to question the importance of survivor testimonies; that they do not
represent the perspective of the victims does not imply that they are invalid, just that
they are partial, in both senses of the word, in their depiction of Treblinka.
A related difficulty, which also arises partly from a lack of material, is the
failure to provide a perpetrator perspective in many of the non-fictional representations
produced by historians and others. Other than Gitta Serenys interviews with Franz
Stangl, and to a lesser extent Serenys and Claude Lanzmanns with Franz Suchomel,
there is little other than trial testimony, with all its obvious limitations, available as a
source for any attempt to represent the SS personnels experience of the camp. There is
even less to go on for anyone attempting to represent the experiences of the Ukrainian
guards or those of the Poles living in the neighbourhood of the camp. This is because
the Ukrainian guards, like the SS men, were subject to post-war prosecution and
therefore reluctant to incriminate themselves; and because Polish witnesses were for the
most part unwilling to acknowledge that they had accepted the unacceptable without
any major qualms, and therefore have either remained silent, or, when pressed by
Lanzmann, understated their knowledge of what was happening in Treblinka at the time
the camp was operating. Helen Darvilles controversial depiction of Ukrainian guards at
Treblinka in her novel The Hand that Signed the Paper31 was condemned as an attempt
to explain, and so to some extent justify (despite the fact that to explain is not
necessarily to justify), Ukrainian involvement in the genocide in terms of the belief of
the volunteers that they were avenging themselves for the actions of Jewish
Bolsheviks during the Ukrainian famine. Lanzmann was criticised by Tzvetan Todorov
for interviewing only Poles who were antisemites in Shoah, and thereby for putting over
30. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.168.
31. Helen Demidenko (real name Helen Darville), The Hand that Signed the Paper (St. Leonards, New
South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1994).

17

the message that all Poles are antisemites. In support of his argument, Todorov cites the
decision of the Polish government to televise only the Polish segments of Shoah, the
effect of which was to make the bias too blatant to ignore.32 Shoshana Felman, who is
much more sympathetic to Lanzmanns film, perceptively describes the stance of the
Polish witnesses in terms of their strategy for avoiding the need to accommodate what
they saw: The Poles . . . do see but, as bystanders, they do not quite look, they avoid
looking directly.33
It is a key feature of the survivors accounts, and those of their subsequent
interpreters, that they do not simply describe, but try to explain and, in many cases
attempt to justify, the prisoners behaviour at Treblinka. Their different interpretations
of individual events seem less the result of failing memories or deliberate manipulation,
than the result of describing events which they did not personally witness but heard
about on the camp grapevine. This applies, particularly, to events leading up to and
including the uprising, when few of the prisoners were privy to what was happening.
When they were eyewitnesses of events, they sometimes appear to represent them and
their part in them with the aim of seeming, as much to themselves as to others, what
they would have liked to have been, rather than what they were. This is, of course, a
common feature in past representations of the self. These factors exemplify the
limitations of a survivor-based perspective in representations of Treblinka. An emphasis
on the behaviour of the prisoners not only marginalises the experiences of the
exterminated victims, but takes insufficient account of the key fact that the prisoners
were not free and fully responsible agents in Treblinka (or in the other camps), that the
camp was the creation of the Nazis, and that it was they who controlled the victims prior
to their deaths, and every aspect of the prisoners lives. It was Christian Wirth, the
inspector of the death camps, who developed the extermination process used at Belzec,
32. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. Arthur Denner
and Abigail Pollack (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), pp.273-4.
33. Shoshana Felman, The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmanns Shoah, in Shoshana Felman and
Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York and
London: Routledge, 1992), pp.204-283, p.208.

18

Sobibor and Treblinka, and it was he who influenced the daily lives of the Jewish
prisoners more than anyone else, although they were for the most part unaware of his
existence (see Arad, pp.183-4).
Jean-Franois Steiners Treblinka: historical reconstruction, novel or ideological
tract?
Jean-Franois Steiner was born in 1938, of a Polish-Jewish father who died
during deportation to Auschwitz and a French-Catholic mother. In 1967 he married Grit
von Brauchitsch, the granddaughter of Walter von Brauchitsch, Commander-in-Chief of
the Wehrmacht from 1938 to 1941. In the 1994 European elections, Steiner ran
alongside Flemish neo-Nazis. In 1997 Steiner testified on behalf of Maurice Papon, a
former member of the Vichy government involved in the deportation of Jews, and
assisted him in his attempt to flee abroad in 1999.34 According to George Steiner it was
a trip to Israel, and the malaise felt by younger Jews throughout the Eichmann trial
about the passivity of Holocaust victims, that prompted Jean-Franois Steiner to
interview the handful of survivors of Treblinka and to write an account of the revolt in
the extermination camp.35 Treblinka was originally published in French in 1966, and
Helen Weavers English translation was published in the following year. Treblinka
proved to be a controversial best-seller. Praised in a preface by Simone de Beauvoir as a
vindication of Jewish courage, it was bitterly attacked by others, including David
Rousset and Lon Poliakov, for its alleged inaccuracies, racism, and its general thesis of
Jewish passivity. Poliakov accused Steiner of giving new life to old antisemitic themes,
and saw Treblinka as a need for diversion or even projection in the face of the
terrifying reality of the Holocaust.36 These criticisms can only have been encouraged
by Steiners own provocative statements, such as one explaining why he wrote the
book:
34. Samuel Khalifa, Jean-Franois Steiner, S. Lillian Kremer, ed., Holocaust Literature (New York and
London: Routledge, 2003), pp.1217-20, p.1217.
35. George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1982), p.164
36. Lon Poliakov, Treblinka: vrit et roman, Preuves, May 1966, 23-31, quoted by Khalifa, p.1219.

19

The reason I wrote this book is because rather than the indignation and
the emotion I was supposed to feel, I felt the shame of being one of the
sons of a people who . . . in the end let themselves be packed off to the
slaughterhouse like a flock of sheep.37
Neal Ascherson criticized Steiners view of the SS, who are referred to by
Steiner throughout Treblinka as the Technicians. Ascherson disputed this image of
the SS as intellectual and cool-headed characters, and what he described as Steiners
easy equation of their disgusting ingenuities with the de-humanizing efficiency of
modern factory practice.38 Terrence Des Pres, while acknowledging the technical
expertise of those German higher officials who designed and ran the death camps but
who were not directly involved in their day-to-day operations, argued that we now
know that there was a great deal of sloppiness, trial and error and heavy drinking
amongst the SS personnel, which suggests that they were not as fully in command as
they were thought to be.39
After introductory chapters describing the events leading up to the destruction of
the Vilna ghetto, Treblinka tells the story of Treblinka from the perspective of its slave
prisoners, with a strong emphasis on the planning and execution of the uprising of 2
August 1943. Treblinka illustrates the limitations of a representation based almost
solely upon the testimony of survivors (Steiner, Afterword, pp.412-3). Steiner
utilised both written testimonies and personal interviews with survivors. Steiners
expressed intention was to reconstruct the history of Treblinka (p.413), only changing
the names of those survivors who requested it, but as Terrence Des Pres says in his
introduction to the book, telling the story from the inside requires novelistic
techniques (Steiner, Introduction, p.xiv). These include imaginary dialogues40 and
37. Jean-Franois Steiner, Les juifs, ce quon a jamais os dire, Le Nouveau Candide 251, 13 February
1966, quoted by Khalifa, p.1217.
38. Neal Ascherson, Chronicles of the Holocaust, New York Review of Books, 1 June 1967, pp.23-26,
p.24.
39. Terrence Des Pres, Introduction to Jean-Franois Steiner, Treblinka, trans. Helen Weaver (New
York: Meridian, 1994), pp.xiv-xv. Treblinka is hereinafter referred to within the text as Steiner.
40. David Bond notes that The reader is soon struck . . . by the texts abundant use of dialogue. Page
after page record lengthy conversations of which there cannot possibly be written records, and which
survivors could not remember in this detail. . . . Such conversations . . . are not occasional devices, but a
major means of narration. David J. Bond, Jean-Franois Steiners Treblinka: Reading Fiction and Fact,
Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 26, No. 3, Summer 1990, 370-378, 374. Bonds interpretation

20

character sketches. Steiner, however, does not acknowledge this, and the book seems to
be presented as a literal representation of real events, and is therefore vulnerable to the
criticism that it misrepresents the facts. Des Pres refers to heated debate over
particular characterizations (p.xiv), and Sereny quotes from an Open Letter written
to Steiner by Richard Glazar, a survivor, where he expressed the:
profound dismay felt by all the survivors at the politically or personally
motivated misrepresentations of real events and real people, most of
them now dead and unable to defend themselves (Sereny, p.246).
Criticisms like Glazars need not be accepted without question. Steiners
representation is not necessarily invalid because it is rejected by the survivors. An
interpretation of testimony, even though it is based exclusively on that testimony, can
legitimately come to conclusions about individuals and events which differ from those
of the witnesses. The survivors own representations are not consistent, and include
conflicting assessments of particular individuals and their actions. Glazar himself
describes Rakowski, who was Lagerlteste for a period, as a grumbler and a blusterer,
and the biggest speculator in the entire camp, a glutton, a boozer, a bellyacher.41
Samuel Willenberg, on the other hand, describes him as an intelligent man who was
very humane and understood our suffering, although if the Germans were around he
would be forced to torture the men of whom he was in charge.42 Such divergences in
the assessment of an individual are, of course, part of everyday life. They can arise from
many different factors such as witnessing differing manifestations of a persons
character; varying levels of insight in interpreting the same behaviour; or a general
predisposition to judge human behaviour as deriving either from base or from virtuous
of Steiners use of fictional techniques, however, is hardly credible: By proclaiming itself as nonfiction
and then breaking this promise by using fictional techniques, it mirrors the Nazis use of lies; by its own
devices it deconstructs, as it were, the ones used by the Nazis to create their fictional world in Treblinka. .
. . Paradoxically, this painstaking reconstruction of historical events becomes a commentary on the
devices of fiction 376, 378. Khalifa takes a more plausible stance, suggesting that the imagined speech in
Treblinka is simply meant to suggest historical authenticity, and that this is implicitly reinforced by the
authors genealogy because as the son of a Holocaust victim, he may be seen as the bearer of historic
memory. Khalifa, p.1218.
41. Richard Glazar, Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka, trans. Roslyn Theobald (Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999), pp.57, 99.
42. Samuel Willenberg, I Survived Treblinka, trans. from Polish, in Alexander Donat, ed., The Death
Camp Treblinka: A Documentary (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), pp.189-213, p.200.

21

motives. In the case of Rakowski, Willenbergs is the only favourable assessment, so it

could be attributed to Willenbergs lack of acuity; one might say that in his exculpatory
assessment of his character he was taken in by Rakowski. Such a judgement can
never be definitive, but it would be legitimate to base it on a general assessment that
Glazar, taking account of factors such as the internal coherence and uncompromising,
self-critical honesty of his testimony, is a more trustworthy and astute witness than
Willenberg.
James Young uses Treblinka as an example of what he categorises as
documentary fiction, which, he argues, creates the illusion of documentary authority
generated by authentic eyewitnesses [which] sustains [its] putative factuality . . . and, by
extension [its] power.43 Young argues that the intention of novelists like Steiner when
they interweave the words of actual witnesses into fictional narrative is to create the
texture of fact, suffusing the surrounding text with the privilege and authority of
witness.44 He cites Steiners insertion of Yankel Wierniks testimony at a crucial
place near the end of Treblinka (Steiner, pp. 395-6), and argues that by seeming to
yield to the authority of an actual eyewitness [Steiner is] hoping to incorporate this
same authority into his text.45 What Young fails to mention is that this is the only
instance where Steiner quotes directly from testimony; other relevant passages in
Treblinka refer to the absence of authoritative evidence:
Unfortunately there remains nothing of all that Kurland wrote, and it is
difficult to follow his underlying thought through second-hand reports of
conversations (p.197).
The oral tradition of Treblinka has preserved the memory of an episode
[the transportation of German Jews who were heroes of the First World
War] (p.209).
The issue is more complex than Young suggests. Steiners authority (such as it
is) derives, not from the single instance of direct quotation from testimony cited by
43. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of
Interpretation, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p.59.
44. Ibid., pp.59-60.
45. Ibid., p.60.

22

Young, but from his interviews with witnesses and his study of witness testimonies
combined with his previously quoted aim to reconstruct the history of Treblinka (pp.
412-3).
Youngs analysis of documentary fiction depends on his unstated assumption
that the reader of such works is nave:
By allowing himself to be moved to the willing suspension of disbelief
by the documentary novels contrived historical authority, the reader
risks becoming ensnared in the encompassing fiction of the discourse
itself, mistaking the historical force of this discourse for the historical
facts it purports to document.46
Youngs use of the words contrived and purports begs the question, and he
makes the unwarranted assumption that the reader is unable to distinguish between the
facts of Treblinka and the, necessarily, fictional elements in the narrative, such as the
description of events for which there were no surviving eyewitnesses. The presence of
dialogue is a clear sign to the reader of reconstruction. Moreover, the English translation
of Treblinka includes Des Pres Introduction, and this explicitly alerts the reader to
Steiners use of novelistic techniques. However, Des Pres does emphasise his belief that
objections to Steiners use of these techniques are not serious so long as the story as a
whole remains true to known facts (Introduction, Steiner, p.xiv), with the implication
that he believes that it does. There is indeed at least one instance where Steiner
uncritically appropriates or, according to Sereny, invents what she claims is a myth
(although she provides no direct evidence for this, such as explicit denials by survivors).
Assuming she is right in her assertion, this would generally undermine the readers faith
in Steiners overall fidelity to the known facts. The myth in question is ascribed by
Sereny to an unnamed novel, which is undoubtedly Treblinka, where the imaginative
novelist invented an episode with irresponsibility:
[A] passing passion for a group of little boys was ascribed to a
homosexual by the name of Max Bielas, who . . . had a special miniature
barrack with miniature beds, night-tables and candlesticks built, in a
46. Ibid., p.62.

23

special rustic setting and kept the boys as a personal harem until he . . .
got tired of them and had them killed. It does seem extraordinary that
novelists find it necessary to invent such tales when the appalling truth is
surely far more dramatic (Sereny, p.259).47
If Sereny is correct, then the appropriate analogy would be with the readers loss
of confidence in an historian who is proved to have represented a myth as reality, rather
than with his or her loss of faith in a novelist who, in Youngs words, purports to
document historical facts. Ian MacMillans repetition of the myth in his novel Village
of a Million Spirits (see MacMillan, pp.27, 79 and 82) is less of a problem because it
could be argued that it is a fictional event rather than part of the books verifiable
historical context, although his designation of precisely which events in the novel form
part of this historical context is not fixed.48
Steiner describes the decision to plan the uprising in terms of the recovery of
[the prisoners] humanity (Steiner, p.302), which only came after a time when their
abdication was total, when all values had ceased to exist, when their humanity had
almost left them (p.187). This abdication is described in words Steiner ascribed to
Galewski, the Lagerlteste:
Not only do the Jews let themselves be killed without a gesture of
revolt, but they even help their killers with their work of extermination.
We, the accomplices, the employees of death, live in a world beyond life
and death; compromised so profoundly that we can only be ashamed to
be alive (p.147).
These precise words were not of course spoken by the real Galewski, even if
there were evidence from survivor testimony that he held opinions of this type. That
47. This refers to Steiner, pp.157-8.
48. MacMillan, on my questioning him about Serenys claim, replied: Well, I forgot what Sereny said
about [the Bielas boys], but have read I believe in more than one place that it happened. And then of
course I can always back away and say, Well, this is a work of fiction (email to Alan Polak, 20 October
1999, para 4). This could aptly be described as trying to have it both ways, and makes the boundary
between the fictional events and their mostly unspecified verifiable historical context adjustable, after
the event, at the whim of the author.
There is some testimonial basis for the myth, if that is what it is, although the story relates to
Kurt Franz, rather than to Max Bielas. Wierniks testimony includes mention of a few boys who were
cared for by The Haupsturmfhrer (Franz) who gave them the best food and the best clothes; during
the time when Wiernik was a prisoner in the other part of the camp Franz had tired of these boys and had
them killed. See Donat, ed., The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary, p.176.

24

Steiner may have misrepresented the real Galewski is beside the point, because the role
of Galewski here is to be the mouthpiece of an idea, and can productively be
interpreted in terms of Bakhtins notion of the significance of an idea in a monological
world, which is merely placed in [the heros] mouth, but could with equal success be
placed in the mouth of any other hero. . . . Such an idea belongs to no one.49 The
function of Galewskis speech is to provide a representation of the behaviour of the
victims and the prisoners which is a legitimate, if arguable, interpretation of real events.
Rather than its possible misrepresentation of individuals, which is a minor issue in the
context of what occurred at the camp, it is its manner of depicting the passivity of the
victims and the complicity of the prisoners in the extermination process as stages in a
redemptive process culminating in the uprising, that is the real problem for the critics of
Treblinka. This idea of a redemptive process performs two functions in Treblinka which
are ascribed by Bakhtin to what he describes as a confirmed and full-valued authorial
[narratorial] idea in a monological work: firstly, it is the principle of the vision and
representation of the world, the principle of the choice and unification of material; and
secondly, it is given as the conclusion drawn from that which is being represented.50
The redemptive symbolism of the uprising in Treblinka is most clearly and explicitly
expressed in a poetic passage describing the moment the prisoners break out of the
camp:
Behind Weinstein the mass, a force too long pent up, rumbles and roars.
Tide, river, lava, herd, the Jewsslaves, accomplices, sublime heroes or
accursed people, broken, gassed, burned, killed a thousand times and a
thousand times rebornthe Jews, one solid mass of humanity,
unleashed, blinded, catapulted by hatred, hope and rage, explode and
flow and roll and charge and erupt . . . those who abandoned their own,
those who pulled their teeth out, who gassed them, burned their bodies,
and reduced their bones to powder, the Jews of abdication and of the
miracle, the Jews of death and of life, of agony, of faith, and of desperate
hope. (p.406)
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi claims that a particular reading of history underlies

49. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (USA: Ardis, 1973), p.64.
50. Ibid., p.67.

25

Steiners claim to objectivity: In Treblinka, he tailors the evidence of a revolt in a

death camp to a rigid procrustean concept of Jewish history.51 In other words:
Steiners ideological commitment directs the organisation of his
material; he attempts to trace a progressive emergence out of slavery to a
point where the Jews are seen as masters of their own fate.52
Ezrahis position is that the result of Steiners redemptive idea (functioning in Bakhtins
terms as the principle of the choice and unification of material) leads him to falsify, or
at least distort, what really happened at Treblinka. An example of this, mentioned in
passing by Ezrahi, is Steiners definition of the phenomenon of prisoner suicides
prevalent in the early days of Treblinka as the first step in the schema of regeneration,
since it limited the ultimate power of the Nazis over the lives of the Jews.53 Indeed,
Steiner describes the suicides as the prisoners first affirmation of freedom, and the
action of friends of the suicides in assisting them to hang themselves by pulling the
box away as the first demonstration of solidarity in death (p.110). He has Kurt Franz
describe the suicides as a serious manifestation of lack of discipline. . . . by allowing
the Jews the freedom to die . . . we were permitting them a degree of independence
(p.159). This attitude of the SS towards the suicides is confirmed by Arad, who refers to
the appointment of two prisoners for night duty, part of whose job was to prevent
prisoners from committing suicide (Arad, p.224). Steiner provides only the SS view,
and does not attempt to represent the suicides perspective. His view of the suicides is
coloured by his premise that the Jew, the real Jew . . . though he may be susceptible to
anguish, is inaccessible to despair (Steiner, p.78). Samuel Rajzman does describe the
suicide of a prisoner who hanged himself rather than become a kapo, and refers to
others who chose to refuse appointment as kapos in the knowledge that this meant
immediate execution,54 and these could be described as moral decisions, and thus an
51. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1980), p.30.
52. Ibid., p.31.
53. Ibid., p.31.
54. Samuel Rajzman, The End of Treblinka, trans. Howard Roiter from Yiddish tape, in Alexander
Donat, ed., The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), pp.231251, pp.239-240.

26

affirmation of freedom, based on the view that there are values that are more important
than life. However, it is more reasonable, given the conditions in the extermination area
of the camp where most of the suicides took place, to ascribe the suicides to despair,
rather than describe them as an affirmation of freedom, although these explanations
are not mutually exclusive.
In the light of this evidence Ezrahis argument is convincing, but she confuses
the issue by attempting to link Steiners ideological bias with his choice of form,
presumably because she believes that he decided on the latter because it would be the
most effective for promulgating his ideology:
Because of his ideological bias, Steiner refuses to make a conscious
choice between the authority of fact and fiction, never quite submitting
either to the ambiguities and contradictions of actual history or to the
unities of fictionalized history.55 (my emphasis)
Even accepting Bakhtins argument that in a monological work, The idea as a principle
of representation becomes one with the form,56 this does not imply that the desire to
promulgate monologically a particular ideology, of itself, creates a problem in
determining which particular form to employ. The reverse is rather the case: it is
Steiners choice of a mixed form which leads to his evasion of the issue of how
fictionalisation undermines the historical authority of his work.
On the one hand, Ezrahi condemns Treblinka as an historical work, on the
grounds of historical distortions said to arise from Steiners ideological bias, with the
implication that unideological, objective, historical narrative is somehow possible. I
suspect that her criticism might not be so trenchant if she were not totally
unsympathetic to Steiners particular ideological position, which she describes as
providing a glorified sense of Jewish superiority and revisionist nationalism, and
condemns as therapy for the ruptured pride of the victim, used to counter the
repeated charge that the inmates allowed themselves to be led meekly to the gas
55. Ezrahi, By Words Alone, p.32.
56. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, p.67.

27

chambers like sheep to the slaughter. She claims that Steiners ideology arises from
an overriding loyalty to the dead which generates a kind of hagiographical excess,
even going so far as to suggest that, because Steiners father had perished at Treblinka
[in fact, although a Holocaust victim Steiners father, Kadmi Cohen, did not die at
Treblinka], in commemorating him [Steiner] needed, evidently, to exalt him or those
like him who had managed the revolt.57 Ezrahi does not seem to recognise that such
comments themselves suggest an ideological position, and this is confirmed by her
description of novels like Treblinka in terms of a general avoidance or attempted
redress of unacceptable reality, with its implication that she somehow has access to
knowledge of a reality, avoided by writers like Steiner, in which there were no heroes
and no redemption in Treblinka.58 This may be correct, but it is an ideological
interpretation of what happened at Treblinka, on the same level as Steiners, and not a
historical fact.
On the other hand, Ezrahi attacks Steiner on the grounds that his failure lies in
his imposition of aesthetic forms on historical events rather than transforming those
events through the imagination.59 Although if he had this would presumably have left
his work open to judgement using literary standards, rather than those of historical
accuracy. (Steiner did in fact transform the events using his imagination. What are the
reconstructed conversations and events in the book if they are not the products of
Steiners imagination?) But it is ludicrous to propose that any book which represents
Treblinka, whatever its genre, should give up any claim to historical accuracy, even if
this is limited, otherwise it would not be about Treblinka at all.60 MacMillan, for
example, in the foreword to Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the Treblinka
Uprising, writes that his novel balances history and fiction by using a verifiable
57. Ezrahi, By Words Alone, pp.32, 47, 31.
58. Ibid., p.36.
59. Ibid., p.33.
60. Hayden White is therefore wrong in his claim that Unless a historical story is presented as a literal
representation of real events, we cannot criticise it as being either true or untrue to the facts of the matter
(Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth, in Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of
Representation, pp.37-53, p.40). By definition a story claiming to have a basis in history is open to
criticism that it is untrue to the facts, irrespective of whether it is presented as a literal representation.

28

historical context as a stage on which fictional characters act and fictional events occur
(MacMillan, p.vii). Helen Darville, in an Authors Note to her novel The Hand that
Signed the Paper, which includes the story of both fictional and real Ukrainian guards at
Treblinka, says that What follows is a work of fiction. . . Nonetheless, it would be
ridiculous to pretend that this book is unhistorical.61
Ezrahi suggests that, It may be necessary to establish the facts about Treblinka
before fiction is possible.62 It is, however, far from clear what establishing the facts
would involve here, or if it is achievable. She seems to imply that historians are
somehow able to do this, whereas in practice, and especially in a case like Treblinka
where contemporary documentary evidence is conspicuous by its absence, they often
settle for preponderance of evidence, that is, for an even weaker criterion than the
lawyers beyond reasonable doubt. Their selection and interpretation of that evidence
can never establish the facts. However, even if they cannot establish the facts
definitively, the conventions of historiography do require historians to cite their sources,
and, where there is conflicting evidence, acknowledge the conflict, and then justify their
decision to accept a particular version. Although Simone de Beauvoir, in her Preface,
says that Steiner has not attempted to do the work of a historian, she does go on to
state that [each] detail is substantiated by the written or oral testimony he has collected
and compared (Steiner, Preface, p.xxiv), and Steiner appears implicitly to confirm
this claim in his Afterword, so it is justifiable to criticise him for lack of rigour in this
respect. If he had cited his source for controversial claims, such as that Kurland, kapo of
the Lazarett (the infirmary), personally administered fatal injections to those of the
elderly and infirm who were incapable of walking to the gas chambers (Steiner, p.195),
then even if there are testimonies which deny the accuracy of this (and there are),
Steiner would have had some justification for his allegation. Given that much of the
book describes events for which there is no possibility of any survivor eyewitness
testimony, then if it is to be judged as history, rather than literature, Steiner would have
61. Demidenko, The Hand that Signed the Paper, p.vi.
62. Ezrahi, By Words Alone, p.33.

29

been obliged to identify episodes which were purely invented rather than
reconstructed on the basis of testimony, and indicate which aspects of the reconstructed
episodes were fictional embellishments, lacking any testimonial support. However,
citing sources, or lack of them, for the events described in the book would have required
the addition of fairly detailed notes, and this would have been otiose to the implied
reader of a book written by an author disparagingly described by Ezrahi as
middlebrow.63 It would be unfair to criticise Steiner for writing a book that did not
meet scholarly standards which its intended readership did not require.
Ezrahi describes the controversy that the book generated as arising because it
was being read as [a] historical document by readers who overlooked works like
Wierniks testimony.64 This response, like that of James E. Young referred to above,
implies that people should not read middlebrow works by writers like Steiner because
they do not meet the evidential requirements of academic work, and that nave readers
will be misled into believing that they are reading a historical document rather than a
reconstruction. This is litist and condescending, and in any event misses the point that
testimony, such as Wierniks, itself needs to be read critically, and that the innocent
readers who are supposedly misled by Treblinka, and are apparently unable to
differentiate it from first-hand, eyewitness testimony, would be highly unlikely to be
capable of such a critical reading.
It is, however, legitimate to criticise Treblinka as an historical work on the
grounds of its defective scholarship, not because of unproved assertions that its readers
were misreading it by attributing more authority to it than it merited, but because of
Steiners presentation of his book as a historical reconstruction based on survivor

63. Ibid., p.34.

64. Ibid., p.35. Neal Ascherson, too, worried that Jean-Franois-Steiners documentary novel will from
now on become the general reference for the camps. Ascherson regretted the books widespread
popularity: It was Jeanne Moreau, drawing down the corners of her mouth, who spoke of the holiday
crowds at Saint-Tropez: each winter-pale body turning gold in the sun and each pair of hands grasping the
covers of Treblinka. . . . Tens of thousands of people who will never read Hilberg or Reitlinger . . . will
now form their impression of the Final Solution from this. (Chronicles of the Holocaust, New York
Review of Books, 1 June 1967, pp.23-26, p.23).

30

testimony, without acknowledging the essential role that his imagination played in the
reconstruction. Because Steiner is so insistent on the historical accuracy of his account,
it is also possible to criticise Treblinka as a literary work by employing that critique of
literary realism which accuses it of practising a form of dishonesty: veiling its status as
art to suggest it is simply a copy or reflection of life.65 I would speculate that Steiner
failed to take the risk of acknowledging the important role played by his imagination
because if he had admitted his function as a creative writer, rather than encouraging the
illusion that he was simply a passive conduit of historical truth, it may have led his
readers to suspect that whenever actuality impeded aesthetic effect he had succumbed to
the temptation to discard actuality, preferring the symmetries of art to the ambiguities of
the mundane.66 Such a reaction by his readers would have undermined his authority.
Steiner is not alone in this concern. Professional historians are similarly disinclined to
be open about the way their construction of historical narratives resembles the methods
of creative writers. Yitzhak Arads Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard
Death Camps exemplifies this. Although much of the book is a dry discussion of
various aspects of the death camps, such as their historical context and organisational
structure, when it comes to describing the uprising at Treblinka, there is a marked
change in style (see Arad, pp.286-298). Arads account of the revolt opens with a scenesetting passage:
August 2 began like any other day in the Lower Camp and the
extermination area: reveille, roll call, a meager breakfast, and report to
work detail. Ostensibly a routine morning, one of many; however, the
prisoners felt different. The Underground members barely succeeded in
65. Pam Morris, Realism (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p.97.
66. An example of Steiners distortion of the reality of Treblinka for artistic and other purposes is the way
he exaggerates the efficiency of the camp: By unremitting effort Franz succeeded in turning the camp
into an extraordinary machine whose every wheel, perfectly oiled, turned smoothly, processing convoy
after convoy, without a cry, without a hitch, with fantastic rapidity (p.286). Another example is his
frankly unbelievable description of fraternisation between the SS and senior Jewish prisoners when the
end of the camps existence was clearly in sight to all: The ice was broken between the Jews and the SS.
This did not prevent the SS from killing Jews during the day, but the prospect of having to part company
soon mellowed them a little. They had been together for such a long time, they had so many memories in
common; and then this camp was a kind of joint production. . . . The high point of these festivities was
unquestionably Arthur Golds birthday. An immense buffet was laid in the tailor shop, which the SS
officers decorated themselves. Handwritten invitations were sent to every member of the camp
aristocracy (pp.371-2).

31

concealing their excitement (p.286).

This would not be out of place in Steiners work or in a novel like MacMillans.
There is evidence from testimony to back up Arads description of the prisoners
feelings (he quotes from the testimony of Sonia Lewkowicz: the entire camp seemed
electrified (p.286)), but the way he evokes the tension of the prisoners on the morning
of the revolt does not read like an objective account. This evocation of atmosphere is in
the tradition of Macaulay, but the presentation of the past in a vivid fashion is not what
present-day academic historians are supposed to do. Their approach tends to be
analytical, with the imagination playing a minor, if any role at all. Despite occasional
interventions by the historians voice, such as From the testimony of survivors, it is
impossible to determine how many arms had been removed and to whom they had been
distributed, and The uprising plan for the extermination area had not been executed in
full, but it had achieved a great many of its objectives (pp. 290, 293), the predominant
style in this section of Arads book is that of a war story which uses documentary
evidence from eyewitness testimony to support its authority.
Criticism of his defective scholarship could never establish that Steiners
interpretation of what occurred at Treblinka in terms of a redemptive process is
somehow disproved by the facts, but rather that his interpretation did not take account
of, or deliberately ignored, evidence that conflicted with his account. Moreover,
Steiners interpretation can be criticised precisely because it is not easily amenable to
empirical refutation. His view of the underlying realities of Treblinka is presented like
an article of faith which he would not jettison, or even qualify, in the face of contrary
evidence. The lack of openness and flexibility demonstrated by his failure to consider
other interpretations of the prisoners behaviour for which empirical evidence does exist
is a major weakness in his approach. Steiner does not seriously consider, for example,
the possibility that for many of the surviving prisoners the uprising was simply a
desperate act by men with nothing left to lose, rather than the culmination of a
redemptive process ([T]he Jews, rousing themselves at the bottom of the abyss, began

32

a slow ascent which death alone would stop (Steiner, p.187)). All hope of surviving the
war as a prisoner at Treblinka had, by August 1943, disappeared because new transports
had ceased, the cremation of the corpses was almost complete, the Wehrmacht was in
retreat on the eastern front, and the prisoners were certain that no Jewish witnesses
would be allowed to survive the closure of the camp. This interpretation is supported by
the testimony of Yankiel Wiernik, who writes of the Germans discussing the discovery
at Katyn of the mass graves of Polish officers executed by the Russians, which was used
by Goebbels for anti-Soviet propaganda purposes:
It was probably these reports that made Himmler decide to visit
Treblinka personally and to give orders that henceforth all the corpses of
inmates should be cremated. . . . They did not want any evidence of the
mass murders left.67
Even though Steiner denies the contribution made by his imagination, Treblinka
remains a valuable work precisely because it represents the effort . . . to enter hell by
act of imaginative talent, with all the risks that entails.68

Ian MacMillans Village of a Million Spirits: Can fiction add anything to the
appalling truth?
Ian MacMillans novel Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the Treblinka
Uprising was published by a small American publisher, Steerforth Press, in April 1999.
Although not marketed as such, it is the third part of a trilogy of World War II in
Middle Europe, and according to MacMillan, the final book is Treblinka because the
most horrible legacy of that war ends up being genocide.69 The first book, Proud
Monster,70 is composed of seventy vignettes, or short stories, with no repeating
characters. The idea, according to MacMillan, was to picture mid-Europe during the
67. Jankiel Wiernik, One Year in Treblinka, trans. unknown (1944), in Donat, ed., The Death Camp
Treblinka: A Documentary, pp.148-188, p.169.
68. George Steiner, Language and Silence, p.165.
69. Ian MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 4 November 1999, para 1.
70. Ian MacMillan, Proud Monster (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987).

33

war from multiple perspectives.71 Midway through Proud Monster is a two-page story
called Horror Stories72 set at Treblinka in summer 1943. In this story Jan Kratko and
Anton Zydovska are working in a burial pit in the extermination section of the camp.
The men are presumably supposed to be Jews,73 although it is hard to believe that
anyone would have a name like Zydowska (the feminine form of Jewish in Polish).
There are anomalies in the story. In summer 1943 the burning of corpses removed from
the pits was being completed, and new corpses were not being buried but were taken
directly to the roasts for cremation. When I put these anomalies to MacMillan, he
accepted that I was right about the dates and said that in a reprint the date and names
would be changed.74
The second book, Orbit of Darkness, is made up of fifteen stories, one of which
(about Maximilian Kolbe, the Jesuit priest who volunteered to take another mans place
in a starvation chamber at Auschwitz in 1941) is fragmented and interspersed
throughout. Midway through the book is a story set at Treblinka in July and August
1942, called The Dentist.75 As in Proud Monster, there are anomalies arising from the
time in which the story is set, although in this case the story seems to be set too early
rather than too late. The organisational structure of the prisoners work is described
including the commandos which were not established until the camp was reorganised in
September 1942. Until late August most of the slave/prisoners were shot on a daily
basis. Kurt Franz, who is a character in the story, did not arrive in Treblinka until late
August or early September. When challenged, MacMillan again accepted that the date
was wrong and said it would be changed in a reprint.
More significant than these relatively minor historical inaccuracies, which can
71. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 4 November 1999, para 1.
72. MacMillan, Proud Monster, pp.74-75.
73. In A Conversation with Ian MacMillan, published at the end of the paperback version of the novel
(Penguin Readers Guide to Village of a Million Spirits (New York: Penguin, 2000), pp.4-10, p.4),
MacMillan describes the men as two Polish body-processors. This compounds the error because all of
the slave/prisoners were Jews.
74. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 5 February 2000.
75. Ian MacMillan, Orbit of Darkness (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanavich,
1991), pp.130-149.

34

be attributed to slipshod research, is the clear influence of Steiners Treblinka on the

way MacMillan represents the camp in this story. Whereas in Village of a Million
Spirits he highlights the sadism of the SS rather than the efficiency of the camp (as we
shall see), in The Dentist MacMillan follows Steiner in using imagery likening
Treblinka to a machine: He was a worker insect in the gigantic machine of death. The
Doll [Kurt Franz], tall and handsome, was the operator of the machine.76 When
questioned about this, MacMillan admitted that at the time he wrote Orbit of Darkness
he was more influenced by Steiner because my familiarity with Treblinka was
probably based on his [Steiners] book alone.77 The main character Asher Lopatyns
sexual abuse of the dead, to amuse and so try and ingratiate himself with the SS, seems
to exemplify the extremity of degradation reached by the prisoners which features so
prominently in Steiners account, but without Steiners redemption via the uprising,
although MacMillan claims that Lopatyns abuse of the dead, for me, was no more
than a person facing an absurdity in which the only response left is obscene
jocularity.78 The only redemption offered by MacMillan in this harrowing catalogue of
atrocity is provided by Kolbes extreme, willful selflessness. Nehring, an SS officer,
believes that if the prisoners were magnetized by Kolbes example, then the system
would topple.79 MacMillan says that Kolbe was dangerous in that his humanity
could not be compromised and that if compromising humanity is a key to success in
brutal domination, then Nehring has perceived one weakness his (Nazi) movement was
vulnerable to.80 This ignores the difference between the Nazis attitude to a
troublesome Jesuit priest, and to the dehumanised Jewish victims of the Final
Solution.81 There is no evidence that selfless behaviour by Holocaust victims had
76. Ibid., pp.143-4.
77. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 5 February 2000.
78. Ibid.
79. MacMillan, Orbit of Darkness, p.262.
80. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 5 February 2000.
81. Moreover, the quality of Kolbes humanity is open to question; it did not prevent him from
publishing the virulently anti-Semitic daily newspaper, Maly Dziennik, from 1935 to 1939 (Michael C.
Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, New York:
Syracuse University Press, 1997), p.164, note 19). When I drew MacMillans attention to this, his weak,
clichd response was that its interesting how much contradiction there can be in the life of one person.
Ian MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 6 February 2000.

35

any impact on the perpetrators. MacMillan seems to imply that the choice exercised by
Kolbe in refusing to compromise his humanity was available to, but not taken by, for
example, the slave/prisoners at Treblinka. The prisoners at Treblinka did not have the
option of refusing to compromise their humanity; simply being alive and Jewish in
Treblinka involved such a compromise.
Village of a Million Spirits received several favourable reviews and won the
PEN USA (west) Fiction Award. Carol Herman wrote that the reward of reading the
book comes in the form of a deeper understanding of what happened at Treblinka.82
Merle Rubin went so far as to suggest that anyone who doubts that a work of fiction
can sometimes come closer to the truth than the report of an eyewitness should read this
novel.83 S.T. Meravi pointed out that no context of the Final Solution is offered: this
is a novel of micro-sensation, not macro-information, but concluded that MacMillans
reconstruction via art and imagination is stunning.84 Meravi suggested that one of
MacMillans aims in writing the book was to respond to revisionist historians, and
supports this by pointing to MacMillans reference to the attempt by the revisionists to
deny that the victims ever existed, thereby robbing them of their identity . . . and us of
the opportunity to acknowledge their existence and honor their memory (MacMillan,
Foreword, p.viii). Quite how a novel including a significant fictional element is
supposed to help counter the arguments of Holocaust deniers is far from clear,
especially given that, as we have seen, MacMillan, when challenged about the accuracy
of various episodes, uses the fallback position that he can always back away and say
this is a work of fiction; but despite this MacMillan seems to confirm Meravis
suggestion when he writes because [the revisionists] keep at it, we have to also.85
Alan Cheuse referred to the novels voyeuristic effect, but argued that this was of a
transcendent variety because we see things . . . guided by a higher point of view.86
82. Carol Herman, Capturing mans inhumanity to man, The Washington Times, 25 April 1999.
83. Merle Rubin, The Story is Fictional, but Its Horror Is Real, Los Angeles Times, 26 April 1999.
84. S.T. Meravi, Retold horror, The Jerusalem Post, 11 June 1999.
85. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 4 November 1999, para 5.
86. Alan Cheuse, Feeling the terror, Chicago Tribune, 28 March 1999.

36

I have exchanged a number of emails with MacMillan. His detailed and

thoughtful responses to my questions raise theoretical questions relating to
intentionality and the status of extra-textual authorial statements for interpretation,
which have a wider range than the field of Holocaust literature. My position on these
questions is to follow Roland Barthes when he says that a text is not a line of words
releasing a single theological meaning (the message of the Author-God),87 but
nevertheless to argue that any evidence of the authors intentions must be evaluated and
taken into account in interpretation, unless the interpretation specifically discounts
authorial meaning. This does not imply that the authors statements have to be taken at
face value. Authors can be just as, perhaps even more, disingenuous, dishonest, unaware
of their own motives and subject to unreliable memory, as anyone else; but if, after
critical assessment, an authors statements about his own work are accepted as frank and
honest then they cannot be ignored by the literary critic. An authors statements
constitute a supplementary, not a conclusive, text of special interest given their source,
but in no sense eliminate the need for further discussion.
Whereas Steiner tied himself inextricably to written and oral testimony, and was
open to criticism if he invented any episodes, MacMillan leaves himself space for
fictionalisation. He says that, in comparison to books like Steiners, books like his free
themselves from the burden of reality in order to get closer to reality. While Steiner
focuses the action through real characters, the heroes who took key roles in the
underground activity and the uprising, MacMillan uses fictional characters who are
peripheral to the uprisingnot just Jewish prisoners, but also junior SS men and
Ukrainian guardsand presents the leaders of the revolt, and major events, obliquely
through their eyes. He also uses the viewpoints of fictional Jews who were gassed and
of Polish peasants living near the camp. The secret, he writes:
is in locating oneself inside the mind of the fictional character looking
out at the reality (taken from historical accounts), and allowing the very
87. Roland Barthes, The death of the author, trans. Stephen Heath, in David Lodge, ed., Modern
Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London and New York: Longman, 1988), pp.167-172, p.170.

37

individualized perspective of that fictional character to adjust to [sic],

experience, and judge.88
MacMillan is not particularly concerned that the historical accounts he refers to
are inevitably themselves representations of the reality, largely based on eyewitness
survivor testimony, and therefore far from being unproblematic.89 He acknowledges that
I suppose in ways we will never know the actual objective truth of this collective
experience, but thinks, we can surmise the broad truth of it.90 He seems to be more
interested in describing what Treblinka was by attempting a multi-perspectival
representation, than in trying, as Steiner does, to derive any ideological meaning from it.
MacMillan describes the aim of this approach as the sumtotal of all the different
perspectives creat[ing] a more convincing and truer picture, claims that the multiple
perspective afforded the best chance to picture the camps totality91, and has confirmed
to me that the following dictum of Nietzsches fits perfectly92:
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the
more affects [sic] we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes,
different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will
our concept of this thing, our objectivity, be.93
The books subtitle, A Novel of the Treblinka Uprising, is misleading; the
revolt plays a much smaller part here than it does in Steiners text. MacMillan has
confirmed my suspicion that it was his original publishers who wanted the subtitle.
According to him he winced a little at the idea of a subtitle, but the publisher wanted
something to identify the novel more directly.94 They presumably considered that the
metaphorical title alone was not enough, and that a novel whose subtitle referred to the
uprising was a better commercial proposition than one subtitled, say, A Novel about

88. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 14 October 1999, para 2.

89. See MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 4 November 1999, para 5.
90. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 20 October 1999, para 5.
91. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 14 October 1999, para 1.
92. Ibid.
93. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (and Ecce Homo), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage Books, 1969), p.119. Perspectivism is not equivalent to relativism, but does imply that no
particular point of view is privileged in the sense of affording those who occupy it a better picture of the
world as it really is than all others. Some perspectives are, and can be shown to be, better than others.
94. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 20 October 1999, para 2.

38

the Treblinka Death Camp. Penguin, presumably for similar reasons, retained the
subtitle when they published the book in paperback in spring 2000. MacMillan attempts
a rather weak justification for accepting this clearly inappropriate subtitle by claiming
that he also thought that in ways the uprising in its physical sense was preceded by
[individual] spiritual uprisings.95
MacMillan is more successful than Steiner in demonstrating that the prisoners
direct knowledge of events within the camp was limited, particularly if they were not
part of the underground. He does this by using phrases like word has it (MacMillan,
p.165), the rumour was and the whisper of the event (p.185). This has the effect of
supporting the credibility of the viewpoints of MacMillans fictional prisoners by
drawing attention to their imperfect knowledge of events, but, more importantly, it
confirms the point already implied above: when reading survivor testimony, the
perspective of the individual involved needs to be established and kept constantly in
mind. What is described as though it were eyewitness testimony might be based on
second-hand knowledge or rumour. Because survivors were there does not mean that
they witnessed everything that occurred. In the case of Treblinka, this is particularly
true of events in the extermination part of the camp (the Upper Camp), from which,
with the single exception of Wiernik, prisoners once transferred never returned.
Prisoners in the Lower Camp (the living and reception areas) did not witness what
was happening in the Upper Camp, although soon after arrival at Treblinka (and in
some cases before), they learned of the existence of the gas chambers, and, once the
cremation of the corpses began, they could see the smoke and smell the burning bodies.
Despite his use of fictional characters as the foci of the narrative, MacMillan
cannot avoid criticism for historical inaccuracy. In his foreword he says that the major
events are verifiable. He gives as an example an instance which he apparently believes
is beyond question (and MacMillans version of this event was cited uncritically by

95. Ibid.

39

Carol Herman in her review of his book in The Washington Times96):

It is true that after a long winter lull during which no transports and
therefore no food or valuables had arrived at Treblinka, Deputy
Commandant Kurt Franz (The Doll) announced that the trains would roll
again, bringing on a sustained cheer from the starving workers
(MacMillan, Foreword, p.vii, my emphasis).
This episode is included in the body of the novel, where, following the
announcement of the resumption of transports, the prisoners voices rise in a
deafening, exultant cheer (p.171). Richard Glazar described the event on two separate
occasions. In the 1995 edition of Serenys Into That Darkness, he is quoted as saying,
And do you know what we felt? We said to ourselves, Hurrah, at last we can fill our
bellies again. Thats the truth; thats what we felt; that is where we had got to (Sereny,
p.213, my emphasis). Even more explicitly, in Shoah, he said We didnt say
anything. We just looked at each other, and each of us thought: Tomorrow the hunger
will end (my emphasis).97 There is a big difference between the prisoners having such
feelings, and their expressing them openly in front of Kurt Franz. In the novel, during
the cheer, Franz stands at the door nodding brightly, his fists on his hips (MacMillan,
p.171). If MacMillan invented the cheer then presumably he did so because it is more
dramatic, and because it depicts more extremely the abject depths to which the prisoners
had sunk as a result of the invidious position in which they had been placed as
collaborators in the extermination process, than Glazars more subtle and
undemonstrative version. It is, however, more likely that MacMillans version is
derived from an earlier edition of Serenys book which provides a different version of
the Glazar quotation. In this earlier, original, version Sereny quotes Glazar as saying:
And do you know what we did? We shouted, Hurrah, Hurrah. It seems impossible
now. Every time I think of it I die a small death; but its the truth; thats what we did;
that is where we had got to.98

96. Carol Herman, Capturing mans inhumanity to man, The Washington Times, 25 April 1999.
97. Lanzmann, Shoah, p.137.
98. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: From mercy killing to mass murder (London: Andr Deutsch,
1974), p.213. In the Preface to the 1995 paperback edition Sereny wrote, presumably referring to the

40

I put the evidence casting doubt on whether the cheer occurred to MacMillan,
and attempted to persuade him to amend the Foreword before his book was
republished in paperback by Penguin. He responded by saying I suppose that the
various perceptions of the one event would by necessity differ, and that he had
suggested to his editor at Penguin adding a short clause at the end of the sentence that
would qualify the word cheer.99 In the event, the sustained cheer from the starving
workers is qualified in the paperback edition by the addition of the words: although
the actual volume of this response can never be known.100 This grudging addition does
not allow for the possibility that the cheer did not take place at all. MacMillan still
argues that the cheer is a fact, and merely accepts that it may have been somewhat
more restrained than the deafening, exultant cheer described in his novel. The only
evidence for or against the occurrence of the cheer appears to be the apparently
inconsistent evidence of a single survivor, but MacMillan still holds to his notion that
different versions arise from different perceptions of the event.
The freedom of action of fictional characters in a novel about real events, like
Village of a Million Spirits, has to be limited if the history of those events is not to be
changed or distorted. MacMillans fictional characters are included in his representation
of Treblinka, but they were not in the real Treblinka, so they cannot be allowed to carry
out actions which would alter the course of Treblinkas history. This is why they must
be peripheral to the events which are known from testimony and other sources, and
why I am more comfortable writing that the fictional Jewish prisoners created by
MacMillan are peripheral to events like the uprising, rather than that they were
peripheral to the events. The fictional prisoners were not, in reality, peripheral to the
action, because they were not there. The real prisoners had the capacity to act, even if
change made to this passage, that for this reissue I have removed a few words which, to my regret, did in
retrospect cause distress (Sereny, p.15). I have been unable to persuade Sereny to say whether she made
the change at Glazars specific request, and, if so, whether Glazar questioned the accuracy of the original
quotation, or accepted its accuracy but was concerned that other survivors had been distressed by the
publication of the story.
99. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 28 October 1999.
100. Ian MacMillan, Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the Treblinka Uprising (New York: Penguin,
2000), p.xi.

41

it was severely circumscribed; the fictional prisoners have the potential, through their
actions, to alter the representation of real events, but cannot, in a novel like
MacMillans, which uses a verifiable historical context, be allowed to carry out
actions such as, say, assassinating Stangl, which would break the link with that context.
On the other hand, I have no problem referring to fictional Jewish victims who were
gassed on arrival. This is because the behaviour of fictional victims does not have the
same potential to alter the real (hi)story of Treblinka, given that there are very few
recorded instances of resistance by the real victims.
There are other instances in MacMillans novel, besides his use of the prisoners
cheer, where his transformation (or manipulation) of testimony can be criticised for
seeking an inappropriate literary effect. A telling example is his apparent use of
Wierniks testimony about the cremation of corpses in the extermination area. Wiernik
writes:
When corpses of pregnant women were cremated, their bellies would
burst open. The fetus would be exposed and could be seen burning inside
the mothers womb.101
In Village of a Million Spirits, the narrator describes the same gruesome scene using
very different language:
[Janusz] sees the belly of the woman split open. A fetus rolls out of the
opening, a tiny incandescent body, like a bright doll, and explodes in
flames . . . (p.155)
MacMillan admits that he did read some Wiernik, but claims that his description was
a combination of imagining what would happen and also was mentioned, I believe, in
connection with burning bodies at Birkenau.102 Irrespective of whether or not
MacMillans description is directly or indirectly derived from Wierniks, a comparison
of Wierniks description in matter-of-fact, unadorned language with MacMillans use of
the imagery of the bright doll simile, and the drama of the fetus rolling and exploding,
101. Jankiel Wiernik, One Year in Treblinka, in D, p.170.
102. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 20 October 1999, para 3.

42

leaves MacMillan wide open to an accusation of aesthetic exploitation of the horror of

the Holocaust, of the kind Adorno famously warned against.103 This point is emphasised
by the fact that Wierniks testimony was clandestinely written at the request of the
Jewish Coordination Committee, the representative body of the Jewish underground,
and 2,000 copies were published in Polish in Warsaw in May 1944. A copy was
smuggled to London, and it was published that same year in the USA in Yiddish and
English translations for the polemical purpose of informing the Allied Powers of the
details of the Holocaust while it was still taking place, with the hope of persuading them
to take some action.104 Wiernik had good reason to attempt to elicit an emotional
response from his readers by using the type of language employed by MacMillan, but he
did not. This may have been because it was Wierniks personal style to describe what he
had seen in a plain, objective, manner, but it is just as plausible to argue that, given his
polemical purpose, and the incredulity and scepticism with which previous reports of
the Holocaust had been received, that the primary aim of Wiernik and of those who
commissioned his testimony was that what he wrote should be believed. To achieve this
it was important to reduce the risk of being accused of exaggeration, and one way of
doing this was to resist any temptation to embellish his story, when the unadorned
truth was more than sufficiently awful. This argument can also be applied to
MacMillanif in writing Village of a Million Spirits he wanted his representation of
Treblinka to be truthful (in an historical as well as a literary sense), as well as
credible, then his embellishment of Wierniks testimony (and that is what I believe it
was) must be condemned as gratuitous, and his claim that in writing this book he
103. On reading this, MacMillans response was: Aesthetic exploitation of the Holocaust is something
almost anyone writing about it could be accused of. Try reading Thomass embellishment of Kuznetsovs
Babi Yar, particularly the guard with the knife. Now theres gratuitousness for you. . . . In any case a
simile is simply a means of visual clarification. And the forty or so reviews that seemed to stress the
books restraint and objectivity would appear to disagree. So if I were writing this again, I would describe
the same way. All in the spirit of constructive dialogue. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 30 May 2000.
MacMillans criticism of D.M. Thomas ignores the role of the controversial passage in question in the
plot of The White Hotel, so that in context it does not necessarily seem gratuitous. This does not hang on
whether the passage was an embellishment of Kuznetsov or was purely an invention of Thomas, so that in
this instance (unlike in MacMillans where the bright doll passage plays no significant role in the
development of the novel), the origin of the passage is not relevant. A simile is of course more than
simply a means of clarification.
104. See Donat, ed., The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary, p.147.

43

actually backed away from some of the more horrible things I read about, in effect
tried not to deliberately shock,105 or his sense that he has made this detail less horrible,
subjected to serious doubt.
Although it is difficult to decide between cause and effect, the differences
between Steiners and MacMillans representations of Treblinka do not seem to arise
primarily because they write using different genres, but because they emphasise
apparently opposing aspects of the perpetrators behaviour in the camp, and, as a result,
interpret that behaviour in different ways. As we have seen, Steiner stresses the
efficiency of the SS, whom he designates as the Technicians, part of whose method
was making the victims the accomplices of their own executioners (Steiner, p.93).
The SSs great ambition was for the camp to run itself and their:
desire for rationalisation combined with a concern for detail clearly
illustrates the grandeur of the machine and the disconcerting power of a
technique which, in its constant and unsatisfied search for perfection,
even utilized human imperfections for its ends. Carried to this level,
technique becomes an art which engenders its own aesthetic, its own
morality, and even its own metaphysics (Steiner, p.96).
What Steiner describes as the complicity of the workers in the camp, and their
eventual revolt, all takes place in the context of this rational and almost totally
successful methodology employed by the SS. He stresses that Apart from a few
exceptions arising from human weakness, the Technicians were not sadists, they were
merely technicians (Steiner, p.56). MacMillan, on the other hand, highlights the
sadism, sexual perversions, greed and drunkenness of the SS. Voss, a (fictional) SS
man, comes to understand that there is a secret perversion in everyone in this place
(MacMillan, p.88), and that they are killing people, women and children, every day,
half of them for the pure lurid joy of it (p.207). Schneck, another (fictional) SS man,
describes Treblinka as a sadists dream, one of the few places I know of where you can
exercise absolute freedom (p.138), and says that shooting someone in the neck is one
of the sharpest pleasures (p.141). Dr. Herzenberg says that for Schneck, Treblinka is a
105. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 20 October 1999, para 1.

44

paradise, a dream come true (p.181). When I asked MacMillan why he decided to
highlight the sadism rather than the efficiency of Treblinka, he replied:
I didnt think I was really highlighting sadism, but if it is highlighted, I
suppose the logic is that sadism was more important to its victims than
efficiency. Again, since I try to get as deeply as possible into the heads
of my fictional characters, I assume that their fears about physical harm,
starvation and death, would dominate their consciousnesses.106
MacMillans suggestion that if sadism is highlighted it is because it is from the victims
viewpoint, does not reflect how much of the sadistic violence is actually described in
the novel from other viewpoints. For example, the rape of a young girl, and her
violation with a cane, is described by Voss (p.26), who, although he is described by
MacMillan as psychologically traumatiz[ed]107, is hardly a victim in the context of
Treblinka. The torture of the Ukrainian guard Anatoly by Schneck (pp.174-5) is also
described from Vosss viewpoint and was not even visible to the victims.
While most testimonies name individual SS men who were sadists, Todorovs
general comment that survivors seem to agree that only a small minority of
[concentration camp] guards, on [sic] the order of five or ten percent, could legitimately
be called sadists,108 must also apply to Treblinka. As Todorov goes on to say, This
type of individual [the sadist] was not appreciated by the higher echelons.109 Heinz
Hhne, in his much-praised history of the SS, rejects the notion that sadism was at the
root of the killings: Sadism was only one facet of mass extermination and one
disapproved of by SS Headquarters.110 Steiner makes the same point when he has
106. Ibid.
107. MacMillan, email to Alan Polak, 14 October 1999, para 1.
108. Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, p.122.
Dr Ella Lingens-Reiner, who was a prisoner in Auschwitz, testified at the Auschwitz trial that I know
hardly a single SS man who could not say that he had saved someones life. There were few sadists. No
more than five or ten per cent were criminals by nature. The others were perfectly normal men, fully alive
to good and evil. Quoted by Heinz Hhne, The Order of the Deaths Head: The Story of Hitlers SS,
trans. Richard Barry (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p.382.
109. Todorov, Facing the Extreme, p.122.
110. Hhne, The Order of the Deaths Head, p.382. In autumn 1942 Himmler was asked the hypothetical
question of how unauthorised shootings of Jews should be dealt with. Himmlers response was: If the
motive is purely political there should be no punishment unless such is necessary for the maintenance of
discipline. If the motive is selfish, sadistic or sexual, judicial punishment should be imposed for murder
or manslaughter as the case may be (p.383).

45

Franz condemn Eberl, the first commandant of Treblinka, as a sadistic intellectual . . .

who has understood nothing of the grandeur of our work of purification. He is not just a
bad Nazi, he is the opposite of a Nazi (Steiner, p.159). But it is Sereny, as a result of
her interviews with Franz Stangl (not available to Steiner), who is able to provide a
more complete picture of the function of cruelty towards the victims of Treblinka. When
she asked him if they were going to kill them [the Jews] anyway, what was the point of
all the humiliation, why the cruelty? he replied, To condition those who actually had
to carry out the policies . . . To make it possible for them to do what they did (Sereny,
p.101). When Sereny asked him whether In your position, could you not have stopped
the nakedness, the whips, the horror of the cattle pens? Stangls response was, No, no,
no. This was the system. Wirth invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was
irreversible (p.202).
Whatever reservations one may have about Stangls statements, given his desire
to evade, or at least minimise, his personal responsibility, his explanation does appear to
conform with the idea that the overriding concern of those who devised and commanded
the camp was with the efficiency of the killing operation, rather than with any desire to
inflict gratuitous and sadistic cruelty on the victims prior to their deaths. The same
consideration of efficiency has even been said to have resulted in Stangl overriding an
order from Hitler. Sereny cites Suchomel as remembering Stangl informing the SS
personnel that an order had come from Hitler that nobody was to be beaten or tortured,
and Stangl commenting that this was impossible, although when the bigwigs come
from Berlin you must hide the whips (Sereny, p.202). The function of cruelty in the
In May 1943 SS Untersturmfhrer Max Tubner was found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment by the
SS and Police Supreme Court in Munich for offences involving excesses committed during the
unauthorised execution of Jews in the Ukraine in autumn 1942. The court ruled that The accused shall
not be punished because of the actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated and
none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss. . . . Real hatred of the Jews was the driving motivation
for the accused [the court assumed that the accused did not act out of sadism]. In the process he let
himself be drawn into committing cruel actions in Alexandriya which are unworthy of a German man and
an SS officer. These excesses cannot be justified . . . as the accused would like to do, as retaliation for the
pain that the Jews have caused the German people. It is not the German way to apply Bolshevik methods
during the necessary extermination of the worst enemy of our people. (Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and
Volker Riess, eds., The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders
trans. Deborah Burnstone (New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1991), pp.201-3).

46

process was, of course, irrelevant to those who suffered from it, but it is relevant to
those who now represent Treblinka and to those who read those representations. The
representations of Treblinka by both Steiner and MacMillan fail to show how cruelty
functioned in the extermination process and are therefore incomplete, in the sense that
any comprehension of what occurred at Treblinka is incomplete without an
understanding of how its creators and commanders perceived it. Knowing that they saw
the cruelty inflicted on the victims prior to their deaths as instrumental factors,
subordinate to the efficiency of the killing process (as was the ostensibly humane
practice of keeping the victims unaware of their fate until a late stage in the process),
can result in a reappraisal of the meaning of the apparently gratuitous violence towards
the victims described by the survivors. MacMillans representation of sadism at
Treblinka can, perhaps, be ascribed to his following conventional novelising techniques.
It is easier for the novelist to explain the violence in terms of the release of previously
suppressed urges of the individual than to try and place it in the wider context of the
Final Solution. With a powerful echo of Martin Amiss Times Arrow, MacMillan has
Schneck describe his sadism as a reversal of his previous vocation for healing:
I was a medical student . . . You know, when I first started killing, I was
afraid, but then everything went opposite - I found that it was more
satisfying to put a hole in a person than to sew it up, and since then I
have become a master (p.142).
This type of explanation adds nothing to our understanding of Treblinka or of
the Holocaust. It would be comforting if we could view the majority of perpetrators as
sadists with whom we have little or nothing in common. But the truth is otherwisein
Christopher Brownings memorable formulation:
The fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary menshaped by a
culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the
mainstream of western, Christian and Enlightenment traditionsunder
specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide
in human history.111

111. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), p.222. This issue is discussed further in Chapter 4. Unlike

47

Martin Jays description of the relationship and, especially, the tensions between
testimony and historical reconstruction of the Holocaust is relevant here:
In the case of the Holocaust post facto reconstruction cannot begin to do
justice to the events it emplots. For there will always be an unavoidable
tension between the first order narratives of the victims, which must
approach a kind of incoherence because of the fundamental
unintelligibility of what happened to them, and the second order
narrative of the historian trying nonetheless to make sense out of their
experience and the hidden structures underlying it.112 (my emphasis)
In the case of Treblinka, the prisoners often tried to make sense out of their experience,
but they lacked the information necessary to enable them to comprehend the hidden
structures. The historian and the novelist can try and represent these. Steiner, with his
emphasis on the Nazis perverse application of a rational approach which enabled the
murder of so many with such little effort in Treblinka: Structured, organized, stratified,
disciplined in the image of the other, this world was its negative, its shadow, its
reflection, its projection (Steiner, p.220), is more successful than MacMillan in
revealing the hidden structure of Treblinka. Even if Steiners view of the SS as
technicians is an oversimplification, which tends to exaggerate the efficiency of the
operation, it has much more support from the historical evidence than MacMillans
depiction of the camp as essentially a sadists paradise.
MacMillan does, however, successfully demonstrate that the novelist can
imaginatively represent viewpoints not available to the historian because of the
shortage, or in some cases total lack, of material. These include the incoherence (and the
horror) of the victims experience; the events as seen by those prisoners who did not
survive, were not prominent in the underground, and so had very limited knowledge
about the planned uprising; the experiences of junior SS personnel and Ukrainian
guards; and the perspective of the Polish peasants who lived near the camp.
Browning, I would stress the German particularities rather than the ordinary nature of the
perpetrators, but this does not involve anything like the same distancing effect as the ascription of
widespread sadism.
112. Martin Jay, Of Plots, Witnesses and Judgments, in Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of
Representation, pp.97-107, p.104.

48

Elie Wiesel argued, in his Memoirs, that decency and Jewish custom forbid the
description of death in the gas chambers:
Let the gas chambers remain closed to prying eyes, and to the
imagination. We will never know what happened behind those doors of
steel. . . . Much has been said when silence ought to have prevailed.113
In the context of an article rejecting the idea of the Holocaust as a suitable subject for a
novel, Wiesel questioned whether the victims can ever adequately be portrayed in a
novel: How can one write about a situation and not identify with all its characters? And
how can one identify with so many victims?114 While Wiesels view that it is indecent
to describe the final agonies of those killed in the gas chambers is understandable, given
that he is a survivor whose mother, sister and other family members were gassed, I
believe he is wrong to want to bar novelists from using their imagination to represent
these deaths. Wiesels rhetorical question how can one identify with so many victims?
misses the point that unless an attempt is made to describe the experience of the final
hours of individual, emblematic, albeit fictional, victims, up to and including their
gassing, from the perspective of the victim, then the final experiences of all the victims
will disappear into the void of anonymous death. Creating a representation of this type
of experience is something that a novelist can achieve, but an historian cannot.
MacMillan attempts two such descriptions (pp.11-24, 43-52), the first of which is the
most graphic. In his first story describing the last hours of Yzak Berilman, MacMillan
succeeds in presenting him as a man with desires, opinions, memories, hopes and
fantasies which are increasingly interrupted, and then eventually overwhelmed, by the
realities of his experience when his transport arrives at Treblinka: Then he is awake - it
is as if he had been sleeping up until now . . . (p.19). The physicality of MacMillans
description of Berilmans death in the gas chamber contrasts with the richness of his
earlier mental life, so that the reader is given an impression of what has been lost as a
result of this premature and cruel death, and by analogy the deaths of the other victims.
113. Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run To The Sea: Memoirs Volume One 1928-1969 (London: HarperCollins,
1997), p.74.
114. Elie Wiesel, The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration, 7.

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This is more effective than a statement like 900,000 Jews were murdered at Treblinka
in communicating how the world was diminished by the genocide.
Janusz, a young prisoner employed as a dentist removing gold teeth and
fillings from bodies in the extermination section of the camp, just like the author in his
portrayal of gassing, tries to individualise the victims by inventing pasts and identities
for the corpses, and comes to understand that:
Each of these corpses is a person. Each has a past that is at least as
complicated and abundant with memory as his own. And if he can
remember every day of his life, every trivial or major experience,
everything he has ever seen, then surely they can too, or could (pp.1956).
This is similar to D.M. Thomas in his novel, The White Hotel, referring to the
victims of Babi Yar:
Most of the dead were poor and illiterate. But every single one of them
had dreamed dreams, seen visions and had amazing experiences, even
the babes in arms (perhaps especially the babes in arms). Though most of
them had never lived outside the Podol slum, their lives and histories
were as rich and complex as Lisa Erdman-Berensteins.115
Martin Grays For Those I Loved: Lying about Treblinka?
For Those I Loved was published as a testimony by Martin Gray with Max
Gallo. It was published in French in 1971 under the title Au nom de tous les miens, and
sold more than 250,000 copies. It was translated into English by Anthony White and
published in the USA and the UK in 1972.116 The book is presented as Grays memoirs
covering the period from the beginning of the war in Warsaw to 1970 when Grays wife
and four children were killed in a fire in the south of France. The first part details his
life as a teenager in the Warsaw ghetto, and a chapter called For This I Need Another
Voice117 describes his experiences at Treblinka where he is transported with his

115. D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel (London: Indigo, 1996), p.220.
116. Martin Gray, with Max Gallo, For Those I Loved, trans. Anthony White (Boston and Toronto: Little,
Brown and Company, 1972).
117. Ibid., pp.126-152.

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mother, sister and two brothers who are gassed on arrival.

The authenticity of the book was a controversial issue at the time of publication.
The Insight team of The Sunday Times, with the assistance of Gitta Sereny and Gerald
Reitlinger, drew attention to major inconsistencies between Grays account of his
experiences in Treblinka and those of survivors.118 These raised doubts about whether
Gray was at Treblinka at all, although The Sunday Times was circumspect about
accusing Gray of outright fraud presumably because of the libel laws. For example, they
say that Steiners book does apparently serve to add weight to some aspects of Grays
account, since Steiner . . . produces incidents and observations very similar to those
Gray himself recalls (my emphasis). There is a clear implication that Steiner provides
the source rather than the confirmation of Grays recollections. Don Honeyman, Gitta
Serenys husband, provides an illuminating anecdote which can be read as a supplement
to the 1973 expos:
It may amuse you to hear that by the time they finished [working on the
article], they were so disgusted with him [Gray] that they wondered if he
might have arranged the fire which destroyed his family!119
The authenticity of the book, and especially its Treblinka chapter, continues to
be a live issue; the Amazon.com website as at November 1999 contained a mixture of
polemical reviewsHolocaust deniers taking pleasure from the exposure (although they
conveniently ignore the fact that Grays account can only be exposed as fictitious by
comparing it with genuine witness testimony), and others persisting in a defence of the
books authenticity. While it is difficult to believe that the whole work is fictitious,
particularly the deaths of his family in Poland and France, many of the episodes are
almost impossible to believe. Grays countless escapes from captivity are scarcely
credible. At Treblinka he does every conceivable job, and even escapes from the
extermination section back into the main camp. He consistently confuses the upper

118. Insight, Survivors challenge Martin Gray story of extermination camp, The Sunday Times, 1973
[exact date not established].
119. Don Honeyman, letter to Alan Polak, 8 January 2000.

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(extermination) camp with the lower (main) campThe Sunday Times article points out
that this is repeating an error also to be found in Steiner. Gray does not say, even
approximately, how long he spent in the camp; The Sunday Times cites Gallo as saying
that he found it particularly hard to pin Gray down on specific dates. He mentions
hardly any names. He told The Sunday Times that Richard Glazar remembers me very
well, but Glazar himself told them that he did not remember Gray, and nor had he
given Gray the impression that he did. Much of what Gray describes seems to be
blatantly appropriated from Steiner. According to the interview he gave to The Sunday
Times, Gray said that he had naturally heard of Steiners book, but had not checked his
memories against it while writing his memoirs. Gallo is, however, quoted as saying
that while trying to prompt Grays memory about Treblinka he consulted various
works on the subject, among them Steiners book Treblinka.
Assuming that Gray has not invented the deaths of his mother, brothers and
sister at Treblinka, then I would speculate that he may have spent this period, as well as
the time of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in which he claims to have played a part, in
hiding in Aryan Warsaw (he does not look obviously Jewish and admits, in passing,
that his family included Catholics120). Gray may have invented the Treblinka episode
because he felt guilty about abandoning his family to their fates. He also describes
witnessing his fathers heroic death in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and the same
considerations may apply. Another possibility is that Gray wanted to make his life
appear more interesting for commercial reasons. According to The Sunday Times,
Gray planned to make his own film based on the book, the first major motion picture
about the holocaust, with other Treblinka survivors taking bit parts in the film to
give it authority.
Wladislaw Szpilmans The Pianist proves that a well-written memoir does not
require a dramatic hero or an episode in a death camp to be effective (or commercially

120. Gray, For Those I Loved, p.10.

52

successful).121 Szpilmans experiences mirror Grays in many respects, but in

Szpilmans case he is not transported to Treblinka with his parents, sisters and brother
because he was dragged away by a Jewish policeman just as he was about to board the
cattle car, and he spends the rest of the war in hiding.
Whatever his reason for producing it, Grays representation of Treblinka is of no
interest in itself, having neither authenticity nor literary merit. However, speculating
about his motives for falsely claiming personal experience of the camp raises questions
about the psychology of survivors, and whether they have, or perceive others to have, a
hierarchy of Holocaust experience, and about the nature of a man capable of telling lies
about his experience of events which involved the deaths of his own family.
He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it (Ecclesiastes 10:8): Ingrid Pitts Katarina
and the perils of reinventing Treblinka
Ingrid Pitt (real name Natasha Petrovna, born in Poland on 21 November 1937) is
internationally famous as Hammers Queen of Horror. The House That Dripped
Blood (1971), Countess Dracula and The Vampire Lovers (both 1972), and The
Wickerman (1974), have apparently established her as an icon in the Fantasy Film
genre.122 She has also appeared outside the horror genre in films such as Where Eagles
Dare (1969). According to interviews she gave in 1982-3, she spent her early years in
war-torn Poland, and was separated from her parents until the age of ten, when the Red
Cross took her to Berlin to be reunited with them. She claims to have been born on a
train between Germany and Poland during the last war [like many actors her date of
birth has moved forward by at least a couple of years]. No one knew exactly where the
train was at the time, as my mother was being taken to a concentration camp!123
Ingrid Pitt is the author of a number of books, mostly unpublished.
Unfortunately, this does not apply to her novel Katarina, which was published in
121. Wladislaw Szpilman, The Pianist, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Phoenix, 2000).
122. www.pittofhorror.com/about.htm, 13 July 2000.
123. Greg Turnbull, Ingrid Pitt Biography, www.hammer.gotoinfo.ch/pitt/pittbg.htm, 13 July 2000.

53

England in 1986. It is described on its dustcover as based on the experiences of Ingrid

Pitt and her mother. Well over half of the book is set in Treblinka.124 Like Ingrid Pitt
and her mother, the main characters in Katarina are not Jews. The characters, including
the eponymous Katarina, were deported to Treblinka from a village called Nowomlinsk,
somewhere in eastern Poland. Kuragin, a Soviet officer describes these deportations
without making any distinction between the treatment of Jews and Gypsies and the
treatment of other ethnic groups:
Everyone who isnt one hundred per cent German is being sent to the
camps - Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, anybody! Every day now a train
runs along the line and ends up in Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka or one
of the other camps.125
The only Jewish family from the village is that of Tadeus Grnfeld who
eventually becomes the Galewski-like Lagerlteste of Treblinka. The Treblinka of Pitts
novel is a sometimes bizarre combination of that described in Steiners Treblinka and
elements from other camps. Dr. Eberl, Franz Stangl and Kurt Franz are all there, albeit
at the wrong times; in the novel Stangl replaces Eberl as Kommandant in May 1943,
when in reality he took over in September 1942; Katarina also has Stangl in Berlin and
Franz in the camp on 2 August 1943, the day of the uprising, when in fact Stangl was in
the camp and Franz was absent.126 But these are minor quibbles compared with some of
the fundamental changes made by Pitt to the Treblinka as described by her main
(unacknowledged) source, Jean-Franois Steiner. Pitt only very occasionally
acknowledges that the extermination of Jews might have been an important, never mind
the primary, purpose of the camp. Dr. Eberl greets new prisoners (who in reality were,
without exception, Jews) by telling them that You have been sent here on the direct
orders of Reichsfhrer SS Himmler because you are enemies of the Third Reich! and
Franz adds, You are all condemned criminals. This camp exists for the sole purpose of
ridding the Third Reich of those who are trying to destroy it.127 Even more explicitly,
124. Ingrid Pitt, Katarina (London: Methuen, 1986), pp.105-252 (end).
125. Ibid., pp.87-8.
126. Ibid., pp.135, 201.
127. Ibid., p.112, 113.

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Kurt Franz tells Katarina: I never did like keeping you Poles cooped up with the Jews.
You should be our friends.128 Other inaccuracies include the prisoners wearing
pyjama-like suits (they wore clothes taken from the victims), numbers being stamped
on the prisoners hands (when numbers were introduced they were sewn onto clothing),
electrified fences (they were not), Russian prisoners of war being kept within the
boundaries of the camp129, the chimneys of the five furnaces (the corpses were burned
outside on grills), and Jewish prisoners working on medical experiments under German
supervision.130 Many of these images come from what might be described as a popular
view of a typical Nazi concentration camp, but especially from visual images of
Auschwitz.
While much of the plot, especially relating to the uprising, is appropriated from
Steiner, Pitt adapts some elements for her own purposes so that the Shitmaster who
Steiner took from eyewitness testimony is transformed by Pitt into a prisoner called
Boris Gruben who is dressed as a rabbi and is not Jewish, but has a Polish mother and a
German father. This man helps to hide, and eventually saves Katarinas unnamed baby
girl [aka Ingrid Pitt?] who is born in the camp and, more than just a little miraculously,
survives.
Pitts epilogue to Katarina is worth quoting in full:
There were 1,030 prisoners in the camp at the time of the uprising.
Over 600 reached the forest. The Red Army found less than 50 a year
later.
The special prisoners in the medical experimental unit were shipped to
other camps in Germany and forced to carry on with their experiments.
At the end of September 1943 Treblinka was razed to the ground. It
had existed for only two years. In that time, 900,000 Jews, Poles,

128. Ibid., p.232.

129. While there were no Russian prisoners of war at Treblinka, Birkenau (Auschwitz II) was originally a
camp for Soviet prisoners of war which was transformed into a concentration/extermination camp for
Jews. See Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp.138-51. There was also a separate
camp for Russian prisoners inside Dachau concentration camp. See testimony of Dr Franz Blaha dated 9
January 1946, in Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (London: Allen
Lane, 2001), pp.374-81, p.379.
130. Pitt, Katarina, pp. 107, 108, 138, 144, 148, 218.

55

Russians, Gypsies and other nationalities perished in the camp.131

The first paragraph is mostly accurate. The second is pure fiction. The third
gives an accurate figure for the approximate total number of victims, but is culpably
inaccurate in its description of the victims. As we have seen, about 900,000 Jews and
2,000 Gypsies were killed at Treblinka. There is uncorroborated evidence from Wiernik
of two transports where the men were uncircumcised, and he implies that they may have
been members of the Polish underground.132 The only other instance of victims who
were neither Jews nor Gypsies (also recorded by Wiernik) was that of a German woman
and her two sons who had boarded a transport from Germany by mistake. The woman
and her children, who were presumably considered to have seen too much, were gassed
with the rest of the transport.133 These exceptions (in the unlikely event that she was
aware of them) would not justify the misleading nature of Pitts description of the
victims.
While Pitt cannot be criticised in the same way as Gray who claimed to be
writing testimony, her use of a specific extermination camp primarily used to
exterminate Jews, and where all the slave/prisoners were Jews, as the setting for her
story, was a fundamental error. This is not only because it makes her tale of Polish
workers at Treblinka incredible, but also because it misrepresents the real purpose of
Treblinka which was to play the major role, along with Belzec and Sobibor, in meeting
the objectives of Operation Reinhard - the extermination of the Jews of the General
Government. Pitt has crossed the borderline, so important in Holocaust fiction, between
artistic licence and historical distortion. She has failed to recognise that the specific link
with history she establishes by setting the novel in Treblinka (rather than a fictional
camp) carries a double burdennot just ensuring verisimilitude but also guaranteeing
credibilityand that this precludes any significant departure from the outlines of the
historical record.

131. Ibid., p.252.

132. See Donat, ed., The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary, p.177.
133 Ibid., p.166.

56

The Value of Representations of Treblinka

Representations of the victims in their individual humanity are needed for an
understanding of what was destroyed in the Holocaust. For those who see the Holocaust
as primarily an event in Jewish history (as Steiner does in Treblinka), they could also be
of help in mourning its mostly anonymous victims, a process which is nowhere near
completion. Although lessons, like the need to resist racist and totalitarian ideologies as
soon as they raise their heads, could be drawn from victim-based representations, the
viewpoint of the victims can never be sufficient for understanding the Event. The
Final Solution was a Nazi creation, and an event in German, European and world, as
well as Jewish, history. Although historians and sociologists continue to try and
understand and explain how it could have originated in the centre of European
civilisation in the middle of the twentieth century, novelists also have a role to play by
representing, from the inside, how ordinary men and women could be turned into
genocidal murderers or indifferent bystanders.
When Wiesel asks, rhetorically, how can one identify with the executioner?134
in his attack on the very idea of a Holocaust novel, he makes the strange assumption,
especially as he is a novelist himself, that the reader is obliged to identify with all the
characters in a novel, or that this entails a sudden surrender of judgement. Even a novel
about Treblinka focused through Franz Stangl, for example, has the potential to add to
our understanding of what occurred there. The exercise of the novelists imagination
could provide a picture of Stangl, and particularly of his experiences at Treblinka,
having greater depth than that provided by Serenys psychological speculations in Into
That Darkness. Such an idea would be rejected by those who, like Jean-Franois
Lyotard, believe that a single, integrated discourse about history is impossible, and that
the voices of the perpetrators and the victims are fundamentally heterogeneous and
mutually exclusive.135 As an example that this view is highly debatable, consider the
134. Wiesel, The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration, 7.
135. See Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Lyotard argues that because the means to prove the

57

following:
At the beginning of winter the huge transports from the East started
coming. . . . they were people from a different world. They were filthy.
They knew nothing. It was impossible to feel any compassion . . .
They were so weak; they allowed everything to happen - to be done to
them. They were people with whom there was no common ground, no
possibility of communication - that is how contempt is born.
[On corpses at Treblinka:] They are lumps. . . . The moment you look at
any one of them as an individual youre lost.
They were cargo. . . . I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a
huge mass.
The second and the fourth quotations are comments made by Franz Stangl in
conversation with Sereny (Sereny, pp.232-3, 201); the first and third are statements
made by Richard Glazar.136 Glazar was a slave/prisoner at Treblinka who took part in
the uprising and survived the war, and was clearly a victim rather than a perpetrator, if
not in the same way as those who were gassed or shot. The way that his testimony
echoes Stangls suggests that it may be an oversimplification to argue that the voices of
the victims and the perpetrators are totally heterogeneous and incommensurate, and that
this makes an integrated understanding of the Holocaust impossible. The quotations
from Glazar illustrate how genocidal discourse could infect even its intended victims.
Men like Glazar, forced to collaborate in order to survive, became part of the evil, yet
they were not evil themselves. They remain morally distinct from the Nazi murderers.137
If there is to be any hope of avoiding similar catastrophes in the future the attempt must
be made to comprehend the way in which genocidal discourse is created and
transmitted. Novelists can play a vital part in helping us to understand this process.
crime were destroyed, The shades of those to whom had been refused not only life but also the
expression of the wrong done them by the Final Solution continue to wander in their indeterminacy, and
Between the SS and the Jew there is not even a differend pp. 56, 106.
136. Sereny, p.198 and Glazar, Trap with a Green Fence, p.64.
137. However, the dividing line between the degraded and the inhuman remains more subtle and elusive
than we would want it to be, as Primo Levi demonstrated in his description of The Grey Zone in The
Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), pp. 22-51. The extreme
case of the behaviour of Jewish informers in Treblinka (and elsewhere) shows that it is, regrettably, an
oversimplification to draw a clear dividing line between guilty perpetrators and innocent victims (see
Arad, p.204).

58

CHAPTER TWO
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WARSAW GHETTO
THE INSIDERS STORIES
In the eyes of the conquerors we are outside the category of human
beings. . . . We are caught in a net, doomed to destruction.138
. . . the best solution would apparently still be the removal of the Jews to
some other place. So long, however, as the Jews are still present here, the
course of action adopted in Warsaw would seem to be the most
appropriate: to seal off the Jews as much as possible from their
surroundings, to exploit their labor according to plan, and to allow them
the widest latitude in regulating their own affairs.139
My Hirsch is screaming: Cowards! . . . If not today, then tomorrow or
the next day you will be taken out like lambs to the slaughter. Protest!
Alarm the world! Dont be afraid! In any case you will end by falling
before the sword of the Nazis. Chicken-hearted ones! Is there any
meaning to your deaths? (Kaplan, 16 June 1942, p.352)
Yehuda, said Grandfather. . . . There must be some meaning in this.
And if not? Then what the hell can I, an old ignorant Jew, do about it? .
. . Uncle Yehuda sighed deeply and flung his hands wide apart. There
are no guilty people here and there is no guilt.140
The Warsaw ghetto was created on 15 November 1940. At that time it was
officially estimated that there were 380,740 people in the ghetto, including 1,718
Christians who were registered as Jews under Nazi legislation.141 Tens of thousands of
Jewish refugees from surrounding towns were subsequently forced into the ghetto.142
From 1 January 1941 to 30 June 1942, 69,355 deaths, about one-seventh of the
population, were recorded.143 This high death rate resulted from escalating numbers
succumbing to malnutrition and disease, particularly typhus. According to German data,
138. Abraham I. Katsh, ed. and trans., Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp.59-60. Entry for 28 October 1939.
Hereinafter referred to in the text as Kaplan.
139. Letter from ghetto Commissioner Auerswald to researcher dated 24 November 1941, Documentary
Appendix to Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz, eds., The Warsaw Diary of Adam
Czerniakow, trans. Stanislaw Staron and the Staff of Yad Vashem (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999), p.402.
Hereinafter referred to in the text as Czerniakow.
140. Bogdan Wojdowski, Bread for the Departed, trans. Madeline G. Levine (Evanston, Illinois:
Northwestern University Press, 1997), p.34. Hereinafter referred to in the text as Wojdowski.
141. Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Boston and New York: Mariner Books,
1994), p.80.
142. According to Arad, p.392, there were over 100,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto who had been
expelled from their homes in the counties of Grojec, Lowicz, Skierniewice and Sochaczew-Blonie in
February-March 1941
143. Raul Hilberg and Stanislaw Staron, Introduction, to Czerniakow, pp.25-70, p.60.

59

during the period from 22 July to 3 October 1942, 310,322 Jews were deported from the
ghetto.144 The overwhelming majority were transported to Treblinka where they were
gassed on arrival.145
There was a further deportation action between 18 and 22 January 1943, which
met with limited resistance from the fledgling Jewish Fighting Organisation, and
resulted in a further 6,000 Jews being deported to Treblinka. On 19 April 1943, the final
action started and the Uprising began. In his report, SS General Jrgen Stroop, who
commanded the forces brought in to suppress the Uprising, describes how:
On 23 April 1943, the Reichsfuehrer-SS [Himmler] promulgated his
order . . . to complete the sweeping of the Warsaw Ghetto with greatest
severity and unrelenting tenacity. I therefore decided to embark on the
total destruction of the Jewish quarter by burning down every residential
block. . .146
By 16 May 1943, the rebellion had come to an end and the last groups of Jews
had been killed or sent to death camps, with only a tiny remnant hidden underground.
Stroop claimed that during the course of his operation, 56,065 Jews had been
apprehended and/or destroyed, and a further 5-6,000 killed in explosions or fires. The
figure of 56,065 included 6,929 Jews who were sent to their deaths at Treblinka
[Durch Transport nach T. II wurden 6 929 Juden vernichtet. . .]. The title page of
Stroops report infamously reads: The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more!147
Unlike Treblinka, there is no shortage of material on the Warsaw ghetto. One
way of classifying written representations of the Warsaw ghetto would be to distinguish
between diaries and journals, most, but not all, written by authors who did not survive
the war; the memoirs of survivors written after the war but often using their own diaries
and journals as sources; historiographical works which use Nazi and Polish as well as

144. The Stroop Report, facsimile edition with trans. by Sybil Milton (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980),
p.3.
145. A total of 253,700 Jews were deported to Treblinka from Warsaw during this period according to
Arad, p.392.
146. The Stroop Report, p.9.
147. Ibid., p.11 and title page.

60

Jewish sources; and novels or poems. Classification might also be based on the
language employed, for there are works written in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, German,
French and English. I will however use a more basic, binary classification which cuts
across the others, and involves dividing the texts between those whose authors
experienced the ghetto from the inside, and those where they did not. The primary texts
considered in the insiders category are Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim
A. Kaplan (Kaplan), a diary written in Hebrew, whose author was killed at Treblinka;
Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum,148 notes, written
mostly in Yiddish, by the principal archivist of the ghetto, who was shot by the Nazis in
March 1944 after his hiding place was discovered; The Warsaw Diary of Adam
Czerniakow (Czerniakow), the diary written in Polish by the chairman of the Judenrat,
who committed suicide on 23 July 1942; and Bread for the Departed (Wojdowski) by
Bogdan Wojdowski, a novel written in the 1960s, whose language of narration and main
language of discourse is Polish, where the author draws on his childhood experiences of
the ghetto. The main works considered in the outsiders category are The Wall149 by
John Hersey, a novel written in English by a non-Jewish American journalist/novelist
which was first published in 1950, and The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman150 by Andrzej
Szczypiorski and The Final Station: Umschlagplatz151 by Jaroslaw M. Rymkiewicz, two
novels written in Polish by non-Jewish Polish writers which were first published in
Paris in 1986 and 1988 respectively. This division is intended to facilitate discussion of
two problematic aspects of representations of the Warsaw ghetto: firstly, various
approaches to the depiction of the extreme moral dilemmas faced by the Jews inside the
ghetto, and, secondly, the question whether there are, or should be, any restrictions
applied, on moral or other grounds, to the representations of the ghetto created by
148. Jacob Sloan, ed. and trans., Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum
(New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill, 1958). Hereinafter referred to within the text as
Ringelblum.
149. John Hersey, The Wall (New York: Vintage, 1988). Hereinafter referred to within the text as
Hersey.
150. Andrzej Szczypiorski, The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman, trans. Klara Glowczewska (London: Sphere,
1991). Hereinafter referred to within the text as Szczypiorski.
151. Jaroslaw M. Rymkiewicz, The Final Station: Umschlagplatz, trans. Nina Taylor (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1994). Hereinafter referred to within the text as Rymkiewicz.

61

novelists whose personal experience is remote from the events.

Ghetto Diaries
Marie Syrkin, writing about Warsaw ghetto diaries as early as 1967, assumed that
readers of these diaries were already aware of the facts:
Today we read these diaries no longer in the expectation of learning new
facts, whose further compilation only adds to the known, but to share in
the education of the authors.152
The main events in the life and death of the ghetto may be known, but their
interpretation remains open. Understanding the roles played by the Judenrat, the Jewish
police, and the resistance movement is of interest to more than just historians
specialising in this field, but to all wanting to understand the Holocaust as a historical
event. The Warsaw ghetto diaries are a primary source in this respect. Reading these
diaries is not dominated by the readers superior knowledge of the outcome; rather, as
Barbara Foley argues, ghetto diaries disrupt traditional expectations governing the
reception of diaries as genre largely because of:
the writers own awareness of the ominous drift of events not from
extrinsic information provided by the reader but from intrinsic shaping
achieved by the writer.153
James Young stresses the multiplicity of meaning and significance that comes
with disparate accounts, and describes his critical aim as:
not to discern the truest of five different versions of, say, the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising, thereby dismissing four of them for their deviation from
the most authoritative. More important are the ways that different
witnesses understood their roles in the revolt and how these
understandings may have determined their actions.154
I would argue that Youngs emphasis on the multiplicity of meaning arising from
152. Marie Syrkin, Diaries of the Holocaust, in Murray Mindlin, ed., Explorations: an annual on
Jewish themes (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1967), pp.73-96, p.77.
153. Foley, Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives, Comparative
Literature, Vol. 34:4 (Fall 1982), 330-360, 336.
154. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation,
p.32.

62

disparate accounts is misplaced. Rather, the various accounts of the same public events,
like the closing of the ghetto in 1940, and the main deportation to Treblinka in 1942,
and of personalities like Czerniakow, from widely varying perspectives, can, when read
critically, together produce a rounded picture of life in the ghetto, and of the various
dilemmas faced by its inhabitants. The diarists mostly describe public issues which
affected all of the inhabitants of the ghetto; where there are differing judgements, for
example, of the role of the Judenrat, and of events such as Czerniakows suicide, these
all add to our knowledge, and can, contra Young, allow us to reach objective
assessments.155
Where privacy and particularity are characteristic of the traditional diary, which
usually serves to mediate between two aspects of the selfthe one that performs, the
other that records the performance in peace at the end of the day, in the ghetto diaries,
in Foleys aphoristic formulation, personal experience cries out to be acknowledged as
a register to the fate of a whole people.156 The ghetto diaries discussed below are a
combination of public and private, with the emphasis resting on the public. Their power
resides in their closeness to public events: The diary comes as close as representation
can do to performing the events it cites rather than to describing them; it is an act in . . .
the history it relates.157

155. In his attempt to avoid the problems associated with the use of eyewitness testimony as evidence,
Young goes too far when he suggests that: Instead of looking for evidence of experiences, the reader
might concede that narrative testimony documents not the experiences it relates but rather the conceptual
presuppositions through which the narrator has apprehended experience. Ibid., p.37. The untenability of
this position is quickly established by a diary entry such as Abraham Lewins for 12 August 1942:
Eclipse of the sun, universal blackness. My Luba [Lewins wife] was taken away during a blockade on
30 Gesia Street. . . . Her fate is to be a victim of the Nazi bestiality, along with hundreds of thousands of
Jews. I have no words to describe my desolation. I ought to go after her to die. But I have no strength to
take such a step. Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. Antony Polonsky,
trans. Christopher Hutton (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp.113-4. It would be difficult
to maintain that this documents Lewins conceptual presuppositions and is not evidence of his
experience.
156. Foley, Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives, 337, 336.
157. Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore and
London: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), p.22.

63

Chaim Kaplan: The Jeremiah of the Warsaw Ghetto

Until the outbreak of the war, Chaim Aron Kaplan was the principal of a Hebrew
elementary school he had founded in Warsaw. He started keeping a diary in Hebrew in
1933; his war diary starts on 1 September 1939 and concludes on 4 August 1942.
Despite a statement by the editor and translator, Abraham I. Katsch, that entries missing
from the original edition are included (Kaplan, Introduction dated July 1972, pp.9-17,
pp.15-16), there are no entries for dates between 3 April and 8 October 1941 in the 1999
English language edition. The first English-language edition was published in 1965, and
a Hebrew edition was published in 1966.158
In an essay written in late December 1942 Emmanuel Ringelblum praises
Kaplans diary for its portrayal of the ghetto, but, with more than a hint of intellectual
snobbery, describes Kaplan himself as mediocre:
The diary of the Hebrew writer and teacher, Kaplan, written in Hebrew,
numbered thousands of pages containing a variety of information on
what transpired in Warsaw every day. Kaplans outlook was not
particularly broad, but he knew what the average Warsaw Jew was
experiencing at the time: his feelings and sufferings, his thirst for
vengeance and so on. All this is faithfully portrayed in the diary. It is his
very mediocrity which is of the utmost importance in the diary.159
Alvin Rosenfeld identifies a threefold focus in Kaplans writing: on the cruelty
of the Nazis; on the helplessness and misery of the Jews; and on the passivity and
acquiescence of the majority of Poles.160 However, the most striking aspect to a modern
reader is not so much Kaplans description of Nazi cruelty, but his almost uncanny
prescience as early as 1939 and 1940 of the fatal consequences of the German invasion
of Poland for Polish Jewry, and his understanding of the central role played by Nazi
ideology in sealing their fate.161 Kaplan provides many examples of the cruelty of the
158. Israel Gutman, Foreword (December 1998), Kaplan, pp.5-7, p.7.
159. Emmanuel Ringelblum, O.S. [Oneg Shabbath] in ed. Joseph Kermish, To Live with Honor and
Die with Honor: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives O.S., various
translators (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), pp.2-21, p.18.
160. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), p.40.
161. When a writer like Bernstein (writing about Austrian Jews who failed to anticipate the Holocaust)

64

Nazis, and believes that These people must be considered psychopaths and sadists,
because normal people are incapable of such abominable acts (Kaplan, 28 October
1939, p.60). He ascribes the cruelty to the removal of moral inhibitions, especially
shame, and their replacement by new values:
Everything is permitted [the Nazi], he has no restrictions. That shame
which keeps one from sinning has abandoned him. On the contrary,
cruelty to Jews is a national mitzvah [Hebrew, good deed, literally
commandment]. He who causes the most suffering is the most
praiseworthy. (11 November 1939, p.68)
While Kaplan also acknowledges that there are also some soldiers who possess human
feelings, he concludes that, at the end of the day, individual cruelty and humanity are
not important in determining the future of the Jews because Our tragedy is not in the
humane or cruel actions of individuals but in the plan in general, which shows no pity
toward the Jews (28 October 1939, p.60).
Kaplan realised that It is a mistake to think that the conqueror excels in logic
and orderliness, because [e]verything [the German occupying forces do] bears the
imprint of confusion and illogic. But he noted, that, nevertheless:
The Nazis are consistent and systematic only with regard to the central
concepts behind their actionsthat is, the concept of authoritarianism
and harshness; and in relation to the Jewsthe concept of complete
extermination and destruction. (Kaplan, 1 December 1939, p.80)
Many of Kaplans ideas about the origins of Nazi anti-Semitism are similar to
those adopted at a later date by Raul Hilberg and others:
Nazism found the primeval matter of religious hatred all prepared as a
heritage of the Middle Ages. It merely reinforced it with economic
hatred, in which it mixed . . . bits of ideology . . . from Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, and from other bigots and racists. (25 December 1939,
p.92)

demands respect rather than judgement for people who could not, and should not, be expected to have
any knowledge of the future, (Michael Andr Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic
History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), p.69), then there is an
understandable, though perhaps unjustified, temptation to reply: Kaplan, and others, saw clearly what
the Nazis intended, and if he could, why did so few others?

65

Above all, Kaplan stressed the ideological basis of the Nazis persecution of the Jews:
Their barbarism in relation to the Jews is ideological; and here lies the source of the
evil. Ideological filth is hard to vanquish (24 January 1940, p.107). This distinguishes
him from most other diarists and memoirists who tend to highlight the cruel behaviour
of particular individuals, rather than the ideology underlying their actions. Kaplan is
also one of the very few exceptions who disprove the argument that Holocaust victims
were too close to the events to be capable of understanding them, especially given that
the Nazis policy towards the Jews involved deceiving them about their real
intentions.162 Admittedly, Kaplan himself acknowledged that Historical events capture
the imagination completely only after their time. Like paintings, they require
perspective (Kaplan, 26 January 1940, p.109). It is also true that his knowledge of
what was then happening outside Warsaw,163 and especially within the Nazis decisionmaking apparatus, was much more limited than ours, and that he could not know with
any degree of certainty what was to occur over the next three or four years; but all of
this did not prevent him from understanding very clearly the essentials of what was
really happening to the Jews, and also what, barring the miracle of a speedy military
defeat of the Nazis, was most likely to be their fate in the near future. In March 1940,
Kaplan set out his most detailed analysis of Nazi antisemitism, which avoids the trap
many fall into of over-simplifying a complex phenomenon. The following extract gives
a clear idea of the subtlety of Kaplans understanding:
This is not just hatred whose source is a party platform, and which was
invented for political purposes. It is a hatred of emotion, whose source is
some psychological malady. In its outward manifestations it functions as
physiological hatred, which imagines the object of hatred to be unclean
162. Emil Fackenheim, for example, has observed that: When the eyewitness is caught in a scheme of
things systematically calculated to deceive him, subsequent reflection is necessary if truth is to be given
to his testimony [sic]. Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections on the Age of
Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p.58, quoted by Young in Writing
and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation, p.32.
163. Kaplan was well aware that the limitations to his knowledge also applied to what was happening in
Warsaw, but believed that his not knowing all the facts did not prevent him from writing truthfully: I
dont know all the facts . . . many of them I write on the basis of rumors whose accuracy I cannot
guarantee. But for the sake of truth, I do not require individual facts, but rather the manifestations which
are the fruits of a great many facts that leave their impressions on the peoples opinions, on their mood
and morale. And I can guarantee the factualness of these manifestations because I dwell among my
people and behold their misery and their souls torments (Kaplan, 27 August 1940, p.189).

66

in body, a leper who has no place within the camp.

The masses have absorbed this sort of qualitative hatred. Their
limited understanding cannot grasp ideological hatred . . . They have
absorbed their masters teachings in a concrete, corporeal form. The Jew
is filthy; the Jew is a swindler and an evildoer; the Jew is the enemy of
Germany, who undermines its existence; the Jew was the prime mover in
the Versailles Treaty, which reduced Germany to nothing; the Jew is
Satan, who sows dissension between one nation and another, arousing
them to bloodshed in order to profit from their destruction. These are
easily understood concepts.
But the founders of Nazism, and the party leaders, created a
scientific ideology on deeper foundations. They have a complete doctrine
which analyzes the Jewish spirit inside and out. Judaism and Nazism are
two world outlooks, neither of which is compatible with the other, and
for this reason they cannot live together. (10 March 1940, p.130)
Kaplan also had no illusions about the true purpose of ghettoisation: [The
concentration of Jews in Warsaw, Lublin and Radom] will make it easier for the
murderers to destroy them, not one by one but wholesale (26 January 1941, p.238).
Nor did he believe that the Nazis could be bribed out of their murderous intentions: If
the edict is, according to Nazi opinion, for the good of the state, or the good of the race,
money will be of no avail on the day of wrath. Consideration of profit and pleasures
dont enter the picture (19 July 1942, p.377). Once news of the mass murder of Polish
Jews reached Warsaw, Kaplan identified it as a new phenomenon which should be
distinguished from the pogroms of the past:
. . . this is not the first experience of physical destruction in Jewish
history. In every generation they have risen up against us to destroy us.
The experiences known to us from our history are not, however, like the
current experience. There is no similarity between physical destruction
which comes about as a result of a momentary outburst of fanatical mobs
incited to murder and this calculated governmental program for the
realization of which an organized murder apparatus has been set up. (11
July 1942, pp.371-2)
Other diarists like Emmanuel Ringelblum and Adam Czerniakow have
surprisingly little of interest to say about the Nazis motivation. One explanation, in the
case of Czerniakow, is that, as chairman of the Judenrat, he was inhibited by fear of
discovery, although Kaplan, too, was aware of the risks involved: Anyone who keeps
such a record endangers his life, but this does not frighten me (16 January 1940,
67

p.104). Ringelblum devotes far more space to discussing the actions and motives of the
Poles (of which more later), than to any attempt to analyse the behaviour of the
Germans. As late as June 1942, he believed that the German authorities were fearful
lest the German populace, even the German soldiers, find out about the massacre of
Jews, and that if the German populace knew what was happening at Belzec, the Nazis
would probably not be able to execute the mass murder (Ringelblum, pp.292, 298).
Once the BBC had broadcast information about the exterminations, he recorded that:
There are people who believe that the Germans will be afraid to
perpetrate any new massacres from now on . . . The more sober among
us [presumably including himself], however, warn against having any
illusions. No compassion can be expected from the Germans. Whether
we live or die depends on how much time they have. If they have enough
time we are lost. (Ringelblum, p.298)
Czerniakow simply records warnings about the future of the Jews of Warsaw
without comment. On 4 October 1941, he notes that Bischof disclosed yesterday that
Warsaw is merely a temporary haven for the Jews (Czerniakow, p.285). On 31 January
1942, he records that Probst informed me today . . . that the future looks grim for the
Jews (Czerniakow, p.320). Kaplan employs the literary device of an imaginary friend
called Hirsch, who, in the words of Kaplans editor, presents the dark, hopeless, but
realistic aspect of the situation (Kaplan, n.6, p.345), and as can be seen from the
second epigraph to this chapter, Hirsch pulls no punches. From his first appearance in
May 1942, he rails against the illusions of false hope, and his message is simple, but
devastating: Idiots! . . . Your hope is vain; your trust a broken reed. All of you are
already condemned to die, only the date of execution has yet to be set (7 June, 1942,
p.347). There is no patience here with the notion that illusions are a symptom of the will
to survivesheltering people from total despair. Another example of this type of blunt
realism, in this case involving a real person with the coincidentally similar name of
Hertz, is cited in the memoirs of Stanislaw Adler, who was a senior legal administrator
in the Jewish police. Josef Hertz was police chief of one of the districts of the ghetto,
and according to Adler:

68

Although he hated Hitlers Germans enormously, he believed very

deeply in their victory. It was a point of honour with him to convince
everyone that Hitlers defeat was an unattainable illusion and that every
one of us locked in the ghetto was inevitably condemned to death. He
would laugh merrily, rubbing his hands with ecstasy when his opponents
could not refute his arguments and became inclined to admit that Hertzs
reasoning was correct.164
Alvin Rosenfeld hears the echo of the tradition of Jewish lamentation literature
in Kaplans prose.165 Kaplan at one point describes himself as the grandson of Isaiah
the prophet (31 May 1940, p.159), and Hirschs prophesies of doom do have a biblical
flavour. In other passages he can be compared with the Jeremiah of Lamentations,
although Kaplans dirges are addressed to man rather than to God. Here, for example, is
Kaplan writing on 2 August 1942, in the second week of the great deportation from
Warsaw, and only two days before his final entry:
Jewish Warsaw is in its death throes. A whole community is going to its
death! The appalling events follow one another so abundantly that it is
beyond the power of a writer of impressions to collect, arrange, and
classify them; particularly when he himself is caught in their vise
fearful of his own fate for the next hour, scheduled for deportation,
tormented by hunger, his whole being filled with the fear and dread
which accompanies the expulsion. And let this be known: From the
beginning of the world, since the time when man first had dominion over
another man to do him harm, there has never been so cruel and barbaric
an expulsion as this one. From hour to hour, even from minute to minute,
Jewish Warsaw is being demolished and destroyed, reduced and
decreased. Since the day the exile was decreed, ruin and destruction,
exile and wandering, bereavement and widowhood have befallen us in all
their fury. (2 August 1942, p.396)
This has a similar tone to Jeremiahs description of the hunted state of the Jews who
remained in Judea under Babylonian occupation: They hunt our steps, that we cannot
go in our streets: our end is near, our days are fulfilled; for our end is come
(Lamentations 4:18). As with Jeremiah there is no note of self-vindication in Kaplans
diary; the dire fulfilment of their prophecies filled both men only with grief. But while
Jeremiah finds the cause of the calamity in the sins of the people and their leaders,
164. Ludmilla Zeldowicz, ed., In The Warsaw Ghetto: The Memoirs of Stanislaw Adler, trans. Sara Philip
(Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1982), p.75.
165. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature, p.44.

69

which led to punishment by God: Thou hast covered with anger, and persecuted us;
thou hast slain, thou hast not pitied and thou hast utterly rejected us (3:43 and 5:22),
Kaplan blames the perpetrators rather than God or the victims.
Kaplan describes recording the terrible events in the Warsaw ghetto as a
historical mission which must not be abandoned (26 July 1942, p.383). This historical
motivation for keeping his diary in ever-deteriorating circumstances is clearly set out in
the entry for 16 January 1940:
I sense within me the magnitude of this hour, and my responsibility
toward it, and I have an inner awareness that I am fulfilling a national
obligation, a historic obligation that I am not free to relinquish. My
words are not rewritten; momentary reflexes shape them. Perhaps their
value lies in this. Be that as it may, I am sure that Providence sent me to
fulfill this mission. My record will serve as source material for the future
historian. (16 January 1940, p.104)
Kaplan deliberately avoided recording events of a purely personal nature because he
deemed them inappropriate in a work intended as a historical source. The few personal
references he allowed himself are noted as being exceptions to this rule. A description
of Kaplans attempts to make a living by teaching is considered sufficiently noteworthy
that he records that Contrary to my custom since the outbreak of the war, I have
written this personal entry in my diary today (14 December 1939, p.87). Nevertheless,
the importance of the diary to Kaplans life grew as time passed. By November 1941 it
had assumed such centrality that he could write, in another of his rare personal notes:
This journal is my life, my friend and ally. I would be lost without it. I
pour my innermost thoughts and feelings into it, and this brings relief.
When my nerves are taut and my blood is boiling, when I am full of
bitterness at my helplessness, I drag myself to my diary and at once I am
enveloped by a wave of creative inspiration . . . Let it be edited at some
future timeas it may be. The important thing is that in keeping this
diary I find spiritual rest. That is enough for me. (13 November 1941,
p.278)
Kaplans final entry concludes with the words: If my life endswhat will become of
my diary? (4 August 1942, p.400). Although he could not save himself or his wife, he
managed to transfer his diary to the Aryan part of Warsaw.
70

Kaplan achieved more than just the fulfilment of his historic obligation to
record the events of the Warsaw ghetto and thus provide source material for historians.
Kaplans perceptive analysis of Nazi ideology and intentions, the remarkable
employment of his imaginary friend Hirsch with his prophesies of doom, and the final
lamentation on the destruction of Jewish Warsaw, are some of the elements in a
representation of the ghetto whose evocative power a historian or novelist would find it
difficult to match. This power originates in Kaplans desire to understand what was
happening to the Jews and his ability to express himself, combined with the
ordinariness of his social position in the ghettoto repeat Ringelblums assessment:
he knew what the average Warsaw Jew was experiencing at the time.166
The social positions of Ringelblum, whose journal will now be assessed, and of
Czerniakow, whose diary will be analysed later, were far from ordinary.
Emmanuel Ringelblum: The Archivist of the Warsaw Ghetto
Ringelblum was a professional historian before the war. He organised an underground
group of researchers called Oneg Shabbat (Sabbath Celebrants167) who devoted
themselves to collecting and preserving a record of the everyday affairs of the ghetto.
After the invasion of Poland Ringelblum began to keep a journal, and the result,
spanning the period January 1940 to December 1942, is Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto;
the English version, published in 1974, is a selection from a much longer two-volume
work originally published in Poland.168 Ringelblums journal is even more weighted
towards the public sphere than Kaplans diary; as the editor and translator of the English
version, Jacob Sloan, put it, the Notes are notes toward a history of the times and
nothing else . . . jottings, deliberately left lean for the future historian to put the meat of
interpretation on them.169 Ringelblum only rarely describes how he felt, and much of
the material came to him from outside sources, rather than personal experience: The
166. Ringelblum, O.S., p.18.
167. Jacob Sloan, Introduction to Ringelblum, pp.ix-xxvii, p.xvi.
168. See Rosenfeld, A Double Dying, pp.44-5.
169. Sloan, Introduction to Ringelblum, pp.xxii, xxvii.

71

Notes are not about [Ringelblum]they are about the Ghetto.170 Their style matches
their content:
The Notes, in their spare, fragmentary, often episodic character, reveal
nothing so much as the disconnections and erosions of normal existence
and glimpsed just at the point where it is slipping away.171
Whereas Kaplans work is striking in its early understanding of the genocidal
nature of the Nazis policy toward the Jews, Ringelblums strength is in describing the
impossible dilemmas faced by the Jews in the ghetto. Unlike Kaplan, Ringelblum
survived the great deportation action of July-September 1942, and on 15 October he
raised possibly the most intractable question, which still reverberates many years after
the event: Why didnt we resist when they began to resettle 300,000 Jews from
Warsaw? Why did we allow ourselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter?
(Ringelblum, p.310). In a monograph written in Polish when he was in hiding during the
second half of 1943, Ringelblum described the guilty feelings of the Jews left in the
ghetto at that time:
As soon as the round-ups stopped in September 1942 and numerous
reports started arriving from eyewitnesses of the mass slaughter in
Treblinka, the terrible awakening took place. The Jewish public
understood what a terrible error had been made by their not offering
resistance to the S.S. It was argued that if on the day the Warsaw
resettlement action was announced, everyone had rebelled, if the
Germans had been attacked with knives, sticks, spades and axes . . . if
men, women and children, young and old, had begun a mass rising, there
would not have been three hundred and fifty thousand murdered in
Treblinka, but only fifty thousand shot in the streets of the capital.
Husbands tore their hair because they had let the Germans, unharmed,
take away . . . their wives and children; children loudly reproached
themselves for allowing their parents to be taken away.172
The sense of guilt felt by the surviving Jews has been described as a psychosis
born of despair arising from the trauma of mass annihilation.173 The reason for the lack
170. Ibid., p.xxiv.
171. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying, p.46.
172. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, eds. Joseph
Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski, trans. from Polish, Dafna Allon, Danuta Dabrowska and Dana Keren
(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp.164-5.
173. Ibid., editorial note no.2, p.166.

72

of resistance was explained by the head of the underground Central Committee of the
Bund, L. Berezowski (Dr L. Fajner) in a letter dated 31 August 1942 to Shmuel
Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish National Council in London, as resulting from
three main factors: (i) the illusions fostered by the Nazis; (ii) the collective
responsibility of the Jews (Ringelblum notes that the appeals of the Combat
Organisation calling for resistance were considered a piece of German provocation, the
aim of which was to produce a resistance which would serve as a pretext for the
complete destruction of Warsaw Jewry174); and (iii) the absence of any help from
outside the ghetto walls.175 Marek Edelman, a leader of the Jewish resistance who
survived the war, described the change in attitude which eventually produced resistance
as an overcoming of the fear that other Jews would pay the price: The instinct of selfpreservation finally drove the people into a state of mind permitting them to disregard
the safety of others in order to save their own necks.176 This change only took place
after the main deportation of July-September 1942. In mid-1942 the Warsaw Jews did
not have the slightest possibility of offering significant resistance. The ghetto was
without weapons.
While the question of whether to offer resistance was largely a hypothetical one
at that time, other moral questions had been present from the early days of the ghetto,
and had grown more pressing as time passed. In December 1941, Ringelblum notes:
At the corner of Leszno and Karmelicka Streets, children weep bitterly at
night. Although I hear this weeping every night, I cannot fall asleep until
late. The couple of groschen I give them nightly cannot ease my
conscience. (p.241)
Janina Bauman [born 1926] deals with this issue in her diary entry for 18 April
1941 quoted in her memoir of life as a teenager in the ghetto:
On my way to Pawia Street, strewn all along with starving people . . . I
kept accusing myself of being well fed and for that reason entirely
174. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, pp. 160-1.
175. Ibid., editorial note no.1, p.157.
176. Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, trans. unknown (London, Chicago, Melbourne: Bookmarks,
1990), p.56.

73

indifferent to their plight. I talked to Hanka and Zula about it after class.
Dont you think the way we live is highly immoral? I asked. We eat
our breakfast, lunch and supper . . . At the same time they are starving
and dying. Theres nothing we can do for them, said Zula sadly, for
the thousands of them. Of course not. But for some of them perhaps.
Each of us for somebody? Would you and your family be willing to
take home these two begging boys? asked Hanka . . . I had no ready
answer to her question, and the more I think about it now, the clearer I
see the answer is No. No point in asking my family, I dont want them
myself.177
Within a few months Bauman had become hardened to the sight of the starving, and it
no longer bothered her:
I remember my second winter in the ghetto [1941/2] as a time of weird
stability. I somehow learned to live with evil claiming its victims all
around, with the tide of misery lapping my doorstep. I took it for granted
like summer heat or winter frost. I was not the only one to live like that but if I blame others, I should first of all blame myself.178
Kaplan, writing of this time, describes the same process: Self-preservation has
hardened our hearts and made us indifferent to the suffering of others. Our moral
standards are thoroughly corrupted. He makes it clear where he thinks the
responsibility for this lies: It is Nazism that has forced Polish Jewry to degrade itself
thus. Nazism has maimed the soul even more than the body (Kaplan, 4 January 1942,
p.290). This does not, however, mean that the behaviour of individuals and groups
within the ghetto cannot be criticisedKaplan notes, for example, that A certain
percentage of the ghetto population has become rich by trading on their brothers
privations (7 January 1942, p.290). Alexander Donat, in his memoir, also writes
bitterly of this aspect of life in the ghetto: While hundreds of thousands grew steadily
poorer, a handful of men were making enormous fortunes . . . While the Ghetto was
dying of hunger, champagne toasts were being quaffed.179
Ringelblum was highly critical of the way the Jewish establishment in the ghetto
treated those in greatest need:
177. Janina Bauman, Winter in the Morning: A Young Girls Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond
1939-1945 (London: Virago, 1997), p.42.
178. Ibid., p.51.
179. Alexander Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom: a memoir (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965) p.43.

74

During these days of hunger, the inhumanity of the Jewish upper class
has clearly shown itself. The entire work of the Jewish Council
[Judenrat] is an evil perpetrated against the poor that cries to the very
heaven. (Ringelblum, p.245)
For Ringelblum the treatment of the starving was not just a matter for the individuals
conscience, but a question of public policy:
The well-established fact is that the people who are fed in the public
kitchens are dying out. . . . One is left with a tragic dilemma: What are
we to do? Are we to dole out spoonfuls to everyone, the result being that
no one will survive? Or are we to give full measure to a fewwith only
a handful having enough to survive? (p.285)
This is precisely the sort of question that moral philosophers attempt to help us
to answer, and gives the lie to those like Bernstein who argue that very little about
human nature or values can be learned from a situation in extremis except the virtual
tautology that extreme pressure brings out extreme and extremely diverse behavior.180
While the Warsaw ghetto was certainly a situation in extremis, we still live in a world
where people are dying of hunger, and the dilemma raised by Ringelblum is still with
us, although for those that live in affluent countries it is not as immediate as it was for
the inhabitants of the ghetto. It must not be forgotten, of course, that it was the
deliberate policy of the German authorities to place the responsibility for making life
and death decisions, such as the allocation of official food rations, onto the Jewish
administration so as to deflect the hostility of the population. This policy was spelled
out by Auerswald, the Commissioner for the ghetto, in the letter to a researcher dated 24
November 1941 part of which was also quoted in the epigraph:
The principle that in my view has turned out most advantageously was to
allow the Jews maximum freedom to regulate their own affairs inside the
district. The entire communal administration lies in their hands. . . .
When deficiencies occur, the Jews direct the resentment against the
Jewish administration and not against the German supervisors.
(Documentary Appendix to Czerniakow, p.402)181
180. Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, p.89.
181. Auerswalds letter continues: Added to that is the widest freedom accorded to the Jews in so-called
cultural activities. They have theaters, variety shows, coffee houses, etc. The Jews have opened public
schools and to a considerable extent developed the trade school system. All these measures have
produced a certain reassurance which is necessary if their economic capacity is to be exploited for our

75

Ringelblums journal is the mostly impersonal work of a historian, and its value
lies mostly as a record of the social and ethical dilemmas which faced those trapped in
the ghetto, written from the perspective of a man highly critical of the Jewish
authorities. Czerniakows diary, which will now be examined, documents the life of a
man who was the primary public representative of those authorities.
Adam Czerniakow: He perpetuated his name by his death more than by his life.
(Kaplan, p.384, 26 July 1942)
Czerniakow, as chairman of the Warsaw ghetto Judenrat, was one of the targets
of the (displaced) resentment of the ghetto inhabitants arising from the Nazi policy of
giving the Jews in the ghettos a large measure of internal autonomy. Isaiah Trunk, the
author of a comprehensive history of the Judenrte of Eastern Europe, makes the
important point that, For the ghetto inhabitants the Jewish Councils were the visible
organs of oppression whereas the real bosses, the Gestapo and SS men, seldom
appeared in the filthy and vermin-infested Judengettos. Except during the final
resettlement actions, the ghetto inmates seldom encountered their actual persecutors.
But their Jewish oppressors were better known to them.182
Czerniakow was the subject of much criticism, especially by ghetto inhabitants
writing during the time he was in office or shortly afterwards. These attacks included
personal diatribes like Kaplans on the unrepresentative nature and low calibre of the
Judenrat generally, and of Czerniakow in particular:
Strangers in our midst, foreign to our spirit, sons of Ham who trample
upon our heads, the president of the Judenrat and his advisers are
musclemen who were put on our backs by strangers. Most of them are
nincompoops whom no one knew in normal times. They were never
elected, and would not have dared dream of being elected, as Jewish
purposes. Documentary Appendix to Czerniakow, p.402. The cultural activities in the ghettos are seen
by some historians as a form of resistance. Yehuda Bauer, for example, claims that: To foil the Nazi goal
of breaking their spirit, ghetto inhabitants formed social welfare, religious, educational, cultural, and
political (underground) organizations. Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (Danbury, CT: Franklin Watts,
2001), p.186. Auerswald makes it clear that they were seen rather differently from a Nazi perspective.
182. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (Lincoln,
Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp.528-9.

76

representatives; had they dared they would have been defeated. All their
lives until now they were outside the Jewish fold . . . Who paid any
attention to some unknown engineer [Czerniakow], a nincompoop
among nincompoops, who was an assimilationist not for ideological
reasons but for utilitarian ones. (Kaplan, 27 October 1940, p.215)
Kaplans complaint is not only that Czerniakow was an assimilationist, but that he
tolerated, and even favoured baptized Jews like Jozef Szerynski, the commander of the
Jewish police: it doesnt behoove [Czerniakow] to spread his wings over apostates and
the sons of apostates (Kaplan, 7 March 1941, p.250). This is repeated in Ringelblum,
who also provides Czerniakows response to this criticism:
When complaint was made to Czerniakow that, as head of the Jewish
Council, he not only tolerated baptized Jews, but actually placed them in
important positions, he replied that he could not approach the problem
from the Jewish standpoint, but as one affecting the general government
of the Ghetto. The Ghetto, he said, is not a Jewish state, but an area
where baptized Jews are residents, as are Jewsconsequently they must
be given equal treatment. (Ringelblum, April 1941, pp.146-7)
Czerniakow here demonstrates his appreciation of the fact that the Jewish definition of
who was a Jew had lost much of its relevance; and that it was the Nazis definition
which now prevailed whether the Orthodox Jews liked it or not. The Councils had to
represent all Jews, racially pure or racially mixed, their religion notwithstanding, and
the definition of who was a Jew, and who belonged to the Jewish community, was
decided by a Nazi regulation of 24 July 1940.183
The criticisms expressed by Kaplan and Ringelblum differ from questions about
the role of the Jewish leadership in the mass extermination of the Jews which, at the
time Kaplan and Ringelblum were writing, had not yet started. A distinction needs to be
made between criticisms of Czerniakows behaviour in Warsaw, and the attacks on the
role played by the Judenrte in the Holocaust written after the war, and most notably by

183. Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman and Abraham Margaliot, eds, Documents on the Holocaust, trans. Lea
Ben Dor (Lincoln, Nebraska and London: University of Nebraska Press, and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem,
1999), pp.214-215.

77

Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt.184 Trunk helpfully identifies two periods in the
history of the Judenrte, with the resettlement actions as a borderline. During the
initial period, when the authorities requested cooperation in the seizure of Jewish
property and delivery of Jewish laborers to places of work or to labor camps, the moral
responsibility that weighed on the Councils was still bearable because they could
justify their cooperation by reasoning that in carrying out German demands they helped
to prolong the life of the ghetto.185 As Steven Katz says, Trunks work shows that
Jewish cooperation with the Nazis was, in any event, inescapable because there was,
ultimately, no alternative to such interactionall Arendt-like fantasies of an anarchic
Jewish response to the contrary.186 However the situation of the Judenrte became
morally unbearable when, during the resettlement actions, the Germans forced the
Councils and the Jewish police to carry out the preparatory work and to participate in
the initial stages of the actual deportation. In Trunks analysis, Cooperation then
reached the morally dangerous borderline of collaboration.187
Unlike Judenrat chairmen such as Chaim Rumkowski (Lodz), Jacob Gens
(Vilna), and Moshe Merin (Upper Eastern Silesia), Czerniakow did not cross this
borderline, and cannot justly be accused of playing a pathetic and sordid role in the
destruction of his own people, which is how Arendt, without applying any
discrimination, describes the behaviour of the wartime Jewish leadership in occupied
Europe.188 Czerniakow avoided crossing this borderline as a result of the most
controversial action of his life: his suicide on the 23 July 1942, the second day of mass
deportations from the Warsaw ghetto (whose destination was not known by the Jews at
the time, but which turned out to be to Treblinka). Josef Kermisz gives the following
account of Czerniakows suicide:

184. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Student Edition) (New York and London:
Holmes & Meier, 1985), pp.76-7, 93-4, 196-7, 295-301; and Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
Report on the Banality of Evil (New York and London: Penguin, 1977), pp.117-9.
185. Trunk, Judenrat, p.570.
186. Steven T. Katz, Introduction to the Bison Books Edition in Trunk, Judenrat, pp.ix-xix, p.xii.
187. Trunk, Judenrat, p.570.
188. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p.117-8.

78

Before swallowing the [potassium cyanide] tablet he wrote two notes,

one to the Jewish Council executive and the other to his wife. In the first
he said that [Lieutenant Hermann] Worthoff [one of the principal officers
of the Aktion headquarters] had visited him that day and told him that the
expulsion order applied to children as well. They could not expect him to
hand over helpless children for destruction. He had therefore decided to
put an end to his life. He asked them not to see this as an act of
cowardice. I am powerless, my heart trembles in sorrow and
compassion. I can no longer bear all this. My act will show everyone the
right thing to do.189
Kaplan is one of the few ghetto inhabitants whose contemporary remarks on
Czerniakows suicide were sympathetic. The above-mentioned entry in Kaplans diary
referring to Czerniakows perpetuating his name by his death more than by his life
continues:
His end proves conclusively that he worked and strove for the good of
his people; that he wanted its welfare and continuity even though not
everything done in his name was praiseworthy. . . . The president, who
had a spark of purity in his heart, found the only way out worthy of
himself. Suicide! . . . He did not have a good life, but he had a beautiful
death. . . . There are those who earn immortality in a single hour. The
President, Adam Czerniakow, earned his immortality in a single instant.
(Kaplan, 26 July 1942, pp.384-5)
Ringelblums verdict is much harsher: The suicide of Czerniakowtoo late, a sign of
weaknessshould have called for resistancea weak man (Ringelblum, p.316). The
similar argument that Czerniakow was at fault in not informing the ghetto that
deportation meant certain death, and in failing to ensure that no Jewish cooperation with
the deportation was forthcoming, was made by Marek Edelman in his account of the
Uprising, originally published in Polish in 1945. By the time Edelman wrote this
account his judgement of Czerniakow had become less severe, and he apparently
accepted that there was in fact little that Czerniakow could have done:
On the second day of the deportations the president of the Jewish
Council, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide. He knew beyond doubt
that the supposed deportation to the East actually meant the death of
hundreds and thousands of people in gas-chambers, and he refused to
assume responsibility for it. Being unable to counteract events he
decided to quit altogether. At the time, however, we thought that he
189. Josef Kermisz, Introduction to Czerniakow, pp.1-24, p.23.

79

had no right to act as he did. We thought that since he was the only
person in the Ghetto whose voice carried a great deal of authority, it had
been his duty to inform the entire population of the real state of affairs,
and also to dissolve all public institutions, particularly the Jewish
Police190 (my emphasis)
Alexander Donat, a survivor of the ghetto, argues in his memoir that Czerniakows
suicide was objectively a failure of leadership, and that the subjective motives for his
action are not relevant in reaching this conclusion:
Czerniakows suicide. Whatever his motives or intention, his death did
not help us. We felt it was desertion, not leadership. Czerniakow failed to
sound the alarm and summon his people to resistance. If he had been
given a glimpse of the bottomless abyss to which we were consigned, he
did not pass his knowledge on to us. His suicide only intensified our
despair and panic. If it bore witness to his personal integrity, it did not
attest to his greatness.191
This criticism is unjustified. The ghetto populations reaction of despair and
panic to the deportations, which Donat claims Czerniakows suicide intensified, seems
rather to be an appropriate response at a time when resistance was not a realistic option.
As Gutman says Czerniakow put an end to his life rather than collaborate in handing
over Jews. He would not be an accessory to the crime.192 One need only compare
Czerniakows decision to commit suicide with Rumkowskis notorious speech to a large
assembly in Lodz on the eve of an action against the elderly, sick, and children on 4
September 1942: I have to perform this bloody operation myself: I simply must cut
off the limbs to save the body! I have to take away the children, because otherwise
others will also be taken . . .193 (where self-harm is metaphorical), to see that
Czerniakows action can be interpreted as morally justifiable in the circumstances. As
for the accusation that Czerniakow failed in his duty to warn others, Jonas Turkow in
his memoir seems closer to the truth when he writes that Czerniakows sudden death
left an indelible impression on everyone and served as the best illustration of an utterly

190. Edelman The Ghetto Fights, p.56.

191. Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom: a memoir, pp.60-1.
192. Israel Gutman, Adam Czerniakowthe man and his diary in Israel Gutman and Liva Rothkirchen,
eds., The Catastrophe of European Jewry (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976), pp.451-489, p.486.
193. Quoted in Trunk, Judenrat, p.423.

80

hopeless situation.194
There are two accounts of Czerniakows suicide in literary works that merit
comment. The first is in Yitzhak Katzenelsons Yiddish poem The Song of the
Murdered Jewish People, the fifth canto of which is called The Meeting in the
Kehillah [pre-war Jewish community organisation, many of whose functions were taken
over by the Judenrat] about Ten and imagines the Judenrat meeting to discuss the
deportations taking place while the dead chairman sits in his chair. It was, As if the
dead chairman conducted the meeting.195 In the poem the deciding factor in
Czerniakows suicide is attributed to the German demand to increase the number of
Jews to be deported from six thousand to ten thousand a day:
Why do you cry? You are a fine man after all . . . But honestly,
Not much of a Jew . . . Is ten the issue? To six you agree?
You are angry at whom? At yourself . . . You regret . . .
You take poison . . . Hurry, hurry, the Kehillah council will arrive
soon!196
Katzenelson goes on to castigate Czerniakow for taking the easy optionwith his
suicide described in terms of an attempt by Czerniakow to purge himselfwhile his
gesture made no practical difference to what happened because the surviving members
of the Judenrat were forced reluctantly to acquiesce to the German demands:
You are not much of a Jew, Adamie. You take poison? Commit suicide?
A Jew is killed . . . O to get killed takes greater courage . . .
But it doesnt matter . . . You drink? You cleanse yourself, Adamie?
Your life, yea your life hardly a Jew . . . Your death has greater
meaning.
Does it matter? Not you. Youll not but the Kehillah council
Will approve . . . Do they decide . . . Its a mere formality . . .
Ten are demanded . . . What can be done . . . The same anxieties you had
When six were demanded will gnaw at their hearts and torment them.197

194. Jonas Turkow, Azoi iz dos geven (Buenos Aires: 1948), p.276, cited by Israel Gutman, Adam
Czerniakowthe man and his diary, p.486.
195. Yitzhak Katzenelson, The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, trans. Noah H. Rosenbloom (Israel:
Ghetto Fighters House, 1980), p.35.
196. Ibid., p.34.
197. Ibid.

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This is unfair because Czerniakow did not agree to six thousand a day being deported,
in fact on the previous day he had refused to sign the expulsion order as required by the
Germans. Even accepting that Czerniakows suicide had no effect on the Judenrats
decision to cooperate with, rather than oppose, the deportation, his refusal to be party to
that cooperation deserves praise rather than blame.
The other literary account of the suicide is contained in John Herseys novel
The Wall. The novel will be discussed in detail later in the context of the outsiders
stories, but it is appropriate to mention it here in connection with Czerniakow. This is
so despite the authorial note which Hersey included in the later editions of his work
which specifically denies any historical reality to any of the characters in the book, and
in particular to Sokolczyk, the chairman of the Judenrat:
This is a work of fiction. Broadly it deals with history, but in detail it is
invented. Its archives is a hoax. Its characters, even those who use
functions with actual precedentsuch as the chairmanship of the
Judenrat, for examplepossess names, faces, traits, and lives altogether
imaginary. (Hersey, copyright page)
This is an arguable claim with regard to most of Herseys main charactersthe
archivist and narrator Levinson, for example, while having much in common with
Emmanuel Ringelblum, also has important differences from the historical figure (for
example, Levinson, unlike Ringelblum, worked as an official of the Judenrat). This is
not the case with Sokolczyk; the essential features in the life of this character all belong
to Czerniakow. This is particularly so in the description of the events leading up to the
suicide (Hersey, pp.261-8), which includes details like the chairmans refusal to sign the
deportation order. In the novel, the chairman leaves no notes, at least that we have
found so far (the novel was published in 1950, and it is not clear whether any accounts
of the notes said to have been left by Czerniakow had been published at that time), and
the only clue to what had happened was a pad with the figure 6,000 crossed out, and
under it was written another number: 10,000 (p.268).
Raul Hilberg and Stanislaw Staron describe Czerniakows Diary as the most
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important Jewish record of that time.198 The diary, written in Polish, covers the period
from 6 September 1939 to the day of his suicide, 23 July 1942. The entries for 14
December 1940 to 22 April 1941 are missingthe notebook covering this period is lost.
Czerniakow wrote in a simple, unadorned style. He prepared the notes for his own use
with the apparent intention of elaborating on them after the war. This view is supported
by Czerniakows habit of affixing orders and letters as addenda to the text or
incorporating them into it.199
Czerniakow comes across in the diary as a modest man, not given to sophistry or
self-praisethe antithesis in this respect of Rumkowski. Nor did he take advantage of
his position for material gain. As chairman, he draws no salary although he was far from
being a wealthy man: What am I going to live on? God only knows, especially since I
do not want to take a penny from the Community (Czerniakow, 20 November 1939,
p.91). He continues to refuse payment even when Auerswald suggests that he do so,
replying that so long as there was no money for the staff, neither I nor the other
councilors could accept pay (24 May 1941, p.242). There is no doubt that Czerniakow
was motivated by a desire to help his people while maintaining his own dignity and
uprightness. He castigated Jewish leaders who fled, and himself turned down the offer
of a visa to Palestine (12 February 1940, p.117). He was arrested twice, in November
1940 and April 1941, and on both occasions badly mistreated. In spite of this he did not
modify his behaviour towards the Germans with whom he came into contact: his
manner was not obsequious. He compared himself with a tinge of ironic humour to
saints and martyrs: Practical training for the life of a saint (8 December 1939, p.97);
Replete with glory I returned home at 4:30 (21 June 1940, p.164); and even to Christ:
I asked for the preparation of a large Community organization chart. The artist
hastened to frame me with laurel leaves. Wouldnt the crown of thorns be more
appropriate? (27 February 1940, p.122). At one point he attempted to resign, but it was
made clear that this was not possible without unpleasant, probably fatal, consequences:
198. Raul Hilberg and Stanislaw Staron, Introduction to Czerniakow, pp.25-70, p.25.
199. See Josef Kermisz, Introduction to Czerniakow, p.3.

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I asked the SS to be released from the chairmanship since I find it impossible to

manage the Community under these abnormal conditions. In reply I was told that this
would be inadvisable (26 January 1940, p.111), and he continued to fantasize about
being relieved of his post: I had a dream that I handed over my responsibilities to
Mayzel [the previous chairman who fled Warsaw at the outbreak of the war]. What a
beautiful illusion (2 July 1940, p.169).
Czerniakows problems were not confined to his dealings with the Nazis:
all these Jewish complaints. They do not want to make payments to
the Community, yet they keep demanding that I intervene on their behalf
. . . And when my efforts fail . . . they blame me without end as if the
outcome depended on me. (8 July 1940, p.172, my emphasis)
This suggests that Czerniakow was more aware of the limits of what he could achieve
than many of the ghetto inhabitants. As Stanislaw Adler, who was a lawyer, expressed
it:
Auerswalds basic thesis, that in the Quarter everybody and everything
was subject to the authority of the Obman, did not encroach upon the
principle which proclaimed the total exclusion of Jews from legal
protection and the loss of all their civil rights. The Obman . . . could
have some kind of competences and any range of obligations, but the
official apparatus of the Third Reich did not recognize the right of any
Jew to present any claims. If, in exceptional circumstances, the request
of the Jewish representatives were taken into consideration, it was never
for the sake of Jewish interests alone.200
Yet, despite these severe restrictions, Czerniakow achieved several successes,
including prisoner releases, the establishment of public schools and of playgrounds. He
records the opening ceremony of a playground just a few weeks before the start of the
deportations: Balm for the wounds. The street is smiling! (7 June 1942, p.364). When
he was criticised for continuing with such activities at a time when rumours of
deportation were widespread, Czerniakow likened himself to the captain of the Titanic:
Many people hold a grudge against me for organizing play activity for
the children, for arranging festive openings of playgrounds, for the
200. Zeldowicz, ed., In The Warsaw Ghetto: The Memoirs of Stanislaw Adler, p.238.

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music, etc. I am reminded of a film: a ship is sinking and the captain, to

raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz
piece. I had made up my mind to emulate the captain. (8 July 1942,
pp.376-7)
Even as late as three days before the transports began, after all Czerniakows German
contacts had denied that they were aware that a deportation was about to start, he
continues with his policy of trying to calm the ghetto population:
Because of the panic I drove through the streets of the entire Quarter. I
visited 3 playgrounds. I do not know whether I managed to calm the
population, but I did my best. I try to hearten the delegations which come
to see me. What it costs me they do not see. Today I took 2 headache
powders, another pain reliever, and a sedative, but my head is still
splitting. I am trying not to let the smile leave my face. (19 July 1942,
p.382)
It is possible to see Czerniakow as simply a dupe of the Nazis here. It was
obviously in the Nazis interests for the ghettos population to be calm to facilitate their
transportation to the gas chambers of Treblinka. But the question remains, was it also in
the interests of the Jews? It is not clear to what extent Czerniakow was taken in by the
lies he was told by the Germans, but even if he strongly suspected that transports to
almost certain death were imminent, and he probably did, it is still an open question
whether emulation of the captain of the Titanic might still have been the right approach
given the total powerlessness of the Jews at that time.
This issue of whether Czerniakow was unknowingly simply a Nazi tool can
affect how all of his limited successes as chairman of the Judenrat are evaluated.
Hilberg and Staron argue that:
Such small achievements, temporary stabilizations, and phantom
victories were an important factor in fostering an illusion of progress and
sustaining the official Jewish faith in the survivability of the ghetto.201
Trunk demonstrates that from the Nazi point of view the Judenrte had to serve only
one purpose: to execute Nazi orders regarding the Jewish population. Other activities,
which dealt with the internal needs of the Jewish population, were sometimes tolerated,
201. Hilberg and Staron, Introduction to Czerniakow, p.66.

85

and even encouraged because they served the Nazi-propagated illusion that the
continued existence of the ghettos was guaranteed, and also concealed the Final
Solution from the Jews for as long as necessary.202 But it would be unjust to blame
Czerniakow for a failure to see his role from the Nazis viewpoint, when they took great
pains to hide their intentions (not everyone can have the insight of a Kaplan). In many
ways he was an heroic figure who did his best for the ghetto inhabitants, and who took a
principled decision to kill himself rather than collaborate in their destruction.
Czerniakows diary is more conventional than Kaplans or Ringelblums. Even
taking account of Czerniakows abnormal role, his diary falls within the sub-genre of
politicians diaries, written partly as a self-justification, with one eye on posterity.
Having examined three diaries which provide widely differing perspectives on
the ghetto, I now turn to a novel about the Warsaw ghetto written by a survivor. The
underlying question when considering this, and the novels written by outsiders
discussed in the next chapter, will be, not their literary value, but whether they can add
anything important to the representations of the ghetto which the diarists and other nonfiction writers have created in their writing.
Bogdan Wojdowski: a medium between a destroyed people whose agony he
shared and those from the other side among whom he dwells and in whose
language he writes?203
Bogdan Wojdowski was born in 1930, and committed suicide on 18 April 1994.
His novel, Bread for the Departed which draws on his own childhood experiences, is
set in the Warsaw ghetto prior to the April 1943 uprising, and was completed during the
1968-9 antisemitic purges in Poland. With the abatement of the anti-Semitic repression
following the fall of Gomulka and Moczar, the novel was published in Warsaw in 1971.

202. Trunk, Judenrat, p.44.

203. Madeline G. Levine, Two Warsaws: The Literary Representation of Catastrophe, Eastern
European Politics and Societies 1 1987 (3), 349-362, 361.

86

By 1987, the Polish edition had been reprinted five times.204 An English version
(Wojdowski), translated by Madeline G. Levine, was published in the USA in 1997.
The books Polish title Chleb rzucony unmarlym, literally bread thrown to the dead,205
is more powerful and less euphemistic than its English title.
The multilayered linguistic complexity of Bread for the Departed is necessarily
obscured in translation. Although standard Polish is the language of narration and the
main language of discourse in the novel, the Polish of the dialogue sometimes mimics
the intonations of Yiddish speech, and Wojdowski also employs Warsaw dialect,
thieves argot, Yiddish and Hebrew words or phonemes, and German. In the English
translation, Levine decided to render most of the passages not written in standard Polish
in only marginally defective English because there are no equivalents in English that
would not introduce inappropriate cultural associations. Passages in German were left
untranslated to preserve their alien sound.206
Henryk Grynberg, a Jewish-Polish writer of the same generation as Wojdowski,
described Bread for the Departed as without a doubt the best novel about the Warsaw
Ghetto and one of the best literary depictions of the Holocaust.207 In the same vein,
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska called the novel, the best fictionalized account of the
Warsaw ghetto ever writtenhead and shoulders above such popular novels as Leon
Uriss Mila 18 or John Herseys The Wall.208
Bread for the Departed is a largely chronological description of the deteriorating
conditions in the Warsaw ghetto, with the dominant point of view assigned to David
[Dawid in the Polish original] Fremde, a boy aged eleven or twelve when the story
begins. David is not, however, the narrator, who is anonymous, and has no particular
204. Madeline G. Levine, Polish Literature and the Holocaust, Holocaust Studies Annual 3, (1987),
189-202, 193.
205. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Bogdan Wojdowski, in Kremer, ed., Holocaust Literature,
pp.1338-40, p.1338.
206. Madeline G. Levine, Translators Note to Wojdowski, p.xi.
207. Henryk Grynberg, Foreword: Bogdan Wojdowski, My Brother, Wojdowski, pp.vii-x, p.viii.
208. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, A New Generation of Voices in Polish Holocaust Literature,
Prooftexts, 1989, no.3, 273-287, 281.

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persona, but echoes the points of view of various characters, although his closest
affinity is with David. Wojdowskis past identity is thinly disguised in the character of
the boy. Levine surmises that Wojdowski submerges his present individuality so as not
to detract from his task of bearing witness, although she undercuts this by also arguing
that the suffering and destruction in the ghetto is described from the perspective of a
long-term survivor.209 She was right in the first instance. Wojdowskis assignment of
the dominant point of view to a youthful participant-observer has the effect of providing
an insiders view of the ghetto with the survivors perspective mostly absent. This has a
distinct advantage in comparison with, for example, Elie Wiesels novelized memoir
Night, where a jarring note is introduced by the interventions of an omniscient,
judgemental voice, which may be that of the author from the perspective of ten or more
years later than the events described: The Germans were already in the town, the
Fascists were already in power, the verdict had already been pronounced, yet the Jews
of Sighet continued to smile.210 There are no such monological judgements in Bread
for the Departed; conflicting views are expressed by different characters, but no
authorial or narratorial voice, having the survivors superior knowledge of the
outcome, expresses an opinion on their merits, or attempts a resolution.
Levine, while acknowledging that Wojdowskis decision to make the dominant
point of view that of a child springs from the autobiographical origins of the novel,
interestingly suggests that it was also a necessary strategy to facilitate communication
with his Polish readers:
The device of the child-observer offers a distinct narrative advantage
given the cultural context in which the book appeared. Since the boy is
still trying to understand his world, the narrative device of filtering
through his consciousness descriptions of Jewish ritual and of political
tensions in the Ghetto does not seem uncalled for; at the same time, it
also functions as a means of instructing the Polish reader in Jewish
exotica.211

209. Levine, Two Warsaws: The Literary Representation of Catastrophe, 361, 351.
210. Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway (London: Penguin, 1981), p.20.
211. Levine, Two Warsaws: The Literary Representation of Catastrophe, 360.

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Religious holidays are used in the novel as markers of passing time, but the Polish
readers of the novel require an explanation of their place in Jewish life, so there are
scenes in which the characters celebrate and discuss the significance of each holiday.
These passages do not seem intrusive and are justified by the presence of the childobserver, but their presence stems as much, if not more, from the need to explain Jewish
cultural references to Polish readers than from any necessity arising from the story.
Levine speculates that the officially sponsored antisemitic purges of 1968-9, and
the resulting peaceful decimation of the surviving remnants of Jewish life in Poland,
provided an important stimulus to Wojdowskis writing his novel 25 years after the
events. Wojdowski did not join the mass emigration of the Holocaust survivors and
their offspring, and his novel appeared in the wake of that wave of emigration, bearing
witness to the existence of the Jewish community that had been an integral part of
Warsaw life . . . and that now was virtually extinct.212 Wojdowski, Levine reminds us,
is not appealing to communal memories in his readers,213 rather his role was to be a
medium between the destroyed Jewish community in Poland and the Polish people, who
knew little about them. This view makes sense because the prospective readers of the
original version of the novel must have been almost exclusively indigenous non-Jewish
Poles, with the addition of the tiny number of Jews who remained in Poland, and of
Jewish and non-Jewish Polish speakers living abroad (which involves making the
questionable assumption that readers in the West would have had ready access to works
issued in Warsaw at the time the book was published).
Wojdowskis representation of the ghetto from the perspective of a young
adolescent provides fresh insights into issues like the incommensurate relationship
between Nazi antisemitic Jewish stereotypes and the real nature of the Jews:
It was the same thing on all sides. The campaign never let up. . . . The
Jews control the world; death to the Jews. . . . He knew they were talking
about him. And he was amazed that his young life could be of
212. Ibid., 352.
213. Ibid., 360-1.

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importance to anyone. (Wojdowski, p.50)

Davids response to the persecution of the Jews is the common adolescent reaction of
reacting against any identity which he did not choose. This reaction is compounded in
the circumstances of the ghetto because this imposed identity not only denies his
individuality and any possibility of self-development, but it is negative in every respect:
. . . no one cared who he wanted to be; what was important was his
genealogy, and anybody could ask him about it. He was a Jew, because a
Jew is a person who is born of a Jewish mother and a Jewish father,
whose grandfather and grandmother were also Jews . . . How many of
[his Jewish ancestors] must have had to live, procreate, and die in order
that one despised individual might come into this world! (p.207)
This denial of the possibility of individuality by the imposition of a fixed racial identity
applied to all those designated by the Nazis as Jews, but many Jews, while, of course,
rejecting the attributes the Nazis associated with Jewish identity, did not reject the
notion of a Jewish identity whose origin was an amalgam of race and religious
chosen-ness. Young David in the Warsaw ghetto, who was going through the normal
process of identity formation, can only see his Jewish identity in the Nazis negative
terms. Wojdowski shows here how successful the Nazis were in destroying any idea of
a positive Jewish identity, not just in the eyes of Aryans but also in the eyes of
many of the victims themselves, well before the Final Solution.
Wojdowski also uses David as an example of the physical and psychic
deterioration which living in the ghetto made inevitable, as well as of the guilt of
surviving while others are dying of hunger and disease:
Lethargic, somnolent, condemned to disintegration into nothingness, he
drew no connections between his fears about himself and the annihilation
that he saw around him every day. He did not know what to think about
that and how to compare himself with other people. His deterioration
also aroused fear in him, and shame. The great evil worked apart from
him, but the small evil was within himself. He felt guilty that he was
alive. Annihilation had spared no one and had swept multitudes of beings
out of every corner. By chance one bitter individual, of no use to anyone,
insignificant, and astounded by his own insignificance, was still alive
he himself. (p.209)

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Rather than following the natural course of development from child into adolescent, in
the ghetto David learns about the necessity of being indifferent to the pain of others:
He became secretive, uncommunicative. He became instinctively nasty.
He saw that the sufferings and wrongs of some people only arouse
laughter and mockery in others; so then, it was necessary to lower his
head and walk past without hurrying, as if nothing were happening. He
judged himself harshly, thinking it was fear that guided him at such
moments, and he was ashamed, for himself and for the people who were
beaten; with time he came to recognize that one could become
accustomed to this and he grew indifferent. (pp.256-7)
The novel is not confined to Davids point of view, and the impersonal
narrators descriptions of the starving and diseased, and especially of children, are
particularly memorable:
Tiny skeletons covered with sores came running down . . . wheezing,
squealing, joyously waving their stunted arms. Impetigo was already in
bloom in the summer warmth and their skin was overgrown with its
luxuriant tendrils. Their scabs oozed and their lips, ulcerated with canker
sores, smiled broadly, jaggedly. Red blotches grew on them like weeds.
The stigmata of abcesses, scarlet stains on necks and torsos, persistent
thrush infections, and an assortment of rashes covered the frail, swollen
little bodies that shunned the bright rays of the sun. Hunger had placed
its filthy mask on them, deforming their faces with old mens grimaces,
gnawing at their chapped skin. They squinted in the sunlight and their
festering eyelids squeezed shut involuntarily, lending them a cunning
expression, the hint of a cruel, sly smile. (pp.90-91)
This kind of vivid description is missing from even the most literary of the diaries and
memoirs. It depicts the horror of the plight of children in the ghetto without attempting
to make them appealing (rather like the disturbing photograph of a youth in the Warsaw
ghetto in 1941 reproduced on the front cover of Kaplans Scroll of Agony), and because
it was written by a survivor-witness its use of literary language, like the flowery (in the
literal sense) metaphor for the spread of impetigo, and the description of abcesses as
stigmata, does not seem exploitative, as it might otherwise have done. Wojdowskis
experiences seem to give him the right to use language in the most effective way of
which he is capable, so as to provide the reader with an accurate impression of the
reality of the ghetto. As we have seen in the chapter on Treblinka, and will discuss

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further in the examination of representations of the Warsaw ghetto by outsiders, more

stringent critical standards are applied to novelists who have no experience, and thus no
first-hand memory, of the Holocaust, and must rely on other sources, including the
testimony of survivors as well as their own imaginations, than to those who do. The
author is not only not dead in the Barthesian sense, but, in Holocaust writing more
than elsewhere, the normal distance between a novelist and his or her text breaks down,
and who the author is often determines how the reader reacts to the text. This would
apply even to two texts whose words are identical as in Borges story Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote.214 If the above passage had been written by, for example, Ian
MacMillan it might be seen as aestheticising and exploiting the Holocaust, but written
by a survivor who is also capable of fine writing it is more likely to be praised for its
realistic evocation of the horrors of the ghetto.
Many of the questions about the Holocaust which remain controversial are the
subject of open-ended discussions by the main characters in the novel. Davids
grandfather tries to understand what is happening to the Jews in terms of the story of
Sodom; he sees the Nazi persecution as divine punishment for the failings of the Jews.
His son, Davids uncle Yehuda, angrily rejects this idea:
Sodom, Sodom! So God Himself has descended to earth in a German
uniform and is punishing guilty Jews? When did Yahweh start wearing a
uniform? . . . I dont want to hear a word about Sodom as long as there
are people walking around barefoot and hungry crowds roaming the
streets. . . . There are no guilty people here and there is no guilt. (pp.334)
This idea is echoed by a friend of the family, Professor Baum: There are no
better people or worse people anymore. Equality in misfortune, and thats that. The
stick falls equally on every back and doesnt choose (p.216). Baum is also the vehicle
for other important notions so that this is in parts a novel of ideas in Bakhtins
sense.215 These include asserting that the Nazis were doing more than just killing their
214. Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, trans. James E. Irby, in Labyrinths, eds.
Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp.62-71.
215. See the discussion of Steiners Treblinka in the previous chapter.

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victims: Its not only life that theyre taking away from us, but also faith in life
itself; and an insistence on the impossibility of ever exacting adequate restitution from
the perpetrators: What restitution can there be after such a crime? Hollow laughter and
scattered bones. We wont be here and it wont touch us (p.219). Baum rejects
Yehudas notion that the perpetrators are bandits and criminals: that . . . sounds like
an excuse. Its not only criminals who are working to achieve Judenrein but ordinary
Germans, too, and then they become criminals. The most average people (p.221). Like
David, Baum also feels survivors guilt:
And over there, the apathetic people go to the pit without a word of
rebellion, and when they are suffering beneath the bodies of the dead,
they cry out, Noch eine Kugel! Another bullet! They are conscious
and they yearn for the end. To live? To live with such thoughts? And if I
am going to live, will I forget that? Such a life is a disgrace, when your
people are dying. To cheat fate and profit from chance. (p.220)
Baum meditates on the desirability of achieving calm when facing his murder, but is
aware that this would also ease the task of his killers:
Calm, to preserve ones calm. The final use that I can make of my
freedom. Yes, but even that has been figured into their conniving
calculation! Who is served by the dignity of one little condemned person,
a child who goes peacefully to his death, having first neatly folded his
clothing? They are, because it hastens his execution and makes it
simpler. (pp.220-1)
The novel includes a discussion on the merits of resistance between Davids
father, his two uncles Yehuda and Gedali, and two youths called Uri and Naum. No
conclusion is reached, and Wojdowski does not use the narrator to indicate his own
position in this debate, but, as Levine puts it, Wojdowski makes no apologies for the
dominant non-heroic response of the populace, nor [does he show] excessive admiration
for the heroic.216 Davids grandfather had previously made the religious, fatalistic, case
against resistance:
Hasnt it been just like this in every place and at all times? Why should
we mourn and rend our garments? . . . The madness abates when it grows
216. Levine, Two Warsaws: The Literary Representation of Catastrophe, 359.

93

weary of its own shouting. Theres an intermission for law, an

intermission for peace, and an intermission for civilization. . . . I have
lived as a Jew. I shall die as a Jew. Together with other Jews. Rebellion
leads nowhere, and crying for justice ends in blasphemy. (pp.222-3)
Gedali and Davids father now argue the secular case against resistance. Gedali defines
the principle involved: There is no law that says a man must defend himself to the end
against everything and everyone (p.368). Davids father provides the pragmatic
argument: Its all very well to fight! But with what? With bare hands? A gun is a
luxury (p.370). Yehuda denies that survival on its own is a sufficient reason for
resisting: Life is cheap. . . . We have to fight for something greater. Not just for . . .
life itself (p.371, second ellipsis in original). The set-piece argument, which confirms
the novels status as a novel of ideas, continues:
Uncle Gedali: Just staying alive is a lot.
Uri: I spit on such a life!
Uncle Gedali: Its sufficient to survive in order to bear witness.
Uri: Witness? Who cares about that? And who is going to care?
Naum: A flock led to the slaughter remains alive only until the cleaver
drops. The Jews are being led to the slaughter but they insist, out of fear,
that they should go to the slaughter obediently in order to stay alive.
Uri: We should fight in order to preserve life.
Uncle Yehuda: To fight means to perish. (p.376)
Another character, Attorney Szwarc, highlights the bureaucracy (the hidden structure
referred to in the chapter on Treblinka) working behind the Jews visible enemies, and
which was even more difficult to resist:
People like Uri see a gendarme, a cannon, a rifle, perhaps a machine gun.
Fine; but what stands behind them? When panic is spreading here and
people are losing their lives, over there papers are wandering from desk
to desk. Calmly, with no sense of urgency. Theres a plan. . . . How can
they fight against that? (p.378)
Although his own views about resistance by the Jews inside the ghetto are
unclear, Wojdowski does indicate his feelings about the failure of the Poles to take any
significant action to prevent the extermination of the Polish Jews (and this is an instance
where I believe it is justified to refer to the author rather than to the narrator, because
the criticism of the Polish resistance inferred is one made by many survivors of the
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ghetto) with his description of how Uri attempted to keep peoples spirits up by
suggesting that help was on the way:
O people of little faith. Hang on just a little longer. How long will it take
the transports to reach their goal? There is the powerful Home Army.
The Communists. They are waiting for the signal; they are all prepared to
fight. And then? Every trestle bridge will collapse, every rail line will be
mined, and the locomotives will fly up into the air. . . . Hold on and
freedom will be given to you. Its a matter of the fatherlands honor, and
the fatherland will not look with indifference at the smoking chimneys of
the crematoria! (pp.377-8)
Few Poles reading this passage would have any doubt about what is implied
here: that the Polish underground was at fault in not attacking the railway lines being
used to transport the Jews to extermination camps, and that the Polish fatherland did
indeed look on the annihilation of its Jewish citizens with indifference.
As well as being the saga of Davids family and friends in the struggle for
survival, Bread for the Departed includes numerous descriptions of deaths from hunger,
typhus, and random shootings, and the terror of children crossing the ghetto walls in
search of food for their families. Wojdowski also attempts to recreate the texture of the
Warsaw ghetto through a fragmented blend of overheard voices and observed street
scenes. He attempts what Levine describes as a veristic rendering of fragmented
speech and the dissonance of voices217 in a few brief crowd scenes, and extensively in
the penultimate chapter of the book, which portrays the chaos and panic of the
population during the great action (pp.345-361). Mingling with, and often drowned out
by, the voices of the victims is the voice of SS-Sturmbannfhrer Hfle, the commander
of the deportation troops, making a speech to the Jews on their way to the
Umschlagplatz, in which he attempts to justify the action by employing a metaphor
relating physical corruption to the effect the Nazis believed the Jews had on civilization:
A Jews corpse lies buried and rotting within the foundation of
civilization, and civilization itself is rotting along with it. Now the time
has come when the last act of historical justice is about to take place. The
Germans are evening the score. (p.348)
217. Ibid., 355.

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This is, however, a rare example of a Nazi voice. The main impact of the novel
is not just to memorialise the murdered Jews of Warsaw, but also to affirm Jewish life
in the face of the Nazi victory over the Jewish people. The characters have distinct
identities as individuals; Wojdowski, while bearing witness to their victimisation, does
not reduce his Jews to the level of anonymous victims. He brings the Warsaw Jews to
life, but the reader is constantly aware that most of their voices will soon be silenced
forever. Although the novel ends before the final destruction of the ghetto, it is also the
story of a boy who, against all the odds, survived. His survival is not, however, a matter
for celebration, because David had learned:
How little it took to become a whimpering, weakened, dying man! And
who was he that he deserved a different end? . . . He felt guilty before
those who did not have the strength to live. . . .
The courage of those who wanted to exist bordered on humiliation and
demanded a calculated, dull submissiveness. It turned out in the end that
bravery is the same as the desire for life. (p.257)
The value of a novel like Bread for the Departed is as an important supplement
to the testimony contained in diaries and memoirs. We do not usually read novels so as
to increase our understanding of an historical event, but that seems to be what this book
achieves. Kaplan, Ringelblum and Czerniakow provide different perspectives on the
public life of the ghetto. By using the medium of a novel, Wojdowski gives us a picture
of life in the ghetto which goes beyond what a diarist or memoirist, writing from his or
her own personal point of view, could achieve. By creating credible characters with
clearly differentiated opinions, who interact and debate, Wojdowski brings out the
impossible dilemmas facing the Jews of Warsaw without privileging any one position.
This is especially apt for a subject where there can be no clear-cut answers to the
questions raised by the extreme conditions created by the Nazis.

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CHAPTER THREE
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WARSAW GHETTO
THE OUTSIDERS STORIES

We now turn to three novels written by non-Jews, one American and two Polish, which
in different ways illustrate the aesthetic and moral questions that arise when outsiders,
each with their own ideological objectives, create representations of the Warsaw ghetto.

John Herseys The Wall: a novel about the Warsaw Ghetto or cultural
homogeneity?
This is a work of fiction. Broadly it deals with history, but in detail it is
invented. Its archives is a hoax. Its characters, even those who use
functions with actual precedentsuch as the chairmanship of the
Judenrat, for examplepossess names, faces, traits, and lives altogether
imaginary. (Hersey, copyright page)
it is not fictionLevinson was too scrupulous to imagine anything . . .
(Hersey, p.6)
Born in Tietsin in China in 1914, where he lived until 1925 when his family
returned to the US, John Hersey (died 1993) was the son of Methodist missionaries.
Hersey was foreign correspondent for Time and Life magazines in East Asia, Italy and
the USSR from 1937 to 1946. He won the Pulitzer Prize for A Bell for Adano (1944), a
fictionalised account of the Allied occupation of a Sicilian town, and Hiroshima, his
non-fictional, journalistic narrative of the explosion of the atomic bomb as experienced
by survivors of the blast, was published in 1946 to great acclaim.218 Hersey saw the
ruins of Warsaw in 1945, and in 1947 talked with a survivor of Auschwitz.219 In 1947,
after finishing A Short Wait, a story about a Lodz ghetto survivor who is reunited
with her American relatives, Hersey embarked on his novel about the Warsaw ghetto,
218. See Hersey, John (Richard), Encyclopdia Britannica Deluxe Edition 2004 CD, and John Hersey,
Hiroshima (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1946), originally commissioned by The New
Yorker which published it in full in its edition of 31 August 1946.
219. John Hersey, The Mechanics of a Novel, The Yale University Library Gazette, July 1952, 1-11, 3
and 5.

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The Wall, which was published in 1950. It was written at a time when few books about
the ghetto were available in English, although there were a number of diaries and other
documents available in Yiddish or Polish. The novel was published before the discovery
in December 1950 of the second cache of the Oneg Shabbat archive buried at
Nowolipki Street 68.
As we have seen in the previous chapter Hersey added an authorial note to the
copyright page of later editions of The Wall stressing that it is a work of fiction and its
archives a hoax. This was presumably because early readers had taken the novel to be
non-fiction. Here we have another example of a failure of nerve by a novelist writing
about the Holocaust. At one level the reader is not supposed to take the book as made
up, but as retrieved just like the diaries of Kaplan, Ringelblum and Czerniakow. The
Wall, edited by John Hersey, claims as its true author a ghetto historian, and it is to his
words that the reader seemingly will be turned in beginning the novel: It is time to let
Noach Levinson speak for himself (p.11). Hersey is inviting his readers to enter the
fictional world he is about to present to them as if it were part of the historical
record.220 The addition of the authorial note suggests that Hersey was concerned that,
in the case of some nave readers, he may have been too convincing, and indeed many
readers had written to him asking where they could view the Levinson archive, and
others had attacked him for deceiving his audience.221 This raises the question of why
Hersey chose this form. Alvin Rosenfeld thinks Hersey is an example of an author for
whom, the tensions and contradictions that exist between the history and fiction of the
Holocaust are overcome by having fiction simulate the historical record, or pose as
fact.222 This leads Rosenfeld to the conclusion that:
. . . the implications of such a narrative conception would seem to be that
the literary imagination cannot gain a sufficient authority in its own
220. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature, p.66.
221. Robert Franciosi, John Hersey, in Kremer, ed., Holocaust Literature, pp.524-7, p.525.
222. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature, p.66. James Young echoes
Rosenfelds argument: Where the non-fiction account attempts to retrieve its authentic connection to
events in order to reinforce its documentary authority, fiction necessarily fabricates its link to events in
order to reinforce its documentary authority. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative
and the Consequences of Interpretation, pp.60-1.

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terms but must yield to the terms of legitimacy that belong to

documentary evidence, in which case readers might prefer to turn
directly to the actual historical testimonies we do have.223
Rosenfelds argument seems to receive some support from Hersey himself, who
is quoted by David Sanders confirming the importance of Levinsons authority:
This particular story needed to be told with an authority my gifts could
not evoke; it needed to be told by a participant in the events: and my
creature, Levinson . . . did seem to me to have the gifts, the background,
and above all the experience to make his story believed.224
Now that there is no shortage of published testimonies of the Warsaw ghetto
compared with the time when The Wall was first published, Rosenfelds point about real
historical testimonies being preferable to a fictional simulation of them must be
addressed, but before doing so Rosenfelds description of the novel needs to be
amplified. Hersey was in fact doing much more than simulating the historical record
to give his novel the desired level of authority. Hersey was being disingenuous when he
claimed that The Walls characters . . . possess names, faces and traits, and lives
altogether imaginary (Hersey, copyright page). While he was certainly scrupulous in
not using any real names for any of his characters, and some central characters like
Dolek Berson are purely fictional insofar as they have no one identifiable historical
original, for most of Herseys characters the change of name from a specific historical
person is purely cosmetic, and the fictional name is the only significant difference from
the real-life source.225

223. Ibid., p.66.

Franciosi springs to Herseys defence against this criticism by pointing to the role The Wall played at the
time of its first publication: Rosenfeld underestimates the valuable intermediary role played by historical
fictions such as The Wall, especially . . . during the immediate postwar years. Offering its American
readers emotional entrance to the Holocausts trauma through a fictional experience based upon
scrupulous research, Herseys novel played a crucial role in bringing this reality to American
understanding. As Hersey himself put it thirty-five years after his novels publication, many more
authentic works have come from survivors; but in its postwar moment The Wall may have helped
people to understand things they hadnt understood before. Franciosi, John Hersey, p.526. Franciosi
quotes Hersey from John Dee, The Art of Fiction XCII: John Hersey, Paris Review 100 (1986), 210249.
224. Hersey, The Mechanics of a Novel, 8-9.
225. Rachel Apt is a more novelistic character in that she is significantly fictionalised, but she was
based on the underground leader Zivia Lubetkin. See Franciosi, John Hersey, p.525.

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While Levinson is not identical with Emmanuel Ringelblum, Hersey uses the
real addresses (Nowolipki Street 68 and Swientojerska Street 34) (p.3) for the locations
where the Oneg Shabbat archives were buried.226 Both Levinsons and Ringelblums
deaths are in the same month, March 1944, although Levinson dies of lobar pneumonia
(p.9), while Ringelblum was tortured and shot by the Gestapo, together with his wife
and son, after their hiding place was discovered. An important difference between
Levinson and Ringelblum is that Levinson is a Judenrat official while Ringelblum was
not. Hersey also conflates the official community archives (which were in fact lost)227
with the secret, unofficial Oneg Shabbat archives (pp. 259, 330). Making Levinson an
employee of the Judenrat could be seen as a conventional change to a historical
source for the purely narrative purpose of making it plausible for Levinson to be present
at many more scenes than he would otherwise have been. Ringelblum, far from working
for the Judenrat, was highly critical of its personnel, policies and practices, and he
deliberately avoided all contact with it:
Everything must be done to avoid disclosing the rich O.S. treasure. Thus,
we shunned all contact with the community leadership, even with the
honest people among it. The very community walls were saturated with
Gestapo air and we were afraid of any sort of dealings with community
leaders. This resulted in a dearth of official material on the
community.228
In fact Levinson has much less in common with Ringelblum than with Hillel
Seidman, who like Levinson was the official Judenrat archivist, and, also like Levinson,
claimed to be involved with the Underground. Daniel R. Schwarz describes Seidmans
diary and Ringelblums archive as being Herseys catalyst, but does not elaborate on
this.229 The Warsaw Ghetto Diaries of Hillel Seidman was first published in Hebrew in
226. The archives contained a large collection of documents, such as diaries, memoirs, journalistic
articles, research and literary works, as well as photographs and clandestine newspapers. The largest
portion was buried at Nowolipki 68, and was dug out in two stages, on 18 September 1946 and on 1
December 1950. The material buried on Swientojerska now appears to be entirely lost. See Joseph
Kermish, Introduction to Joseph Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor and Die with Honor: Selected
Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives O.S. (Oneg Shabbath), trans. M.Z. Prives
et al (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), pp.xiii-xxxv, p,xiv.
227. Ibid., p.xiii.
228. Emmanuel Ringelblum, O.S. [written late December 1942], in ibid., pp.2-21, p.11.
229. Daniel R. Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), p.146.

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1946, and in Yiddish in 1947. The English translation by Yosef Israel was first
published in 1997.230 Hersey employed two translators to read Warsaw ghetto
documents from the original Polish and Yiddish onto a wire recorder, and spent several
months listening to these recordings.231 This must be how he became acquainted with
Seidmans diary. An example of an episode that Hersey derived from Seidman is the
January 1943 trial in absentia of Dr Emil Zadkin by a Jewish Underground court for
being an agent of the Gestapo (pp.471-5). This closely parallels the real-life trial of Dr
Alfred Nossig as described in Seidmans diary.232 Not only is Zadkin, without any
doubt, the equivalent of Nossig, but Levinson plays the same role as Seidman in the
trial, providing the court with a biography of the defendant, and suggesting that the trial
is less than fair. Levinson submits to the gentlemen of this so-called court that the
evidence against Dr Zadkin which we have heard is not enough to justify his
execution. (p.473). Seidman, in similar vein, writes:
Today he [Nossig] is being judged by embittered men, each with their
private pain. . . . So they resolve to sentence him to death. . . . I insist that
Nossig is an important historical figure. Nor may we decide a matter of
life and death on mere suspicion alone.233
A bibliography of the Warsaw Ghetto produced by Philip Friedman for the
Jewish Book Council of America in 1953 lists the Hebrew and Yiddish editions,
together with the comment: [Seidmans] book, written in a lively manner, had been
subjected to severe criticism by several reviewers.234 This is not surprising. Much of
the book does not have the immediacy of a diary. It is more like a memoir, and in this
respect, ironically, it is less convincing as a contemporary account of the events than
Levinsons fictional diary in The Wall. Entries for specific dates in the main body of
230. Hillel Seidman, The Warsaw Ghetto Diaries, trans. Yosef Israel (Southfield, MI: Targum Press,
1997).
231. Hersey, The Mechanics of a Novel, 5. One of the translators was Lucy Dawidowicz, who was
subsequently the author of The War against the Jews 1933-45 (London and New York: Penguin, 1990).
See Michael Hoffman, The Wall, Reference Guide to Holocaust Literature, ed., Thomas Riggs
(Farmington Hills, MI: St. James Press, 2002), p.616.
232. Seidman, The Warsaw Ghetto Diaries, pp.217-223.
233.Ibid., p.222.
234. Philip Friedman, The Bibliography of the Warsaw Ghetto (Jewish Book Council of America), p.4,
reprinted from Jewish Book Annual, Vol. 11, 57131952-53.

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Seidmans diary, which runs from July 1942 to January 1943, include short essays on
subjects like Ghetto Institutions, Apostates, The Jewish Police, Child
Smugglers and Gestapo Agents, which do not read as though they were written on
the dates under which they appear, but rather at a later date and with the benefit of
hindsight. There are also episodes which strain the credulity of the reader, such as that
in which Gancwajch, the Gestapo agent, shows Seidman copies of some of his weekly
reports to the Gestapo,235 but the real problems start with the section of the diary
covering the uprising in April 1943. There is an introduction to this section written at an
unspecified date by Seidman, who survived the war and lived until 1995. There are clear
indications that this was Seidmans response to criticisms made about the part of his
diary covering this period. He admits that, Though I was in Warsaw as these events
began unfolding, I did not personally witness them.236 This was because at that time he
was in the Pawiak Prison prior to his transfer to Vittel in France (and he is vague about
when this transfer actually took place). There follows a lame attempt to authenticate his
account of the Uprising:
Nonetheless I remained in close contact with many of those who had
either taken part in planning the revolt (as I had myself), those who were
in the ranks of fighters, or those who happened to be then in Warsaw
when it all took place. I only wrote down exactly what was said by
sources I could trust.237
Much of the section on the Uprising is written in the third person, and Seidman
does not directly claim to have been a witness to the events described, although this is
certainly implied. This possible escape-route for Seidman cannot be applied to the final
part of this section which is written in the first person plural, and ends with our arrest
by the Germans:
And so began the journey to the Umschlagplatz, to Majdanek, to
Auschwitz, a long route to travail and misery. This is how the resistance
in the Warsaw Ghetto ended for us.238
235. Seidman, The Warsaw Ghetto Diaries, pp.194-5.
236. Ibid., p.254.
237. Ibid.
238. Ibid., p.280.

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Although Seidmans description may be totally accurate except for his claim to
have been present, this is sufficient to undermine his account of the Uprising, which can
only be read as fiction in the context of his purported diary entries. In this sense
Seidman is just as open to criticism as Martin Gray, who also claimed to have taken part
in the Uprising. Seidman denies fictionalization in his account of the Uprising:
. . . these reports are, at the very least, true. (Indeed, considering the
circumstances under which it was written, I was not striving for literary
effect throughout my diary.)239
Hersey, with his insistence that The Wall is a work of fiction, does precisely the
opposite. However, his assertion of fictionality is just as questionable as Seidmans
denial of it. The essential identity of M. Sokolczyk and Adam Czerniakow, the
chairman of the Judenrat, has already been referred to, as has the equivalence of Dr
Emil Zadkin and the historical figure, Dr Alfred Nossig. These are but two of many
such equivalences. Others include Abraham Gancwajch, who ran the organisation
known as The Thirteen in the ghetto, was widely-known to be a Gestapo agent, and
who appears in the novel as Eugeniusz Tauber; Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage
in the ghetto and voluntarily accompanied the children to Treblinka, and who appears as
Colonel Rukner; Heinz Auerswald, the Nazi Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in the
ghetto, who becomes Haensch (although his appointment to this post is in December
1941 (p.206), while Auerswald was in reality appointed in May of that year); the Jewish
funeral director Pinkiert who becomes Rotblat; Abrasha Blum, a leader of the Bund in
the ghetto, who becomes Henryk Rapaport (although the threat to resign from the
Judenrat in November 1939 was by another Bund leader, Szmul Zygielbogm (p.41))240;
Marek Lichtenbaum, Czerniakows successor as Judenrat chairman, who becomes
Grossmann; and Zalmen Frydrych who was sent by the Bund to follow transports to
discover their destination,241 who appears in the novel as Lazar Slonim. Mordecai

239. Ibid., p.254.

240. See Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, p.42.
241. Herseys likely source for this episode is Edelmans The Ghetto Fights, p.57, which was first
published in English in New York in May 1946.

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Anielewicz, the leader of the ghetto uprising, becomes Yitzhok Katz, although, in the
novel, presumably for the sake of simplicity, Katz is said to be responsible for the
assassinations on 18 and 19 October 1942 of Zweinarcz, the Judenrat official in charge
of the Office of Resettlement Affairs, and of the Jewish Police Chief Mashkrov (pp.412416, p.451), whereas Zweinarczs real equivalent, Israel First, was actually killed by
David Shulman on 29 November, and the real Jewish Police Chief Yaakov Lejkin was
killed on 29 October by Eliahu Rozanski-Alek. Herseys insistence on changing names
goes to the apparently pointless extreme of changing the name of the Bunds newspaper
which warned the ghetto inhabitants not to volunteer for deportation from On Guard to
Storm.242
Hersey was not therefore simply using the device of the discovery of
Levinsons archive to simulate the historical record, because his narrative does indeed
closely follow the historical record, not just by including real ghetto personalities as
active characters (albeit under different names) but by sticking fairly rigidly to the
actual course of public events. Official German statistics for the number of Warsaw
Jews deported each day are included (pp.279, 305, 326, 330, 366), and there is even a
discussion about the accuracy of the figures because the numbers provided by the
Germans to the Judenrat for a few specific days were illegible (pp.404-5). It not clear
whether there is any factual basis to this last detail, but the figures that are quoted in the
novel are accurate and this adds to the authority of the work.243
Rather than insisting that The Wall is purely a work of fiction, it would have
been more honest of Hersey to admit that his novel includes a high proportion of real
characters and real events. While there are a number of instances where real events are
transformed into fictional events, in many instances the transformation of the facts is
minimal or non-existent. It may be that Herseys insistence on the fictional status of the
novel was meant to assert the power of his own imagination to invent all of the
242. See Hersey, p304 and Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, p.57.
243. See Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. Antony Polonsky, trans.
Christopher Hutton (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p.295, n. 405.

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characters and the details of plot. He may also have been wary of being accused of
making specious claims to be telling the truth.244 Whatever his reasons for insisting on
the fictional status of The Wall, it creates difficulties for Hersey because Levinsons
diary is grounded, as are almost all real Warsaw Ghetto diaries, on public events.
Whereas Wojdowski, whose novel is centred on the experiences of a fictional group of
characters who play no part in public affairs, does not need to represent public figures,
Hersey cannot avoid describing real characters and events in the ghetto because
Levinson and the other main characters in the novel, as key players in the Uprising, are
all public figures. Herseys insistence on transforming all the real personalities of the
ghetto into fictional characters creates an unnecessary impression of artificiality for any
reader having some basic knowledge of the history of the ghetto. I can see no
compelling reason for Herseys decision not to include people like Czerniakow,
Korczak, Anielewicz and Auerswald, who are minor characters in the novel, under their
real names.
Barbara Foley provides a possible answer to Rosenfelds suggestion that readers
might prefer to turn to real testimonies rather than to Herseys novel, because the
novels form is an implicit acknowledgement that a much higher level of legitimacy
comes from documentary evidence than can ever come from the literary imagination.
She uses The Wall, which she describes as a vastly underrated work, as an example of
what she defines as a pseudofactual novel. That is a novel where the object of
representation is not an imagined configuration of characters and events, but a putative
historical document that records such a configuration and where the text is two steps
removed from reality: . . . it is an imitation of a mode of non-fictional discourse
memoir, diary, letterthat itself refers to the historical world.245

244. See Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1986), n.20, p.15, which cites Herseys attacks on Tom Wolfes The
Right Stuff and Norman Mailers The Executioners Song on this ground in The Legend of the License,
Yale Review, 70 (Autumn 1980), 1-25.
245. Barbara Foley, Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives,
Comparative Literature, Vol. 34:4 (Fall 1982), 330-360, 351.

105

Foley acknowledges that writers like Barth and Nabokov use the device of the
text within the text to question assumptions about the reality of the real, but she argues
that the Holocaust novelist using this form achieves the opposite effect:
For, while recognizing the artifice of the factual text, we are drawn
into a Gestalt that invites us to examine Holocaust experience as
simultaneously general and particulargeneral in that it consists of the
lives of recognizable human types with whom we establish empathy;
particular in that it is rendered by a quasi-historical voice that hesitates to
generalize beyond its immediate sphere. In the pseudofactual novel,
reality is restricted to the point of view of a single character/witness
not in order to suggest the inherently subjective nature of perception and
interpretation, but to guarantee that we do not incorporate Holocaust
experience into abstract generalizations or draw from it the ethical solace
that routinely accompanies even the most concretely immediate
fictitious fiction.246
As we shall see, it is highly debatable whether Levinson hesitates to generalize, and
there is no good reason why a fictional ghetto diarist should not generalise beyond his
or her immediate sphere, just as Kaplan, Ringelblum, Lewin, and many others, did.
Contrary to Foleys analysis, Hersey, by insisting on the fictionality of his work, and so
denying his capacity to offer authenticating statements about real persons and events,
could even be seen as insisting that his text was a suitable vehicle for generalising.
Foleys claim is that a special relationship exists between text and reality in this
form of Holocaust literature:
The pseudofactual mode provides the unified image of a fictive realm but
challenges the autonomy of this realm. While it projects an imagined
world in its totality, in its local effects it substitutes historical
probabilities for literary ones, and thus insistently reminds the reader of
the texts relation to the historical world.247
Her neologism may appear to have some merit, but difficulties arise when she attempts
246. Ibid.
247. Ibid. In a later work, which makes no reference to any Holocaust novels, Foley alters her stance and
stresses, not the historical probabilities of the novels local effects, but the general and abstract
connection to reality in pseudofactual novels, and she seems to deny any referential significance to the
particular facts these novels may contain: [In the pseudofactual novel] the reader is asked to accept the
texts characters and situations as invented, which means seeing the text not as having no referent but as
referring to relations rather than to particulars allegedly existing apart from their representation in
discourse. Foley, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction, p.107.

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to apply it specifically to The Wall. Although this is counter-intuitive, I would suggest

that it is arguable whether The Wall does in fact project an imagined world in its
totality other than in the trivial sense that all novels can be said to do this by definition.
Foley herself argues that:
the closeness between Levinson and such ghetto archivists as
Ringelblum and Kaplan substantially enhances our sense that the novel is
grounded concretely in the historical moment. The Wall may not have
been written by a Ringelblum or a Kaplan, but . . . it certainly could have
been written by such an actual witness.248
Assuming for the sake of argument that Foley is justified in making this large claim for
Herseys novel, his success in simulating real ghetto diaries cannot simply be attributed
to the power of his imagination as Hersey, himself, would like us to believe: Broadly it
[the novel] deals with history, but in detail it is invented (Hersey, copyright page). If
The Wall is a convincing story of the Warsaw ghetto it is largely because the historical
events which are described in detail (events which are central to the novel and not just
the background to the action), as well as most of the characters, are not invented. The
Wall projects an imagined world in its totality only to the extent that it is the product
of Herseys imagination, and this does not apply to important elements in the novel.249
Foleys other claim for the novel is even more debatable. She believes that:
Herseys strict adherence to the restricted point of view of an engaged
participant precludes the troublesome sense of totalization and catharsis
that accompanies many straightforward realistic novels of the Holocaust.
. . . Nor does Hersey exhibit any compulsion to direct his narrative
toward a gripping climax or to incorporate his imagined world into an
ethical scheme . . . Hersey does not . . . propose any startling analysis of
fascism; but neither does he suggest humanistic moralism or false
transcendence.250

248. Foley, Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives, 352.
249. This, of course, has no connection to the question of authenticity. Levinson, and his archive, are
indeed fictions, so the question does not arise, while in the case of the short text Yosl Rakover Talks to
God (Zvi Kolitz, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999)) which also starts with the
discovery of a document in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, the authenticity or otherwise of the text has
been the subject of controversy. The text, a work of fiction written shortly after the war in Buenos Aires,
was long believed to be authentic.
250. Foley, Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives, 352.

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Humanistic moralism is now a rather dated idea, but it remains a good description of
what Hersey does indeed promote in The Wall, and its inappropriate application to his
representation of the ghetto is the main reason for the novels ultimate failure to
convince as a credible portrayal. Daniel R. Schwarz describes this in terms of The Wall
being shaped by a humanistic teleology that wishes to overcome conflicts that divide
society, and which the doctrine ascribes to political or religious extremism.251 Levinson
lays the foundations for this teleology by normalising the ghetto experience and thus
demonstrating that it is a suitable subject for the extraction of universal moral, cultural
and political lessons:
I tried to point out to Berson that our ghetto differs from a normal society
only in that all the normal pressures are increased a hundredfold;
consequently the end products of pressure are also manifest a
hundredfoldamong them, ingenuity for survival, the willingness to do
anything for oneself and ones own, selfishness, corruption. . . . By the
same token [there is also] nobility just as exaggerated and generosity and
selflessness grown just as enormous as [Berson] now sees corruption to
be. (p.162)
The response of Herseys characters to the various crises in the life of the ghetto
is measured in terms of Western humanistic values. It is significant that none of the
sympathetic characters in the novel are observant Jews. There is some irony here
because Seidman, one of Herseys primary sources, and in many other respects the
model for Levinson, was a religious Jew who, in addition to being the Judenrat
archivist, was also head of the Judenrats Religious Department.252 Seidman was
successful in obtaining exemptions from forced labour for 1,800 religious Jews.253
Yosef Israel, who translated Seidmans diary into English, even suggests that his
translation hopes to partly remedy the deficiency created by secular historians who
ignore the unique contribution [of religious Jews] to spiritual resistance and morale
during the Holocaust.254 Levinson, on the contrary, mocks the passivity of the orthodox
who believe they are in Gods hands:
251. Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust, p.146.
252. Seidman, The Warsaw Ghetto Diaries, p.62.
253. Ibid., p.298.
254. Ibid., Yosef Israel, Translators Preface (17 June 1997), pp.19-32, p.19.

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Goldflamm: . . . If I must go to Treblinka, I intend to die as decently and

quietly as I would hope to die of typhus. . . . I am calm because I know
that any system that is based upon love and respect will outlive any
system that is based on hatred and contempt. . . .
[NOTE. N.L. This is all very well, but I would like to ask Rabbi
Goldflamm exactly how his benign system will remain so vigorous when
all its practitioners are dead.]
(p.369)
Goldflamms benign system seems rather more Christian than Jewish, but the
message of the need to reject passive resignation in the face of evil will not have been
lost on Herseys American readers in the early phase of the cold war: we are indeed
involved in the struggle of Humanity against Anti-Humanity. . . . We may all die. But
we will win (p.417).
This rejection of resignation to evil, no matter how powerful, is, however, a side
issue compared with Herseys main message which is the rejection of religious
particularism and of extreme ideologies whether they be socialist or nationalist. This
becomes overt in the concluding section of the novel (pp.608-629), which Schwarz
thinks some contemporary readers will find with its moral epithets, sentimental and
reductive.255 `The surviving protagonists are trapped in a sewer as they attempt to
escape from the ghetto after the uprising. In a contrived scene, the weakest in the novel,
Levinson records a series of conversations which set out how each recants his various
extremist ideological errors. The socialist Bund leader Rapaport had already listed a
number of self-indictments (in true Stalinist fashion) where he regretted his nave
and slavish adherence to ideals. Rapaport admitted to having been too rigid, too
literal-minded, too inflexibly hopeful, and to having taken some of the party slogans
[like the Brotherhood of the working masses] too literally (p.580), which,
incidentally, echoes Seidmans criticism of the socialist idealism of the Bundists.256
Now the Zionist leader Zilberzweig joins Rapaport in repudiating his earlier beliefs:
It came to me that extreme nationalism can be as frightful in a Jew as in
a German. What does Nazi stand for, anyhow?National Socialism. I
255. Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust, p.153.
256. See Seidman, The Warsaw Ghetto Diaries, pp.212-3 and 268-9.

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should not like to survive the ghetto and go to Palestine, only to fall into
the hands of Jewish Nazis. . . . I have not abandoned the idea that the
Jewish ethical tradition is worth preservingit is the basis of Western
monotheism, after all . . . No, I have rebelled only against excessive
nationalism. (p.614. Italics in original)
Whatever ones views on Zionism, the notion of a Zionist leader repudiating his ideals,
and describing extreme Zionists as Jewish Nazis, at a time when millions of Jews had
just been, and were still being, exterminated by the real Nazis, stretches the readers
credulity past breaking point.
During the ghetto uprising Levinson gives a talk on the Yiddish writer Isaac
Leib Peretz (1851/2-1915) who had been critical of the humility and resignation of
eastern European Jews. In the course of this talk Levinson quotes, with obvious
sympathy, Peretzs attack on the ghetto:
Ghetto is impotence. Cultural cross-fertilization is the only possibility for
human development. Humanity must be the synthesis, the sum, the
quintessence of all national cultural forms and philosophies. (p.550.
Italics in original)
Now Mordecai Apt elaborates on this view of the ghetto by speaking of the wall as an
idea, and explaining its metaphorical significance:
There are two ways of looking at the wall between Jews and gentiles:
from the inside and from the outside: there is much to be said on both
sides. On the one hand, it can be said that the actual masonry is done by
the Jews: the Jews mix the mortar and lay the bricks and complain about
the wall, but are sometimes glad to have it. On the other hand, it is the
goyim who oblige the Jews to build the wall and who supply most of the
materials for it; and they are very smug about its existence: without ever
going inside it, they assume it is better to be outside and to keep the Jews
inside. (pp.620-1)
This has nothing to do with the Warsaw ghetto and everything to do with
Herseys view of America after the war. It is particularly objectionable because Hersey
is implying that the Warsaw Jews were glad to be inside the ghetto walls, when tens
of thousands of them died of malnutrition and disease as a result of being incarcerated
there. The only reason that many Jews initially welcomed the creation of the ghetto in

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November 1940 was that it was a barrier which protected them from unofficial
expropriations by soldiers and other Germans, as well as from attacks by antisemitic
Polish mobs which were condoned and possibly encouraged by the occupation
authorities.257 Despite the acknowledgement that the Jews were obliged to build the
wall, there is a suggestion that they share some responsibility for its existence because
of the desire of religious Jews to remain separate from their non-Jewish neighbours.
This is an example of blaming the victim. The Jews, of course, had no say in the
decision to create the Warsaw ghetto. Rather than accurately portraying the situation of
the Jews of Warsaw, Hersey is distorting the historical record so that he can provide an
analogy which supports his views about the development of society in the United States.
As Schwarz says:
Hersey creates a teleology of cultural homogeneity that would reach out
to his audience and tear down the invisible bricks that perpetuated the
walls of cultural separation between Jew and gentile in America.258
Philip Roths Portnoys Complaint includes a Holocaust lesson for JewishAmericans which is the exact opposite of Herseys. Fourteen-year-old Alexander
Portnoy growing up in post-war Newark, New Jersey, rejects what he perceives as the
imposition of a narrow-minded Jewish identity: Do me a favor, my people, and stick
your suffering heritage up your suffering assI happen also to be a human being. His
sister Hannah responds: But you are a Jew and:
Do you know . . . where you would be now if you had been born in
Europe instead of America?
That isnt the issue, Hannah.
Dead, she says.
That isnt the issue.
Dead. Gassed or shot, or incinerated, or butchered, or buried alive. Do
you know that? And you could have screamed all you wanted that you
were not a Jew, that you were a human being . . . and still you would
have been taken away to be disposed of.259
257. See Kaplan, pp.113 and 134-5, and Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the
Second World War, eds. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski, trans. from Polish, Dafna Allon, Danuta
Dabrowska and Dana Keren (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp.52-3.
258. Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust, p.154.
259. Philip Roth, Portnoys Complaint (London: Corgi Books, 1981), pp.84-86 (italics in original). It is
hard to side with Hannah in the context of the novel, but, from the perspective of the older Alexander

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This has the merit of staying true to the facts of the Jews situation in Nazi-occupied
Europe, where any suggestion that if Jews had rejected a particularist identity it would
have made any difference to their fate is not supported by the fate of assimilated
Jews,260 including those inside the Warsaw ghetto, whereas Herseys desire to provide a
universalist moral message to his fellow-Americans leads him to distort the meaning
and significance of the Nazis ghettoisation of the Jews. There is nothing inherent in the
form used by Hersey that made this kind of distortion inevitable. Nor are all ideological
or moral lessons drawn by a Holocaust novelist to be condemned; but such lessons,
even if disputable like Jean-Franois Steiners redemptive interpretation of the revolt at
Treblinka, must be capable in principle of being shown to be broadly consistent with the
facts from which they claim to derive. Hersey researched the history of the Warsaw
ghetto thoroughly, but, to the extent that he utilised that history for wholly inappropriate
ideological purposes, he was denying the ghettos historical specificity. The argument
that The Wall is a work of fiction is no defence.

Jaroslaw Rymkiewiczs The Final Station: Umschlagplatz: a Poles attempt to come

to terms with the Holocaust.
I am chiefly interested in the future. What does Umschlagplatz signify in
Polish life and Polish spirituality, and what does it portend for posterity?
We live within the orbit of their death. (Rymkiewicz, p.8)
It is only as a Christian that I can address the problem. And a Christian
testimony, to my mind, is what we need. (p.44)
Theres surely no harm in my trying to put myself in their shoes. Even if
I never discover what it is to be a Jew, I might at least define what it is to
be a Pole and thus pinpoint my thoughts about Jews. (p.104)
Portnoy who is narrating the novel, the difference between Hannahs and the young Alexanders feelings
about the Holocaust is not what it at first appears to be, for: now she begins to cry too, and how
monstrous I feel, for she sheds her tears for six million, or so I think, while I shed mine only for myself.
Or so I think. (p.86)
260. The Jew who openly avows his race is a hundred times preferable to the shameful type which
claims to differ from you only in the matter of religion. Adolf Hitler, The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The
Bormann-Hitler Documents February-April 1945, ed., Franois Genoud, trans. R.H. Stevens
(London:Cassell, 1961), p.52.

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When I mourn for the Polish Jews it is an act of self-mourning, the

lament of a Pole forever forsaken by Polish Jews. Youd have to be
really mean to call that fiction. (p.129)
Perhaps we genuinely dont want to rememberI dont mean what
happened to our Jews, but what happened to us as onlookers. Perhaps it
is ourselves we would rather forget about. (p.287)
. . . we must erect monuments worthy of our epoch. The loading ramp
and the track between Dzika Street and Stawki Street. The path taken by
the looters laden with counterpanes and pillows. The field track where
they waited under the supervision of the mounted policeman for the boy
to bring ammunition. The beach on the Swider where people sunbathed
and ate ice cream while their neighbors were being murdered a stones
throw away. Unique monuments. (pp.295-6)
Born in Warsaw in 1935, Rymkiewicz is a literary critic and historian of
literature, essayist, poet, translator and playwright.261 His novel was originally
published in Polish under the title Umschlagplatz in Paris by Instytut Literacki, the
largest Polish migr publishing house, in 1988. It was reprinted a few times by
underground publishing houses in Poland and only officially appeared in 1992.262
According to Monika Adamczyk-Gabowska, what made Umschlagplatz and other
novels like Andrzej Szczypiorskis The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman (discussed below)
unacceptable to the Polish censorship authorities was not so much that they are critical
of Polish attitudes to Jews, as that they present a critical image of Communist rule.263
This argument applies more obviously to Szczypiorski, whose book is overtly anticommunist, than it does to Rymkiewicz. Rymkiewiczs novel was published in French
under the title La Dernire Gare (Umschlagplatz) in 1989, and in German under its
original title of Umschlagplatz in 1993. Nina Turners English translation was published
in the USA under the title The Final Station: Umschlagplatz in 1994.
Adamczyk-Gabowska describes Umschlagplatz as the first full-length novel
written by a Polish gentile writer that deals exclusively with the Holocaust,264 and, like
261. www.polska2000.pl/en/authors/rymkiewicz_jaroslaw_marek.html.
262. Katarzyna Zechenter, Marek Rymkiewicz, in Kremer, ed., Holocaust Literature, pp.1063-6,
p.1063.
263. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, A New Generation of Voices in Polish Holocaust Literature,
Prooftexts, 1989, no.3, 273-287, 283.
264. Ibid., 283.

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many literary works about the Holocaust, Umschlagplatz mixes a number of different
genres. Madeline G. Levine describes it accurately as a hybrid blend of novel,
confessional journal, meditative essay, and record of investigative research.265 It is
classified by the Library of Congress system as both personal narrative and fiction. The
narrator (named as Rymkiewicz (Rymkiewicz, p.127) and referred to below as the
narrator to distinguish him from the author), wants to know why the Umschlagplatz,
the loading area from which the Jews of Warsaw were transported to Treblinka, has
never been accurately described. He conducts research into what it looked like during
the war by unearthing descriptions from both Jewish and German sources. This is,
however, only one strand of this multi-levelled book, which also depicts a group of
Jewish intellectuals and artists, invented by the narrator, who are on holiday at the
summer resort of Otwock, not far from Warsaw, in 1937. The book also switches to the
present, where the narrator discusses questions about the nature of reality with Hania,
his assimilated Jewish wife.
Levine

oversimplifies

when

she

claims

that

Umschlagplatz

feels

autobiographical, but it is the creation of literary imagination, although she is right to

hesitate to identify the first-person narrator with the real Rymkiewicz.266 The
question of how close the narrator and the author are in reality, e.g. whether or not the
author has a Jewish wife, is not relevant to an assessment of the way the book
approaches the Holocaust.267 The narrators wife Hania plays the literary role in the
novel of acting as a foil to the narrator, questioning the morality of his fictionalizing the
lives of Jewish characters, and giving him the opportunity to attempt to justify what he
is doing. Levine places Umschlagplatz alongside other recent Polish literature, by
265. Madeline G. Levine, Wrestling with Ghosts: Poles and Jews Today, East European Studies,
Occasional Paper Number 36, March 1998.
Posted at wwics.si.edu/PROGRAMS/REGION/ees/occasional/levine36.html without pagination.
266. Ibid., note 37.
267. In reality, Rymkiewiczs wife, Ewa Suliborska, is not Jewish. See Froma I. Zeitlin, The Vicarious
Witness: Belated Memory and Authorial Presence in Recent Holocaust Literature, in History and
Memory 10(2), Fall 1998, 5-42, 42, note 41. On the other hand, the author has demonstrated that his
interest in the Umschlagplatz extends beyond the literary. Zeitlin records that after the first publication of
Umschlagplatz Rymkiewicz tried unsuccessfully to organize a museum of the Umschlagplatz to be
constructed (in addition to the 1988 memorial) on the exact site (17).

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authors such as Tadeusz Konwicki and Kazimierz Brandys, which also employs the
genre of the hybrid not-quite-autobiographical narrative that mixes deliberate fictions
with apparently confessional autobiography.268 Umschlagplatz is not, however, simply
the creation of literary imagination. The numerous sources cited in the text are not
invented (this is no Pale Fire). The sections devoted to the narrators research into the
Umschlagplatz and into the deportation of Jews from Otwock are not on a par with
Levinsons diary in The Wall; they are not, to use Barbara Foleys term, pseudofactual.
The narrators aim is to describe the Umschlagplatz, and as he knows neither Hebrew
nor Yiddish he consults only works written in, or translated into, Polish, of which he has
read several dozen (pp.47-8). Many such works are cited and discussed in the text.
Similarly, when researching the deportation of Jews from Otwock to Treblinka, he
considers and evaluates the conflicting testimony. In the case of the diary of a Jewish
policeman from Otwock, Calel Perechodnik269, the document had not been published at
the time Umschlagplatz was written and the narrator (and, perforce, the author) uses,
and quotes extensively from, the copy deposited in the archives of the Jewish Historical
Institute in Warsaw (pp.228-231). It is quite conceivable that the subsequent decision to
publish Perechodniks diary was a case of life taking its cue from art. At times the
narrator becomes pedagogical, and it would surely be a mistake to suggest that only an
implied (Polish) reader is being addressed. Referring to Adina Blady Szwajgers Short
History of the Berson and Bauman Hospital (1939-1943),270 the narrator says:
Although stories of the Warsaw ghetto ought not to be graded on the
basis of their documentary value, Adina Szwajgers account belongs in a
category of its own. Its eschatological significanceI dont think its too
strong a termmakes it one of the most important documents of our
century. Anyone curious to know about the times he has to live in should
read that text. It is not easily obtainable, so here are the bibliographical
details: . . . (p.142)

268. Levine, Wrestling with Ghosts: Poles and Jews Today, note 37.
269. Calel Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, ed. and trans. Frank
Fox (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996). Published in Poland in 1993.
270. Published in English as Adina Blady Szwajger, I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Childrens
Hospital and the Jewish Resistance, trans. Tasja Darowska and Danusia Stok (London: Collins Harvill,
1990).

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This real reader, for one, sought out Adina Szwajgers memoir on the basis of this
recommendation.
Umschlagplatz might, initially, appear to be a classic example of what James
Young categorises as documentary fiction (see the discussion of Youngs application
of the concept to Steiners Treblinka in the chapter on representations of Treblinka
above). Young claims that this type of fiction creates the illusion of documentary
authority generated by authentic eyewitnesses [which] sustains its putative factuality . . .
and, by extension [its] power.271 The putative factuality in Umschlagplatz is,
however, limited in scope, and does not extend to the characters (with the possible
exception of the narrator) who are openly acknowledged to be fictitious (Maybe I
invented it all . . . [but] even if Ive invented it all, including you [Hania] . . . it is no less
true for all that (pp.127-8)). The documentary authority of Rymkiewiczs book is,
moreover, no illusion. The fact that the documents are discussed within the framework
of a novel does not change this, although the hybrid genre of Umschlagplatz has the
effect of weakening the impact of that authority. This is because the dividing line
between fiction and reality in the book is not made explicit. Not only is the status of the
autobiographical passages left open, but they are not always clearly separated from
those passages which are acknowledged as fictional within the text. For example,
following an autobiographical section (pp. 19-29), a conversation with his sister
Alinka, where I is clearly Rymkiewicz the narrator, there is a first-person description
of Otwock (Rymkiewicz, pp.29-36), where it is only after several pages (p.35) that it
becomes clear that the narrator here is not Rymkiewicz but Icyk Mandelbaum, one of
his fictional characters. Reference is made (p.59) to a present given to Icyk by Hania,
whose fictional status is never confirmed. Later in the book the boundaries start to
collapse altogether; for example, without any signal, a conversation between fictional
characters is interrupted by a conversation between Hania and the narrator (pp.138-9).
The documents cited in Umschlagplatz are in fact real, but in a context where non271. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the consequences of Interpretation,
p.59.

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fictional research sections are juxtaposed, sometimes abruptly, with both ostensibly
autobiographical and overtly fictional episodes, the reader might be forgiven for
wondering whether some of these documents might have been invented272. The narrator
of Umschlagplatz (perhaps with some irony) accepts that this deficiency applies to the
testimony included in another work:
I cannot decide how to classify Hanna Kralls book [To Outwit God273].
Is it reportage or a novel? No doubt it is both. The fact that it may be a
novel makes it a less reliable source. (p.51)
Ultimately, however, the reliability or otherwise of Rymkiewiczs sources is not
a vital issue, because the importance of Umschlagplatz is not as an essay about the
physical layout of the Umschlagplatz, or about the details of the deportation of the Jews
from Otwock, but, rather, as the heading and epigraphs of this section suggest, as an
inquiry into what the murder of Polish Jews on Polish soil signifies or should signify for
Poles now. In this respect it has more in common with Jan Blonskis controversial 1987
article, The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,274 and with the testimony of Wladyslaw
Bartoszewski,275 than with John Herseys The Wall, although like the ghetto wall, the
272. The discussion of Calel Perechodniks testimony, referred to above, includes an imaginary
conversation between the narrator and Perechodnik in which the narrator, while looking at a photograph
of him, asks Perechodnik, who did not survive the war, why he did not go to Palestine when this was still
possible, and records his reply (Rymkiewicz, pp.224-5). This differs from Steiners recreation of
conversations in Treblinka, because it is clear that the conversation is intended to be taken as imaginary.
It does, however, have the effect of fictionalizing Perechodnik.
273. Hanna Krall, To Outwit God (published in one volume with The Subtenant), trans. Joanna Stasinska
Weschler and Lawrence Weschler (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992).
274. Jan Blonski, The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto, in Polonsky ed., My Brothers Keeper?: Recent
Polish Debates on the Holocaust, various translators (London: Routledge, 1990), pp.34-52. First
published in Tygodnik Powszechny, 11 January 1987. Blonski argued that the Poles should stop
haggling, trying to defend and justify ourselves, and accept responsibility for insufficient resistance to
the crime. We should acknowledge our own guilt, and ask for forgiveness (pp.44-46). Most of the
reaction to Blonski was negative. What was rejected above all was the notion that Poles needed
forgiveness from Jews. See Michael C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the
Holocaust (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997), p.115.
275. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Christians Testimony, trans. Stephen G.
Cappellari (London: Lamp Press, 1989). In 1942, Bartoszewski became co-founder of the Zegota
Council for Aid to Jews. He has served two spells as the Polish Foreign Minister (commencing 1995 and
2001). His memoir exaggerates the assistance provided by the Polish Underground to the Jewish
resistance. He stresses the rescue of Jews, and regrets that characteristic, but also understandable, trait of
human nature as a result of which the memory of the wrongs . . . suffered as a consequence of
denunciation was stronger and more lasting in those who were rescued than the memory of the
incomparably more numerous cases of proffered assistance (pp.71-2, 76, 89). In an epilogue written in
the second half of the 1980s, at about the same time as Umschlagplatz, Bartoszewski describes those
saved as symbols who remind us of the acts of the rescuers: . . . the people who . . . were able to combat

117

Umschlagplatz has a symbolic value:

. . . in time the territory and the word have both acquired a symbolic
value. Umschlagplatz denotes not only a defined, tangible place near
Stawki Street in Warsaw but also a special realm of the spirit or, more
aptly, a specific human destiny. Umschlag signifies limbo, gate to the
underworld, antechamber of death. Umschlag is what befell the Jews
who found themselves there. From the Polish point of view, its symbolic
value is best encapsulated in a foreign word. One may not know the
German noun der Umschlagplatz, but one grasps the allusion. Vagueness
here favors symbolization. (p.47)
The importance of the Umschlagplatz for the narrator (and, analogously, the
importance of the book of the same name for its author) is that reflection on its meaning
should act as a stimulus to the Poles for a re-examination of their reaction to the
Holocaust:
We who live in its immediate vicinity, in the very heart of Warsaw,
ought to reflect on what it means for us, not in terms of the past, but in
terms of our own reaction to what once happened there. (p.7)
The achievement of Rymkiewiczs novel is, however, not limited to its
contribution to this thorny issue. From a literary point of view, the novel is significant
because it embodies, and explicitly discusses, the question of the limits of fictional
Holocaust representation, in particular by authors who have no direct connection to the
victims. Michael Andr Bernstein praises the dramatization and vivid representation of
an insoluble moral dilemma about his right to speak as embodying Rymkiewiczs most
significant breakthrough as a Pole writing about the Shoah, and one which owes as
much to [Rymkiewiczs] willingness to take artistic risks as it does to the seriousness of
his moral imagination and historical scrupulousness.276
Hania, who here represents the strand of Jewish opinion which vociferously
opposes fictional representation of the Holocaust, puts the case not against the narrators

Nazi crimes and those who, having been saved from destruction, remind us of those acts of human
solidarity, made and make a contribution toward assuring that the world after Auschwitz will not be
completely without hope. Epilogue: Forty Years Later, pp.97-103, p.103.
276. Michael Andr Bernstein, Victims-in-Waiting: Backshadowing and the Representation of European
Jewry, New Literary History, 29 May 1998, 625-651, 643.

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invention of fictional characters (who she seems here to accept as real, perhaps because
she, too, is such a character), but against the fictionalization of details in their historical
background (such as a reference to tennis courts in the Otwock of 1937) in the
narrators work:
I dont like what youre writing . . . And the reason I dont like it . . . is
that youre fabricating. Im not saying I dont like fiction, but in this case
I feel it is unacceptable, a bit indecent even. Not one of them survived.
Then a mere spectator of their death starts inventing a novel. . . . Its not
that youre belittling them, its as if you didnt believe what they lived
through and what they suffered, and found your own imaginings more
reliable than the facts. Thats what I find so distasteful. I dont want you
to fabricate. (pp.124-5)
The narrators initial response is to agree with the premise that it would be indecent to
fictionalize, accepting that only established facts deserve to be retold, but to counter
that In my story I invent nothing (pp.125, 127). He elaborates:
To have the right to tell stories theres no use doubting the veracity or
accuracy of certain things; you must know what really happened and
have the guts to say exactly how things were. (p.127)
Hania, raising the large question of the limits of historical knowledge, responds: Thats
the whole problem . . . How can you possibly know the facts? (p.127) The narrator
then falls back on the notion of literary rather than historical truth in the argument,
previously quoted, that even if he has invented it all, it is no less true for all that
(p.128). There follows an emotional assertion of the narrators right to testify as a
witness (despite the fact that he was a child at the time and remembers nothing but
broken scraps and disjointed fragments):
I think I am a suitable witness, and I feel that I not only can but should
testify. Even if I cannot testify to their lives, it will be my own personal
act of remembrance. . . . So youre wrong to accuse me of wholesale
fiction-mongering. You surely cant mean that my great dirge for the
Polish Jews is imagined . . . And surely, my testimony is not imagined
either. My dirge is a lament for myself. When I mourn for the Polish
Jews it is an act of self-mourning, the lament of a Pole forever forsaken
by Polish Jews. Youd have to be really mean to call that fiction.
(pp.128-9)

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Because those Poles who remember the Jews who were killed are aging and
dying out, the narrator is not sure that anyone else will be able or willing to testify. My
juniors by only a couple of years remember even less than I do, and its unlikely that
my juniors can even begin to gauge the extent of the loss (p.129).
Near the end of the book, the narrator himself takes up Hanias criticism of his
fictionalizing, but argues that some fictionalization is inevitable because of his limited
knowledge of Polish-Jewish life:
Even as I write this book I am irritated by my tendency to fictionalize,
though I try to keep these elements to a minimum. Ideally my book tells
the common history of Poles and Jews as it really was, with no
imaginary additives. To my mind no other book could properly testify to
the past, or provide the restitution we Poles owe to our Polish Jews. But I
am limited to a spiritual rather than a practical experience of PolishJewish life, and this prevents my writing an unfictionalized testimony.
Who knows, my novel, in which authentic facts are mixed with fiction,
may also be an act of restitution. That is how I conceived it, and that is
the best that I can do. (p.319)
Even if Barthesian theory says it is a mistake to do so, this passage makes sense if we
identify the author with the narrator, and conflate Umschlagplatz and the narrators
novel. Attributing this important statement to a fictional narrator (or to an implied
author) rather than to the real author would weaken its impact. Rymkiewicz here seems
to confirm Berel Langs argument that Holocaust genres aspire to the condition of
history.277 Rymkiewicz is saying that he would write history (in the sense of
unfictionalized testimony) if he could, but that, as an outsider, fictionalization is his
only option. This has implications, not just for Polish writers, but for all those who write
about the Holocaust. Holocaust survivors like Bogdan Wojdowski can write novels
about the Holocaust which include a significant proportion of fiction without this
affecting the authority of their works because readers tend to treat survivors novels as
fictionalized autobiography. This does not work for outsiders like Hersey and
Rymkiewicz, and as the survivors, perpetrators and witnesses die out, and their
277. Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore and
London: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), p.30.

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descendants become increasingly distant from the events, all writers about the
Holocaust will be outsiders. Rymkiewiczs notions of keeping fictionalization to a
minimum, and of maintaining the ideal of telling the history as it really was, with no
imaginary additives, even though this is impossible in practice, are standards against
which all future Holocaust writing might be judged. It is not, however, the primary
standard by which Umschlagplatz itself should be judged, because, as we have seen, the
novel is noteworthy not so much for telling the common history of Poles and Jews as it
really was, but for two other aspects: what the murder of Polish Jews on Polish soil
should signify for modern-day Poles; and the limits of fictional representation in
Holocaust literature.
Whereas Hersey, although an outsider, wrote about the Warsaw ghetto from the
perspective of its inhabitants, which meant that his post-war liberal American point of
view could only be expressed by a distortion of the ghettos historical reality,
Rymkiewicz does not attempt to represent the lives of his fictional characters inside the
Warsaw ghetto. Rymkiewiczs perspective of the ghetto (as represented by the
Umschlagplatz) is explicitly a Polish view from the present dayas Bernstein puts it
Poland . . . is shown haunted by a past it can neither honestly acknowledge nor
successfully repress.278 Rymkiewiczs approach is both more modest because it
acknowledges the limitations of the authors imagination, and more honest because it
facilitates the readers ability to judge the degree to which the authors ideological
beliefs have coloured his representation. Degrees of authorial modesty and honesty are
not criteria that are usually applied to the judgement of works of fiction; but, as one
moves on a spectrum of fictional works towards the limiting case of Holocaust fiction,
authorial accountability for the moral quality of a work grows from a starting point
where there are few, other than legal, constraints on the content of a novel, to a point

278. Bernstein, Victims-in-Waiting: Backshadowing and the Representation of European Jewry, 643.

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where the moral deficiencies of a work can override its aesthetic value.

Andrzej Szczypiorskis The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman: naturalising and relativising

the Holocaust?
Although [Nazism] was indeed the most cruel, bloody, and rapacious
[form of totalitarianism], it was also the most stupid and in a sense
primitive, lacking as it did the finesse of those to come. (Szczypiorski,
p.73)
. . . she [Irma Seidenman] would have understood then the banal truth
that Stuckler [an SS man] had not humiliated her in the least. Not for a
moment had she felt humiliated then, abased, stripped of her dignity,
disgraced, because Stuckler had wanted only to kill her, whereas those
others [antisemitic Communist officials], who years later [1968] came to
her office . . . took from her something more than life because they took
away her right to be herself, the right to self-determination. (p.192)
Andrzej Szczypiorski was born in Warsaw in 1924. He was in the Peoples
Army during the war, was captured during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and sent to
Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Szczypiorski wrote many novels after the war. He
was active in the opposition to the Communist government, and was imprisoned for
several months following the imposition of martial law in December 1981. He was
elected to the Polish Senate following the fall of the Communists in 1989. The Beautiful
Mrs Seidenman was first published in Polish under the title Poczatek [The Beginning] in
Paris in 1986. It became a bestseller when it was published in West Germany in 1988,
and was translated into fifteen languages. An English edition was published in the UK
in 1990.279
Like Rymkiewicz, Szczypiorski chose not to represent Jews inside the Warsaw
ghetto, but unlike Rymkiewicz, he does depict the lives of Warsaw Jews outside the
ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Szczypiorskis main characters include Poles and
Germans as well as Jews. Like Umschlagplatz, The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman often
279. See Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, A New Generation of Voices in Polish Holocaust Literature,
Prooftexts, 1989, no.3, 284, http://festival.zero.cz/szczypio.htm, and front piece to Szczypiorski.

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shifts to the present, and follows the lives of those characters who survived the war. As
MacMillan did with his representation of Treblinka, Szczypiorski uses a multiperspectival approach to build up a picture of occupied Warsaw. Szczypiorski achieves
this both by creating a wide range of characters, and by providing a post-war
perspective. The diversity of the characters points to the idea that no one group has a
monopoly of good or evil. It implicitly rejects any suggestion that the Jews, as the
victims of the Holocaust, are beyond all criticism. This results in the Jews in the novel
being clearly individualised, although they are not typical of Warsaw Jews as a whole,
because only assimilated Jews living in hiding on the Aryan side are represented.
The Jewish characters include the eponymous, golden-haired, azure-eyed, totally
assimilated Irma Seidenman, who is rescued from the SS by her Polish friends and a
sympathetic ethnic German, only to be forced to leave Poland by antisemitic
communists in the late 1960s. Henryczek Fichtelbaum is the son of an assimilated
lawyer, whose father Jerzy:
was a modern man, did not believe in God, and was a bit of a
communist, as were many other Jewish intellectuals then who looked to
communism as a remedy for all racial prejudice, forgetting quite stupidly
that communism developed in Russia. (Szczypiorski, p.26)
(This last derogatory comment about Jewish intellectuals is, as we shall see, an example
of an anti-communist, narratorial voice which makes political judgements at several
points in the novel.) Young Henryczek leaves the ghetto and tries to survive on the
Aryan side, only to return to the ghetto to embrace his fate (pp.26-41, p.40). The
Jewish boy Arturek Hirschfeld is handed over to a nun and becomes Wladyslaw
Gruszecki. He surpasses his mentor Sister Weronika in Catholic zeal. After the war he
is both anti-German and antisemitic: Kikes are ruining our country! (p.54). In the
summer of 1968, he expressed his joy over the fact that Poland was finally ridding
itself of Jews (p.55). Bronek Blutman, a Jewish gigolo, becomes an informer engaged
in handing over Jews, hoping to save his own skin (p.21).

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The Polish characters are equally diverse, and present a range of attitudes
towards the Jews. Judge Romnicki helps Jews out of a sense of moral duty; Elzbieta
Pawelek takes in a Jewish child for a night as a Christian act, Polish and humane
(p.116); Professor Winiar (a liberal, a Christian, a supporter of independence, as well
as a Semitophile. People like him were not very common (p.166)) dies of a heart attack
when he sees the burning ghetto and young people enjoying themselves on the merrygo-round just outside the ghetto walls, while a very different (and more prevalent)
reaction is expressed a few days later when a man standing on the spot where Winiar
died says cheerfully, The little Jews are frying till it sizzles! (p.171); the antisemitic
tailor Apolinary Kujawski takes over the business of his Jewish employer, but is
troubled by his conscience; Beautiful Lola makes his fortune as a blackmailer
(szmalcownik) of Jews on the Aryan side. Pawelek Krynski, Henryczek Fichtelbaums
Polish friend, attacks the illusions of Polish nationalism from a perspective many years
after the war (a world of . . . well-cared-for flower beds but stinking garbage dumps
(p.154)), and includes a condemnation of the antisemitic character of this nationalism:
At long last the myth of our uniqueness, of this Polish suffering that was
always pure, righteous and noble, has bit the dust. . . . Who chased Henio
Fichtelbaum through the streets of Warsaw? Who betrayed Irma,
delivering her into German clutches? Who drove her out of Poland? . . .
Holy Polishness, drunken, whoring, venal, its mouth stuffed with
claptrap, anti-Semitic, anti-German, anti-Russian, antihuman. . . . Holy
blasphemous Polishness, which dared to call Poland the Christ of
Nations and was rearing informers and denouncers, careerists and
dimwits, torturers and bribetakers; who elevated xenophobia to the rank
of patriotism . . . Maybe now Poland will at last understand that villainy
and holiness dwell in one house, and here too, on the shores of the
Vistula, like everywhere in Gods world! (pp.159-160)
Szczypiorskis use of the old saw that there is good and bad in every group
(including the Jews) is defensible on the grounds of its truthfulness, but, given the
novels primary subject is Warsaw at the time of the Holocaust, those who applaud this
type of sentiment the loudest are those who resent any suggestion that the Polish Jews
suffered more than the Poles as innocent victims of the Nazis, and who angrily reject
the idea that the behaviour of the large majority of Poles towards the Jews is deserving
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of any criticism. Szczypiorski himself has been defensive in his views about what
actions were realistically available to the Poles to help the Jews avoid extermination.
Rafael Scharf provides an account of a discussion with Szczypiorski in the Paris
monthly Kultura ( a few years ago, i.e. a few years prior to 1984). Scharf had written
that:
. . . if it had been known that it was not the Jews who were being
incinerated but Polish fathers, husbands, mothers, wives and children, the
explosion of wrath and revenge would have been uncontrollable, even if
it came to . . . tearing up the rails with bare teeth.280
Szczypiorskis response to this emphasised:
the impotence of the Poles in the face of such actions as the
pacification of the Zamosc region, street roundups and transports to
concentration camps, public executions, the systematic decimation of the
Polish intelligentsia, and later the crushing of Warsaw, whose victims
were Polish flesh and blood.281
By stressing the impotence of the Poles Szczypiorski evades the truth that, for the
overwhelming majority of Poles, the Polish Jews, even though they had been living in
Poland for centuries, were thought of as aliens rather than as Polish citizensfor most
Poles the Jews were not included in what Helen Fein calls the universe of
obligation.282
We have seen one example of the narratorial voice quoted above. It is a
judgmental and omniscient voice which relativises the Holocaust:
. . . the world later started in on others and left the Jews in peace, as if
their quota of suffering had become exhausted . . . and the quota of
280. Rafael F. Scharf, Cum ira et studio (Lecture at International Conference in Oxford, 1984), in
Poland, What Have I To Do With Thee . . .: Essays without Prejudice (Cracow: Fundacja Judaica w
Krakowie, 1999), pp.74-81, p.78.
281. Ibid., p.78.
282. Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide (New York: The Free Press, 1979), p.4. The comparison with
Denmark is illuminating. Fein (p.146) quotes Leni Yahil: what is significant here is that for the Danes
national consciousness and democratic consciousness are one and the same . . . Equality, freedom, the
rights assured to every Dane, and the duties incumbent upon him as laid down in the constitution are valid
for all citizens without exception . . . The struggle of the Danish people for its national existence during
the occupation therefore included the struggle for the equal rights of the Jews. (Leni Yahil, The Rescue
of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy, trans. Morris Gradel (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1969), p.85.)

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suffering of others had not. . . . For behold, in Vietnam people falling

like flies from gas that exceeded Zyklon B in excellence, in Indonesia
the rivers quite literally ran red with human blood, in Biafra people were
shrivelling from hunger to such a degree that next to them the corpses
on Nalewki Street in the ghetto looked like bodies of gluttons, and in
Cambodia pyramids were being constructed from human skulls whose
numbers exceeded those in the crematoria and gas chambers. (p.33)
(my emphasis)
This is not just saying that the Holocaust can be compared with other atrocities, which
only those dogmatically committed to the notion of the Holocausts uniqueness would
disallow, but it is claiming that other more recent events were worse. Likening the
corpses of those who died of malnutrition in the Warsaw ghetto to the bodies of
gluttons, when compared with those who died in Biafra, is just as wrong as any
comparison which belittled the suffering of those who died in Biafra. The claim that the
numbers who died in Cambodia exceeded those in the crematoria and gas chambers is
not, and could not, be justified by any historical evidence. Making such comparisons in
itself reveals an ideological approach. It may also go some way towards explaining the
success of Schne Frau Seidenman in West Germany.283
The final episode in the book is about Joasia Fichtelbaum, Henryczeks younger
sister, who, like Arturek Hirschfeld, was handed over as a child to Sister Weronika. She
survives the war as Marysia Wiewiora, a Catholic girl. When she turned twenty she
heard a voice calling her, and emigrated to Israel where she became Miriam Wewer
(p.197). When she sees an Israeli soldier kick down a Palestinian door:
Her eyes were full of tears and her heart full of pride, gratitude and
ardent faith. She absolved the world of all evil, for the moment for
settling scores had arrived, and Jews were never again to be held in
contempt, humiliated, and persecuted. ( p.198)
But Miriam quickly realises that no kick dealt a Palestinian fedayeen will erase

283. Irena Irwin-Zarecka explains the novels bestseller status in West Germany thus: A West German
reader [at the time of the Historikerstreit] could easily fit the novel into a larger framework of efforts to
de-emphasize the uniqueness of Nazism. Coming from a Polish writer, the soothing of German
conscience is undoubtedly even more effective. Irena Irwin-Zarecka, Challenged to Respond: New
Polish Novels about the Holocaust, in Alan L. Berger, ed., Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Lewiston:
Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), pp.273-83.

126

centuries of history or constitute reparation. It is at this point that the relativising

narratorial voice reappears: She [Miriam] was not educated enough to see at that
moment that she was participating in an immemorial act of imitation (p.199). The
imperious stance of the Israeli soldiers is then likened to, amongst others Stroop on the
street of the burning ghetto (ibid). While this can be read as a condemnation of military
aggression against civilians, from which few would dissent, comparing Israeli soldiers
with Stroop, who implemented the final destruction the Warsaw ghetto and who was
hanged as a war criminal, is a further example of the type of rhetoric employed by the
omniscient narrator in the relativising and inaccurate comparisons of the Holocaust with
events in Biafra and Cambodia.
The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman, with its range of characters, provides the reader
with a human panorama of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. The novels humanity
and compassion compensate to some extent for its failure to acknowledge the enormity
of the Holocaust. It remains, however, a major weakness for a novel whose action is
centred on Warsaw during the German occupation, that the transport of well over
250,000 of the citys inhabitants to be murdered at Treblinka in 1942/3 scarcely gets a
mention. Nevertheless, although it is far from being his central concern as it is for
Rymkiewicz, Szczypiorski does recognise the impact of the destruction of Polish Jewry
on Poland. This is despite the lack of any desire by the Poles to remember what has
been lost, for they are people who are:
busy with their own affairs, with current everyday life, and unaware that
they are maimed, for without the Jews they are no longer the Poles they
once were and should have remained forever. (p.40)

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CHAPTER FOUR
NAZI IDEOLOGY, GERMAN GUILT, AND THE SECOND GENERATION
We ended up seeing everything through anti-semitic eyes. It became a
complex . . . We National Socialists saw in the struggles which now lie
behind us, a war solely against the Jews not against the French,
English, Americans or Russians. We believed that they were all only
tools of the Jew . . .284
Its one of those things that are easy to say. The Jewish people will be
exterminated, says every Party member, sure, its in our program,
elimination of the Jews, extermination, can do.285
Today it seems so cruel, inhuman, and immoral. It did not seem immoral
to me then: I knew very well what I was doing in the SS. We all knew.286

Having examined representations of Treblinka and of the Warsaw ghetto which

mostly utilised the victims perspective, I turn now to fictional and non-fictional
representations of the perpetrators of the Holocaust created by writers connected to
these people by their common German nationality, and, in some instances, also by
family ties. In the spectrum of different types of literary representation, I will continue
to argue that the Holocaust lies at that extremity where, when representations are being
considered, the focus of concern should remain on the people (including both victims
and perpetrators) and the events represented rather than on the representations
themselves. Purely aesthetic considerations are less significant in this analysis than the
relationship between these texts and the historical reality they represent. This approach
necessitates an examination of a number of historical issues as a preliminary to a
discussion of the representations selected.
Any discussion of the Holocaust from the perspective of its instigators and
perpetrators needs to establish how they perceived the event, because the Holocaust
284. From Robert Leys last letter before his suicide at Nuremberg on 24 October 1945. Quoted in
Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2001), p.197.
285. From Himmlers speech at Posen on 4 October 1943. Quoted in Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death:
The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p.267.
286. Hans Heutig, former commandant of Buchenwald in 1986 interview. Quoted in John Weiss,
Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997),
p.341.

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did not come from the void; it was brought into being because it had meaning to its
perpetrators.287 This is not just a matter for historians, although how German historians
have dealt with this will be our starting point, not only for the light it sheds on the
causes of the genocide, but also because it indicates how Germans have dealt with the
legacy of the Holocaust since the war. This chapter begins by examining the role of
Nazi ideology in the Holocaust, and the disagreements about its importance that have
arisen among historians, especially in Germany. Differing views about the connection
between German antisemitism and the Holocaust are also examined. These are
necessary preliminaries for an examination of the question of German guilt and
responsibility for the Holocaust, including especially the contributions of Karl
Jaspers288, and of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich289. Following this, examples of
the impact of the Holocaust on the second generation are examined. This involves
looking at several books of interviews with children of leading Nazi families as well as
Niklas Franks In The Shadow of the Reich290, a powerful condemnation of his father
Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of Poland who was hanged at Nuremberg. As
well as being important in its own right, the consideration of Nazi children is a
prelude to an examination of the German literary response to the crimes of the Third
Reich, and especially of the way this literature represents the perpetrators of the
Holocaust, which is covered in the next chapter. The first work discussed is Wolfgang
Koeppens controversial portrayal of a family of senior Nazis in the postwar years,
Death in Rome291. The chapter goes on to examine more recent literary works: Alfred
Anderschs Efraims Book292, Bernhard Schlink'
s The Reader293 and Flights of Love294,
287. Raul Hilberg, The Nature of the Process, in Joel L. Dimsdale, ed., Survivors, Victims, and
Perpetrators (Washington, New York and London: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1980), pp.5-54,
p.5.
288. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2000).
289. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior,
trans. Beverley R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975).
290. Niklas Frank, In the Shadow of the Reich, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger with Carole Clew-Hoey (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). Hereinafter referred to within the text as Frank.
291. Wolfgang Koeppen, Death in Rome, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York and London: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2001). Hereinafter referred to within the text as Koeppen.
292. Alfred Andersch, Efraims Book, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York and Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1984). Hereinafter referred to within the text as Andersch.

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Rachel Seifferts The Dark Room295, and Gnter Grasss The Tin Drum296, From the
Diary of a Snail297, and Crabwalk298.
The Perpetrators Perspective
Inga Clendinnen, who had previously written books about the Mayans and the
Aztecs, noted in her Reading The Holocaust that:
The newcomer to Holocaust studies is impressed by a curious imbalance.
The overwhelming mass of scholarly writings bears not on the few who
planned the actions or the thousands who carried them out, but the
millions who suffered them.299
This is a surprising view. Clendinnens reference to scholarly writings cannot be a
reference solely to historical works because historians, from the pioneering work of
Raul Hilberg through to modern German historical studies, have approached the
Holocaust as a German project:
. . . this is not a book about the Jews. It is a book about the people who
destroyed the Jews. Not much will be read here about the victims. The
focus is placed on the perpetrators.300
. . . there are almost no studies by German historians . . . that do not
present and analyze events merely from the perspective of German
policemen, bureaucrats and officers . . . almost none break the
perpetrators interpretive monopoly that derived from the surviving
documents. That holds true for this volume, which in that sense

293. Bernhard Schlink, The Reader, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (London: Phoenix, 1998). Hereinafter
referred to in the text as Schlink1.
294. Schlink, Flights of Love, trans. John E. Woods (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002). Hereinafter
referred to within the text as Schlink2.
295. Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room (London: William Heinemann, 2001). Hereinafter referred to within
the text as Seiffert.
296. Gnter Grass, The Tin Drum (published in one volume with Cat and Mouse and Dog Years as The
Danzig Trilogy), trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: MJF Books, 1987), pp.1-465. Hereinafter referred to
within the text as Grass1.
297. Grass, From the Diary of a Snail, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Vintage, 1997). Hereinafter
referred to within the text as Grass2.
298. Grass, Crabwalk, trans. Krishna Winston (London: Faber and Faber, 2003). Hereinafter referred to
within the text as Grass3.
299. Inga Clendinnen, Reading The Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.82.
300. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967), p.v. First
published in 1961. Hilberg began his work in 1948.

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continues the German tradition.301

Perhaps, as well as historical works like Martin Gilberts The Holocaust: The Jewish
Tragedy which relies heavily on witness testimony, Clendinnen has in mind works like
those of Bruno Bettelheim and Tzvetan Todorov which deal with the psychology and
moral behaviour of the victims.302 In any event a focus on the victims alone is
insufficient if an attempt at understanding of the Holocaust as an historical event is the
aim, because, as we have seen in the chapters on Treblinka and on the Warsaw ghetto,
the victims were groping for meaning in a world made senseless.303 Avraham Tory, who
left a detailed account of existence in the Kovno ghetto, understood that the Nazis
deliberately operated an uncertainty principle:
We must understand that, from their point of view, our situation must
always remain unclear; we are not to be allowed to understand anything,
even if our lives are at stake. Anything that happens to us must occur like
a bolt from the blue. We are to remain always in a state of anticipation,
without understanding what is going on around us.304
People like Avraham Tory and Chaim Kaplan who had a fairly good idea of the Nazis
project were very rare.305 Many victims were unaware that they were going to be killed
until their final hours, or even moments. Seen solely from a victims perspective, any
violent crime committed by a stranger is inherently meaningless, so, If we want to
understand the extremes of human capability we must turn not to the victims but to the
301. Ulrich Herbert, Extermination Policy: New Answers and Questions about the History of the
Holocaust in German Historiography, in Ulrich Herbert ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies:
Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000),
pp.1-75, p.17.
302. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: Collins, 1986); Bruno Bettelheim, The
Informed Heart (New York: Avon Books, 1973); and Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life
in the Concentration Camps (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999). These works are included in
Clendinnens bibliography.
303. Aharon Appelfeld, a Holocaust survivor and novelist born in 1932, described this lack of meaning
and his continuing failure to understand the motives of the perpetrators in a discussion with Philip Roth:
We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which
we do not know, nor do we know it to this day. . . . I didnt understand, nor do I yet understand, the
motives of the murderers. Philip Roth, Shop Talk (London: Vintage, 2002), p.25.
304. Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, ed. Martin Gilbert, trans. Jerzy
Michalowicz (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), entry for 12 January
1943, p.209.
305. Still rarer are those like Jean Amry who read a death sentence in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. See
Jean Amry, On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew, in At The Minds Limits, trans. Sidney
Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1980),
pp.82-101, especially p.85.

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dark territory of the Nazi leaders motives and understanding.306

According to Saul Friedlnder, No one of sound mind would wish to interpret
the events from Hitlers viewpoint.307 This is incorrect because it implies that
understanding requires identification, and that to understand is to justify or excuse.
Identification is not necessary for understanding, and as Christopher Browning puts it
Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving.308
Clendinnen, as well as showing that understanding the perpetrators motives was
basic to an understanding of the Holocaust, also identified the importance of taking
Nazi ideology seriously if the aim is to acquire an understanding of the Holocaust (a
requirement that is less obvious than it might initially seem, given the still widespread
notion that the Nazis ideology does not merit detailed analysis because it is essentially
irrational, if not insane309):
One of my early difficulties in grasping what the Nazis thought they
were up to was that I could not take their professed racist ideology
seriously. Instead of listening hard to what they were saying, I assumed
the violence of the language to be largely rhetorical.310
Clendinnen is not alone. This failure to distinguish an ideological programme from
propaganda meant that most of the Nazis Jewish victims were totally unprepared when
the Final Solution was implemented, but it also affected perpetrators like Robert Jay
Liftons Auschwitz doctor Karl K:
306. Clendinnen, Reading The Holocaust, p.83.
307. Saul Friedlnder, The Final Solution, in Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in
a Changing World, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp.23-35, p.31.
Quoted in Clendinnen, Reading The Holocaust, pp.87-8.
308. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), p.xx.
309. The Nazis genocidal antisemitic ideology does not lack internal logic. Its weakness, from a purely
rational (rather than an ethical) point of view, lies in its foundation on assumptions which are derived
from a theory of race which depends on a mythological idea of both Jews and Aryans, and has no basis in
reality. As Leni Yahil says when describing senior Nazi perpetrators like Eichmann, Ohlendorf and Best:
There was wholeness in their concept, and their mentality was not in disorder; on the contrary, logic,
rationality and intuition directed their activity. Leni Yahil, The Double Consciousness of the Nazi Mind
and Practice, in David Bankier, ed. Probing the Depths of German Society and the Persecution of the
Jews, 1933-1941 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and the Leo
Baeck Institute, 2000), pp.36-53, p.39.
310. Clendinnen, Reading The Holocaust, p.91.

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There was no one in Germany or in the whole world who had not heard
Hitlers and Streichers proclamation that the Jews had to be
exterminated [vernichtet]. . . . Everybody heard that. And everybody
heard past it [vrbeigehort (sic); didnt take it in]. Because nobody
believed that such a reality would come into practice . . . And suddenly
one is confronted with the fact that what one used to take for propaganda
verbiage is now . . . matter-of-fact and strategically concrete, that it is
being realized . . .311
No Hitler, No Holocaust?
Anti-Semitism was a necessary condition for the Holocaust, it was not a
sufficient condition. Hitler was needed.312
The title of Milton Himmelfarbs article No Hitler, No Holocaust is rather
more noteworthy than its contents, but the question of Hitlers role, and that of
antisemitism, in the Holocaust have both been controversial. John Weiss, for example,
takes a contrary view to Himmelfarbs:
Anti-Semitism was never just one issue among many; indeed, it would
be less of a distortion to say there were no other issues. It is time to stop
believing that without Hitler, no Holocaust.313
Both of these writers are dealing with the centrality or otherwise of German
antisemitism as a cause of the Holocaust; an issue that was re-ignited, especially in
Germany and the US with the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagens Hitlers Willing
Executioners314 and its controversial thesis that most Germans in the Third Reich
supported what Goldhagen termed Eliminationist Antisemitism. German antisemitism
and its connection to the Final Solution will be considered below. What is at issue at
this point is how historians have dealt with the two rather different questions of whether
Hitler had a coherent ideology with antisemitism at its core; and, if he had such an
ideology, whether the Holocaust was the result of his conversion of this ideology into a
genocidal policy and later into a programme, which, when he felt the circumstances

311. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 1986), pp.204-5.
312. Milton Himmelfarb, No Hitler, No Holocaust, Commentary, March 1984, 37-43, 37.
313. Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, p.287.
314. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(London: Abacus, 1997).

133

were right, was carried out under his authority.

Eberhard Jckel in his groundbreaking book Hitlers World View: A Blueprint
for Power, first published in Germany in 1969 under the title Hitlers Weltanschauung.
Entwurf einer Herrschaft, identified an important omission by other historians because
previously the Holocaust has never been carefully investigated in the context of
Hitlers goals and his Weltanschauung.315 In Jckels account, Hitlers contemporaries,
posterity, and finally historical scholarship unanimously agreed that Hitler did not have
any ideas of his own, let alone a self-consistent Weltanschauung.316 Jckel traces the
origin of this idea to Hermann Rauschning, the Nazi President of the Danzig Senate in
1933-4, who became disillusioned with Nazism and went into exile in 1935, and wrote
two books before the war exposing the nihilistic character of Nazism.317 According to
Rauschning, Hitlers antisemitism was nothing but tactics and an instrument of power.
Rauschning quotes Hitler as saying he would not destroy the Jew for, We should
have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract
one.318 Alan Bullock, an early biographer of Hitler, called him an opportunist
without principle.319 There is some support in Mein Kampf for the idea that Hitler saw
antisemitism in instrumental terms:
In general the art of all truly great national leaders at all times consists
primarily in not dividing the attention of a people, but in concentrating it
upon a single foe. . . . Hence a multiplicity of different adversaries must
always be combined so that in the eyes of the masses of ones own
supporters the struggle is directed against only one enemy.320
Some historians, like Gerald Fleming, claim that Hitler was able to combine his
opportunism with a visceral hatred of Jews, by postulating that he had two kinds of

315. Eberhard Jckel, Hitlers World View: A Blueprint for Power, trans. Herbert Arnold (Cambridge
Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.47.
316. Ibid., p.15.
317. Robert S. Wistrich, Whos Who in Nazi Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 2002),
pp.196-7.
318. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), p.234.
319. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (revised edition, Pelican, 1962), p.806. Quoted in Jckel,
Hitlers World View, p.17.
320. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf , trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Pimlico, 1999), p.108.

134

antisemitism:
the one a traditionally inspired and instinctively affirmed anti-Semitism
[and] the other a flexible, goal-oriented anti-Semitism that was
pragmatically superimposed on the first.321
Hitler, himself, denied from an early date that his antisemitism was emotional (i.e. the
first kind), claiming that it was rational. For example, in a speech made on 6 April
1920 he said:
We have no intention of being emotional antisemites who want to create
the atmosphere of a pogrom; instead our hearts are filled with a
determination to attack the evil at its roots and to eradicate it root and
branch.322
Jckel examines the question of the relation between Hitlers rational antisemitism
and his opportunism in the context of conflicts between the twin goals of territorial
policy and antisemitism at the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union, and concludes
that:
Hitler was indeed an opportunist to a considerable extent, and this may
have led to the widespread notion of his total, unprincipled, and nihilistic
opportunism. It has become clear, however, that we have to differentiate
between total and partial opportunism, that Hitlers opportunism was
definitely guided by principles . . . Germany had to conquer new living
space in the East, and it had to remove the Jews and all other aspects of
public life had to serve as means to those two ends.323
Hitler had a pragmatic approach to achieving the destruction of the Jews. This does not
imply that he did not have sincerely held and internally coherent ideological reasons for
pursuing this objective. His ruthless pragmatism is most clearly expressed in a speech
he made to Nazi Party Kreisleiters on 29 April 1937, at a time when many old
grassroots Nazi Party members were pressing him for more radical action against the
Jews:
. . . the final aim of our policy [on the Jewish problem] is crystal clear
321. Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1984), p.29.
322. Quoted in Eberhard Jckel, Hitlers World View, p.50.
323. Ibid., p.81.

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to all of us. . . . You must always understand that I always go as far as I

dare and never further. . . . Even in a struggle with an adversary it is not
my way to issue a direct challenge to a trial of strength. I do not say
Come on and fight, because I want a fight. Instead I shout at him (and I
shout louder and louder): I mean to destroy you. And then I use my
intelligence to help me to manoeuvre him into a tight corner so that he
cannot strike back, and then I deliver the fatal blow.324
Hitler saw himself as a combination of programmatic thinker and politician: In
long periods of humanity, it may happen once that the politician is wedded to the
theoretician.325 Jckel shows how originally Hitlers antisemitism and his territorial
ideas were essentially unrelated, but that in 1928, at the end of the Secret Book, he
succeeded in synthesising them into a coherent Weltanschauung. Hitler believed that the
Jews could not create their own nation and so had to live on the productive forces of
their host nations as parasites. The Jewish goal was the denationalisation of the whole
world, which was to be achieved by using egalitarianism, pacifism and internationalism
to obstruct the struggle for existence intended by nature. By this means Jewish
internationalism would destroy the meaning of history which was contained in this
Darwinian fight for existence.326 Hitler believed that he:
had to annihilate the Jews, thus restoring the meaning of history . . .
Unless the Jews were annihilated there would very soon no longer be any
struggle for living space, nor therefore any culture, and consequently
nations would die out; not just the German nation, but ultimately all
nations. But if, on the other hand, the German people failed to conquer
new living space, it would die out because of that and the Jews would
triumph.327
Jckel accepts that Hitlers antisemitism was not the deductive result of his view
of history but had originated many years earlier, with the synthesis simply pulling
together previously existing ideas. The two core elements of Hitlers programme could
have been translated into practice without being related to each other, but Jckel argues
324. Quoted in Helmut Krausnick, The Persecution of the Jews, trans. Dorothy Long, in Anatomy of the
SS State, Helmut Krausnick, Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (London: Collins,
1968), pp.1-124, p.34.
325. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p.193.
326. See Jckel, Hitlers World View, pp.102-107, and Adolf Hitler, Hitlers Secret Book, trans. Salvator
Attanasio (New York: Grove Press, 1962), pp.211-216.
327. Jckel, Hitlers World View, p.106.

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convincingly that:
the synthesis may well have provided not only intellectual satisfaction
but also a sense of confirmation concerning the appropriateness of the
goals. This, in turn, may explain the obstinacy with which Hitler
attempted to pursue his political program over the course of twenty
years. His self-assurance which knew no doubts, his unswerving and
finally self-destructive consistency, may have been derived ultimately
from his self-consistent Weltanschauung.328
Michael Marrus suggests that even the most determined sceptic about the
importance of his role in the Final Solution could draw two conclusions about Hitler.
First, he had an intense hatred of Jews, lasting his entire political career. Second, Hitler
was:
The principal driving force of antisemitism in the Nazi movement from
the earliest period, not only setting the ideological tone, but raising his
personal antipathy to an affair of state. Hitler alone defined the Jewish
menace with the authority, consistency, and ruthlessness needed to fix its
place for the party and later the Reich.329
This is to suggest that Hitlers ideology played a crucial role in motivating him
to instigate the extermination of the European Jews. It is not to imply that his esoteric
Weltanschauung was adopted in detail by those who carried out Hitlers murderous
policy, and was therefore an internalised factor in motivating their behaviour. As Jckel
says, . . . perhaps not even Hitlers followers and contemporaries had ever gone to the
trouble of trying to understand this Weltanschauung in its entirety.330 The antisemitic
ideology of the Nazis varied widely in levels of sophistication. Some top Nazis had
antisemitic views not dissimilar to Hitlers, but with their own particular quirks.
Himmler, for example, was if anything more paranoid than Hitler in seeing the hidden
hand of the Jews everywhere. He did not, however, consider it necessary to even
attempt to provide the senior implementers of the Final Solution with a detailed
ideological justification for the killing:
At this point we cannot furnish even the SS corps of leaders with a
328. Ibid., p.120.
329. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (New York: Meridian, 1989), p.17.
330. Jckel, Hitlers World View, p.121.

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historical justification of this undertaking. Much of it would be beyond

them . . . Only at a greater distance from these events, perhaps only after
decades, perhaps only after a period of fierce defamation, will the
perspective that alone can reveal the real necessity of this assignment be
that of the majority.331
Tim Mason called the debate among historians over the role of Hitler in the
Third Reich a clash between intentionalists and functionalists (sometimes also referred
to as structuralists).332 For the intentionalists there is a straight line from Hitlers
antisemitic ideology of the 1920s to the policies of the Third Reich and on to the Final
Solution. Among German historians adherence to this clear link is to be found in the
writings of Helmut Krausnick, Ernst Nolte, Eberhard Jckel, Karl Dietrich Bracher,
Klaus Hildebrand, and Andreas Hillgruber.333 What is clear is that on the Jewish
Question Hitler remained an implacable fanatic from the early days of the Nazi Party
right to the very end, and that there is little doubt that the Nazi leadership themselves
were intentionalists (in the sense of seeing Hitlers radical antisemitism as the driving
force which led to the implementation of the Final Solution), and not always simply
for reasons of self-exculpation. Himmler, although he justified the extermination policy
in a number of well-recorded pronouncements, consistently said that in carrying it out
he was obeying Hitlers explicit order (Ive never acted on my own initiative, Ive only
carried out the Fhrers orders) although he claimed that Hitler had been persuaded to
adopt the policy by the arguments of Goebbels and Bormann.334 Goebbels himself refers
to Hitlers radical approach in his diary, for example:

331. SS-Sturmbannfhrer Alfred Frank-Gricksch, From the Diary of a Fallen SS Leader, quoting
Himmler in spring 1943 at a meeting also attended by Maximilian von Herff, the Head of the SS
Personnel Main Office. Cited in Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, pp. 146-152, pp. 150-1.
332. Tim Mason, Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of NationalSocialism, in Der Fhrerstaat: Mythos und Realitt, ed., Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker
(Stuttgart, 1981) cited in Saul Friedlnder, Introduction to Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution,
pp.vii-xxxiii, p.ix.
333. See Friedlnder, Introduction to Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, p.x.
334. See Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs 1940-1945, trans. Constantine Fitzgibbon and James Oliver
(New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp.161-4, 193. As Germany headed towards defeat Himmler tried to deny
any personal responsibility for the Holocaust, and claim that he favoured expulsion of the Jews rather
than their extermination, in the unrealistic belief that this would help him to negotiate a separate peace
treaty with the Western allies. Nevertheless his consistently subservient role in his relationship with Hitler
confirms that, whatever the truth about his personal attitude, he would never have considered carrying out
the extermination of the Jews without Hitlers specific authority.

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A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully
deserved by them. The prophesy which the Fuehrer made about them for
having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most
terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did
not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. Its a life-and-death struggle
between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government
and no other regime would have the strength for such a global solution to
this question. Here, too, the Fuehrer is the undismayed champion of a
radical solution . . . 335
The functionalists deny that there is a necessary relationship between Nazi
ideology and the policies of the Third Reich. Martin Broszat, for example, argues that
the Holocaust was the result of a series of local initiatives aimed at solving local
problems and only gradually became an overall action.336 While stressing Hitlers
antisemitic ideology, Broszat questions its direct relation to policies. The heart of
Broszats argument is that the Final Solution was not begun after a single Hitlerian
decision, but arose bit by bit. For Hans Mommsen, too, ideology loses concrete
significance, and the ultimate outcome of Nazi policies toward the Jews can best be
described as cumulative radicalization, a process arising from the competition
between various Nazi agencies. Mommsen presents the functionalist position in an
extreme form: there was no Fhrer Order for exterminating the Jews, and Hitlers
declarations about their annihilation were just propaganda.337 For the functionalists it is
the system rather than individuals which is responsible for what happened to the
Jews; the process of genocide arises automatically, without human involvement, most of
all without perpetrators.
Recent research by German historians has concentrated on the various situations
in the individual regions of central and eastern Europe, and, following Broszats lead,
stresses the local factors which shaped the way the extermination of the Jews was
335. Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943, ed. and trans. Louis P. Lochner (New York:
Doubleday, 1948), entry for 27 March 1942, p.148.
336. This is not necessarily inconsistent with intentionalism. Even a super-intentionalist like Fleming
accepts that the liquidation process was pursued and adapted according to the local exigencies
conditioned by political, geographical, economic, and personal factors. Fleming, Hitler and the Final
Solution, p.67.
337. See Ulrich Herbert, Extermination Policy: New Answers and Questions about the History of the
Holocaust in German Historiography, in Herbert ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies:
Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, p.46, note 19.

139

carried out in each area.338 To the extent that local initiatives are highlighted this tends
to undermine the role played by Hitler and other senior Nazis. Wendy Lower has shown
that while Germans at the periphery often acted independently, the highest Nazi leaders
shaped events to a far greater extent than many of the authors of these regional studies
acknowledge.339 Christopher Brownings research also found no evidence that the
Final Solution was launched or triggered by middle-echelon bureaucratic initiatives
from below rather than by signals from above.340
German Antisemitism and the Holocaust
For Daniel Goldhagen and John Weiss the implementation of the Nazi policy to
exterminate the Jews was the result not of Hitlers determination to realize his
antisemitic fantasies, but of a murderous type of antisemitism which was so widespread
in Germany that it was easy for the Nazis to recruit the actual murderers who
implemented the Final Solution:
Nazi ideology was scarcely the creation of a near psychotic and a few
henchmen. It was an extreme version of ideas long familiar to millions.
The tragedy is not that an obsessed fanatic somehow gained power, but
that his bellicose racial hatreds were shared by legions of his fellow
Germans and Austrians.341
This explanation is not accepted by historians like Ian Kershaw and Ulrich Herbert who
believe that the attitude of the Germans to the extermination of the Jews can best be
characterised as one of indifference:
. . . passivity, as the most general reaction, was a reflection of a
prevailing lack of interest in the Jewish Question, which ranked low in
the order of priorities of most Germans during the war and played only a
minor role in the overall formation of popular opinion. At the time that
338. See especially the essays by Ulrich Herbert, Gtz Aly, Dieter Pohl, Thomas Sandkhler, Walter
Manoschek, Christian Gerlach, Christoph Dieckmann and Sybille Steinbacher, in Herbert ed., National
Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies.
339. Wendy Lower, Anticipatory Obedience and the Nazi Implementation of the Holocaust in the
Ukraine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol.16. No.1, Spring 2002, 1-22, 13-14.
340. Christopher R. Browning, Bureaucracy and Mass Murder: The German Administrators
Comprehension of the Final Solution, in Asher Cohen, Joav Gelber, Charlotte Wardi, eds.,
Comprehending the Holocaust (Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York, Paris: Peter Lang, 1988), pp.159177, p.166.
341. Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, p.205.

140

Jews were being murdered in their millions, the vast majority of

Germans had plenty of other things on their mind.342
The gradual introduction of the systematic extermination policy cannot
be explained as the direct result of the spread of anti-Jewish attitudes in
the German population . . . On the contrary, one of the prerequisites for
setting the policy of murder in motion was an extraordinary indifference
toward the fate of the Jews on the part of a considerable proportion of the
German population. . . . What proved decisive was the fact that the
groups of anti-semites urging action were operating in a political space to
which the majority of the population attached no significance.343
Kershaws and Herberts analyses support Gramscis notion that, What comes
to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the
mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be.344 Gramscis idea is
similar to the earlier belief attributed to Edmund Burke: The only thing necessary for
the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.345 Martin Broszat links the
indifference of the German population directly to the success of the operation to
exterminate the Jews: The ease with which the centrality of the Final Solution was
carried out became a possibility because the fate of the Jews constituted a little-noticed
matter of secondary importance for the majority of Germans during the war.346 The
characterisation of German opinion as indifferent to the fate of the Jews is itself

342. Ian Kershaw, German Public Opinion During the Final Solution: Information, Comprehension,
Reactions, in Cohen et al. eds., Comprehending the Holocaust, pp.145-158, p.154.
343. Ulrich Herbert, Extermination Policy: New Answers and Questions about the History of the
Holocaust in German Historiography, in Herbert ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies:
Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, p.42.
Like Kershaw, Herbert explains the indifference of the German population as stemming from their having
plenty of other things to worry about, especially during the war: Most people, faced with their own
concerns, were indifferent [to the fate of the Jews]. Why, with ones own son or father at the front and
ones hometown exposed to attack, should one worry about the fate of a small group that, rightly or
wrongly, had always been accused of bad things and with which one as a rule had hardly any personal
contact? The anti-Jewish policy was not an important subject for the German population before the war,
and still less after the war came. And not following up on ones own many observations, or reports, or
rumors about what was happening to the Jews; not allowing them to coalesce into a mental image and not
drawing the obvious conclusionsthat describes precisely the process of verdrngung, repression.
(p.30)
344. From an unsigned article in the Turin edition of Avanti, 26 August 1916. Cited at
http://www.sentienttimes.com/02/feb-mar/print-indifference.html
345. Ascribed to Burke, though never found in his writings. Possibly a distillation of the words found in
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770). Quote number 9118, The Columbia World of
Quotations (1996). See http://www.bartleby.com/66/18/9118.html
346. Martin Broszat and Saul Friedlander, A Controversy about the Historicization of National
Socialism in Peter Baldwin ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians Debate
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), pp.102-134, pp.115-6.

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controversial because it serves to diminish any active complicity of the German

population in the genocide.347 In 1933 the SA comprised about two million men, which
together with other Nazi formations constituted a popular mass disposed to active antiJewish campaigning. Sebastian Haffner, in a memoir written before the outbreak of the
war, describes the result of an antisemitic campaign conducted shortly after the Nazis
came to power in 1933, which does not suggest that the German attitude to the Jews was
one of indifference:
. . . it triggered off a flood of argument and discussions all over
Germany, not about anti-Semitism but about the Jewish question. . . .
Suddenly everyone felt justified, and indeed required, to have an opinion
about the Jews, and to state it publicly.348
Claudia Koonz makes a strong case for the view that the Nazi takeover led to a
fundamental change in attitudes, and that it was only after January 1933 that Germans
attitudes towards The Jewish Question began to depart from Western norms:
Germans did not become Nazis because they were antisemites; they became
antisemites because they were Nazis, and Germans who in 1933, were ordinary
Western Europeans had become, in 1939, anything but.349
There is, however, general agreement that in contrast to the widespread
discussion of the Jewish Question in the 1930s, a depersonalised attitude evolved
during the war period, the background to which was the Jews complete isolation and
their gradual disappearance from Germany. The major area of disagreement involves
the interpretation of that attitude. One view ascribes the silence and general passivity of
the German population towards the fate of the Jews to indifference; another sees it as
the expression of a broad consensus on the governments policy, a kind of tacit
347. Theodor Adorno describes the result of this type of analysis in terms of responsibility falling on the
majority for their passivity rather than on the many active Nazis: As for the unspeakable acts of Hitler,
those who tolerated his seizing power are made responsible, and not those who cheered him on. Theodor
W. Adorno, What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?, trans. Timothy Bahti and Geoffrey H.
Hartman, in Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986), pp.114-129, pp.116-7.
348. Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: a memoir, trans. Oliver Pretzel (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2002), p.115.
349. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2003), pp.10, 12.

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agreement that there was no need to take an active stand on the subject.350 According
to Otto Dov Kulka:
This [latter] analysis views the emerging passive orientation as the
cumulative effect of the German populations gradual internalization and
assimilation of the claims and content of the war propaganda on the
countrys life and death struggle against the [supposed] driving force
behind its enemies.351
David Bankier provides a third interpretation of German indifference to the fate
of the Jews. According to Bankier, collective indifference and apathy were neither
attitudes deriving from concern over everyday needs, nor from internalization of Nazi
propaganda, but rather from a fear of the consequences of the extermination policy and
anxieties over Jewish retribution. The majority of Germans knew in broad terms what
was happening to the Jews, but had no wish to be regularly reminded of it by the Nazis
antisemitic propaganda:
[The Germans] relegated the Jewish issue to a marginal position neither
because of concern with daily troubles, nor because they had internalized
the antisemitic preaching to such a degree that they did not need
articulate responses to the antisemitic policy, but mainly because
according attention to the antisemitic propaganda entailed an unpleasant
awareness of the atrocities committed in the name of solving the Jewish
question.352
Outward passivity and apathy, in this interpretation, were the way the German
public chose to minimize discomfort. They were attitudes, which stemmed from
awareness of the Jews fate without entailing any affective implications. Beneath the
apparent insensitivity . . . were fright and fear.353 Many interpreted the bombing of
350. Otto Dov Kulka, The German Population and the Jews: State of Research and New Perspectives,
in Bankier, ed. Probing the Depths of German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933-1941,
pp.271-281, p.277.
351. Ibid., p.277. Kulka argues that postwar opinion polls conducted in the American Zone disprove the
interpretation that the German population was indifferent to the genocidal policy. In October 1945, at a
time when there was no question of people being ignorant of the truth, and when identification with Nazi
policies cannot possibly be deemed opportunistic, 20% of those questioned went along with Hitler on his
treatment of the Jews, while 19% were generally in favour but felt that he had gone too far. In a further
poll conducted in August 1947, 55% of the population still believed that National Socialism was a good
idea badly carried out. See pp.279-280.
352. David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford and
Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1992), p.146.
353. Ibid.

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German cities as retaliation for what had been done to the Jews. Bankier cites the diary
entry of Ursula von Kardoff for 3 March 1943 noting that everyone in Berlin was saying
that that days bombing-raid was a reprisal for the deportation of the Jews a few days
earlier. People throughout Germany connected the Allied air raids with the
extermination of the Jews in a relation of cause and effect.354 This is a good example of
the Nazis success in persuading many German people to accept their belief that all of
Germanys enemies were under the control of the Jews.
Unlike Goldhagen and Weiss, Bankier draws a distinction between popular
German antisemitism and Jew-hatred in the Nazi sense, and identifies the link
between the two in terms of the widespread antisemitism in Germany which allowed the
Nazis a free hand to implement their genocidal policy without opposition: Nazi
antisemitism was successful not because the German population changed course and
suddenly became devotees of racial theory: it was effective because large sectors of
German society were predisposed to be antisemitic.355 Bankier provides telling
evidence against the simplistic identification of popular German antisemitism with the
Nazis murderous policies in his description of the response to the introduction of
regulations requiring German Jews to wear the yellow star from 19 September 1941.
The initial reaction of the public was largely sympathetic to the Jews. According to
Speer, Goebbels complained about the attitude of Berliners:
The introduction of the Jewish star has had the opposite effect from
what we intended. . . . People everywhere are showing sympathy for
them [the Jews]. This nation is simply not yet mature; its full of all
kinds of idiotic sentimentality.356
354. Ibid., pp.147-8.
355. Ibid. pp.84, 155.
356. Albert Speer, Spandau. The Secret Diaries (New York: Pocket, 1976), p.287, quoted by Bankier,
p.127.
The initially sympathetic attitude of Berliners is confirmed by Victor Klemperers diary entry for 22
September 1941: Lissy Meyerhof writes from Berlin: Passers-by sympathised with the star wearers.
Victor Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1933-41, trans. Martin
Chalmers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p.416. Klemperers own experiences in Dresden at
first led him to conclude that There is no doubt that the people feel the persecution of the Jews to be a
sin. (4 October 1941, p.419). Within a month he had become uncertain about the true nature of public
opinion after being verbally abused by some Hitler youth cubs, and then later the same day being told by
a porter in the nursery where he worked that, It doesnt matter about the star, were all human beings,

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These attitudes resulted in a decree of 24 October 1941 which provided for three
months incarceration in a concentration camp for Germans who publicly displayed
sympathy towards Jews. Goebbels also wrote an editorial in Das Reich on 16 November
1941 headed The Jews are Guilty also intended to put a stop to any public expressions
of pity or sympathy for the Jews:
If Mr Bramsig or Mrs Knterich feel a stir of pity at the sight of an old
woman wearing the yellow star, let them kindly not forget that the Jews
planned the war and started it. The death of every German soldier is on
the head of the Jews . . . Everyone owes a duty to the anti-Jewish
regulations and must support them.357
These actions by the Nazi authorities, at a time when the mass killings of Jews
in the east had already started, would hardly have been necessary if Goldhagens
German eliminationist antisemitism had been present throughout German society.
The link between popular German anti-Jewish sentiment and Nazi-style antisemitism
remains unclear, and Michael Marrus (writing before Goldhagen and Weiss argued for
the centrality of popular German antisemitism as a cause of the Holocaust) warned that
we have only the vaguest idea of the relationship of Nazi anti-Jewish policy and public
opinion.358 The attempt to keep the extermination of the Jews in the east secret from
the German people occurred partly because the Nazi leaders involved were aware that
there were limits to popular support for anti-Jewish measures.359 There is, however, no
doubt that the role of Nazi antisemitic propaganda and language was significant in
creating a mentality in Germany that predisposed acceptance of racial policy even in its
most radical forms: . . . day-to-day contact with a virulent, antisemitic atmosphere

and I know such good Jews. Klemperers response to these mixed messages was: Such consolation is
not very cheering either. But which is the true vox populi? (1 November 1941, p.423).
357. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, pp.127-8.
358. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, p.94.
359. There were other reasons for secrecy. The Nazis wished to hide what was happening (i) from the
Jews themselves to reduce the likelihood of their resisting deportation; (ii) from their allies and satellites
in Italy, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia and Vichy France, to minimise opposition to
German requests to hand over their own Jews; and (iii) from their enemies, to avoid providing them with
material for atrocity propaganda, like the discovery by the Germans of the bodies of Polish army officers
executed by the Russians at Katyn, which was successfully used by Goebbels to cause a split between the
Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London.

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progressively dulled peoples sensitivity to the plight of their Jewish neighbours,360

and, The constant repetition of anti-semitic sentiment . . . lodged in the collective
psyche in ways that reduced the ability and willingness of a great many Germans to
question race policy and encouraged them to endorse it.361 Although popular protest
articulated by a few Protestant and Catholic religious leaders led to Hitler ordering the
official end of the killing of mental patients under the euthanasia operation in August
1941,362 there were no comparable protests when the deportation of the German Jews
commenced: Taking the crucifixes out of Bavarian schools aroused violent protests;
taking the Jews out of Bavarian towns aroused nothing much, one suspects, but
approval.363
In Yehuda Bauers explanatory model of the Holocaust, popular antisemitism
has the function, not of being a direct cause of the killing, but of preventing effective
opposition to the murder of the Jews. According to Bauer, it is the elite of the Nazi
Party, perhaps two hundred people, who saw the Jews as the major threat to Germany,
and it was from within this group that the murderous inclinations developed, with
Hitlers leadership vital because he provided the radicalising factor. Bauer puts much of
the blame for the Nazi leaderships ability to put its murderous policies into practice
onto the intelligentsia who flocked to the Nazis, and who became the chief transmitters
of murderous orders: . . . once the Fhrer expressed a desire and once an enthusiastic
class of educated people backed it, the simpler folk who did the shooting . . . were easily
found.364 This model is convincing, although it perhaps underestimates the importance
of the Nazi Partys old fighters in maintaining pressure on the leadership for radical

360. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, p.130.

361. Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945, p.197.
362. See Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, p.95.
363. Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, p.373. In an indication of what
popular protest might have achieved, at the end of February and the beginning of March 1943 several
hundred German women demonstrated, successfully, in Berlins Rosenstrasse in front of a Gestapo
building to demand the release of their Jewish husbands. However, the effectiveness of the Rosenstrasse
protest remains unclear because the Nazis may not have been planning to deport these men immediately,
so that their lives may not have been in imminent danger at that time.
364. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002),
pp.31-36, p.36.

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action against the Jews.

Koonz provides a variation on Bauers explanation. She also stresses the role of
the intelligentsia, but highlights especially its role in making the idea of genocide
respectable, and thus in helping to form a genocidal consensus well before the Final
Solution was initiated:
Citizens of the Third Reich were shaped by a public culture so
compelling that even those who objected to one or another aspect of
Nazism came to accept the existence of racially based human worth . . .
The Final Solution did not develop as evil incarnate but rather as the dark
side of ethnic righteousness. Conscience, originally seen to protect the
individual from the inhumane demands of the group, in the Third Reich
became a means of underwriting the attack by the strong against the
weak. To Germans caught up in a simulacrum of high moral purpose,
purification of racial aliens became a difficult but necessary duty.365
Those party functionaries and state employees who became desk murderers did not
have any great crises of conscience because:
They did not, as it is so often assumed, suspend their moral beliefs when
they put on their figurative uniforms. Expert opinion vindicated the
elimination of Jews as a moral act.366
This moral universe, based on a shared vision of a righteous Volk and its
dangerous Jewish enemy, collapsed with the military defeat of Germany and the
destruction of the Nazi regime. Now questions of guilt and responsibility would be
determined not by Nazi values but by those of the victorious powers.
Avoiding Guilt
A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will not be
erased.367
Shortly after the end of the war, Karl Jaspers, a professor of philosophy at the
University of Heidelberg who had been forced to resign from his post in 1937, broached
365. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p.273.
366. Ibid., p.265.
367. Hans Frank at Nuremberg trial, 18 April 1946. Quoted in The Judgement of Nuremberg, 1946
(London: The Stationery Office, 1999), p.124.

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the question of national guilt in a series of lectures. He distinguished four different types
of guilt. Criminal guilt requires the punishment of individuals, and only applies to those
who committed crimes, and did not apply to the overwhelming majority of
Germans.368 Political guilt arises because the citizens of a country are liable for the
results of actions taken by their state: everyone is co-responsible for the way he is
governed. This type of guilt is graduated according to the degree of participation in the
rgime, but even affects those who opposed the rgime and its actions. In Jaspers
analysis it is determined by decisions of the victor.369 Moral guilt arises because
people are morally responsible for all their deeds, including the execution of political
and military orders. Jurisdiction remains with the individuals conscience: Morally
man can condemn only himself, not another . . . No one can morally judge another.
Furthermore, It is nonsensical to lay moral guilt to a people as a whole. There is no
such thing as a national character. As well as the moral guilt of outward compliance, of
running with the pack, by for example joining the Nazi Party for careerist reasons,
there is also blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart,
inner indifference toward the witnessed evilthat is moral guilt.370 Metaphysical guilt,
Jaspers most well-known category, arose because:
There exists a solidarity amongst men as human beings that makes each
co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world,
especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If
I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty. If I was
present at the murder of others without risking my life to prevent it, I feel
guilty in a way not adequately conceivable either legally, politically or
morally. That I live after such a thing has happened weighs upon me as
indelible guilt.371
In the case of being present at a crime It is not enough that I cautiously risk my life to
prevent it; if it happens, and I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I
know from a voice within myself: I am guilty of being still alive.372 As far as the
368. Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, pp.25, 44.
369. Ibid., pp.25, 27, 37.
370. Ibid., pp.25, 33, 34, 64.
371. Ibid., p.26.
372. Ibid., p.65.

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crimes against the Jews are concerned:

We did not go into the streets when our Jewish friends were led away;
we did not scream until we too were destroyed. We preferred to stay
alive, on the feeble, if logical, ground that our death could not have
helped anyone. We are guilty of being alive.373
Beyond this heavily limited survivor guilt, which makes the doubtful assumption
that most Germans had Jewish friends, the wider German population are exonerated
with respect to the extermination of the Jews because they were neither perpetrators, nor
even particularly antisemitic:
. . . the guilty were a few Germans, a small group (plus an indefinite
number of others capable of cooperating under orders). German antiSemitism was not at any time a popular movement. The population failed
to cooperate in the German pogroms; there were no spontaneous acts of
cruelty against Jews. The mass of the people, if it did not feebly express
its resentment, was silent and withdrew.374
The fact that only a handful of evil men was being brought to some form of legal
justice at Nuremberg only served to underline the essentially exonerating view of what
has been called the outlaw theorythat it was a small gang of criminals who had led
the majority of innocent Germans astray. In postwar Germany, according to Mary
Fulbrooks ironic description:
Fine distinctions were drawn between a very small group of perpetrators
and the mass of those to be exonerated. The perpetrators [consisted of]
no more than a handful of evil individuals, Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich
and a few others - the lower-class thugs . . . who had been the sadistic
elements running the camps. In between were the very large numbers
who had merely followed orders, the so-called desk perpetrators, the
professional men and the members of socially elite groups [who] as mere
accessories [were] effectively exonerated.375
There was a practical and political decision for integration over
denazification in the first years of the Federal Republic, a political process described
by Anson Rabinbach as involving the triumph of the view of Nazism which
373. Ibid., p.66.
374. Ibid., p.90.
375. Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999),
pp.59-60.

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emphasized its criminal aspects at the expense of its broad popular basis and deep social
roots in German history and tradition.376 Relegated to the limited justice of Nuremberg,
by the end of the 1940s German guilt became, in Jaspers terminology, largely a
metaphysical question. The majority of the population lived in a state of moral amnesia
between criminal and metaphysical spheres of guilt, and the crime against the
Jews was almost never mentioned and, if it was, then euphemistically and
metaphorically.377
Referring to the time of the German reparations treaty with Israel in 1951,
Rabinbach identifies a deep disjuncture between public professions of responsibility
and popular attitudes.378 This arose, according to Rabinbachs provocative and
convincing analysis, because, as well as demonstrating West Germanys desire to be
accepted internationally as a post-Nazi state, domestically the treaty focused the Nazi
past on the singular crime against the Jews, and consigned all other questions of the
Nazi eraespecially the issue of former Nazisto the periphery. The rediscovery of
the Jewish Question as a way of distancing the German government from the past
created the situation which required that German leaders be more philosemitic than the
German people, whose attitude towards the Jews, and the crimes committed against
them during the Third Reich, remains hugely controversial.
In an article first published in 1959, Theodor Adorno describes how the
Germans had failed to come to terms with the Nazi past. He identifies the appeal of
National Socialism as a form of collective narcissism, which although grievously
damaged by the collapse of the Third Reich, had not been extinguished: . . . secretly,
unconsciously smoldering and therefore especially powerful [this] group narcissism
[was] not destroyed but continued to exist.379

376. Anson Rabinbach, The Jewish Question in the German Question, in Baldwin ed., Reworking the
Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians Debate, pp.45-73, p.47.
377. Ibid., p.49.
378. Ibid., p.50.
379. Adorno, What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?, in Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and
Political Perspective, pp.114-129, p.122.

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Having considered the philosophical analysis of Jaspers and the political

explanations of Rabinbach, we now turn to yet another discourse which attempts to
explain the German problem, a psychoanalytic model. The Germans postwar failure
to come to terms with their behaviour during Hitlers regime was taken up and
elaborated by the German psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in their
influential and groundbreaking study, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective
Behavior, which was written in 1966, and first published in Germany in 1967. The
Mitscherlichs tried to explain the rapid and radical reorientation of many Germans
following their defeat in 1945:
For years the Nazi leaders conduct of the war and their war aims had
been accepted with a minimum of inner detachment; certainly any
reservations the population may have had remained without effect. Yet,
after the total defeat, the theory of an enforced obedience sprang up;
suddenly the leaders (those who could not be found or who had already
been convicted) were alone responsible for putting genocide into
practice. In actual fact, all levels of society, and especially those in
positions of leadershipthat is, industrialists, judges, university
professorshad given the regime their decisive and enthusiastic support;
yet, with its failure, they regarded themselves as automatically absolved
from any personal responsibility.380
The Mitscherlichs analysis of the problem begins, not with the end of the war,
but with the state of untroubled harmony that previously existed between the German
people and Hitler. From the perspective of the German people, the relationship is
described as an infatuation in which the Germans choice of Hitler as their love object
took place on the basis of self-love, and involved the disregard of reality characteristic
of a narcissistic object choice so that, Every command of the idolized object, the
leader, becomes ipso facto just, lawful, and true.381 Freud is quoted on this:
Conscience has no application to anything that is done for the sake of the
object; in the blindness of love, remorselessness is carried to the pitch of
crime. The whole situation can be completely summarized in the

380. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior,
trans. Beverley R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975), p.15.
381. Ibid., p.60.

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formula: The object has been put in the place of the ego ideal.382
According to the Mitscherlichs then, in a formula that has the potential to help
explain not just the behaviour of the German people in general, but also that of the
perpetrators in particular: The hallmark of the psychological mechanism which carries
the mass leader to victory is that, in the conflict between conscience and the
fetishistically flattered ego-ideal, conscience is defeated. Hitler personified a new
conscience, so that, Until the end of the war, obligations of conscience existed only in
relation to the Fhrer. It was only Hitlers failure, not the old conscience, that helped
guilt feelings to break through; only fears of reprisal finally brought about a shift of
conscience, but with the collapse of the Third Reich, the pre-Nazi conscience was
reinstated as if it had never been abrogated.383
Because the Germans did not assimilate Hitler into their own ego, but rather
surrendered their own ego to him, then, on his defeat and death:
. . . in keeping with narcissistic object-cathexis, the leader disappears
from the psychic household like a foreign body. No memory of the
man himself remains, and the crimes committed in his name are derealized, too, behind a veil of denial.384
The egos of those who had been abandoned felt betrayed. These people tried to
externalise this wrecked and dangerous ideal. Now, It was all the fault of the Nazis.
According to the Mitscherlichs, Such distortions of reality serve to protect the
382. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, translation from the Standard
Edition, Vol. XVIII, p.113. Quoted by Mitscherlichs, The Inability to Mourn, p.60.
383. Mitscherlichs, The Inability to Mourn, pp. 57, 19, and 21. Yahil provides a different approach which
seems to be more in accord with the facts, when she argues that pre-Nazi morality was not totally
abolished during the Third Reich, as it is in the Mitscherlichs analysis, but rather that it continued to
exist alongside a Nazi normality, which the Nazi regime had put side by side to and even infiltrated into
the existing German society. It was Hitler, in his own person, who provided the resolution to this
contradiction: the two faces of societyone reflecting the traditional way of life, and the other the
revolutionary racist scheme[were] unified by the Fhrer. In his personality, Hitler not only represented
both, but cast his authority on both, thus belying the inherent contradiction. This unification closed the
rift, eliminated moral conflict, and, easing the passage from one to the other, made it possible to live both
ways at one time. Thus the illusion of a harmonious world was created in which a man could be a loving
parent to his own children while sending masses of other helpless children to their death, carrying out the
orders based on the racist principle of the children-loving Fhrer. This double-consciousness became the
order of the day Yahil, The Double Consciousness of the Nazi Mind and Practice, in Bankier, ed.
Probing the Depths of German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933-1941, pp. 40 and 42-3.
384. Mitscherlichs, The Inability to Mourn, p.61.

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individuals ego, his self-regard, from abrupt devaluations. With the loss of Hitler, as
of any narcissistic object, there was a loss of self-esteem. In cases like this: The pain is
not in grief for the lost object, instead, the grief is for oneself and [can lead] to the selfhatred of melancholia [which] is a reproach against the object for having inflicted such a
loss upon ones own self. The Mitscherlichs conclude that, had it not been
counteracted by defence mechanisms, a condition of extreme melancholia would have
been inevitable for a large number of people in postwar Germany because of their
narcissistic love of the Fhrer, and of the crimes they committed in his service.385
The initial defence mechanism, collectively practised in the wake of the
bewilderment and disorientation which the Germans experienced with their defeat, was
the withdrawal of cathecting energies [i.e. the withdrawal of affect] from all the
circumstances related to former enthusiasm for the Third Reich, idealization of the
Fhrer and his doctrine, and, of course, actual criminal acts. The rapidity of the process
can easily hide the fact that it involved a violent rupture with the individuals own
previous identity. As a result, the Nazi past was de-realized, and there was an inability
to mourn Adolf Hitler; the occasion for mourning being not only the death of Hitler as
a real person, but his disappearance as the representation of the collective ego-ideal.
Avoidance of the traumata that can arise from the latter type of loss was the most
immediate reason for the general de-realization, while, Defense against mourning for
the countless victims . . . came later.386
Another defence mechanism was to claim that the Germans had merely obeyed
in good faith the demands of the Fhrer. This explains the postwar tendency of many
Germans to adopt the role of innocent victim:
Each one of them had experienced disappointment of his wishes for
protection and guidance; he had been misled, betrayed, let down, and
finally dispossessed and despised. And yet, he will insist, he was only

385. Ibid., pp.62-63.

386. Ibid., pp.20, 23, 24, 27.

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being obedient; and obedience is, of course, the primary civic duty.387
In these attempts to shake off guilt, it is remarkable how little attention is paid to the
real victims, If somehow, somewhere, one finds an object deserving of sympathy, it
usually turns out to be none other than oneself.388 During the Third Reich:
Germans were prevented by their total self-dedication, and the
dissolution of their own ego in the Fhrers ideals and claims, from
feeling any sympathy for the victims of persecution as human beings.389
Yet, over twenty years after their defeat:
Germans still have no emotional perception of the real people whom
[sic] they were ready to sacrifice to their dream of being a master race: as
people, these have remained part of the de-realized reality.390
Perhaps the Germans inability to mourn their victims is not so surprising
given that according to the Mitscherlichs own definition, Mourning arises when the
lost object was loved for its own sake. . . . mourning can only occur when one
individual is capable of empathy with another. The death of Hitler was an occasion
for mourning because he was an important part of the emotional world of the German
people:
If we analyze the psychological phenomenon of mourning, we find grief
at the loss of an individual with whom the mourner was united in a deep
emotional relationship. With the mourned object, something has been
lost that was a valuable component of ones own emotional
environment.391
Neither the German Jews during the Third Reich, nor, a fortiori, the millions of
murdered east European Jews, were part of the Germans emotional environment. The
Mitscherlichs optimistic conclusion that discovering a capacity to feel compassion for
people never before apprehended behind our distorting projections, would give us back
our ability to mourn cannot be applied to the victims of the Holocaust.392 The time
387. Ibid., p.40.
388. Ibid., p.25.
389. Ibid., p.65.
390. Ibid., p.65.
391. Ibid., p.25.
392. Ibid., p.67.

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when the Germans might have mourned the loss of Hitler has long gone, but creating
empathy for millions of victims where none existed before, and genuinely mourning
their loss, is surely an impossible task.
Having examined the varieties of guilt of those who were adults during the Third
Reich, and the psychological mechanisms that they employed to make life tolerable
following the defeat of Germany, I now move the focus to their children and
grandchildren. The evaluation of the way the Nazi past, and the Holocaust in particular,
is represented by German writers that is attempted below requires a prior understanding
of the various ways in which the descendents of the perpetrator generation have tried
to deal with their onerous legacy.
The Second Generation and the Conspiracy of Silence
How can we regard a house as our own and settle down comfortably in it
when we know there is a corpse in the cellar?393
Once again we realise that the past juts into the present, that we cannot
wipe away this past, that we cannot cleanse ourselves of it that, instead
we must confront it.394
In their foreword to the 1975 American edition of The Inability to Mourn, the
Mitscherlichs identified two distinct psychic processes that were operating in Germany,
the retrospective warding off of real guilt by the older generation and the unwillingness
of the younger to get caught up in the guilt problems of their parents.395 The postwar
generation inherited not guilt so much as the denial of guilt. In many cases the parents
were available to the children only on the condition that the children contributed to the
restitution of the parents damaged selves and thereby entered into complicity with their

393. Barbara Heimannsberg and Christoph J. Schmidt, Psychological Symptoms of the Nazi Heritage,
the introduction to the German edition of Barbara Heimannsberg and Christoph J. Schmidt, eds., The
Collective Silence: German Identity and the Legacy of Shame, trans. Cynthia Oudejans Harris and
Gordon Wheeler (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), pp.3-9, p.3.
394. Wolfgang Thierse, president of the German parliament, referring to a controversy about the
construction of the German national Holocaust memorial in Berlin, quoted in Associated Press, Berlin,
Nazi-row firm to work on Jewish memorial, The Guardian, 14 November 2003, 19.
395. Mitscherlichs, The Inability to Mourn, Authors Foreword to the American Edition, pp.xv-xxi,
p.xx.

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defence mechanisms.396
Barbara Rogers, a relative of the Krupp family who was born in 1950, also
describes the stifling effect of this silence on her generation:
The atmosphere of family silence was conspiratorial; it lay like a heavy,
thick blanket over most postwar children and teenagers. Being taught not
to ask, never to question, many of my generation became . . . blind,
uninformed and ignorant . . .397
Saul Friedlnder describes this silence as the result of a tacit agreement, in a society
where within families and even larger groups most members knew about the
collaboration of other members. Contra the Mitscherlichs, Friedlnder believes this is a
sufficient explanation of the silence.398
Katharina von Kellenbach was born in West Germany in 1960. Her uncle,
Alfred Ebner, the Nazis deputy area commissioner to the city of Pinsk, was accused in
the 1970s of responsibility for the deaths of at least 20,000 Jews. Within Kellenbachs
family, however, Ebner was firmly accepted as a victim of war and of postwar
harassment . . .399 Kellenbach confirms Friedlnders explanation of the silence,
describing her experiences within her own family as an example of how the second
generation were inducted by their elders, into bonds of loyalty and silence: I was
inducted into this family conspiracy that denied the existence of Nazi crimes and
cleansed the biographies of participants. While she experienced herself as the
blameless victim of [her] familys conspiracy of silence, she later came to realise that
her lack of precise knowledge also colluded with the perpetrators desire to conceal
their crimes.400 Kellenbach draws attention to the distinction between the vibrant, if at
396. See Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca,
NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp.34, 46.
397. Barbara Rogers, Facing a Wall of Silence, in Alan L. Berger and Naomi Berger, eds., Second
Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators (Syracuse, New
York: Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp.289-302, p.292.
398. Saul Friedlnder, Some German Struggles with Memory, in Baldwin ed., Reworking the Past:
Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians Debate, pp.27-42, p.29.
399. Katharina von Kellenbach, Vanishing Acts: Perpetrators in Postwar Germany, Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, Vol 17, Number 2, Fall 2003, 305-329, 320.
400. Ibid., 306 and 308.

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times obsessive, public discourse on the past in Germany, and the considerable
reluctance to approach the Holocaust personally and by way of ones own family
involvement.401 As we shall see, even writers like Rachel Seiffert who engage with the
question of German responsibility for the Holocaust in their works of fiction, are
reluctant to discuss their own family history in public, unless, like Bernhard Schlink and
Gnter Grass, it is to stress their innocence. As Kellenbach succinctly puts it: the older
generations message to their children and grandchildren has been soothing and
reaffirming: whoever the Nazis were, they didnt belong to our family.402
There have been extensive studies of the effects of the Holocaust on the children
of survivors, but it was only in the late 1980s that the effects of the Nazi period on the
children of perpetrators was articulated in a number of books of interviews, including
notably Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families403 by Peter Sichrovsky, a journalist who
was born in 1947, the son of Jewish emigrants who had returned to Vienna, and Legacy
of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich404 by Dan Bar-On, an Israeli
professor of behavioural sciences. Gerald Posner, an American author of popular nonfiction (including a book about Doctor Josef Mengele), criticised Sichrovsky and BarOn in his own book of interviews, Hitlers Children: Inside the Families of the Third
Reich, for guaranteeing anonymity to induce the children to speak. Posner thought it
important to know who the father was to understand fully what the child had endured.405
In practice, although Bar-On did agree to keeping his interviewees anonymous (with the
single exception of Heydrichs nephew), there are enough biographical details provided
to make it relatively easy to identify the children of senior Nazis such as Robert Leys
daughter and Martin Bormanns son, and of major perpetrators like Friedrich Jeckelns
daughter (Jeckeln headed Einsatzgruppen first in the Ukraine and later in the Baltic
401. Ibid., 306.
402. Ibid., 320.
403. Peter Sichrovsky, Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families, trans. Jean Steinberg (New York: Basic
Books, 1988), originally published in German as Schuldig geboren: Kinder aus Nazifamilien, 1987.
404. Dan Bar-On, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass.,
and London: Harvard University Press, 1991).
405. Gerald Posner, Hitlers Children: Inside the Families of the Third Reich (London: Heinemann,
1991), p.7.

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States. He was hanged at Riga in 1946).

Mengeles son Rolf, interviewed by Posner, articulates how the children of
famous perpetrators are forced to confront issues which other Germans of their
generation find less of a problem:
More than any other German group . . . we are faced with these issues.
The other Germans say, Okay, it happened, and it is too bad, but its
done and lets get on with our life. They dont get involved as much as
we, the children of the direct participants. I must always seem to have an
answer for what he did. He is gone, but he has left me here to answer the
questions of what he did and why he did it. He is gone but I must bear
the burden.406
Although as Bar-On says . . . the children of perpetrators are unhappy
reminders of the burden of the past rather than a source of truth. German society prefers
a more convenient history, more comforting illusions,407 they provide examples of
confrontations with the crimes of the Third Reich which other members of the second
generation were mostly successful in avoiding.
Stephan Lebert, a German journalist and newspaper editor, whose My Fathers
Keeper follows up interviews with the children of leading Nazis which his father had
conducted in 1959, raises the question of the degree to which these children might
themselves be considered victims:
Is a leading Nazis son or daughter a victim too? One might argue that
[they] find themselves on the boundary between perpetrators and
victims, insofar as they are forced to take a position on what their father
did. . . . as for victimhood, arent they haunted their whole life through
by a curse arising from events for which they bear no responsibility?408
This is a sensitive issue. Any comparison between Holocaust victims and the children of
perpetrators, is clearly inappropriate (as in the case of Stefan below), but this is not to
underestimate the heavy burden involved in being the child of a perpetrator. Given a
406. Ibid., p.144.
407. Bar-On, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich, pp.328-9.
408. Stephan and Norbert Lebert, My Fathers Keeper: The Children of the Nazi Leaders An Intimate
History of Damage and Denial, trans. Julian Evans (London: Little, Brown and Company, 2001), p.210.
First published in Germany in 2000 as Denn Du trgst meinem Namen.

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choice, most people would surely prefer to be the child of a victim than of a perpetrator.
Of all the interviewers, it is Sichrovsky who is most successful in illustrating the
claimed victimhood of both the Nazi parents and their children. Monika, born in
1947, whose father had been in the SS, is one of the few children who confronts this
problem openly, and comes to realise the importance of refusing to continue to see her
parents as victims:
My greatest problem is to avoid becoming like my parents, given their
past. I know what I have in common with them. And I wasnt able to
change, to make myself over, until I stopped thinking of them as victims.
I also saw myself as the victim of their upbringing and their past. But as
soon as I stopped seeing my parents as victims I became able to distance
myself from them. . . . I have become convinced that they must be
counted among the perpetrators. But when I was small, as a child, I saw
something altogether different. They were refugees with very little
money, frightened people living from hand to mouth. Thats not what
perpetrators are supposed to look like. They saw themselves as victims
and felt like victims, and thats how I saw them as well.409
As we shall see, the question of German victimhood remains a controversial issue in the
twenty-first century. Another of Sichrovskys interviewees, Stefan, the son of an SS
officer, continued to represent himself as a victim, and even had the temerity to compare
his plight with that of the Nazis Jewish victims: Im in the same boat as you. I was the
Jew in my family. Moreover, as the child of a Nazi his suffering was more recent than
that of the Jews:
Theres all that talk about you Jews being the victims of the war. But for
those of you who survived, the suffering ended with Hitlers death [!].
But for us, the children of the Nazis, it didnt end. When their world
collapsed . . . the heroes of the Third Reich staked out another
battlegroundthe family. . . . Im sure that in the old days my father
brutalized Jews, but after the war there werent any left. There was only
me.410
There was therefore no good reason why he should feel anything special for the Nazis
victims:

409. Sichrovsky, Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families, p.106.

410. Ibid., pp.137-9.

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Im not responsible for what my father did. I wasnt born then and have
nothing to do with it. And I dont feel responsible for it. And I think that
words like complicity and shared responsibility or continuing to
mourn are inappropriate. I cant apologize for what my father did. Its
he who did it, not I. . . . I am entirely different person, perhaps even his
exact opposite. I think of myself as being in the other camp, someone
who is suffering under him just as all those others during the Third
Reich. But Ive been mistreated by him all my life! Why am I now
supposed to feel any special compassion for the victims of National
Socialism?411
Most of the children do not take such an extreme position as Stefan, with his
claim that he and the other children of the Nazis have replaced the Jewish survivors and
their children in the hierarchy of victims. Many of these German children, reluctantly,
accept a degree of inherited guilt. One of Bar-Ons interviewees, born in 1947, whose
father was stationed in an extermination camp and who had committed suicide when his
son was eight months old, described the nature of the inheritance from his father as
formative and unavoidable:
It shaped and continues to shape me in that I think it places a certain
moral guilt upon a person . . . Of course, what is moral guilt? I mean, I
wasnt directly involved. But you think, well, after all, he was your
father. . . . I have no personal guilt in the matter. But certainly one does
feel different from others . . .412
The daughter, born in 1943, of an Einsatzgruppe Commander who was arrested in 1962,
takes a similar position, but is more forthright about accepting the guilt her father failed
to feel:
I have taken over the guilt my father didnt feel, or didnt show me he
felt. In rational terms, its absurd, I mean, I had nothing to do with it.
And I used to think that because I had nothing to do with it, I was
untouched by it.413
Sichrovskys interview with Brigitte and Rainer, the children of a highranking officer in the Wehrmacht, is one of the most disturbing, because the daughter
who defends her fathers behaviour, but refuses to accept that her identity is in any way

411. Ibid., p.140.

412. Bar-On, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich, pp.54, 56.
413. Ibid., p.266.

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shaped by her fathers Nazi past, is portrayed as a stronger and more independent
character than the son who actively rejects everything his father stood for.
Rainer is a politically active anti-Nazi:
Im waging war on the German past. I long for the day when the last
survivor of the Third Reich will be dead. I look forward to their
extinction. Perhaps then well finally get a chance for a new Germany.414
Brigitte, on the other hand, defiantly attempts to justify her fathers decision to become
a Nazi:
. . . I was proud of our father. He had the courage to join a movement
that held out the promise for a better future. I always defended him
because I understood him. I defended him in school against the lying
teachers who overnight had turned into antifascists . . . I know what
happened back then. . . . But I also know that when my father joined the
Nazis in the thirties he did so enthusiastically, convinced that what he
was doing was right.415
But notwithstanding this robust defence of her father, she resolutely refuses the role of
the child of a perpetrator, insisting that she has responsibility only for her own actions,
while managing to ignore the fact that, although she claims never to have harmed Jews
or anybody else, her actions include the exoneration of her perpetrator father:
I am not the child of a perpetrator. I am not the child of a Nazi . . . I dont
want to be pressed into a mold. I am not willing to live out the fantasy of
psychologists who see in me the twisted child of a Nazi big shot. I
consider myself a human being responsible for her own actions. . . . I
never witnessed the Third Reich, I wasnt in the Hitler Youth, my
neighbors werent deported because they were Jews . . . I never
participated and I never looked away. Ive never done anything to harm
anybody.416
Brigitte exposes Rainers desire to see himself as a victim of his father, which is no
more attractive when the supposed victim has excellent anti-Nazi credentials:
Stop whining. Again that victimization. Youre not a victim of your
father. . . . I dont crawl and dont turn myself into an innocent bystander
by pretending that I, along with thousands of others, am the victim of my
414. Sichrovsky, Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families, pp.62-3.
415. Ibid., p.61.
416. Ibid., p.67.

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father.417
Sichrovsky cuts through the complexities of these family relationships when he
describes the stark and difficult choice faced by the children of perpetrators who wanted
to develop a feeling of self-worth:
In order to develop pride, these new Germans have had to reject their
parents, breaking with them completely. The only other alternative open
to them was to follow in their parents footsteps. Either decision is made
with misgivings. The one seems unfair because it means standing up to
ones parents, and the other excuses or even sanctions parental
misdeeds.418
While Sichrovsky appreciates the difficulty of having a Nazi for a father, and
understands that it takes strength and self-assurance to criticise ones parents, let alone
to break with them, he still expects young Germans to break with their parents: In this
instance love of parents . . . cannot be permitted to override all other considerations. . . .
For the children of Nazis the unconditional love of parents is an indulgence they cannot
afford.419 This echoes Auschwitz survivor Jean Amrys bitter outburst:
What happened is no concern of yours because you didnt know, or were
too young, or not even born yet? You should have seen, and your youth
gives you no special privilege, and break with your father.420
The unspoken assumption of Sichrovskys and Amrys harsh injunctions is that there is
no possibility of the perpetrators successfully atoning for their crimes, for if forgiveness
were even a possibility it would not be necessary to require a child to break with its
father.
Besides the children of well-known perpetrators, those who were born in
Germany during or shortly after the war, and who subsequently left to live abroad, are
another group which has confronted the Nazi past more than most Germans of their
generation. Ursula Hegis Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America is a book
417. Ibid., p.66.
418. Ibid., p.171.
419. Ibid., pp.177-8.
420. Jean Amry, At the Minds Limits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1980), p.96.

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of interviews with Germans who, like the author, emigrated to the United States. As
Hegi writes in describing her own experiences:
Perhaps those of us who leave Germany are more constantly aware of the
legacy of being German than people who live in Germany. By becoming
citizens of a foreign country, we are instantly marked as being different.
For many we become representatives of the German. 421
One of Hegis interviewees, Beate, makes a similar point: People who are out of
their familiar surroundings are forced to define it. If you never get out, you dont have
to define it.422
The range of responses among those interviewed by Hegi is as wide as that in
the books of interviews with the children of perpetrators:
While some genuinely attempted to understand their cultural heritage,
quite a few had stayed within the familiar silence and were afraid or
unwilling to look much beyond it. It was not that they didnt speakit
was rather that their silence manifested itself in denial, evasion,
repression, justification, defensiveness, and an inability to mournnot
all that different from the response of our parents generation.423
The status of their parents and themselves as victims, and the question of personal
responsibility for Nazi crimes, are also important issues for this group. Responses range
from Gisela who says What my father did in the war really doesnt have anything to
do with me. . . . If he did horrible things in the concentration camps, I consider him just
as much a victim as anyone he may have victimized,424 to Johanna who refuses to
consider her parents generation, or her own, as victims:
It took me a long time to understand that the people of this generation are
angry at Hitlernot because of what he did, but because he lost the war.
They make it sound as if its because of the atrocities and the Holocaust
and the whole ideology, but thats not the reason. Theyre angry with
Hitlertheir Hitlerbecause he didnt give them what he promised. . . .
Now, when I go back to Germany, I feel nothing has changed. . . . Even
people of my generationand thats what scares medont want to
421. Ursula Hegi, Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America (New York: Touchstone, 1998),
p.42.
422. Ibid., p.241.
423. Ibid., p.288.
424. Ibid., p.248.

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think about it too much. [The claim now that] its been overdone in
school . . . is still a form of denial.425
Johanna goes on to define the responsibility of her generation in practical, concrete
terms: I read somewhere that, being born in 1949, Im not responsible for what
happened, but I am responsible now every time the subject comes up. Every time people
talk about it, Im responsible in my own reaction, my response.426
The theme of Hegis work is the silence of the Germans about the Nazi past.
Some try to find a positive aspect; Katharina says, The Holocaust was unspeakable,
and the silenceeventuallyspoke much louder than the words would have.427 Hegi,
however, describes the outcome in more negative terms: I came to understand . . . how
the pervasive silence of our childhood still affects us today, that it is our legacy to be
evasive. Overcoming this heritage is a long-term project: My emergence from the
habit of silence has taken decades, and it continues. 428
Before examining the work of Niklas Frank, which represents the kind of radical
break of a perpetrators son from his father envisaged by Sichrovsky and Amry (albeit
a father who was executed when Niklas was still a seven-year-old child), it is
appropriate to make a few remarks about the third generation whose relevance will
become apparent when the work of later writers like Rachel Seiffert is examined in the
next chapter. Sichrovskys interviewee Werner, born in 1946, the son of an SS
officer, describes the three generations in terms of their diminishing guilt, tacitly
admitting that the second generation must accept some responsibility for the crimes of
its parents, but insisting that it should end there, and that the third generation should be
considered innocent: I am something like a connecting link between the guilty and the
guiltless, the son of the guilty and the father of the guiltless.429 Rolf Mengele changed
his surname for the sake of his children: They deserve to grow up without having to
425. Ibid., pp.61, 63.
426. Ibid., p.63.
427. Ibid., p.286.
428. Ibid., p.302.
429. Sichrovsky, Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families, p.147.

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answer for what their grandfather did.430

There are important differences between the experiences of the second and the
third generations. Sichrovsky describes one of the most important in a postscript to his
book:
While those who came of age [after the war] complain that when they
were young they were told next to nothing about the Nazi era, todays
youth complain that all they hear is that they were, and perhaps still are,
a nation of murderers and accomplices.431
In Germany, the response to Sichrovskys book focused overwhelmingly on the
interview with Stefanie, aged nineteen when she was interviewed, whose paternal
grandfather was executed after the war. Stefanie attacks her parents, who are Jehovahs
Witnesses:
They ask God to take pity on him, and they promise to atone for him
through their lives. The only question is, how? Theyre ruining
themselves, and me along with them, only because the old man was
some kind of big shot under the Nazis. I know him from pictures. He
really looked great. The black uniform, the boots, what a guy! And that
haircut, those eyes. I bet they were all afraid of him. Say what you like
about the Nazis, but they looked great. . . . What enthusiasm! Tell me
where you find something like that today.432
Stefanie describes a confrontation with a left-wing history teacher (long hair, beard, ski
sweater, jeansthe works), who carried on about victims, nothing but victims.
Someone in Stefanies class asks him:
Tell us, where was the madness? Why did all those people shout hurrah
and Heil? Why was everybody so enthusiastic? There must have been
something to it. . . . Wed seen the pictures. The laughing kids, the
glowing faces of the women, the streets filled with cheering masses.
Where did all that enthusiasm come from?433
Stefanie describes how the left-wing hero cannot cope with this line of questioning,
and resorts to calling in the headmaster, who delivers a long speech to the pupils in
430. Quoted in Posner, Hitlers Children: Inside the Families of the Third Reich, p.144.
431. Sichrovsky, Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families, p.165.
432. Ibid., p.30.
433. Ibid., pp. 30-1.

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which he tells them that they are covered with guilt and shame. Stefanie totally rejects
this:
Maybe he, not I. I didnt murder anyone, I didnt mistreat anyone, I
didnt cheer Hitler. . . . Im sick and tired of it. Enough that we Germans
are always the bad ones, that we have constantly to be reminded of it.
What does that meanwe started the war, we gassed the Jews, we
devastated Russia. It sure as hell wasnt me.434
It was not Stefanies attack on atonement for Nazi crimes that caused the
reaction to her interview. The idea of atonement has never been popular. The
Mitscherlichs refer to the derisive term atonement Germans which was coined for
the small group which has steadfastly resisted the illusion that guilt can be historically
eliminated by denial.435 What did concern the older generation was how it was possible
for young people to arrive at so uncritical and angrily defensive a stance on the Nazi
era. Sichrovskys explanation is relatively optimistic in its implication that there is little
likelihood of a neo-Nazi resurgence amongst the youth in Germany, but it holds out no
prospect of the younger generation being any more successful than their parents in
coming to terms with the past:
The students feel that they have the same right as the teacher to consider
themselves as part of a generation that did not participate. And more and
more they defend themselves . . . against the schools use of the Nazi
crimes just to put pressure on them. They tend to react with a blatant
display of callousness, indifference, and sympathy with the perpetrators.
Their objective is provocation, not neo-Nazism. 436
The rejection of collective guilt by many in the third generation is
understandable given their personal remoteness from the crimes of their grandparents
generation. But this serves as an excuse to avoid the real issue, which was clarified by
the then German President, Richard von Weizscker, in an address to the Bundestag on
434. Ibid., p.32.
435. Mitscherlichs, The Inability to Mourn, p.29.
The unpopularity of atonement amongst Germans continues. In an opinion poll published by Der Spiegel
in 2001 six out of ten Germans said they felt no guilt or responsibility for the Nazi era, while 61% said
they were fed up with the continual digging at old wounds. 45% agreed with the statement: I am fed
up hearing about the Third Reich and I dont want to hear any more. Kate Connolly, Germans sick of
Nazi atonement, The Guardian, 7 May 2001, p.11.
436. Sichrovsky, Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families, p.164.

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8 May 1985:
The vast majority of todays population were either children then or had
not been born. They cannot profess a guilt of their own for crimes that
they did not commit. No discerning person can expect them to wear a
penitential robe simply because they are Germans. But their forefathers
have left them a grave legacy. All of us, whether guilty or not, whether
old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its
consequences and liable for it. . . . It is not a case of coming to terms
with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or
made not to have happened. However, anyone who closes his eyes to the
past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity
is prone to new risks of infection.437
What is possible, and has not yet been achieved, is a general acceptance that everything
to do with the Nazi past needs to be rejected, not just the criminal actions like the
Holocaust, but also the so-called good aspects, such as the creation of full
employment (a result primarily of re-armament), the building of the Autobahns which
are often mentioned as an achievement of the Third Reich (built mostly by forced
labour, and which the Jews were prohibited from using), and the pleasures of the mass
enthusiasm which followed events like the defeat of France (rarely mentioned publicly
except by neo-Nazis, and adolescents seeking to provoke).438 If German national
identity is to include the celebration of its cultural heritage, and pride in its postwar
economic and political achievements, then it cannot exclude an explicit awareness and
rejection of those parts of its recent history which are and will continue to be shameful.

437. Richard von Weizsckers Address to Bundestag in Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political
Perspective, pp.262-73, p.265.
438. The extent to which the Nazi past should be rejected was an issue in the argument about the
historicisation or normalisation of the Nazi past which was part of the Historians Debate or
Historikerstreit in 1986/7. Even a politically moderate historian such as Martin Broszat argued that: The
fact that this epoch was in general one of infamy should not mean that its many social, economic, and
civilizing forces and efforts at modernization must be deprived of their historical significance solely
because of their connection with National Socialism. Martin Broszat, A Plea for the Historicization of
National Socialism, trans. Thomas Ertman, in Baldwin ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust,
and the Historians Debate, pp.77-87, p.87. Auschwitz survivor Jean Amry, on the other hand, had,
previous to the Historikerstreit, imagined a national community that would reject everything, but
absolutely everything, that it accomplished in the days of its own deepest degradation, and what here and
there may appear as harmless as the Autobahns. Jean Amry, Resentments, in At The Minds Limits,
pp.62-81, p.78.

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Frank the son, psychopath.439

Niklas Frank (Niklas) was born in Munich in March 1939. His father, Hans
Frank, was the Nazi Partys leading jurist, and he was appointed by Hitler as governor
of the Government General in Poland. He was hanged as a war criminal in Nuremberg
prison on 16 October 1946. Niklas became a journalist with Stern magazine, and for six
years studied everything that was published about his father and interviewed many of
his surviving colleagues, before publishing Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (The Father: A
Reckoning) in 1987.440 The book was serialised in Stern. An English translation, with
some variations from the German original, was published in the US under the title In the
Shadow of the Reich in 1991 (Frank).
Public opinion in Germany at the time of the serialisation in Stern was
overwhelmingly critical. Dozens of readers letters appeared in Stern, all on the same
theme: It doesnt matter what your father did, hes still your father and should be
respected.441 Niklas anticipated this response to his work in his dialogue with his dead
father:
Almost every person who has ever spoken with me about you has had a
remarkable urge to defend you to me and has been horrified when I said,
my father was a criminal. They told me this was utterly appalling and
kept on insisting on the virtue of filial pietya virtue that is meant never
to be consumed, not even by the flames of the ovens packed with Jews.
(Frank, pp.21-2)
Niklas claims that he approached his subject with an open mind:
I wanted to learn everything there was to know about you. I was
prepared, as your son, to let mercy temper justice. But the more I learned
about you . . . the more you came to life, and the more I hated you. (p.22)
This might give the impression that Niklass work provides an objective and restrained
criticism of his father. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was not just because

439. Headline from Die Zeit quoted in Lebert, My Fathers Keeper, p.143.
440. Posner, Hitlers Children: Inside the Families of the Third Reich, p.42.
441. Lebert, My Fathers Keeper, p.141.

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Niklas judged and condemned his father that the German public objected to his writing,
it was because he did so using obscene language and images. Stephan Lebert describes
the work, quite accurately, as a cry of rage which exceeded every boundary of
journalistic restraint.442 In one of the most outrageous passages (which was apparently
considered unacceptable by the American publishers) Niklas describes how on the
anniversary of his fathers hanging, he always masturbated over a photo of his father.
The American version reads:
The nights before October 16 were the holiest ones in my rituals of
release. I took almost physical pleasure from your dying. I would begin
to see you: There you would be, walking up and down in your cell . . .
(Frank, p.5)
The German version as translated in Lebert reads:
As a child I made your death my own. In particular, the nights of 16
October were sacred to me. I willed your death. I used to lie down naked
on the stinking linoleum of the toilet, legs spread out, my left had around
my limp penis, and with a gentle rubbing movement I began to see you
walking up and down in your cell . . .443
In an interview conducted by Stephan Lebert, Niklas refers to this controversial
passage: Everybody thought Henry Miller was great, then all of a sudden they say its
gone too far. He was convinced when a Jewish fellow journalist told him that she
thought his masturbating on the anniversary of his fathers death had been a way of
challenging his fathers death with his own lust for life.444
Lebert describes the usual response of left-wing commentators to Niklass work
as it looks as though young Niklas has got a problem. Not a problem we need to
discuss either; he should see a psychiatrist. Niklass book may be tasteless, but as
Lebert argues how could it have been otherwise, with Hans Frank as [its] subject.445 If
one seeks real obscenity and tastelessness, it is present in abundance in the speeches of
Hans Frank, as exemplified by a speech quoted by Niklas which his father made at
442. Ibid., p.140.
443. Ibid., p.145.
444. Ibid., p.152.
445. Ibid., p.141.

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Lemberg (Lvov) on 1 August 1942, the first anniversary of the annexation of Galicia to
the Government General:
It is clear that we, above all we in the Government General, . . .
appreciate what the Fhrer has given us with his gift of the District of
Galicia, and Im not talking here about its Jews. Yes, we still have some
of them around, but well take care of that. Incidentally, I dont seem to
have any of that trash hanging around here today [sic]. Whats going on?
They tell me that there were thousands and thousands of those flatfooted
primitives in this city once upon a timeand there wasnt a single one to
be seen when I arrived. Dont tell me that youve been treating them
badly? And what does the official account record about the reaction to
these words on the part of all the generals and German officials present?
Great hilarity. How can language permit such abominations? (p.225)
In the light of this and much more in the same vein, Niklass wish that his father
had been gassed rather than hanged seems an appropriate response rather than a
symptom of mental illness:
It would have been so perfect if they had sent you alone into one of the
gas chambers after the trial and closed the doors. . . If it had been my
choice, I would much prefer this way of death for you; it has the
advantage of being slower and more agonizing than death by hanging.
(pp.363-4)
At the end of the book Niklas describes how, towards the end of his trial, his
father retracted his earlier qualified admission of guilt with the argument that atrocities
were being committed against Germans in the east which, cancelled out . . . any
possible guilt on the part of our people and nation. (This is an argument that, pointed
the way for our next generation to deal in its own special way with overcoming the
past) (pp.370-1). This is followed by the books memorable final passage:
And now the arm of God reaches down from Heaven [and] is plunged
into your mouth, down through your throat, through your stomach. And
here Gods fingers grab hold, and then He, Supergod, begins to pull His
arm back, slowly, very slowly, and He turns you inside out, skin side in,
with a squishy sucking sound, so that I, amazed by this spectacle of
flesh, come down to you from the judges bench and watch your organs
wriggling on your outside; your face has disappeared inside your head.
Your eyes are gone. I come closer and see your heart anchored to its
tough arteries and veins; its beating like crazy. You are turned upside
down and inside out now, hanging head downward. Your heart is beating
in my face. And I open my mouth and bite into it, into your heart, I take
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bite after bite, until I swallow you and your last flood of lies, until that
pumping heart of yours goes limp and you collapse like a bag in the
witness stand, a horrifying mass of tattered fleshwhile I, an Eternal
zombie, no doubt about it, leap away from you. I will be trying to leap
away from you for the rest of my life. (p.371)
In this striking representation of Hans Frank at Nuremberg the relationship of
the author/son to his dead father is important; the passage would be remarkable but not
an improper representation of Hans Frank, the convicted war criminal, if the author
had no close connection to his subject. It is the father/son relationship which makes the
writing seem transgressive, because it is improper for a son to write in that way about
his father, and this leads to thoughts about the authors psychic health. Niklas should,
however, be compared with others in a similar position. Gudrun Burwitz (ne Himmler)
takes a very different stance towards her own dead father, Heinrich: I look on it as my
lifes work to show him to the world in a different light. Today my father is branded as
the greatest mass murderer of all time. I want to try to revise this image.446 She was
active in the neo-Nazi NPD and in an organisation called Stille Hilfe, which supported
elderly Nazis including Hermine Ryan-Braunsteiner, known as Kobyla the Mare at
Maidanek camp because she trampled women and children to death.447 Edda Goering
disputes the overwhelming evidence that her father, Hermann, condoned the persecution
of the Jews: The things that happened to the Jews were horrible, but quite separate
from my father.448 Stephan Lebert summarises the childrens attitudes:
Except for Martin Bormann [Junior] and Niklas Frank, practically every
one of the offspring has framed their own historical image of the father
along the lines of: he was all right, maybe a little too loyal to the Fhrer
as things turned out, but it was the others who were the real villains.449
The outraged reaction to Niklas Franks work in Germany failed to offer an
alternative approach which would not result in the children of Nazis condoning the
actions of their parents. Far from being an inappropriate or psychopathic response to
being born the son of such a father, Der Vater is a fine example of the courageous
446. Ibid., p.106.
447. Ibid., p.12.
448. Posner, Hitlers Children: Inside the Families of the Third Reich, p.210.
449. Lebert, My Fathers Keeper, p.217.

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confrontation with and rejection of the Nazi heritage needed if a new beginning is truly
desired.

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CHAPTER FIVE
RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCAUST BY GERMAN WRITERS
Wolfgang Koeppens Death in Rome
[Judejahn] said: The Jews are to blame. And [his wife, Eva] replied:
The Jews. . . . Judejahn said: It was betrayal. And she replied:
Betrayal. Jews, he said, international Jewry. And she repeated,
Jews, international Jewry. (Koeppen, p.144)
The high level of hostile criticism directed at Niklas Franks work about his
father was also aimed many years earlier at Wolfgang Koeppens novel Death in Rome.
The novel, described by David Ward as a scathing indictment of recrudescent fascism
and middle-class opportunism,450 is centred on a senior Nazi family nine years after the
collapse of the Third Reich, and in it Nazi ideology and language have not ceased to
exist. In the 50s when Germany wanted severance and disavowal of the past, Koeppen
showed it bonds of steel and blood instead.451
Koeppen (1906-1996) was born in Greifswald, Pomerania. Research by a
Koeppen scholar, Jrg Dring, conducted after Koeppens death indicates that he gave a
distorted version of what happened to him during and immediately after the war.452 A
journalist who had published a novel, Koeppen left Germany in 1935 for what he later
presented as voluntary exile in Holland, prompted by political considerations. In fact
it transpires that he was trying to get away from the risks involved in prolonging his
affair with the wife of an SS officer. He returned to Germany in 1938 having failed to
make his way in exile. He spent most of the war writing screenplays. He later claimed
that none of these was ever made into a film, but this also was far from the truth.
Towards the end of the war, when more and more older men were being drafted,
Koeppen claimed that, as a pacifist, he went underground, living in a cellar in

450. David Ward, Introduction to Wolfgang Koeppen, Pigeons on the Grass, trans. David Ward (New
York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1991), pp.ix-xxiii, p,xvi.
451. Michael Hofmann, Introduction to Koeppen, pp.v-xii, p.ix.
452. See Alexander Scrimgeour, A Leap from the Bridge, London Review of Books, Vol.24, No.24, 12
December 2002, 33-34, 33, citing Jrg Dring, Ich stellte mich unter, ich machte mich klein: Wolfgang
Koeppen 1933-48 (Stroemfeld, 2001).

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Starnberg.453 This cellar was actually a room in the basement of a cliff-top hotel with
a view of a nearby lake. Since he was registered with the home defence troops for the
last months of the war, the claim that he had gone underground was apparently
another fabrication.454
Death in Rome [Tod In Rom] was published in 1954. It is usually considered to
be the third volume of a loose trilogy following Pigeons on the Grass (1951)455 and The
Hothouse (1953)456, whose common theme is to expose the residual effects of Nazism
and the war on German society. An English version was published in 1956457, and a
new translation by Michael Hofmann was published in 1992 (Koeppen). Ernestine
Schlant describes the trilogy as, the first postwar effort to reconnect German literature
to the heritage of high modernism . . ., and refers to the influence of writers like Joyce,
Faulkner, Proust, Kafka, and especially Thomas Mann.458 The allusion to Manns Death
in Venice can be seen as indicating Koeppens discomfort with the literature of the past,
which did little to relate private woes to the brutal force of German history.459
Although praised by critics such as Marcel Reich-Ranicki for the richness and
sensuality of its language, Koeppens indictment of postwar German society was not
well received. Death in Rome sold only 6,000 copies, and no paperback publisher was
interested in the book.460 Hofmann describes the trilogy as works of memory and
continuance and criticism, and believes that this was why the books were savaged by
the press, the response to Koeppens work being characterized by hostility, even
revulsion and repugnance (Neue Zrcher Zeitung).461 Hofmann describes Death in
453. David Scrase, Fact, Fiction, Truth, Lies: The Rights of Imagination and the Rights of History in
Four Holocaust Accounts, in Reflections on the Holocaust: Festschrift for Raul Hilberg (Burlington,
Vermont: The Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, 2001), pp.167-188, p.172.
454. Scrimgeour, A Leap from the Bridge, 33.
455. Wolfgang Koeppen, Pigeons on the Grass, trans. David Ward (New York and London: Holmes &
Meier, 1991).
456. Koeppen, The Hothouse, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta Books, 2002).
457. Koeppen, Death in Rome, trans. Mervyn Savill (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956).
458. Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (New York
and London: Routledge, 1999), p.37.
459. Peter Demetz, Postwar German Literature (New York: Pegasus, 1970), p.170.
460. Schlant, The Language of Silence, pp.37-8.
461. Hofmann, Introduction to Koeppen, p.vii. Hofmann refers to a review of The Hothouse in a
leading German Sunday paper which was headed: Not to be touched with a barge-pole, and to the

174

Rome as a comprehensive and brilliant provocation of an entire nation,462 with its

stress on continuities which imply that a clean break with the Nazi past has not really
been achieved.463
The action of Death in Rome takes place in May 1954, when members of the
Judejahn and Pfaffrath families meet in Rome. The novel was therefore contemporary
when it was first published in the same year, maximising its relevance to the Germany
of that time. Gottlieb Judejahn is a former SS general, condemned to death in absentia at
Nuremberg. His wife Eva (ne Klingspor) is frozen in the past:
. . . the vengeful Fury, her thoughts on dreadful retribution, the true
preserver of the myth of the twentieth century,464 the Fhrers mourner,
the true believer in the Third Reich and in its resurrection . . . (Koeppen,
p.127)
Evas sister is married to Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, now the Oberbrgermeister of
the same town in which he had been a high-ranking Nazi administrator. Pfaffraths son
Dietrich is following his fathers opportunist lead and is planning a career in law, while
his other son, Siegfried, is a composer. Judejahns son, Adolf, is in Rome to be ordained
as a priest. From the same hometown is the conductor, Krenberg and his wife, Ilse,
who is Jewish. Her father, a department store owner, was killed in protective custody
after Pfaffrath had refused her husbands request for help in securing his release. (pp.48,
163)

cancellation of a reading from that novel scheduled for a bookshop in Bonn when the police said they
would be unable to guarantee Koeppens safety. Hofmann, Introduction to The Hothouse, pp.9-20,
p.12.
462. Hofmann, Introduction to Koeppen, p.ix.
463. The postwar continuities with Third Reich are also featured in The Hothouse where the politician,
Keetenheuve, muses that after the war people had naturally remained the same, it didnt even occur to
them to change, merely because the form of government had changed, because the uniforms thronging the
streets and making babies were now olive-green instead of brown, black, and field gray . . . and
Democracy was held in low repute. It failed to galvanize. And the repute of the dictatorship? The people
said nothing. Was it silent because it was still afraid? Or was it silent out of unabating adoration? The jury
acquitted the men of the dictatorship on all charges. The novel also satirises the denials of complicity
with the Nazis widespread in postwar Germany: Where was the protagonist cropping the grass? But of
course there had never been any directors or protagonists. The taxi merely passed a lot of so-called
resisters, who had prevented worse things from happening. Koeppen, The Hothouse, pp. 34, 54, 72.
464. A reference to Alfred Rosenbergs The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930. Second
only to Mein Kampf as a bible of the Nazi movement, but little read even by the other Nazi leaders.

175

Hofmann notes the significance of the characters names. While no one likes or
fits his own first name (the rebels and exiles, for example, are called Adolf and
Siegfried), the surnames of the main characters are both fabrications:
Judejahn from Jude, a Jew, and jahn, not a word but like a cross
between Wahn, madness, and jten, to weed out; and Pfaffrath, from
Pfaffe, a disrespectful term for a priest, and rath, council or counsel.465
The four main characters are identified by Hofmann as representing the four quarters of
the German soul: murder, bureaucracy, theology and music; and he argues that part of
Koeppens point is that you cant have one of them without the others.466 What is less
contentious is that the characters represent a spectrum of postwar attitudes to the recent
Nazi past. Koeppens depiction of the second generations responses to their parents
past foresaw the consequences of parental denial and cover-up. The two cousins, Adolf
Judejahn and Siegfried Pfaffrath, have both rejected their families and their upbringing
in Nazi Party schools. Ernestine Schlant believes it important that neither cousin will
procreate so that, The break with the parent generation that these two younger
Germans symbolize does not lead to renewal through mourning, but to extinction. In
what Schlant describes as Koeppens extremely pessimistic view, the best young
Germans refuse to integrate and contribute to contemporary society while opportunists
like Dietrich Pfaffrath thrive. This anticipates the argument that the Holocaust destroyed
Enlightenment faith in progress. Schlant concludes that:
Koeppen radically insists on discontinuity in face of the continuity that
has appeared to carry the day; he almost abandons any hope that the
Germans will ever come to reflect on the Nazi past, let alone mourn it or
work through it. . . . Just as Siegfried and Adolf are without hope or a
future, so the novel does not point to eventual redemption or
regeneration. Those who embody reason, conscience, and suffering over
the past shatter continuity, while the unrepentant opportunists will live
in, literally, eternal and unchanging hell.467
Schlant rejects the idea that Germans tainted by Nazism should disappear, as a result of

465. Hofmann, Introduction to Koeppen, p.xii.

466. Ibid., p.ix.
467. Schlant, The Language of Silence, pp.41, 49.

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their voluntary refusal to procreate, on the grounds that, Extinction may well be the
most radical disruption of continuity, but in its radicalness it devalues life itself.468
Schlants criticism comes down to the claim that Koeppen denies that the Germans have
even the possibility of redemption, and the belief that the consequences of this are
undesirable. Schlants position implies that German redemption for the crimes of the
Holocaust is possible, and that such an outcome is desirable, whereas, as we have seen,
others like Amry deny this, and Hans Frank, the only senior Nazi to admit
(temporarily) that the murder of the Jews was a crime, acknowledged that, A thousand
years will pass and this guilt of Germany will not be erased. 469 Schlants argument for
keeping open the possibility of German redemption is justified because it is necessary
for the avoidance of despair by the descendents of the perpetrator generation, but any
suggestion that this redemption is imminent is premature, while many Germans,
including the authors of some of the novels I will be considering below, are still unable
to accept responsibility for their history.
Koeppens portrayal of Gottlieb Judejahn as a senior Nazi perpetrator is one of
very few such representations in German literature. As Hoffmann notes, Judejahn has an
immaculate Nazi curriculum vitae taking in The Ruhr Uprising, the Freikorps, the
Kapp Putsch, the Black Reichswehr,470 but what made the character disconcerting in
Germany in the 1950s was that he is totally unrepentant, remains viciously antisemitic
and still uses Nazi language without restraint. Schlant justly praises Koeppens bold use
of this tabooed vocabulary, in which she sees a strategy:
intended to remind readers that this language was in fact their language
in the not-so-distant past. His effort is aimed at perforating the wall of
468. Ibid.,p.50.
469. The Judgement of Nuremberg, 1946 (London: The Stationery Office, 1999), p.124. The claim that
the Germans have redeemed themselves in rather less than a thousand years is made by Thomas
Matussek, the German ambassador to Britain, who attacked history teaching in British schools, claiming
it fuels xenophobia by focusing solely on his countrys Nazi past: I think it is very important that people
know as much as possible about the Nazi period and the Holocaust. But what is equally important is the
history of Germany in the past 45 years and the success story of modern German democracy. This is
necessary to convey to young people that the Germans have learned their lesson and that they have
changed. Jeevan Vasager, History teaching in UK stokes xenophobia, says German envoy, The
Guardian, 9 December 2002, 2.
470. Hofmann, Introduction to Koeppen, pp. x-xi.

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philo-Semitic cover-ups . . . in an effort to provoke a confrontation with

a past that used this language and subvert the silence of denials.471
Judejahn does not regret his wartime atrocities, but rather that the task had not
been completed: Judejahn had no regrets about having killed, he hadnt killed enough.
When Ilse Krenberg is identified to him as the daughter of the department-store Jew
who had been liquidated:
then he regretted that she had escaped; escaped his hands, his boots, his
pistol, the borders had been sealed too late, they had always been too
generous, the bacilli had been allowed to spread throughout Europe, and
they had been the death of a German Europe. . . (Koeppen, p.168)
In what Schlant describes as the novels bitterly ironic coda,472 just before his
own death Judejahn shoots and kills Ilse, thus completing the botched final solution to
the Jewish problem (Koeppen, p.168) 473:
he was the firing squad, he fired all the shots himself, he didnt just give
the orders, orders were disregarded, he had to do his own shooting, and
at the last shot, Ilse Krenberg fell, and the Fhrers command had been
executed. (pp.197-8)
It is not just the unreconstructed Nazism of the Judejahns that is so graphically
presented in the novel, Koeppen also portrays Pfaffraths antisemitism as even more
insidious than Judejahns rant.474 While for Pfaffrath the Nazi past is only referred to
using carefully censored language, he speaks plainly enough about the Jews he
encounters in the present: . . . now that the Jews were back in business internationally,
dishing out fame and prize-money once again (p.33), and in his description of the
people he encounters backstage following a concert in Rome: . . . the whole gesocks,
as Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath yiddishly/antisemitically referred to them. (p.167)475
471. Schlant, The Language of Silence, p.42.
472. Ibid., p.43.
473. This notion of a botched final solution coming from an unrepentant Nazi is reminiscent of Gring
at Nuremberg, where, according to Speer: Once in the prison yard something was said about Jewish
survivors in Hungary. Gring remarked coldly: So, there are still some there? I thought we had knocked
them all off. Somebody slipped up again. Quoted (unreferenced) in Posner, Hitlers Children: Inside the
Families of the Third Reich, p.212.
474. Schlant, The Language of Silence, p.43.
475. Koeppen also describes postwar German antisemitism in Pigeons on the Grass: Frau Behrend drank
Maxwell House coffee. She bought the coffee from the Jew. The Jewsthose were blackhaired people

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As well as describing the continuities of the Nazi past into the 1950s, the novel
has important things to say about the role of art in coming to terms with this past. Music
is presented as the only voice that can effectively express the lament for which words
are shown to be inadequate by Siegfried Pfaffraths inability to express himself at a
dinner given by the Krenbergs. Ilse, the child of a victim, wants to repress painful
memories and therefore rejects Siegfrieds music, which tries to express and to elegise
what has happened. Krenberg, the conductor, on the other hand, wants to humanise the
music, thus, as Schlant says, aligning himself with those who tried to aestheticise the
Holocaust476:
Krenberg smoothed, accented, articulated Siegfrieds score, and
Siegfrieds painful groping . . . under Krenbergs conducting hand, had
become humanistic and enlightened, music for a cultured audience; but
to Siegfried it sounded unfamiliar and disappointing, the feeling now
tamed and striving for harmony . . . (p.6)
Koeppen is perhaps criticising the method of conductors like Herbert von Karajan, but
what he says is equally applicable to works of art which aestheticise the Holocaust
(like Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces477), and perhaps to elements in Koeppens own
text, with its numerous German historical and literary references.478
In 1992, towards the end of Koeppens life, a controversy arose when a book
originally published in 1948 under the name of a Holocaust survivor, Jakob Littner, was
republished with Koeppen as author.479 Koeppen said the book was based on three
pages of notes provided by Littner before he emigrated to America, and that the
publisher had asked him to rewrite them. It later transpired that the notes were actually a
183-page manuscript.480 These original notes written by Littner have now been

who spoke broken German, undesirables, foreigners, drifters who looked at you accusingly through
darkly glistening, nightspun eyes, likely wanting to speak of gas and gravedigging and of execution sites
in the gray of dawn . . . Koeppen, Pigeons on the Grass, p.10.
476. Schlant, The Language of Silence, p.47.
477. Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (London: Bloomsbury, 1997).
478. See Hofmann, Introduction to Koeppen, pp.x-xi.
479. Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch (Notes from a Hole in the Ground). Neither edition has been
translated into English.
480. See Scrimgeour, A Leap from the Bridge, 33.

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published,481 and according to Scrimgeour the extent of Koeppens changes makes it at

least plausible to treat his book as a separate work, although His failure to come clean
about the size of the original suggests he wasnt himself entirely at ease about claiming
authorship.482 According to David Basker, Koeppen gives a brief account, in the
foreword to the 1992 edition, of the circumstances under which the text originally came
about, in which he emphasises his own input into Littners story, and concedes a degree
of personal guilt for Littners fate in that Koeppen, too, was a German who knew what
was happening to Jews but did nothing to stop it, on which Basker comments:
[Koeppen] seems to have no difficulty in appropriating Littners story as
a creative work of his own [and] in view of the fact that Koeppen is so
keen to emphasise that Littners material was simply the catalyst for a
creative reconstruction of his story, an obvious question arises: how can
Koeppen, a non-Jewish German, speaking in what he claims is a work of
fiction on behalf of a Jew who has been through the most terrible
torment, absolve Germans of collective guilt?483
Basker is referring here to comparisons between Littners manuscript and Koeppens
work which reveal that there are additions by Koeppen particularly images that tend
to dehistoricise and additional characterisations of good Germans that tend to blur
the distinctions between victims and perpetrators.484 Basker speculates that Koeppen
had personal reasons for writing from a Jewish perspective in this way because he saw
himself as a victim of the Nazis:
If one accepts . . . that Koeppen felt that he had something in common
with the more obvious victims of Nazi rule, then his readiness . . . to
describe Germany from a Jewish perspective with an absence of hatred
and . . . with a desire to move on from the horrors of the past . . . has a
logic of its own.485

481. Journey through the Night: Jakob Littners Holocaust Memoir, ed. and trans. Kurt Grbler (New
York and London: Continuum, 2000).
482. Scrimgeour, A Leap from the Bridge, 34.
483. David Basker, Whose life is it anyway? Jewish Characters in Wolfgang Koeppens post-war
Fiction, in Pl ODochartaigh, ed., Jews in German Literature since 1945: German-Jewish Literature?
(Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp.637-649, p.645-6.
484. Ibid., p.646.
485. Ibid., p.648. This also applies to Ilse Krenberg in Death in Rome: [Ilse] thought: I dont want
revenge, I never did, revenge is sordid, but I dont want to be reminded, I cant stand to be reminded
(Koeppen, p.188).

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The morality of Koeppens rewriting is certainly questionable given the fact that it is, at
the very least, an overstatement to describe Koeppen as a victim of National Socialism,
or as Basker puts it: It is a moot point whether one can really equate Koeppens career
in the Third Reich with the experience of Jewish people in ghettos and concentration
camps.486
There is an element of irony in this strange controversy, given the criticism of
Krenbergs aestheticising methods in Death in Rome, because Koeppen was not just
accused of plagiarising Littners testimony, he was (in self-contradictory fashion)
attacked by the same critics for aestheticising it: he took liberties with a
straightforward if terrifying narrative to make it into something more literary and
mythic, something more aesthetic.487
Koeppen did not write another novel after Death in Rome. He became famous as
the great silent one who repeatedly promised his publisher a great novel. He
frequently referred in interviews to a novel about life in the Third Reich. When asked
about his own experiences during this period he revealed little, claiming that he didnt
want to discuss his experiences because they were material for a novel. Scrimgeour
suggests that the ambiguous morality of what Koeppen did before 1948 might well
have contributed to his writers block, his failure to transform his biography into
fiction.488 As Germans became more sympathetic to his criticism of the Adenauer era,
Koeppen was held up as a courageous exception to the suppression and denial of the
Nazi past. If Death in Rome is read as an attack on the Germans failure to deal with
their common Nazi past, then it is ironic that the disclosures about Koeppens
fabrications about his own past have led to suggestions that the novels of the 1950s are
a substitute for his failure to deal with his own past in the Third Reich.489
Notwithstanding Koeppens disingenuousness about his own past (and the disclosures
486. Ibid., p.648.
487. Reinhard Zachau quoted by Ralph Blumenthal, Holocaust Memoir Is Reissued, No Longer
Designated Fiction, New York Times, 12 July 2000.
488. Scrimgeour, A Leap from the Bridge, 33, 34.
489. See ibid., 33, citing Jrg Dring.

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are hardly earth-shattering), Death in Rome, with its deep pessimism and
uncompromising honesty, is like Niklas Franks Der Vater, an example of an all-toorare genuine confrontation with the Nazi past by a German writer.
Alfred Andersch: Efraims Book
When a morally compromised author claims the field of aesthetics as a
value-free area it should make his readers stop and think.490
The political, intellectual and literary climate in West Germany in the 1940s and
1950s militated against a deep examination of the legacy of the Nazi past, as we have
seen exemplified by the mostly unenthusiastic reception given to Koeppens trilogy. A
new phase arose following the Eichmann trial of 1961 and the Auschwitz trials in
Frankfurt in 1962-4491, and was ushered in by two plays: Rolf Hochhuths controversial
dramatisation of the wartime failure of Pope Pius XII to intervene on behalf of the Jews
in The Deputy,492 first produced in 1963, and Peter Weisss reconstruction of the
Auschwitz trials in The Investigation,493 first produced in 1965.
Alfred Andersch (1914-1980) was born in Munich. He headed the Bavarian
youth branch of the Communist Party when the Nazis came to power. He was held as a
prisoner in Dachau for three months in 1933, and later in Munich Police headquarters.
His final release coincided with his decision to withdraw from the Party. A manuscript
of his short prose was rejected for publication during the war, but his career as a
novelist began after the war, when he became a prominent literary figure. He was a cofounder of the influential Group 47 whose members included Heinrich Bll, Gnter

490. W.G. Sebald, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: On Alfred Andersch, in W.G. Sebald, On
the Natural History of Destruction (With essays on Alfred Andersch, Jean Amry and Peter Weiss), trans.
Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), pp.107-145, p.133.
491. See Keith Bullivant, The Spectre of the Third Reich: The West German Novel of the 1970s and
National Socialism in Keith Bullivant, ed., After the Death of Literature: West German Writing of the
1970s (Oxford, New York and Munich, Berg Publishers, 1989), pp.139-154, p.141.
492. Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Grove Press, 1964).
493. Peter Weiss, The Investigation: Oratorio in 11 Cantos, trans. Alexander Gross (London and New
York: Marion Boyars, 2000).

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Grass and Jakov Lind.494

Andersch began writing his novel, Efraim, in 1963, during the time of the
Auschwitz trials. It was first published in German in 1967, and in English under the title
Efraims Book in 1970, and confirms the impact of the trials by including testimony
from both the Auschwitz trial and the Treblinka trial (Andersch, pp.143, 296). The
novels eponymous protagonist is a Jew born in Germany whose parents are Holocaust
victims. Although perpetrators are not represented, the novel is of interest because it
raises the question of whether, and if so how, the disclosure that an author may be
morally compromised affects the evaluation of his or her literary work, especially where
the Holocaust is concerned.
Critical reception of Efraim was divided. Hans Schwab-Felisch gave it an
existential, positive reading, seeing it as centred on the problem of identity, but ignored
the fact that the novel focuses on the specific identity of a post-Holocaust German Jew,
although this is why the novel won the Nelly Sachs Prize.495 The particularly influential
Marcel Reich-Ranicki condemned the novel, suggesting that the reason why so many of
the reviews were friendly and respectful was precisely because Andersch has a German
Jew tell the history of his life. Reich-Ranicki attacks Andersch for bathing Efraim in an
unfortunate, sticky-sweet philo-Semitic aura and for trading in clichs and pure
Kitsch. He categorises the novel as insignificant, frighteningly poor, and
embarrassing, and questions whether Andersch had the right to judaize his
protagonist, coming to the conclusion that although there was no objection in principle
to Andersch having a Jew as his leading character, his portrayal of Efraim was a

494. See Peter Demetz, After The Fires: Recent Writing in The Germanies, Austria and Switzerland (San
Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), pp.5-6. Group 47 was co-founded by
Hans Werner Richter in 1947, and met every year until 1967. It was a loose association of authors, critics,
and publishers which provided a forum for reading and discussing new work, and exercised a
considerable influence on West German literature.
495. Hans Schwab-Felisch, Efraim und Andersch, Merkur 10 (1967), 990, cited by Schlant, The
Language of Silence, p.170.

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failure.496
W.G. Sebald in his polemical essay Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea:
On Alfred Andersch repeats this criticism of Efraims Jewishness. Despite
Anderschs efforts to research into the Jewish background of the novel, which included
paying a Doctor Ehrlich of Basel, an authority on Judaism, a fee to look through the
Jewish parts of the novel, Jewish readers, including not only Reich-Ranicki, but Jewish
acquaintances of Andersch, could see nothing Jewish in Efraim.497 But it is not this
failure to create a credible Jewish character which is Sebalds main concern. He accuses
German academic critics, who were generally more sympathetic to Andersch than some
of his contemporary reviewers, of being accomplices in what he terms Anderschs
stratagem of concealment, because they failed to cast light on Anderschs
compromised stance, strikingly obvious as it is, and on the root causes and effects of
such a compromise on literature.498
The novels principal character, George (originally Georg) Efraim, was born in
1920 and brought up in Berlin. His parents send him to live with a relative in London in
1935. He returns to Berlin for the first time in 1962 as a naturalised British journalist,
sent to report on the mood of the city during the Cuban missile crisis and on a private
mission by his editor, the British Keir Horne. This private task is to get news of Esther
Bloch, Hornes illegitimate daughter, born in 1925 as a result of his affair with a Jewish
woman, Marion Bloch. Esther disappeared in Germany before the war; her mother,
496. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Sentimentalitt und Gewissensbisse, in Lauter Verrisse (Munich: Piper,
1970), pp.47-56, cited by Schlant, The Language of Silence, pp.170-1.
497. Sebald, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: On Alfred Andersch, p.140. Sebald cites
Stephan Reinhardt, Alfred Andersch, Eine Biographie (Zrich, 1990), p.423, on the Jewish research by
Doctor Ehrlich.
Andersch seems confused about Efraims religion. Efraim is not a religious Jew: I am not a practising
Jew . . . in fact I know next to nothing of the Jewish religion (p.157). However, having described himself
as not baptized (p.111), he later records that he was baptized a Protestant (p.157). This appears to be
a slipshod inconsistency on Anderschs part, but more significant is that it is unlikely in the extreme that a
Jew, apostate or not, would describe his own physical appearance to himself employing the language of
an antisemitic stereotype, as Efraim does in the following passage: I am not one of those excessively
slender, nervous scholars or musicians, the product of centuries of religious speculation in the ghettos of
Cordoba or Kiev, who have assimilated themselves so perfectly to the Teutons and Slavs as to invite the
hatred of a loathsome hybrid, a pale human toad (p.228).
498. Ibid., p.115.

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Marion, was killed in Auschwitz. Efraim discovers that the nuns running the school
which Esther had attended had approached the British Embassy in Berlin when the
situation became really critical (Andersch, p.263), and asked them to contact Keir
Horne as they were aware that he was the girls natural father. Two weeks later they
were informed that Esthers father wished no steps to be taken in the matter. (p.264)
This, despite the fact, as Efraim describes the situation (using language that understates
the difficulties that German Jews faced if they wanted to leave Germany):
Up to the beginning of the war all Jews were allowed to emigrate. They
merely had to renounce their property. The problem was not whether
Esther would have been allowed to leave Germany, but whether she
would have been admitted to England. And for that a simple affidavit
from her father would have sufficed. (p.264)
Keir Horne knows that he was once asked to save his child. And that he
declined to do so (p.277). Sebald draws attention to the parallels that this tale has with
the story of Anderschs marriage in May 1935 to Angelika Albert, who came from a
German Jewish family. Anderschs biographer Stephan Reinhardt claimed that
Andersch married Angelika to protect her from the consequences of the Nuremberg
Laws.499 The main reason Sebald thinks it impossible to sustain the argument that
Andersch wanted to protect Angelika is that:
. . . after February 1942, when he was separated from her and the
daughter she had by now borne him, he immediately began pressing for a
divorce, which he was granted a year later, on 6 March 1943. There is no
need to go into more detail about the danger to which Angelika Albert
was thus exposed, at a time when mere enforcement of the race laws had
long been overtaken by the implementation of the Final Solution.500
There is more. In his application to be accepted into the Reich Chamber of
Literature on 16 February 1943, Andersch described himself as divorced three weeks

499. Ibid., p.119. Sebald cites Reinhardt, Alfred Andersch, Eine Biographie, pp.55 ff.
Although the Nuremberg Laws were not promulgated until September 1935, there were vociferous
demands for harsh legislation against the Jews in spring 1935, and the issue of banning intermarriage and
outlawing sexual relations between Jews and Aryans was top of the agenda of the demands of the
radicals. Streicher spoke in May of a forthcoming ban on marriages between Jews and Germans. See Ian
Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), pp.563-4.
500. Sebald, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: On Alfred Andersch, p.119.

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before his divorce came through, whereas in October 1944, when he was a POW in
Louisiana he petitioned the authorities for the return of his confiscated papers, and his
submission includes the following (in English): Prevented from free writing, up to
now, my wife being a mongrel of jewish [sic] descent . . .501 Sebald condemns this:
The shocking aspect of this document is the mans aggressive selfrighteousness, the horrible description of Angelika as a mongrel of
jewish descent in terms deriving from the warped notions of racist
ideology and above all that Andersch does not shrink from reclaiming
Angelika as my wife, despite their divorce, and after he had concealed
her existence in his application to the Reich Chamber of Literature. He
could hardly have devised a shabbier trick.502
The charges Sebald makes against Andersch are far more serious than the
comparatively minor revisions to his personal history of which Koeppen has been
accused. In addition to the central charge of abandoning his wife and child when their
lives were at risk, Sebald also accuses Andersch of failing to take the opportunities of
going to Switzerland which were offered to him between 1935 and 1939, quoting
Anderschs admission two years before the end of his life that he chose the wrong
course of action: I could have emigrated, but I did not. To go into internal emigration
under a dictatorship is the worst alternative of all.503 Sebald also questions how
Anderschs employment during the Third Reich by a publishing firm which
concentrated on subjects such as race and racial hygiene could be reconciled with an
internal emigrants idea of himself.504 The question, however, remains how these
moral failings impact on Anderschs literary work.
Sebald provides no information on the fate of Angelika and her daughter
following the divorce, but sees a connection between Anderschs wartime behaviour
towards his family and the way he presents the story of Esther and her mother in
Efraim, suggesting that Anderschs choice of George Efraim as his representative in the
novel (as evidenced by the linguistic style of the novel, which consists entirely of
501. Ibid., pp.121-2. Sebald includes a facsimile of this document.
502. Ibid., pp.122-4.
503. Ibid., p.117.
504. Ibid., p.118.

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Efraims notes), has the paradoxical effect of distancing Andersch from any personal
association with Keir Hornes moral treachery:
The story of the lost daughter (who was betrayed, as Efraim makes clear
to us, by her father) is sidelined in the structure of the text, and depicted
in a way which, paradoxically, allows the author to ignore the fact that in
her he is touching on the trauma of his own moral failure. There are no
links enabling one to identify the fictional figure of Keir Horne with
Andersch the author of the book.505
If Sebald is right then Andersch was playing a dangerous gameif he was
concerned about his public image, then it would surely have been safer for Andersch to
have avoided describing this type of betrayal altogether. However, the kind of
distancing manoeuvre (conscious or otherwise) which Sebald attributes to Andersch is
made credible by other inauthentic elements in the novel. In what Sebald terms the key
scene of the novel506 Efraim is at a party in Berlin. He overhears someone saying that
he intends to go on carousing until Im gassed (bis zur Vergasung), a notorious
phrase still quite prevalent in postwar Germany. Efraim reacts immediately: I went up
to him and asked: What did you say? Then without waiting for an answer, I came in
with an uppercut. . . . I had learned the rudiments of boxing in the army (p.128).
Although he accepts that Andersch intended to reflect legitimate moral outrage in this
episode, Sebald believes that the violent outburst really shows that:
Andersch is involuntarily projecting into the mind of his Jewish
protagonist a German soldier [perhaps himself as a former soldier in the
Wehrmacht?] showing a [stereotypically passive] Jew how best to deal
with his own kind [i.e. using violence, because this is the only language
antisemites understand]. In the sub-text of this scene the roles are
reversed.507
Sebalds interpretation of this episode is convincing, because it is not the only
example of role-reversal in the novel. Efraim speaks as a non-Jewish German rather
than a Jew when expressing the belief that the Holocaust was an accident. Efraim
claims that the Holocaust was the result of pure chance:
505. Ibid., p.138.
506. Ibid., p.139.
507. Ibid., p.140.

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I dislike the word fate, I refuse to see predestination in the gas chambers
no, they were the outcome of various accidents. . . . it was pure chance
that Jews were exterminated twenty years ago and not entirely different
people twenty years earlier or later, now, for instance. (p.143)
He rejects the possibility that the Holocaust was the product of will, because
then one might discover an explanation for it. But there was no explanation for
Auschwitz (p.143). Efraim is right in his belief that the Holocaust was not predestined,
but its dependency on contingent factors, such as Hitlers achievement of power and the
progress of the war, does not warrant the conclusion that it was pure chance that the
Germans attempted to kill all the European Jews in 1941-5. It is simply not credible that
the son of Holocaust victims would believe that the Final Solution was an accident,
rather than what it was: a willed action by a large number of Germans at a particular
time, whose specific victims were the Jews. This idea of gas chambers being the
outcome of various accidents was, however, both congenial and convenient for those,
like Andersch, who were adults in Germany during the Third Reich, and who preferred
both to ignore antisemitism as a causative factor in the murder of the Jews, and to avoid
examining too closely the extent of their own complicity in the crimes authorised by the
regime. This identification of the central character with the generalising idea that the
Holocaust was an accident which could have happened to other victims at another time
is the novels most execrable featureas Ruth Angress points out, having a Jewish
consciousness dominate the novel, lends the authority of the victim to the comforting
idea that Auschwitz happened but wasnt caused.508 The kind of psychological
speculation indulged in by Sebald is unnecessary. The information provided by Sebald
about Anderschs treatment of his wife and child is sufficient prima facie to condemn
his moral behaviour; the prevarications in Efraim are sufficient to condemn his writing.
In this case at least, there is no need to connect the two.

508. Ruth K. Angress, A Jewish Problem in German Postwar Fiction, Modern Judaism, 5 (1985),
215-33, 222.

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Bernhard Schlinks The Reader: a touchstone of moral literacy509 or bad

writing, tendentious moralizing and dishonest imagining?510
We turn now from the novelists Koeppen and Andersch, who were both adults
in Nazi Germany, and as a result were under pressure after the war to adjust the
presentation of their pasts through tactful omissions and other revisions, to a writer
whose concern is to deal with the legacy of the Nazi past on the second generation.
Josephine Hart describes Bernhard Schlink as an allegorist for an entire generation of
post-war German youth for whom the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt was a decisive
event.511
Schlink was born in 1944, in Bethel, near the Dutch border. His parents were
theology students, and his father Edmund became a professor of divinity. Edmund
Schlink was sacked from his university post in 1937 because of his membership of the
Confessing Church, and he became a pastor in Heidelberg.512 After the war he returned
to his university, and was involved with the reconciliation and integration of former
Nazi colleagues. Bernhard Schlink became a professor of law, and was appointed a
judge in 1987. He published his first novel in 1990, followed by a trilogy of detective
books.
The Reader was published in Germany under the title Der Vorleser in 1995, and
in an English translation by Carol Brown Janeway in 1997. It has been translated into
thirty-two languages, and has sold 500,000 copies in Germany, 750,000 in America
(where it featured on Oprah Winfreys television show, and rose to number one on the
New York Times bestseller list), and 200,000 in the UK.513

509. George Steiner, quoted in Josephine Hart, The Reader, The Writer, Telegraph Magazine, 1997/8
[exact date not established], 60-64, 60.
510. Frederic Raphael, letter to The Times Literary Supplement, 8 March 2002, 17.
511. Hart, The Reader, The Writer, 60.
512. Based on this limited information, Hart claims that Schlink does indeed know what his father did in
the war. The Reader, The Writer, 63.
513. See ibid., 60 and 63, Nicholas Wroe, Readers guide to a moral maze, The Guardian Saturday
Review, 9 February 2002, 6-7, 6, and dust jacket of Schlink2.

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The Reader opens in the late 1950s, when 15-year-old Michael Berg has a
sexual relationship with Hanna Schmitz, a 36-year-old tram conductor. Hanna
disappears, and Michael assumes that this is because he hesitated to acknowledge her in
front of his friends. Michael next sees Hanna in the winter of 1965/6 when as a law
student he observes a trial in which as a former SS concentration guard she is accused
with others of taking part in selections, and of responsibility for the deaths of several
hundred Jewish women locked in a burning church during a death march.514 During the
course of the trial it is revealed that while Hanna was a guard at a small camp near
Cracow in 1944/5 she had favourites among the female prisoners who were invariably
weak and delicate young girls. These girls were made to read aloud to her in the
evenings. It becomes apparent, first to the reader, then to Michael, that Hanna is a secret
illiterate, and that this has both affected her behaviour in the past and undermined her
defence in court. Hanna is found guilty and imprisoned. Michael does not visit Hanna in
prison, but he records works of literature on tape and sends them to her during the latter
years of her confinement. Hanna hangs herself just as she is about to be released.
The focus of the novel is not on the Holocaust but, like much of postwar
German writing (both literature and non-fiction), insofar as it refers to the Holocaust its
primary concern is with its impact on Germans, and the victims are rarely mentioned.
Schlinks own description of The Reader is quite open about this:
It is definitely not a book about the Holocaust. It is a book about how
the second generation attempted to come to terms with the Holocaust and
the role in it played by their fathers generation.515
Schlink unambiguously defines the central relationship in the novel, that
between Michael and Hanna, as representing the relationship between the two
generations:
514. Marianne Friedrich identifies striking parallels with the Majdanek trial in Dsseldorf (1975-81), in
which out of five female camp guards the exceptionally cruel guard Hermine Ryan (known as the
Mare) was sentenced to life in prison. Marianne M. Friedrich, Bernhard Schlink, Kremer, ed.,
Holocaust Literature, pp.1110-7, p.1112. There is a reference to a comparison between Hanna and this
notorious guard in The Reader (Schlink1, pp.118-9).
515. Wroe, Readers guide to a moral maze, 7.

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The relationship between Hanna and the boy represents the relationship
between the first and second generation, who loved their parents
innocently and then, when faced with irrefutable proof of Nazi atrocity,
continued to love them. For example, not one single friend of mine
ceased to love their parents.516
The substitution of erotic obsession for the power of a childs love for its parents allows
Schlink to deflect attention from what he claims Hannas crimes represent: the crimes of
the parents. Michael, in later years, becomes critical of the behaviour of his own (and
Schlinks) generation in condemning their parents without discrimination:
My father did not want to talk about himself, but I knew that he had lost
his job as a university lecturer in philosophy for scheduling a lecture on
Spinoza, and got himself and us through the war as an editor for a house
that published hiking maps and books. How did I decide that he too was
under sentence of shame? But I did. We all condemned our parents to
shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they
had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst. (Schlink1, p.90)
The apparent total innocence of Michaels father (I had no one to point at.
Certainly not my parents, because I had nothing to accuse them of (p.168).) parallels
that of Schlinks own father. Michaels implicit complete exoneration of his father
ignores the categories of guilt which Jaspers identified. An adult living in the Third
Reich did not need to be a perpetrator of crimes to be politically, morally or
metaphysically guilty. If one excepts the tiny number of active resisters, Germans did
not have to be enthusiastic Nazis to share moral responsibilitylecturers on Spinoza
and editors of hiking maps are not automatically exempt; it was not just a question of
tolerating perpetrators after 1945.
Schlinks refusal to endorse the blanket condemnation of their parents
generation adopted by many of the 1968ers is reflected in his treatment of Hanna in
The Reader. Frank Finlay links this to the distancing effect of German reunification, and
associated demands to treat Germany like a normal state again, being reflected in the
way perpetrators have been depicted in fiction:
For the first time characters who perpetrated crimes could be ordinary
516. Hart, The Reader, The Writer, 63.

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people and even possess some redeeming features, albeit ordinary

people, like Hanna, who committed appalling crimes.517
Faced with criticism for not unambiguously condemning Hanna, Schlink responded
with, I think there is more to it than just condemning, period.518 It is precisely for its
moral discrimination that the novel has been most praised and most condemned. Gabriel
Josipovici, who described The Reader as badly written, sentimental and morally
outrageous, questioned why so many intelligent people, many of them Jews, have
found it so moving and profound.519 In response, Jeremy Adler attributed The Readers
success to its claim to offer new moral insights: It creates the illusion that by reading it,
we have extended our knowledge and sympathy, whereas the opposite is true.520
Frederic Raphael and Cynthia Ozick accused Schlink of making Hannas illiteracy an
excuse for her actions. According to Ozick The Reader, is the product, conscious or
not, of a desire to divert [attention] from the culpability of a normally educated
population in a nation famed for Kultur.521 Raphael described the idea that Hanna had
no alternative to being discovered as illiterate other than joining the SS as not only
silly . . . but also literally unbelievable: how many people joined the SS without having
to fill in a form?522
Asked by Josephine Hart whether he was worried that some readers might be
tempted to grant Hanna a degree of absolution because of her illiteracy, Schlink
responded that he had been very worried: I was afraid that I might be misunderstood,
that people might think it was a whitewashing book.523 Schlink was right to be
concerned. After becoming aware that Hanna is a secret illiterate, Michael reflects on
the motives for Hannas crimes, asking himself, was she vain enough, and evil enough,
517. See Wroe, Readers guide to a moral maze, 6.
518. Ibid., 7.
519. Gabriel Josipovici, letter to The Times Literary Supplement, 15 March 2002, 17.
520. Jeremy Adler, letter to The Times Literary Supplement, 22 March 2002, 17.
521. See Wroe, Readers guide to a moral maze, 6.
522. Raphael, letter to The Times Literary Supplement, 8 March 2002, 17. Heinz Hhne confirms that
literacy was necessary for SS membership. Although standards had dropped considerably by 1943 when
Hanna joined, the SS still considered itself an lite force, and it would have been impossible to hide
illiteracy. See, for example, Hhne on the requirement for candidates to learn the SS catechism. Hhne,
The Order of the Deaths Head, p.148.
523. Hart, The Reader, The Writer, 64.

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to become a criminal simply to avoid exposure? His answer to this question can be
seen as reflecting Michaels lack of objectivity arising from the ongoing effects of his
youthful erotic attachment to Hanna:
Both then and since, I have always rejected this. No, Hanna had not
decided in favour of crime. She had decided against a promotion at
Siemens, and had fallen into a job as a guard. And no, she had not
dispatched the delicate and the weak on transports to Auschwitz because
they had read to her; she had chosen them to read to her because she
wanted to make their last month bearable before their inevitable dispatch
to Auschwitz. And no, at the trial Hanna did not weigh exposure as an
illiterate against exposure as a criminal. She did not calculate and she did
not manoeuvre. She accepted that she would be called to account, and
simply did not wish to endure further exposure. She was not pursuing her
own interests, but fighting for her own truth, her own justice. (pp.132-3)
This favourable verdict on Hanna is not presented as an objective assessment,
for Michael is no neutral observer, and moreover feels guilty of having loved a
criminal (p.133), which might incline him towards giving Hanna the benefit of the
doubt so as to diminish his feeling of guilt by association. Nevertheless, despite their
overtly subjective nature, Michaels exculpatory conclusions about Hanna still stand as
a possible interpretation of her behaviour, and have the apparent advantage of being
reached by someone who has made a real effort to understand her, and refuses to
condemn her out of hand. In a key passage, Michael cannot resolve the contradictions
between understanding and condemnation:
I wanted simultaneously to understand Hannas crime and to condemn it.
But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the
feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I
condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for
understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to
understand her meant betraying her all over again. I could not resolve
this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks understanding and
condemnation. But it was impossible to do both. (p.156)
The task is impossible only because Michael equates understanding with
sympathy and exculpation. It need not be thus. As we have seen, understanding does not
require sympathy. It is perfectly possible to understand (and condemn) a criminals acts
without sympathising with the criminal. Narrationally, Schlink treats Hannas crimes as
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the acts of an individual which demand an explanation in the context of Hannas life
history. He does not situate them in their primary context of the Final Solution, when
killing subhuman Jews was sanctioned by the state, and, for those committed to Nazi
ideology, did not raise any moral issues or questions of conscience. Hannas attitude
towards the Nazi rgime and its ideology is not mentioned; the possibility that she was
an enthusiastic supporter is not considered, rather it seems to be assumed that she was
indifferentpolitically, as well as linguistically, illiterate. Michaels guilt at having
loved a criminal (like a childs love of a perpetrator parent) is only pertinent once the
criminality of the loved one has been exposed (and the child has grown into a
responsible adult). It is at this point that the decision has to be taken whether to excuse
(and better excuses than illiteracy can, and have, been found) or to condemn.524 Any
guilt involved is not guilt by association, but by continuing affection, and is more
relevant to the relationship with a parent than with a former lover.
As we have seen, Michael distances himself from those in his generation who,
when they were students in the 1960s, dissociated themselves from their parents and
thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the wilfully blind,
accommodators and accepters . . . (p.169). He accuses them of parading their selfrighteousness, and wonders:
Was their dissociation of themselves from their parents mere rhetoric:
sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love
for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes?
(p.169)
This is an interesting suggestion, but is noteworthy here because it is made in the
context of Michaels criticism of those who rejected the entire older generation. The

524. See Michaels attempt to explain his feeling of guilt: I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I
pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her. I tried to tell
myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. I tried to talk myself into the
state of innocence in which children love their parents (Schlink1, p.168). Schlinks employment of an
erotic love-story as an allegory of a childs love of its parents complicates the issue by introducing the
element of the lovers choice of the beloved. This irrational erotic element in the relationship deflects
attention away from the responsibility of the innocent lover or grown-up child to take a moral decision
once the guilt of the perpetrator lover or parent has been established.

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Reader can be read as a refutation of this total rejection of the generation of

perpetrators. The thought that others in his generation experienced anything analogous
to his own pain provides Michael with no comfort:
How could it be a comfort that the pain I went through because of my
love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate,
and that it was only more difficult for me to evade, more difficult for me
to manage than for others? (p.169)
Evading, rather than confronting and working through, the legacy of his parents
generation is precisely what Michael (and Schlink) achieves in The Reader.

Schlinks Flights of Love: from bad to worse.

Flights of Love, Schlinks collection of seven stories loosely linked by the theme
of love, or rather the guilt, shame and mistrust that afflict would-be lovers, was
published in German as Liebesfluchten in 2000, and in an English translation by John E.
Woods in 2002. Two of the stories, Girl with Lizard (Schlink2, pp.3-51) and The
Circumcision (pp.197-255), are concerned, like The Reader, with the legacy of the
Holocaust.
In Girl with Lizard, a boys curiosity about the origins of a painting leads him
to worry about his fathers wartime role. After his fathers death, he confronts his
mother with the banal: What did Father do during the war? (p.39) As a judge in a
military court, the father had sentenced an officer to death for helping Jews. In his
defence he claimed that he and another officer had been working with the condemned
man helping Jews to escape, and that the officer who was executed had to be sacrificed
so that they wouldnt all end up dead, especially the Jews who were in danger (p.42).
He insisted that the painting was a gift from the Jews, for helping them to escape. The
mother gives her son a file the father kept of his self-justifications, including a denial
that he had illegally enriched [him]self with the property of Jews (p.45). In the sons

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assessment, his fathers defence, makes for appalling reading. It reads as if he would
be willing to acknowledge everything, but insists he did nothing punishable by law
(p.46).
The son deliberates on what he should do when it transpires that the painting is
valuable:
Should he look for [the painters] heirs and give them the painting? But
he didnt think much of the notion of inheritance. Should he cash the
painting in and make his life easier with the money? Or do good with it?
Did he owe anything to the people his father had treated unjustly?
Because he had profited from his fathers misdeeds?525 (pp.48-9)
Ruling out these other options, the son, in what is clearly a symbolic act, burns the
painting.
Critics of Schlinks stories have complained that a tendency to didactism stifles
the stories as fiction,526 and that is certainly the case with Girl with Lizard. George
Walden, whose verdict on the collection as a whole is that these stories are not just
execrable as literature those dealing with Jewish themes are vulgar and dishonest,
describes the moral dilemma of the narrator of Girl with Lizard as ludicrously
contrived, and summarises the plot as: the young generation, conceived in violence,
rejects its Nazi inheritance. As Walden says, this is All to the good . . . but this
gallumphing, Goody-two-shoes fabrication has nothing to do with literature.527
Any weaknesses in Girl with Lizard pale into insignificance compared with
those of The Circumcision, which generated more critical heat than any of the other
stories in the collection. In The Circumcision Andi, a German student visiting New
York, has a love affair with Sarah, a young Jewish woman. Their relationship is tested
by conflicts both internal and external, and Andi has a circumcision because, we cant
handle the fact that we come from two different worlds. So Im simply changing over to
525. This is noteworthy because perpetrators children rarely mention that they may have profited from
their parents misdeeds.
526. See Wroe, Readers guide to a moral maze, 6.
527. George Walden, Morality or banality, The Sunday Telegraph, 20 January 2002.

196

hers . . . (p.246). Maya Jaggi attacks the ill-judged flippancy of the story, and
accuses Schlink of resorting to caricature and farce.528 Benjamin Markovits is more
sympathetic, blaming the difficulties in the relationship on both cultures, but
acknowledging that Schlink weights the argument slightly [sic] on Andis side.529
Caricature is indeed a central element in The Circumcision: the story is a critique of
the Fawlty Towers-like caricature of all Germans as Nazis, but this is only achieved by
presenting a caricature of Jewish attitudes towards Germans. Andi is full of whingeing
self-pity, but, perhaps because the narrator is not unsympathetic to Andi, Sarah is not
supplied with the responses which would expose the fundamental flaws in his argument.
Andi complains that although Sarahs relatives told him their own family
history, they were not interested in his. Sarahs inadequate response to this is: Why
should they pester you to tell your story? They know youre German. Andis reaction
is, for the time being, silent: In view of which all else is irrelevant, is that it? It was
only a thought, he didnt ask it (p.204). Sarahs failure to go beyond They know
youre German, provides the fuel for Andis resentments to build up. Markovits makes
the point that Andi needs to complicate everything, because only complications can in
some measure redeem his past, while Sarah needs to simplify, because only simplicity
does justice to such immeasurable mourning.530 This, however, gives the advantage to
Andi, because although there are sophisticated arguments available to respond to Andi,
Sarah fails to employ them. This is exemplified in the following exchanges between
Andi and Sarah:
[Andi:] . . . both the Holocaust and the war were fifty years ago;
whatever guilt fathers and sons of those generations brought upon
themselves, the generation of their grandchildren has nothing to feel
guilty about . . . (p.226)
Youre not trying to say . . . that what I get from your friends and family
is empathy? At best its curiosity, and very superficial at that. . . . Above
all they meet me with prejudices. You already know everything about the
Germans. And so you already know everything about me. And so you
528. Maya Jaggi, Historys nightmare, The Guardian Saturday Review, 16 February, 2002, 10.
529. Benjamin Markovits, Are words pointless, London Review of Books, 21 March 2002, 32-3, 32.
530. Ibid., 33.

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dont have to be interested in me beyond that. Were not interested

enough in you? Not the way youre interested in us? Why do we so often
have the feeling youre examining us at arms length? And why do we
recognize this kind of cold reception only from Germans? So how
many Germans do you know? Enough, and along with those that
weve been happy to get to know, there are the ones wed rather have not
got to know, but got to know anyway. What was she talking about?
With whom was she comparing him? With Mengele and his cold,
inhuman, dissecting, analytic curiosity? He shook his head. He didnt
want to ask what she meant. He didnt want to know what she meant.
(pp.235-6)
You like everything in good order. . . . Tina [a friend of Sarah] would
say its the Nazi in you. Im sorry, but Ive had enough of all that. The
Nazi in me, the German in meIve had enough of it. Whats wrong?
Why the violent reaction? I know that youre no Nazi, and I dont hold it
against you that youre German. And whats that supposed to mean,
that you dont hold it against me that Im German? Whats there to hold
against me that you so generously dont hold against me? (p.238)
I was head over heels in love with you after three days, even though
youre German. Dont you understand what upsets me? . . . How
would you feel if I were to say to you that I love you even though youre
Jewish? That my friends look for what is Jewish about you? That they
actually think its a bad thing that Im going with a Jewish girl, but still
like you anyway? Wouldnt you think thats anti-Semitic idiocy? So why
is it so hard to understand that I find anti-German prejudice equally
idiotic . . . How dare you compare the two . . . the Jews never hurt
anybody. The Germans killed six million Jews. . . . What have I got to
do with . . . [ellipsis in original] What do you have to do with the
Holocaust? Youre German, thats what you have to do with the
Holocaust. (pp.239-40)
These lengthy quotations are justified because they confirm the one-sidedness of
the argument. Sarah, as a fictional character, does act unfairly. When Andi makes his
plea to be treated as an individual, he represents all those second- and third-generation
Germans who want to normalise the recent German past. It appears to be a sentiment
that might be applauded by any liberal who rejects the biblical notion of the sins of the
fathers being visited on their children. No one enjoys being the object of prejudice, and
few would not empathise with Andis complaint: I dont understand not being taken
for the person I am, but some abstract idea, some construct, some creature of prejudice
(pp.241). Nevertheless, this superficially attractive position depends on essentialist
assumptions; in its simplistic form it involves treating individuals as though they were

198

sui generis, and rejecting the more credible notions that individuality (like
nationality) is a construct, that nationality is an important part of what goes to make
up an individual, and that German nationality cannot be isolated from the memory of
the Third Reich.
It is one thing to endorse the increasingly vociferous claim that many Germans
were innocent victims of the war (and Gnter Grasss contribution to this issue, in his
novel Crabwalk, will be discussed below), but it is quite another to fail, as Andi does, to
see any irony in a German claiming to be the innocent victim of Jewish prejudice. There
is some justification in Waldens emotional response:
On the Holocaust Schlink is worse than bad, he is pernicious, since he
uses a subject of the most sombre import for dubious motives and
meretricious effects.531
Without necessarily endorsing Waldens litist assumptions, there is also an element of
truth in his reflection after reading Schlink, that, for millions of people good writing
can be measured by the subjects it treats (the Jewish issue, relationships) and by the
worthiness of its sentiments.532

Rachel Seifferts The Dark Room.

We now turn from Schlink, who sees himself as representative of the German
second generation, to a writer, who, although not born in Germany, can properly be
described as coming from the third generation. Hegis comments about German
immigrants in the USA, quoted in the previous chapter, can also be applied to the
children of immigrants: Perhaps [they] are more constantly aware of the legacy of
being German than people who live in Germany.533

531. Walden, Morality or banality.

532. Ibid.
533. Hegi, Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America (New York: Touchstone, 1998), p.42.

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Rachel Seiffert was born in Oxford in 1971. She grew up in England and was
brought up bilingually by her German mother and Australian father, who met in Berlin
before moving to England. Her fathers great-great-grandfather emigrated from
Germany to Australia in 1835. Seiffert describes herself as a half-German (although it
is unclear whether she considers the other half to be Australian or British), and
emphasises her German origins: I have always been close to my German family . . .
and the German part of my identity has always been important to me. She was bullied
for being a Nazi as a child. This led to a feeling of shame at being German, a feeling
she only admitted to her family many years later. She credits her family with being open
with her when she asked them questions about the Holocaust and the Third Reich, but
refuses to discuss her German relatives connections with the Nazis beyond admitting
that some of them were in the Hitler Youth (After a while it was compulsory).534
One of the short stories Seiffert wrote while on a creative writing course in
Glasgow became Helmut, the first part of a trilogy of stories published in the UK and
eight other countries in 2001 as her dbut novel, The Dark Room. The novel was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize. Seiffert describes The Dark Room as a novel in three
parts [Helmut, Dore, and Micha] about children and grandchildren of Nazis. The
stories, which are linked thematically, but not as a narrative, take place at three different
time pointsbefore and during the war, just after the war, and in the late 1990s. Seiffert
ascribes her decision to use these different time frames to her conviction that the subject
of the Nazi past is not closed in Germany: its still very much present.535 Unlike those
who want the legacy of the Holocaust to stop at the second generation, and who stress
the innocence of the third generation, Seiffert continues in the tradition of Koeppen
by acknowledging that the effects on Germans will be long-term:
What I really wanted to do with the book was to say that for the German
side, as well as for the survivors of the Holocaust, time doesnt stop at
the end of the war. People dont stop. It all carries on, and it carries on
534. BBC Author Profile for Rachel Seiffert: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/books/author/seiffert/index.shtml
and Aaron Hicklin, Dont look back in anger, Sunday Herald, 17 June 2001.
535. Interview with Seiffert. The Peoples Booker: http://bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/education/betsie/parser.pl

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through generations.536
Seiffert has woven her interest in film and photography into the novel. The title,
The Dark Room, refers to the place where a picture develops, an image becomes clear.
Her work in cutting rooms in the film industry influenced her in editing down the action
to what she considered the minimum necessary to tell the story.537 Although the novel
received mainly positive reviews for its courage and candour, as well as for its clarity
and simplicity, some disliked its spare style. Martin Chalmers criticised what he
described as the woodenness of the language, and accused Seiffert of par[ing] down
her prose to the point where it has no weight at all.538 James Hopkin described the
novel as suitable for school reading lists because it is intelligent, but not difficult, but
felt the adult reader would yearn for a little more substance and a little less design.539
These estimates are rather harsh, but there is some force in Hopkins criticism. Seiffert
can seem rather didactic in the way her themes are inserted, especially in the third story,
where, for example, Mina, the partner of the main character, is given Turkish origins in
a rather overt attempt to point out the continuities of German racism: Minas father
says, I am Turkish: that doesnt change. Germany is racist: that doesnt change
(Seiffert, p.235).
In the first story the eponymous Helmut is a young man in wartime Berlin. He is
patriotic, but cannot join the armed forces because of the partial paralysis of his arm.
Helmuts disability excludes him from a society which rejected, and in many cases
murdered, those with physical and mental handicaps, and his particular disability
symbolically prevents him from making the Nazi salute: alone in his room, he lifts his
arm out in front of him, as high as it will go: just below shoulder height now (p.25). He
nevertheless embodies a perfect patriotism:
There are plenty of young men here, all willing to die for Fhrer and
Vaterland, in the service of the next one thousand years. Helmut still
536. Quoted by Benedicte Page, The burden of history, The Bookseller, 13 April 2001, 28.
537. See BBC Author Profile for Rachel Seiffert
538. Martin Chalmers, One Reich, one Volk, one dimension, The Independent, 29 June 2001.
539. James Hopkin, Slow healing, The Guardian Review, 28 July 2001, 10.

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counts himself among them, aches and yearns for uniform, active
service, Kamaraden. But he knows, he knows. Because of his arm, his
fault, his flaw, he is left behind, while everyone else moves on into the
Lebensraum beyond. (pp.28-9)
Helmut becomes a photographers assistant and photographs a round-up of gypsies and
the destruction of Berlin, but he is unable to grasp the ideological significance of what
he witnesses. He remains inwardly blind to his own pictures; they do not enlighten or
alter him, and he remains complicit in the spirit if not in the deed to the bitter end. In the
dying days of the Reich, The order comes for the last stand of the German people and
Helmut is finally given his chance. He is issued with a greatcoat, an armband and a
shovel, and experiences this as the best time of his life (p.60). Helmut, in his pathetic
naivety, represents one of those ordinary Germans who, Seiffert insists, were not
intrinsically evil: They were not all nasty Nazis. Many were just ordinary people
caught up in that time.540
In the second story, it is 1945 and 12-year-old Lore is stranded with her younger
siblings when her Nazi parents are arrested by the Americans. Lore knows she must
throw the familys swastika badges away, but is not sure why. The children set off on an
journey across a defeated and demoralised Germany, from Bavaria to their
grandmothers home in Hamburg. On the way they fall in with Thomas, apparently a
Holocaust survivor, who it turns out has stolen the identity of a murdered Jew, because
Americans like Jews (p.209). Lore, in a symbolic laying to rest, burns the dead mans
belongings (p.210). The children see the explicit photographs from the liberated camps
which were put on public display by the occupation authorities, and overhear people
claiming that they are fakes staged by the Americans using actors (pp.103, 175). Lore
initially believes this story, but is disabused by two women on a tram, who identify the
corpses in the photographs as Jews who had been killed with gas and guns by men
wearing uniforms similar to her fathers (pp.202-3). Seiffert uses this story to examine
how much German children understood of what was happening in the immediate

540. Quoted by Jim McLean, Novel look at Nazi Germany wins acclaim of critics, The Herald, 2001.

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postwar period, and the way these children acquired knowledge of the guilt of their
parents: I wanted to explore how you come from innocence to realising what your
parents or people of their generation have done. This involved thinking her way into a
time before she knew about the Holocaust, and imagining what it is like to find out.541
The final story is the one which is most directly relevant to our purposes. It is set
in 1997-9, a period when Michael (Micha), who was born in 1967, becomes obsessed
with how he can reconcile his happy memory of his maternal grandfather, his Opa,
Askan Boell (who died at around the time Micha started school), with the discovery that
as a member of the Waffen SS, he had taken part in the shooting of Jews in Belarus.
Micha travels to Belarus where he meets Jozef Kolesnik, a Belarussian collaborator who
had taken part in the shootings, who confirms his grandfathers guilt: He killed people.
I am sorry, Michael. He killed Jews and Belarussian people (p.362).
Although Seiffert covers similar ground to Schlink, in that she, too, explores the
contradiction of being linked by loving family bonds to perpetrators (Schlink, as we
have seen, uses Michaels erotic relationship with Hanna to represent these family
bonds), in The Dark Room there is no possibility, as there is with Hanna in The Reader,
of any sympathy being evoked for the perpetrators. The responses of Seifferts Micha to
his grandfather being revealed as a perpetrator can be read as a riposte to the failure of
Schlinks Michael to consistently resist his inclination to exculpate Hanna.542 Michas
condemnation of his grandfather involves a struggle, because of his love for him when
he was a child:
-I love my Opa, Mina [Michas partner]. He might have done something
terrible. Its just important to me to know.
-Will you still love him if he killed people?
-I dont know. (p.313)
Micha wonders if his Opa took comfort in his children, and then his
grandchildren, too. . . . He didnt deserve to feel comforted. Micha thinks
it, and it feels right, but it also feels impossibly cruel. (p.375)
541. Page, The burden of history, 28.
542. See the passage quoted above in the section on The Reader (Schlink1, pp.132-3).

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Ultimately, however, Michas feelings for his grandfather are determined by the crimes
he committed:
I have the photo. I can say: thats Askan, he was my Opa. Married to my
Oma, even then. And father to my mother, and later my grandfather. And
all the while a murderer, too. (p.370)
Opa, and Jozef. What they did, and they each lived a whole life
afterwards. Micha always finds them in his minds-eye maps; replays the
choices they made; follows the unravelling lines. Years and generations.
No way to change it. Never enough sadness and no forgiveness.
It revolts him when he thinks of them. (p.380)
Michas need to know the truth leads him to question his mothers blind faith in
her father:
He didnt do anything, Michael.
-How do you know?
-I know.
-Have you ever been curious?
-No. Of course not.
-Did you ever ask him?
-I didnt have to.
-How do you know then? How can you know?
-Because I knew my father. (p.297)
Micha argues with his sister, Luise, about her desire to protect their parents from
unpleasant truths about his grandfather:
Mutti and Vati dont need to know. . . . It has to be their choice,
Michael. You cant inflict it on them.
-They would just choose not to know.
-Whats wrong with that? How does it help them to know?
-Why should we protect them from what he did? (pp.301-2)
In contrast to Michas overriding need to discover and transmit the truth about his
grandfather, Luise colludes with the second generations desire to avoid the pain
involved in openly acknowledging their parents guilt, even when the guilty parent is
dead and the possibility of a direct confrontation is avoided. Michas insistence on
openness and honesty also leads him to reject his fathers argument for refusing to
discuss his grandfathers war record. Michas fathers insistence that: I wanted to stop
it with our generation. . . . I didnt want you and Luise to be touched by it. Askan loved
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you both. Thats the part of him I wanted you to have (p.318), is representative of the
stance of the second generation. Despite widespread collusion with their parents in the
repression of the truth, they were aware of their parents guilt at some level, but were
determined that this should not be transmitted to their own children. The differing
responses of the third generation to this continuing attempt to hide the truth are typified
by Luise and Micha.
As a teacher, Micha has definite ideas about how the history of the Holocaust
should be transmitted to the next generation. He complains to Mina about the annual
commemoration performed in his own school:
-Every year its the fucking same. The students read survivors accounts.
Everyone cries these we didnt do it tears. Then the essays get marked,
the displays are packed away, and we move right on with the next project
. . . its perverse, Mina. They identify with the survivors, with the
victims. . . .
-And they shouldnt cry?
-Yes they should cry! But they should cry that we did this. We did this, it
wasnt done to us. . . .They shouldnt only cry about the things that
happened, they should cry because we made them happen.
-But we didnt do it. It was another generation.
-But were related. Its still us. I mean, I cant be the only one. There
must be others in that hall with grandfathers like mine. (p.289)
Micha is concerned that the next generation are being taught to ignore their personal
connections to the perpetrators:
They are being taught that there are no perpetrators, only victims. They
are being taught like it just happened, you know, just out of the blue
people came along and did it and then disappeared. Not the same people
who lived in the same towns and did the same jobs and had children and
grandchildren after the war. (p.290)
Micha is also noteworthy because it convincingly portrays a perpetrator, and
examines his motivation as well as the impossibility of his atonement. This perpetrator
is not Opa Askan, who is only a shadowy presence, but the Belarussian Jozef
Kolesnik. Kolesnik transferred his hatred for the Communists who had arrested his
father to the Jews, and volunteered as a shooter, although he admits to Micha that he

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was aware it was wrong at the time. When questioned by Micha, he does not make any
attempt to justify his past behaviour:
I can give all these reasons. I lost my father, I was hungry, I wanted to
help my family, orders were orders, I was not responsible, they said the
Jews were Communists, Communists caused my pain. Over and over I
can say these things. Nothing changes. I chose to kill. (p.345)
Kolesnik accepts that there is no one who can forgive him. When Micha asks him
whether he feels sorry for what he did, he responds with: How can I apologise? Who
can I apologise to? Who is there to forgive me? Although he had spent seventeen years
in prison in Russia, he does not argue that this was sufficient: I think there is no
punishment for what I did. Not enough sadness and no punishment (pp.355-6).
Some critics interpret the ending of Micha as optimistic. After refusing to visit
Askans widow, Oma Kaethe, after his return from Belarus, because he is convinced
that she must have known about her husbands crimes, Micha relents and takes his baby
daughter Dilan to see her. According to David Robson:
The novel ends on a note of cautious optimism. The truth has been
confronted and, with the birth of a new child, Seiffert holds out the hope
that the shadows of the past may be about to lift.543
Jonathan Heawood also describes the ending as pointing towards the diminishing effect
of the past as time passes, although he uses a metaphor where the past is clouded over,
rather than exposed to the light of day:
The last image of the book sees Michas baby daughter waving to the
distant window of his grandmother; as the generations lengthen, so the
image of the past clouds over.544
This would seem to be confirmed by Seiffert:
Our generation is the last that has a contact, an emotional or human
contact, with survivors or perpetrators, and for our children it will be
something that happened to other people, done by other people, and they

543. David Robson, Long shadow of the Nazis, Sunday Telegraph, 8 July 2001.
544. Jonathan Heawood, Paperback of the week, The Observer Review, 13 January 2002, 18.

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wont have that physical connection.545

This optimism, if that is what it is, is heavily qualified within the story, because even a
baby born over fifty years after the end of the war, is vulnerable to the love of a guilty
relative:
Micha looks into his daughters face, watches her accept another family
member without a flicker. Her family map spreads out; unproblematic,
curious, unhesitant. Painful for Micha to see. (p.390)
The victims in this novel are not the victims of the Holocaust, but rather, the
German people struggling to understand what could have taken place in their midst.546
This is acknowledged within the text. Micha admits to Mina, that: Even when I cry
about [the Holocaust], Im crying for myself. Not for the people who were killed
(p.377). This awareness, that the German concern with the legacy of the Holocaust
(perhaps inevitably) excludes its real victims, is an important advance in representation
compared with the self-obsession of Michael in The Reader and Andi in The
Circumcision.
Seiffert has suggested how the Germans sense of themselves as victims served
to obscure the reality of the Holocaust:
One of the reasons why this period is so difficult for Germans is that they
did suffer a lot themselves, combined with a sense of defeat. But I think
within families the mourning process [for German losses] happened
privately and obliterated the fact that six million Jews were killed.547
The relationship between the victimhood of the Germans and the legacy of the
Holocaust is the subject of Gnter Grasss novel Crabwalk (Grass3), and this, together
with relevant parts of his earlier novels The Tin Drum (Grass1) and From the Diary of a
Snail (Grass2), will now be examined.

545. Quoted by Hicklin in Dont look back in anger. This is even more of an issue for Germans than it
is for Jews. Because there were few survivors, and many families were totally wiped out, it is far more
common for Germans to have a physical connection with the perpetrators of the Holocaust, than for
Jews to have any direct connection with the victims.
546. Zoe Green, The wrong kind of German, The Observer Review, 22 July 2001, 15.
547. Quoted by Hicklin in Dont look back in anger.

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Gnter Grasss The Tin Drum.

Gnter Grass was born in Danzig (now Gdansk) in 1927. His father came from a
family of working-class Germans and owned a grocers shop, and his mother was
Kashubian, a Slav minority from the Danzig area, who were distinct from Poles in
culture and language. Grass belongs to the generation that was just old enough to have
fought in the war. He was a member of the Hitler youth, and following service as a
Luftwaffe helper, he was drafted into the army. He was wounded in April 1945, and
captured by the Americans. In his own assessment, he had been too young to have
been a Nazi but old enough to have been formed by the Nazis.548 After the war he
studied painting and sculpture, and began to write, joining Group 47 in 1955.
In 1959, his novel Die Blechtrommel was published in Germany, and an English
translation by Ralph Manheim was published under the title The Tin Drum in 1962. The
novel was a literary success, both in Germany and internationally. In Germany its
success was combined with controversy. Many Germans were not willing to confront
the images of the Nazi era painted by Grassthe Bremen city authority refused to grant
Grass a literary prize.549 The impact of the novel endures; none of his subsequent novels
has achieved the same fame. When Grass won the Nobel prize for literature in 1999, the
award committee specifically mentioned The Tin Drum. Eva Figes described the novel
as: the book the postwar generation was waiting for. It coped with the tragedy of the
Third Reich with huge energy and scope.550
The Tin Drum creates a surreal and mocking vision of Nazism and the petit
bourgeois milieu in which it thrived. Oskar Matzerath, born in 1924, rejects the
grownup world where he is destined to take over the family grocery business. In order
548. Jonathan Steele, Gnter Grass: Shaper of a nations conscience, Guardian Review, 8 March 2003,
20-23, 22.
549. Peter Demetz, Postwar German Literature (New York: Pegasus, 1970), p.215.
550. Steele, Gnter Grass: Shaper of a nations conscience, 20.

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to avoid this fate he resolves to stop growing: I remained the three-year-old . . . whom
no one could persuade to grow (Grass1, p.43). With his glass-shattering voice, and a
succession of tin drums, he voyages through the world of the Third Reich and beyond.
His father (whose paternity Oskar denies) joins the Nazi Party in 1934:
. . . he always had to wave when other people were waving, to shout,
laugh, and clap when other people were shouting, laughing, and
clapping. That explains why he joined the Party at a relatively early date,
when it was quite unnecessary, brought no benefits, and just wasted his
Sunday mornings. (p.115)
Oskar uses his drum to disrupt Nazi rallies. He does this because, [he] rejected the cut
and color of the uniforms, the rhythm and tone of the music normally played on
rostrums (p.93), rather than for political reasons. He does not see himself as part of the
resistance, and mocks those who, after the war, claimed to be resisters based on the
flimsiest of grounds:
. . . it would never occur to me to set myself up as a resistance fighter
because I disrupted six or seven rallies and threw three or four parades
out of step with my drumming. That word resistance has become very
fashionable. We hear of the spirit of resistance, of resistance circles.
There is even talk of inward resistance, a psychic emigration. Not to
mention those courageous and uncompromising souls who call
themselves Resistance Fighters, men of the Resistance, because they
were fined during the war for not blacking out their bedroom windows
properly. (p.93)
Oskar also mocks German claims of ignorance of Nazi crimes which are made in order
to extinguish feelings of guilt: he refers to, the ignorance which came into style in
those years and which even today quite a few of our citizens wear like a jaunty and oh,
so becoming little hat (p.192).
Although it is only a small part of the story, the fate of the Jews under the Nazis
is a recurring theme. Oskar witnesses Kristallnacht, and the suicide of the Jewish
toystore owner, Sigismund Markus, who had supplied his drums. Referring to Grasss
presentation of Markus, Ernestine Schlant comments that, there is an enormous
difference in the perception of the victims of the Holocaust between a well-intentioned

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gentile writer and his Jewish interpreters,551 and approvingly cites the criticism made
by the Holocaust survivor and literary scholar, Ruth Angress (henceforth referred to as
Ruth Klger, the name under which she published her later works): [Markus is] a
harmless parasite, a Jew without a Jewish community or a family, without a
background, or religious affiliation . . .552 She claims that his life is portrayed by Grass
as essentially worthless:
Since his life seems to consist of nothing but a futile infatuation and a
shopful of rather less than significant objects, not much is lost when this
store is vandalised and he commits suicide. A pathetic, ridiculous victim
has died, who had tried to worm his way into circles where he was not
wanted . . .553
For Klger, the case against this representation of Markus is that Grass sets out through
him to reduce the Holocaust to manageable size by sentimentalizing a victim, and has
simply repeated a stereotype with mitigating variations.554 Schlant argues that, This
assessment weighs heavily, particularly when one considers that Grass is one of the
most explicit among postwar German writers to condemn the Nazi genocide and to
speak about it to his own and the next generation.555 I would argue that Schlant is
wrong to place so much weight on Klgers Jewish interpretation. Leaving aside the
question of the accuracy or otherwise of Klgers description of Markus, her criticism is
based on the undeclared assumption that the victims of the Nazis should be portrayed as
attractive and observant Jews, and is itself a denial of their humanity. Klger also
misses the point that we have raised before: for the purposes of the Holocaust, it was the
Nazis who defined who was a Jew, and their religious practices and integration into the
Jewish community were almost always irrelevant in determining who would become
victims.556

551. Schlant, The Language of Silence, p.70.

552. Ibid., p.70. Angress, A Jewish Problem in German Postwar Fiction, Modern Judaism, 5 (1985),
222.
553. Angress, A Jewish Problem in German Postwar Fiction, 223.
554. Ibid., 222.
555. Schlant, The Language of Silence, p.71.
556. It was only relevant in determining the status of those of mixed race, the Mischlinge.

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Grass is scathing in his representation of Nazi racist values. In an episode in

which Grass applies irony with a thick brush, Meyn, a neighbour of Oskars,
notwithstanding his bravery when persecuting defenceless Jews, is expelled from the
SA for conduct unbecoming a storm trooper because of his cruelty to cats:
Even his conspicuous bravery on the night of November 8, which later
became known as Crystal Night, when he helped set fire to the Langfuhr
synagogue in Michaelisweg, even his meritorious activity the following
morning when a number of stores, carefully designated in advance, were
closed down for the good of the nation, could not halt his expulsion from
the Mounted SA. For inhuman cruelty to animals he was stricken from
the membership list. (p.154)
There are two symbolic episodes in the novel that are worthy of note. In the first,
Russian troops have entered Oskars home following the fall of Danzig. Oskars father
tries to dispose of his Nazi Party badge, but Oskar hands it back to him. Not realising
that the pin is open, his father tries to swallow the badge. This causes him to choke, and
leads to his death when one of the Russian soldiers shoots him. Oskar admits to
deliberately opening the pin, and the symbolism of his father choking on the Nazi Party
badge is made explicit:
. . . it was not true that the pin had been open when I picked up the badge
from the concrete floor. The pin had been opened within my closed hand.
It was a jagged, pointed lozenge that I had passed on to Matzerath,
intending that they find the insignia on him, that he put the Party in his
mouth and choke on iton the Party, on me, his son . . . (p.317)
The second symbolic episode is the story of the onion cellar, in which Grass
satirizes the postwar Germans inability to mourn. Germans, desensitised and
incapable of crying after the war, gather together at Schmuhs Onion Cellar, where, at
great expense, they purchase onions which enable them to shed tears again:
. . . what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of
the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made
them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without
restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away.
(p.412)
The novel includes a relatively early representation of a Holocaust survivor, and

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of an extermination camp. Mariusz Fajngold is a survivor of Treblinka whose large

family have all been gassed. At first, he behaves as though his dead family are still
present:
He called not only Luba his wife, but his whole family into the cellar,
and there is no doubt that he saw them all coming, for he called them by
name: Luba, Lev, Jakub, Berek, Leon, Mendel, and Sonya. (p.312)
As time passes, the illusion gradually fades: Mr. Fajngold called his Luba less and less
often . . . (p.327). Grasss description of a deeply traumatized survivor of a death
camp is a clear signal that he would not follow other postwar German writers in their
avoidance of the issue of the crimes committed by the Germans under the Nazi regime.
There is a brief account in the novel of the uprising at Treblinka, which includes a
mixture of real and fictional characters (p.324).557 There are inaccuracies in Grasss
version, which refers to cremating ovens and to electric fences, which existed in other
camps, most famously at Auschwitz, but not at Treblinka. However, the basic elements
of the uprising story are there, including prisoners breaking into the weapons room
(about which surviving testimonies provide a number of different versions) and the
administration of an oath to the leaders of the uprising by Kurland. Grasss account of
the uprising draws heavily on the testimony of one of the surviving participants, Samuel
Rajzman, given at the Nuremberg trials.558
Grasss The Tin Drum is not a novel about the Holocaust, so Schlants criticism
that, . . . there is an ingrained obtuseness and insensitivity to those who suffered and
died, evident in a language where silence is veiled in verbal dexterity and a creative
exuberance rooted in pre-Holocaust aesthetics,559 is misplaced. The novel was one of
the earliest attempts to grapple with the Nazi past, and remains among the most
important works in postwar German literature.
557. The real people mentioned are the prisoners Zev Kurland and Galewski and the SS guard
Hauptsturmfhrer Kutner (Kttner). The mixture of real and fictional characters in the literary depiction
of Treblinka is discussed in Chapter 1 above.
558. See Julian Preece, Gnter Grass, his Jews and their Critics: from Klger and Gilman to Sebald and
Prawer, in Pl ODochartaigh, ed., Jews in German Literature since 1945: German-Jewish Literature?
pp.609-624, p.616.
559. Schlant, The Language of Silence, p.71.

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From the Diary of a Snail

Grass became increasingly politically active during the 1960s. Aus dem
Tagebuch einer Schnecke was published in Germany in 1972, and an English translation
by Ralph Manheim was published under the title of From the Diary of a Snail in 1974.
The snail in the title is a metaphor for patient but effective progress, and part of the
book is an account of Grasss political campaigning for Willy Brandt and the SPD in the
West German federal elections of 1969. During the campaign Grass kept a diary,
purportedly written for his children. This became the structural backbone for From the
Diary of a Snail.560 The other main strand in the book, which is a montage of
autobiography, fiction, and documents, is the history of the persecuted Danzig Jews.
Grass is the fictionalized narrator, and his family is also fictionalized. The story
of the Danzig Jews is addressed to Grasss young children. As a responsible father,
Grass stresses the continuities with the past, telling his children about the
consequences of intolerance in the past to indicate guidelines for their future behaviour:
Now Ill tell you . . . how it happened where I come fromslowly,
deliberately, and in broad daylight. . . . Its true: youre innocent. I, too,
born almost late enough, am held to be free from guilt. Only if I wanted
to forget, if you were unwilling to learn how it slowly happened, only
then might words of one syllable catch up with us: words like guilt and
shame . . . (Grass2, p.13)
It all begins, children, with: the Jews are. The foreign workers want. The
Social Democrats have. Every petit bourgeois is. The niggers. The leftwingers. The class enemy. . . . Signposts with changing inscriptions but
identical destination: destroy unmask convert smash eliminate pacify
liquidate re-educate isolate exterminate . . . (p.16, second ellipsis in
original)
I was busy telling you in a roundabout way how things came to be as
they are . . . (p.121)
Ideas foreshadow violence. Ideas can be resisted. Consequently,
resistance must begin before ideas take power. (p.144)
560. Ibid., p.71.

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This dimension of the novel fits in well, then, with the category of historical novels in
the sense of Georg Lukcs, i.e. which narrate past events as the pre-history of the
present.561 The two aspects of the novel can only cohere if the narrators support for
Willy Brandt, the former anti-Nazi migr, is seen to be a consequence of the
knowledge of what had been done to the Jews in the Third Reich. It is debatable
whether Grass succeeds in establishing this connection, and From the Diary of a Snail
often reads like two disparate stories which have been subjected to an unsuccessful
attempt to graft them together.
In the part of the novel which describes the history of the Danzig Jews, Grass
describes the complicity of the ordinary Germans of Danzig in their persecution, and
does not avoid references to his own real history as a youth, and later as a soldier:
Many inhabitants of the city [Danzig], standing on sidewalks or
balconies, or looking out of windows from behind flower boxes, took
loud leave of their erstwhile fellow citizens [the last Jewish emigrants
who left the city on 26 August 1940]. Flanking laughter, malicious
jingles, spitting. The young people showed particular zeal. (I wasnt
there; butchildrenI was thirteen and could have been there.) (p.152)
When I was a seventeen-year-old POW, they brought me here [to
Dachau] to educate me: we didnt want to understand; we saw the
showers and cremating chambers, and we didnt believe. (pp.146-7)
All this is evidence that Grass was making a serious attempt to confront the
legacy of the Holocaust. However, his use of a literary form which mixes several
genres, and which blurs the boundary between fact and fiction, used to good effect by
Rymkiewicz in The Final Station: Umschlagplatz to engage with difficult questions
about the representation of the Holocaust and its victims, results in From the Diary of a
Snail in a number of evasions. Grasss creation of the fictional character, Hermann Ott,
a non-Jew, who interacts with members of the Danzig Jewish community, has been
criticised. Otts period in hiding during the latter part of the war is acknowledged in the
text as deriving from events in the life of the Jewish critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (pp.18,
561. Bullivant, The Spectre of the Third Reich: The West German Novel of the 1970s and National
Socialism, p.143.

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111-2, 279). According to Julian Preece, it was at a Group 47 meeting in 1958 that
Reich-Ranicki relayed his account of his survival on the eastern outskirts of Warsaw
from February 1943 to September 1944, which Grass adapted. Preece questions whether
Reich-Ranicki was properly consulted by Grass, and speculates that Reich-Ranicki was
unhappy that Grass utilised his period in hiding rather than other episodes more central
to the Holocaust:
Reich-Ranicki was clearly disturbed by this unexpected appearance in a
work of documentary fiction, though recalls that he had given his
permission all those years back in 1958. After finally recounting in 1999
the horror he witnessed in the Warsaw Ghetto before finding refuge, one
reason for his dismay, which fed the acrimony between the pair, could
well be that Grass had reworked his least harrowing experiences
besonders harmlose Episoden, as Reich-Ranicki calls them - while
presenting them as representative of suffering in the Holocaust.562
Kurt Lothar Tank suggests that Grass, as a non-Jew, makes Ott a non-Jew
because he was shying away from representing the sufferings of a Jew.563 This is not
necessarily a fault, because the difficulties for a German writer who wants to represent
the victims of the Holocaust are real enough. There is more force in W.G. Sebalds
criticism of Grass. Sebald sees in Ott a retrospective figure of wishful thinking on the
part of the author, who is trying to prove that the better German really existed.564
Preece defends Grass against Sebalds accusation, stressing that Otts fictionality is key,
and claiming that Grass used the character to show how the Germans might have
behaved, if they had chosen to do so:
The whole point . . . about Ott is that he is an incredible figure who never
existed; Grass shows through him how Germans could have behaved in
order to highlight once more their behaviour in reality.565
562. Preece, Gnter Grass, his Jews and their Critics: from Klger and Gilman to Sebald and Prawer,
p.610. Marcel Reich-Ranickis autobiography, The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki
trans. Ewald Osers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), was published in Germany under the title
Mein Leben in 1999.
563. Kurt Lothar Tank, Deutsche Politik im literarischen Werk von Gnter Grass, in Manfred
Jurgensen, ed., Grass: Kritik-Thesen-Analysen (Bern: Francke, 1973), 184. Cited in Schlant, The
Language of Silence, p.75.
564. W. G. Sebald, Konstruktionen der Trauer: Zu Gnter Grass, Der Deutschunterricht 35, 5 (October
1983), 39. Quoted in Schlant, The Language of Silence, p.75.
565. Preece, Gnter Grass, his Jews and their Critics: from Klger and Gilman to Sebald and Prawer,
p.619.

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Preeces interpretation of Ott is persuasive, but it serves to confirm that Grasss

representation of the Danzig Jews, much of which is focussed through Ott, is more
concerned with German behaviour than with Jewish suffering.
The way that Jews are represented by Grass in From the Diary of a Snail is
directly criticised by Schlant. As we have seen, her criticism of this aspect of The Tin
Drum was weakened by her giving too much weight to Klgers insistence on positive
representations of Jewish victims, but in the case of From the Diary of a Snail her
criticism is more substantial. Schlant attacks Grass for the absence of Jews in the latter
part of the book:
. . . the physical dispersal and destruction of the Jews . . . has its parallel
in their narrative elimination. As they have vanished from German
territory, so they vanish from the narrators consciousness. . . . If almost
the entire second half of a book purportedly written to tell their
catastrophe does not mention them, then this silence reveals a blind spot
in the authors capacity for imaginative projection.566
Schlant accuses Grass of failing to demonstrate a genuine concern for the individual
lives of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust:
Grass lets go of the problematics at precisely the same point where
Lichtenstein [the author of an account of the destruction of the Jewish
community of Danzig567] concludes his documentation. Narrating the
destruction of the [sic] Danzig Jewry from the safe vantage point of
Jewish documentation does not demonstrate an affective concern with
individual lives but rather an intellectual, though profoundly committed,
interest.568
Schlant concludes that despite his openness in speaking about the Holocaust, Grass falls
into the category of German intellectuals described by Sebald: German literati still
know very little of the real destiny of the persecuted Jews.569 She seems unable to
decide whether to ascribe what she sees as Grasss shortcomings in the representation of
Jews to his lack of knowledge about the subject (which could presumably be remedied
566. Schlant, The Language of Silence, pp.77-8.
567. Erwin Lichtenstein, Die Juden der Freien Stadt Danzig unter der Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus
(Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1973).
568. Schlant, The Language of Silence, p.77.
569. W. G. Sebald, Konstruktionen der Trauer: Zu Gnter Grass, 38. Quoted in ibid.

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by further research), or to a wilful failure of his imagination. The latter is suggested

when she again refers to Grasss reliance on documentary sources:
Grass certainly wants to write about the Nazi crimes and wants them to
be known to successor generations, but without a guide (Lichtenstein and
his documents) he cannot enter unknown territory and create individuals
or imagine their suffering. . . . It seems as if Grass can speak about the
Holocaust and its burden of guilt only in mediated terms, through the
filter of others testimonies and gestures.570
The question of whether German writers can, or should, only represent the
Holocaust indirectly is discussed below, but what is missing both from Schlants
assessment and from Grasss text is an indication that either is aware that there are any
problems associated with Holocaust representation. The difficulties faced by a German
writer wanting to represent Holocaust victims are not, as Schlant implies, restricted to
the authors capacity for imaginative projection. Grass seems to treat as
unproblematic issues which are central to Rymkiewiczs work, such as the morality of
mixing fact with fiction in the depiction of the Holocaust. Grasss narrator has no
doubts about his right to represent the murdered Danzig Jews, and lacks the modesty
and self-consciousness of Rymkiewiczs, who acknowledges that: I am limited to a
spiritual rather than a practical experience of Polish-Jewish life (Rymkiewicz, p.319).
As a result of this, and the failure to bring off the combination of a political diary with
an account of the history of the Jews of Danzig into a coherent whole, From the Diary
of a Snail, despite its apparently good intentions, is a seriously flawed work.
Crabwalk
Grasss novel, Im Krebsgang, was published in Germany in 2002. Fted in the
magazines and on talkshows, it was an instant bestseller.571 An English translation by
Krishna Winston was published in 2003 under the title of Crabwalk. There is no
mention in the English version of the novel that the German word Krebs means both
crab and cancer. The German title can be read as an allusion to the way crabs move
570. Schlant, The Language of Silence, p.78.
571. Steele, Gnter Grass: Shaper of a nations conscience, 20.

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sideways, and thence to the nervous, side-long approach to a subject, but there is also a
suggestion of a reference to the way malignancy spreads.572
Crabwalks central theme is suppression and the damage it causes. In a
development that is symptomatic of a change in German attitudes, the suppressed events
in question are not the murders of the Jews and other Nazi victims, but the roughly
contemporaneous sufferings of the German people. In Grasss novel the cause of
German suffering is the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a liner carrying several
thousand refugees, by a Russian submarine in the Baltic in January 1945. German
victimhood, however, also encompasses the civilians who were killed as a result of the
Allied bombing of German cities, the victims of atrocities committed by the invading
Soviet troops, especially the rape of German women, and the fate of millions of
Vertriebene (expellees) who were forced to abandon long-established German
communities in Poland and Czechoslovakia in the period after the end of the war.
Although organisations of expellees emerged to plead their case, mainstream
Germany as well as foreign governments ignored them because their plight cast
Germans as victims. Many individual expellees joined in this collective suppression and
did not even tell their children what had happened. What interest there was in the cause
of the expellees was almost exclusively confined to right-wing organisations.573 Grass
572. See Collins German Dictionary (4th Edition) (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2001), p.496. Krebs is
defined as: (1) Crab; (2) Cancer (astrological); (3) Cancer (medical). Krebsgang is defined as
retrogression, and Im Krebsgang Gehen as To regress, to go backwards. There seems to be a strong
sense of returning to a worse state of affairs, which relates to the rise of neo-Nazism.
573. This is denied by Robert Moeller. Moeller argues convincingly that Grass presents an incomplete
picture of how Germans have remembered and represented these events since 1945: In the 1950s, stories
of German loss and suffering were central to the politics of memory in the Federal Republic, and even in
the 1960s and 1970s, as many West Germans focused more on the victims of Germans than on German
victims, they never entirely faded from view. In the 1980s, tales of the expulsion . . . once again defined a
central point of reference in the public remembrance of the wars end. Also: If the left was loath to
speak about the end of the war in the east, this did not mean that the topic was cloaked in silence nor was
it ever the exclusive preserve of irredentist expellee groups. Robert G. Moeller, Sinking Ships, the Lost
Heimat and Broken Taboos: Gnter Grass and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary Germany,
Contemporary European History, 12, 2 (2003), 147-181, 151 and 179. Moeller argues that far from being
suppressed, the idea of Germany as a nation of victims was, one of the most powerful integrative
myths of the 1950s, and that while, what Germans had inflicted on others remained abstract and
remote; what Germans had suffered was described in vivid detail and granted a place of prominence in
the public sphere. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of
Germany (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 6 and 34.

218

describes the consequences for his own literary output:

The issue was neglected. In East Germany it was taboo. It was the same
with me. I touched on it in Dog Years but I couldnt find a literary way to
handle it. Eventually I managed to turn it into a novella. I didnt want to
write reportage.574
Because of Grasss left-wing political credentials, he could handle the subject
sympathetically and novelistically without being accused of moral equivalence, or of
trying to minimise German crimes by weighing them against the hardships suffered by
Germans. The novel was welcomed in Germany on the left and right alike.575 MarcelReich Ranicki confessed that he had tears in his eyes as he read the novel: it was among
the best, most distressing works that Grass has written.576 Grasss own family were
refugees. His mother was raped by Russian soldiers before she fled Danzig: My
mother never told me. It was too traumatic. I only heard about it after her death from my
sister.577 In Crabwalk, as the title implies, the subject is not approached head-on. Nor
is the sinking of the ship at the centre either of the narrative or of Grasss message about
suppression. With Crabwalk Grass moves the question of German victimhood further
than earlier writers who concentrated on the events alone. The German response to the
book seems to have emphasized its depiction of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff
rather than the way it describes the damage that suppression of memories of this type of
event can cause. Robert G. Moeller describes the publication of Im Krebsgang as
prompting a national sigh of relief that resounded in much of its reception by the
popular media. A headline in Der Spiegel announced that the time had come to
acknowledge Germans as Victims.578 It is, however, the adverse results of
574. Grass, quoted in, Steele, Gnter Grass: Shaper of a nations conscience, 22.
575. Grass might be seen as redeeming himself with the German public by taking German victimhood as
his subject, following the widespread criticism he received for his attack on German reunification in Ein
Weites Feld (1997) (published in English as Too Far Afield, trans. Krishna Watson (Faber & Faber,
2001)). According to Nadine Gordimer, He [Grass] was absolutely crucified for saying reunification
had happened in a hasty way without proper planning. Quoted in Steele, Gnter Grass: Shaper of a
nations conscience, 20.
576. Quoted in John Hooper, Gnter Grass breaks taboo on German war refugees, The Guardian, 8
February 2002, 16.
577. Grass, quoted in Steele, Gnter Grass: Shaper of a nations conscience, 22.
578. See Moeller, Sinking Ships, 151. The headline cited by Moeller refers to Hans-Joachim Noack,
Die Deutschen als Opfer, Der Spiegel, 25 March 2002. Moeller is right to draw attention to the
standpoint of many of those who praised Grass: Der Spiegel and others who credited Grass for taking a

219

repressing the past which are the focal point of the novel, rather than the historical
events themselves. The loss of the ship functions as one of the causal events of the longterm suppression which, with its consequences for contemporary Germany, is the main
subject of the novel:
In a way you can say the book is too late. But you have the advantage of
seeing the story from the point of view of three generations. I wanted to
describe this suppression complex and its consequences.579
The story of Wilhelm Gustloff is twofold. The ship which was sunk was a
Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude or KDF) tourist ship launched by Hitler in
1937 to take deserving German workers on cruises. It was named after a Nazi organizer
and recruiter, who joined the pantheon of Nazi martyrs following his murder in Davos,
Switzerland, in 1936, by a young Jew named David Frankfurter. The narrator of the
novel is Paul Pokriefke, whose mother, Ursula (Tulla), gave birth to him immediately
following her rescue from the sinking ship on 30 January 1945, and named him Paul
after the captain of the rescue ship (Grass3, p.157). The coincidence that Pokriefke
shares a birthday with Gustloff, and that the Nazis took power on 30 January 1933, is
incorporated into the narrative as an example of the persistence of the Nazi past into the
present: . . . the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up is a clogged toilet. We
flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising (p.122).
Pokriefke is a journalist, who is persuaded by an author, who is clearly Grass
making one of his regular appearances in Grasss novels (there is even a specific
reference to Dog Years to eliminate any doubt (p.97)), to tell the story of the Wilhelm
GustloffGrass and his contemporaries having previously failed to deal with the issue
of German suffering:
Actually, he [Grass] says, his generation should have been the one. It
should have found words for the hardships endured by the Germans . . .
Never, he said, should his generation have kept silent about such misery,
merely because its own sense of guilt was so overwhelming, merely
courageous step assumed that the left had dominated accounts of the German past, privileging Auschwitz
and pushing German suffering to the margins. Moeller, 179.
579. Grass, quoted in Steele, Gnter Grass: Shaper of a nations conscience, 22.

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because for years the need to accept responsibility and show remorse
took precedence, with the result that they abandoned the topic to the right
wing. (p.103)
Crabwalk does indeed include passages describing the horrific end of the
Wilhelm Gustloff, but the contemporary part of the novel, which does not seem to have
attracted much critical attention, describes, in what might be termed an internet
allegory, the results of failing to be open about these events. If the new generation of
Germans is not provided with suitable instruction about the Nazi past by its parents, the
educational system, historians or historical novelists, then there is a risk that these
youths will create a past using sources readily available to them, and which are not
approved by the establishment. Pokriefke discovers that his teenage son, Konrad
(Konny), has become involved in a neo-Nazi chatroom, using the pseudonym
Wilhelm (as in Gustloff), and is engaged in a bantering dialogue with David (as in
Frankfurter, Gustloffs assassin). David comes out with statements like You Germans
will always have Auschwitz on your brow as a mark of shame . . ., We Jews are
condemned to neverending lamentation, and We Jews never forget!, to which
Wilhelm responds, with statements straight from the primer of racism, asserting that
the world Jewish conspiracy was everywhere . . . (pp.124-5). When David praises the
captain of the Russian submarine which sank the Wilhelm Gustloff, and Frankfurters
heroic act:
The chat room promptly filled with hate. Jewish scum and Auschwitz
liar were the mildest insults. As the sinking of the ship was dredged up
for a new generation, the long-submerged hate slogan Death to all
Jews bubbled up to the digital surface of contemporary reality: foaming
hate, a maelstrom of hate. Good God! How much of this had been
dammed up all this time, is growing day by day, building pressure for
action. (p.160)
The two youths arrange to meet at the site of a ruined memorial to Gustloff,
where David introduces himself as David Stremplin, and confronts Konrad: As a
Jew, I have only this to say, whereupon he spat three times on the mossy foundation
thereby (in Konrads opinion) desecrating the memorial site (p.187). Konrad then

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shoots David dead, shooting him as many times (four) as Frankfurter had shot Gustloff,
and turns himself in with the words: I fired because I am a German (p.188).
At Konrads trial it transpires that David Stremplin was in fact Wolfgang
Stremplin, who was not Jewish, and who, according to his mother:
at the age of fourteen . . . adopted the name David and became so
obsessed with thoughts of atonement for the wartime atrocities and mass
killings, which, God knows, were constantly harped on in our society,
that eventually everything Jewish became somehow sacred to him.
(p.199)
Konrads response, at his trial, to the revelation that David was not Jewish is to deny its
relevance. He echoes the Nazis insistence that it was they who determined who was or
was not a Jew: That doesnt change the situation in the least. It was up to me to decide
whether the person known to me as David was speaking as a Jew and behaving as
such (p.196). In the course of establishing parallels with Frankfurters declared
motives for killing Gustloff, Konrad declares: I shot because I am a Germanand
because the eternal Jew spoke through David (p.204).
In an analogy with the original Nazi crimes, little is said at Konrads trial about
the victim, and if anything there is a suggestion that he was at least partly responsible
for what happened:
Next to nothing was said about the actual victim . . . He was left out of
the picture in embarrassment, figuring only as a target. The defense
attorney even suggested that he could be charged with provoking trouble
by misrepresenting the facts. Although the idea that Stremplin had only
himself to blame remained unspoken, it lurked behind casual remarks . . .
(p.212)
Although the perpetrator received sizable doses of compassion (p.212) at his
trial, the court fails to come up with a credible explanation of his behaviour:
In the course of the trial one could gain the impression that of all those
who spoke, only my son was speaking his mind. He got to the point
quickly, kept sight of the larger issues, had a solution for everything, and
brought the case into focus, while the [others] were all groping around,
searching for motives, invoking God and Freud as guides. They tried

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repeatedly to portray the poor young man as a victim of social

circumstances . . . (p.211)
Konrad tells the court that his execution of David is something that can be
understood only in a larger context, which is the need to honour Gustloff, and he calls
for the erection of a memorial for the martyr, whose memory he had honoured in his
own way (p.207). In a parallel with the internal coherence of Nazi ideology, discussed
above, Konrads explanation is described by Pokriefke as coherent insanity (p.208).
Pokriefke believes that his sons unhappinessand its dreadful consequences
started when, at school, he was prohibited from presenting his view of 30 January
1933, and also the social significance of the Nazi organization, Strength through Joy
(pp.202-3). Konrads teachers argued that:
For reasons of educational responsibility it had been necessary to prevent
the spread of such dangerous nonsense, the more so because there was a
growing number of boys and girls . . . with radical right-wing tendencies.
(pp.202-3)
Grass has argued that one reason neo-Nazism attracts some German adolescents is that
the history of the Nazi period is still badly taught in German schools and in the German
media: Films tend to portray Nazis as raving idiots. The fact that the Nazi party came
to power legally at a time when there were six million unemployed is suppressed.580
Grasss argument appears to be that disaffected youth learn by other means that the
Nazis were not idiots, that Hitler became Chancellor legally under the Weimar
constitution, and that the economic depression was an important factor in the growth of
the Nazis popular supportand that once they learn these facts, which Grass
suggests are suppressed by the educational establishment and the media, these young
people turn to neo-Nazi groups which openly proclaim these truths. The flaw in this is
that there is no shortage of sources available other than neo-Nazi publications which
provide this type of information. If anything is suppressed it is not these mundane
historical explanations of the rise of Nazism, but rather an acknowledgement of the
580. Grass, quoted in ibid.

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widespread enthusiasm for Hitlers regime referred to by Stefanie and her fellow
students in the previous chapter. Grasss proposals for increased openness about Nazism
have been controversial because they include policies advocated by the extreme right.
At the time Im Krebsgang was published in Germany, Grass was accused of promoting
his book by making intentionally controversial pronouncements attacking the
governments efforts to outlaw the neo-Nazi NPD, and advocating lifting the ban on the
publication of Mein Kampf. Grass responded that he had been opposed to the banning of
extreme rightwing parties since the 1960s and wanted readers to see for themselves the
nonsense in Mein Kampf. 581
Crabwalk describes the failure of the second generation, because of their
suppression of the truth about the past, to prevent their children being susceptible to the
attractions of neo-Nazism. The good behaviour of Pokriefke and his generation is not
enough:
What can be done when a son takes possession of his fathers thoughts,
thoughts that have been festering for years under a lid, and even
translates them into action? All my life I have tried to take the right tack,
at least politically, not to say the wrong thing, to appear correct on the
outside. (p.227)
Although Konrad comes to his senses in prison, symbolically smashing a model
of the Wilhelm Gustloff, Crabwalk ends on a pessimistic note as Konrad joins the ranks
of neo-Nazi heroes:
At the URL www.kameradschaft-konrad-pokriefke.de, a Web site
introduced itself in German and English, campaigning for someone
whose conduct and thinking it held up as exemplary, someone whom the
hated system had for that very reason locked up. We believe in you, we
will wait for you, we will follow you . . . And so on and so forth.
It doesnt end. Never will it end. (p.234, ellipsis in original)
Moeller acknowledges that David/Wolfgang reminds us of ways in which the
German question and the Jewish question are intertwined, but criticises Grass

581. Hooper, Gnter Grass breaks taboo on German war refugees, 16.

224

because all but missing from Im Krebsgang are Jews.582 Moeller speculates that
Grasss reluctance to make German and Jewish suffering part of one story reflects a
concern that such a narrative can lead to false equation of pain that stemmed from very
different sources.583 He suggests that Grass could have juxtaposed the sinking of the
Gustloff with the story of Jewish victims taking place at roughly the same time, such as
the liberation of the camps and the death marches. This is to criticise Grass for not
writing a completely different novel. Crabwalk is not a Holocaust novel, it is a novel
about Germany at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and about the need for it to
find ways to avoid the danger of a resurgent racist ideology.

W. G. Sebald and the indirect approach to Holocaust representation

W. G. (Max) Sebald was born in Bavaria in 1944. His parents were from
Catholic, anti-communist, working-class backgrounds. His father was a professional
soldier who finished the war as a captain.584 Sebald lived in England from 1966 until his
death in 2001. He began publishing what he termed prose fiction in German when he
was in his mid-forties. The first of his books to be translated into English, The
Emigrants, was published in 1996.585 Like several of his other works, it is a hybrid of
memoir, travelogue and history, and incorporates black-and-white photographs without
captions which provide a feel of documentary. It gradually links the stories of four
Jewish exiles and migrs to the Holocaust.
Sebalds last major work, Austerlitz, was published in Germany in 2001, and an
English translation was published in the UK in the same year.586 The story concerns
Jacques Austerlitz, who was brought up by Welsh Calvinist foster parents, and in his

582. Moeller, Sinking Ships, 178.

583. Ibid.
584. Maya Jaggi, Recovered memories, The Guardian, 22 September 2001.
585. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1996), originally published in
German as Die Ausgewanderten in 1993.
586. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001).

225

fifties recovers lost memories of having arrived in Britain from Prague on a

Kindertransport. Both books deal with the long-term effects on migrs who, may
appear well adapted but, especially as they move towards old age, are still suffering
from having been ostracised, deprived of country, family, language.587
The concern here is not with an analysis of Sebalds novels, but with his ideas
on how a German writer should represent the Holocaust. As we have seen in the
discussion of Anderschs Efraims Book above, Sebald disparages literary efforts in the
1960s and 1970s by writers like Andersch and Heinrich Bll: They felt they had to
say something, but it was lacking in tact or true compassion; the moral presumption is
insufferable.588 His own approach involves being conscious of the danger of usurping
others existences. In The Emigrants, all four emigrants are based on real people. The
painter Max Furber is a composite of Sebalds Mancunian landlord and the artist Frank
Auerbach. Sebald felt he had the right to use details from Auerbachs life, because the
information on his manner of work is from a published source. However, once
Auerbach refused to allow copies of his paintings to appear in the English edition,
Sebald modified the characters name (which was Aurach in the German edition): I
withdraw if I get any sense of the persons discomfort.589 He is also careful to avoid
the sensational. This is exemplified by the way he uses one of the sources for Jacques
Austerlitz:
The details of Susie Bechhofers life, with child abuse in a Calvinist
Welsh home, are far more horrific than anything in Austerlitz. But I
didnt want to make use of it because I didnt have the right. I try to keep
at a distance and never invade.590
Unlike other German writers, including Grass in From the Diary of a Snail,
Sebald demonstrates the same kind of uncertainty as Rymkiewicz about whether he has
the right to represent the victims of the Holocaust at all. Although discounting the

587. Sebald quoted in Jaggi, Recovered memories.

588. Ibid.
589. Ibid.
590. Ibid.

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notion of inherited guilt, Sebald accepts that: If you know in the generation before you
that your parents, your uncles and aunts were tacit accomplices, its difficult to say you
havent anything to do with it. It is this acceptance of a personal connection with the
perpetrators that distinguishes Sebald from many other contemporary German writers.
Schlink and Grass, despite accepting that atonement is necessary for crimes that other
Germans committed, do not acknowledge that they share any responsibility for those
crimes.591 Sebalds acceptance of personal responsibility leads to his moral doubts about
what he should represent: Do I, who carry a German passport and have two German
parents, have the right? I try to do it as well as I can. If the reactions were different, I
would stop you do take notice.592
Sebald applies his reticence about the representation of the victims more widely
to the question of how the Holocaust should be represented:
I dont think you can focus on the horror of the Holocaust. Its like the
head of Medusa; you carry it with you in a sack, but if you looked at it
youd be petrified.593
This differs from the type of censorship demanded by Elie Wiesel. Sebald is not, like
Wiesel, rejecting the idea of the Holocaust as a suitable subject for a novel,594 but rather
that, especially for a German writer, the proper approach to the subject should be
indirect. Sebalds moral stance as a German writer is a primary determinant of the
oblique way in which the Holocaust is represented in his works.

591. Grasss speculations in Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out about how he might have
behaved if he had been born in 1917 rather than in 1927, tend to stress his actual innocence, rather than
his potential guilt, just as with the previously quoted: I wasnt there; butchildrenI was thirteen and
could have been there (Grass2, p.152). Grass, Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out, trans. Ralph
Manheim (San Diego, New York and London: Harvest, 1982), pp. 17-20.
592. Sebald quoted in Jaggi, Recovered memories.
593. Ibid. Aharon Appelfeld made the same point as Sebald using a similar metaphor. Responding to a
reference to the obliqueness of his novels representations of the horrors of the Holocaust, Appelfeld
commented that one does not look directly at the sun. Quoted by Berel Lang in his Introduction to
Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1988), pp.1-15,
p.8.
594. Wiesel, The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration, 7.

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CONCLUSION
Throughout this thesis I have argued that representations of the Holocaust vary
according to writers national identity and ideological relation to events, suggesting that
the Holocaust is best approached in a multiperspectival way. It is impossible to claim
that victims, survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, the descendents of these groups, or
those entirely outside the Holocaust world, have a monopoly on its representation.
The majority of writers about the Holocaust reflect a viewpoint determined by
their nationality or ethnicity. Jewish novelists, especially survivors like Wojdowski,
mostly memorialise the victims, and are not particularly interested in the perpetrators.
German writers usually concentrate their attention on the relationship of postwar
Germans to the perpetrators within their midst, and are reluctant to represent the
victims. This is often mentioned as a criticism, but it is surely understandable that those
with direct ties with the perpetrators should be concerned more with how the crimes
came to be committed, and with doing everything they can to avoid the possibility of
anything similar happening again, than with the difficult task of representing victims
who were not part of the Germans emotional environment. Similarly, Polish writers, as
exemplified by Rymkiewicz, are concerned with the meaning for postwar Polish society
of the murder on Polish soil of three million Polish Jews. American writers, like Hersey,
are more interested in drawing lessons from the Holocaust for postwar American
society, than with attempting to understand the event in its context. Except for the
responses of Jews and Germans, with their emotional ties to the victims and the
perpetrators respectively, interest in the Holocaust as a subject for novels is likely to
prove relatively ephemeral. The fate of the Polish Jews, of concern to only a small
minority of Poles, has had little effect on the self-image of the Poles as heroic victims of
the Nazis, and innocent bystanders of the Holocaust. This is only slightly ruffled by the
exposure of events like the massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbours at Jedwabne

228

and other towns in 1941.595 American writers have plenty of other subjects available
which can be used to throw light on the qualities of the American way of life, and the
subject of the Holocaust is bound to be replaced by more topical subjects like Islamic
fundamentalism and the terrorism associated with it.596
The legitimate criticisms of Goldhagens monocausal explanation of the
Holocaust as arising from a popular German Eliminationist Antisemitism, combined
with the liberal desire to avoid national stereotyping, have together tended to diminish
the acceptability of the view that Nazism was a specifically German phenomenon,
which as Hitler insisted was never intended for export,597 and that the Holocaust was a
peculiarly German crime. This results in a failure to acknowledge the essential elements
of the particularity of the Holocaust: that it was the mass murder of Jews instigated, and
mostly carried out, by Germans. If anything the impact of the Holocaust on Germans
and Germany has been and will continue to be even more profound than on Jews. The
relationship of Germans to the perpetrators is, if anything, deeper than that of Jews to
the victims. This is partly a reflection of the success of the Final Solution, which wiped
out many thousands of entire Jewish families, leaving no close relatives. Large numbers
of perpetrators, on the other hand, survived the war, were reintegrated into German
society, and continued the normal processes of raising families. Many Germans are
direct descendents of these murderers. Most other Germans are related to those who
595. See Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001).
596. There are similarities between Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism. Holocaust survivor and
Professor of Psychiatry, Emanuel Tanay, draws attention to the parallels between the Holocaust and
September 11th: The September 11 2001 attack on America evoked familiar feelings in this Holocaust
survivor. Once again a belief system motivated the killing of innocent people. The organizers and the
perpetrators of this mass murder, like the organizers and the perpetrators of the Holocaust, were sane,
educated men dedicated to a belief system. . . . Only a theocratic or ideological society can support
genocide. Genocidal behaviour requires total conviction that one is in possession of absolute truth and the
other is irredeemably evil. Emanuel Tanay, The Genocidal Mind, Perspectives, Autumn 2003, 24-5.
597. The National Socialist doctrine, as I have always proclaimed, is not for export. It was conceived for
the German people. The Testament of Adolf Hitler, ed., Franois Genoud, trans. R. H. Stevens (London:
Cassell, 1961), entry for 21 February 1945, p.83.
It is also a mistake to treat Nazism as a type of fascism. The Nazi leaders consistently distinguished
between Nazism and fascism. Goebbels, for example, wrote that, [Fascism is] nothing like National
Socialism. While the latter goes deep down to the roots, fascism is only a superficial thing. Joseph
Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943, ed. and trans. Louis P. Lochner (New York: Doubleday,
1948), entry for 6 February 1942, p.71.

229

lived in Germany during the Third Reich and were, at the very least, politically guilty
according to Jaspers definition, because everyone is co-responsible for the way he is
governed.598 This is a legacy with long-term consequences. The more perceptive
among the members of the postwar generations acknowledge that: This period of
history hasnt been dealt with properly. Its still unfinished business.599 Literary works
have a central part to play here. German postwar writers have provided a voice for their
respective generations. Some writers have exhibited a desire to exculpate themselves
along with the Germans (Andersch and Schlink), but others (Koeppen, Niklas Frank,
Grass and Seiffert) have, with varying degrees of success, tried to help the Germans
face up to their Nazi past.
The Holocaust has very different meanings for those who identify with the
victims and for those who, whether they like it or not, have connections to the
perpetrators. Jews must continue to mourn and to memorialise the victims: Germans
should not be expected to follow this road, but need to fully acknowledge their
connection to the perpetrators, and to try to understand how the Germans of the Nazi
generation allowed the Holocaust to happen.

598. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2000), p.25.
599. Friedrich Jeckelns daughter in Dan Bar-On, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the
Third Reich, (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p.289.

230

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February 2002, 6-7.

243

APPENDIX
CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE AUTHOR IAN MACMILLAN
2 OCTOBER 1999-30 MAY 2000
1. Letter from Alan Polak to Ian MacMillan, 2 October 1999.
Dear Mr MacMillan
I am a Phd student researching Holocaust literature at Sheffield
University. Your novel Village of a Million Spirits is a primary text in the section of my
thesis which considers representations of Treblinka. I would be most grateful if you
could spare the time to answer some questions:
1. Why did you choose to employ a multi-perspectival approach? Do you, for example,
agree with Nietzsche that There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective
knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes,
different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our concept of
this thing, our objectivity, be?
2. What do you think that a novel about Treblinka with fictional elements can achieve,
which faction or attempted historical reconstruction like Jean-Franois Steiners
Treblinka cannot?
3. Were you familiar with the novel The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Darville
(aka Demidenko) when you wrote your book? Did her controversial portrayal of
Ukrainian guards at Treblinka influence your work?
Best wishes

Alan Polak
2. Email from Ian MacMillan to Alan Polak, 14 October 1999.
Dear Alan Polak,
Here are some attempts at answers to your questions:
1. on multi-perspectival approach: Because I was examining the
attitudes of perpetrators, victims, and '
bystanders'
, I used the multiple
points of view. I also wanted some point of view from outside the camp
itself (Magda). The effects of the experience on those immune from all
the death but nevertheless involved (Voss) were so psychologically
traumatizing that many of those involved lost their lives as they knew
them. The Nietzsche quote of course fits perfectly---the sumtotal of all

244

the different perspectives creates a more convincing and '

truer'picture.
I put the word in quotes because it'
s fiction, but it is based on fairly
careful research, from Steiner'
s book (which is full of material many
involved with T. later called '
fiction'
), to things of a benign nature
like what kinds of plants grow in the area (for which I used a beautiful
book called "Polish Countrysides" published in 1931 by the American
Geographic Society). In any case, the multiple perspective afforded the
best chance to picture the camp'
s totality.
2. What do you think that a novel about T. can achieve that '
faction'
cannot? Books like these free themselves from the burden of reality in
order to get closer to reality. The secret is in locating oneself inside
the mind of the fictional character looking out at the reality (taken from
historical accounts), and allowing the very individualized perspective of
that fictional character to adjust to, experience, and judge. Janusz'
s
deafness is of course a simple metaphor for failing to understand or to
'
hear'what he'
s experiencing, until a certain point at which he finds
himself capable of reasonable judgment. His and others'eccentricities as
people are where I hide from all that I researched, in order to have all I
researched seen freshly as experiences of the present, with as much force
and immediacy as possible, hence the present tense and the close
attention to precise detail. An '
historical'
, nonfictional account can'
t
presume to go too deeply into and use the sensory apparatus of someone
real. Fiction sidesteps that by creating the sensory apparatus to react
to '
all that came of the research'
.
3. I have not heard of The Hand That Signed the Paper. My resources for
this book were bits and pieces from here and there, Steiner (whose account
has excellent descriptive detail but is problematic for various reasons),
and most particularly photographs, because in all three books in this
trilogy, it was the visual that always impressed me particularly. I also
read "Into That Darkness" (Sereny), and some essays.
I hope this is of some use to you.
Best, Ian MacMillan
3. Email from Alan Polak to Ian MacMillan, 16 October, 1999.
Dear Ian MacMillan
Your email got through to me. I appreciate your answering my questions. What you say
is a great help. I hope you have no objection to my quoting your email in my thesis.
Can I impose on you further with a few more questions?

245

1. Why did you decide to highlight the sadism rather than the '
efficiency'of Treblinka
(as Steiner did)? Was it because you believe it more accurately reflects the historical
reality, or for literary reasons?
2. Why did you decide on the subtitle '
a Novel of the Treblinka Uprising'
, when the
revolt plays a much smaller part in your book than it does in Steiner'
s?
3. Did you read survivor testimonies (such as those in Alexander Donat'
s'
The Death
Camp Treblinka'
) as part of your research? If so, was Wiernik'
s description of the
cremation of pregnant women your source for the description of the burning fetus in
your novel?
4. Why did you decide to include the '
Bielas'
s boys'
'story in your novel, given that
Sereny criticises Steiner (without naming him) for creating what she says is a myth?
5. I have been able to find very little material criticising Steiner. Can you help with
details of anything you have discovered?
Best Wishes
Alan Polak
4. Email from Ian MacMillan to Alan Polak, 20 October 1999.
Dear Alan,
(If I can address you that way)
1. I didn'
t think I was really '
highlighting'sadism, but if it
is highlighted, I suppose the logic is that sadism was more important to
its victims than efficiency. Again, since I try to get as deeply as
possible into the heads of my fictional characters, I assume that their
fears about physical harm, starvation and death, would dominate their
consciounesses. In fact, when I wrote this, I actually backed away from
some of the more horrible things I read about, in effect tried not to
deliberately shock.
2. My publisher wanted the subtitle. I also thought that in ways
the '
uprising'in its physical sense was preceded by uprisings in each of
those who decided to risk their lives to put a stop to T. Individual,
spiritual uprisings. I winced a little at the idea of a subtitle, but the
publisher wanted something to identify the novel more directly. It'
s
coming out early this spring from Penguin, and they are using it too.
3. In the last week I tried doing a little archaeological digging
in my study, looking for my notes on T. I did read some Wiernik, and I
think Donat too. As for the pregnant woman, it was a combination of
imagining what would happen and also was mentioned, I believe, in
connection with burning bodies at Birkenau.
4. The Bielas boys. Well, I forgot what Sereny said about that,
but have read I believe in more than one place that it happened. And then
of course I can always back away and say, "Well, this is a work of

246

fiction."
5. Criticism of Steiner. This is a complicated question. Even a
reading of the book by one not familiar with Treblinka would raise
questions, because Steiner assumes much in describing conversations,
elaborate planning, etc., in connection with the revolt, when in fact so
few survived (forty is the usual number), that one wonders how he can make
these assumptions. Part of my digging is for a statement made by a
survivor who identified the book as fiction. This survivor pointed out
that a deliberate plan to get oneself transferred to the more secret
'
death camp'part of T. would have been impossible. One ended up there
rather than being shot at the hospital. One could not predict how any of
the guards or officers would react to some error, and the more likely
reaction would have been a bullet in the back of the neck. A deliberate
plan that gives one less than a fifty-fifty chance of having that plan
come out right, the man asserts, was not something these people would
risk, although of course they were risking everything by planning in the
first place. It would be between illogically selfdestructive heroism and
calculated, judicious heroism, the latter being the more useful because
the possibility of carrying the plan through was better served. When the
revolt took place, of course, you had numerous examples of heroism that
can'
t be matched in this particular part of history.
The book states that Ivan was killed (or at least he is described
as going down). We are fairly sure he survived.
The survivor mentioned above accused Steiner'
s book of being
'
political'in that it described also a religious solidarity that this
survivor claims was not evident. Religious solidarity was there, but he
claimed that their daily lives were not as infused with it as the book
suggests.
I don'
t know. As you can tell by my book, I choose to hide off to
the side of much that Steiner describes. In any case, his is a good book,
and for me was the initial orientation to the subject. I was moved by it.
It was only in subsequent research that I ran across the detractors. And
I suppose in ways we will never know the actual objective truth of this
collective experience, although I think we can surmise the broad truth of
it. And I suppose that Steiner puts himself at risk of criticism because
he is writing nonfiction. We novelists can be thought of as liars in the
service of truth, and so can always smile and say, "Well, remember, this
is a work of fiction."
Best, Ian MacMillan (by the way, any other correspondence is fine
with me---I am still amazed that this machine allows me to do this, all
the way to the UK)

247

5. Email from Alan Polak to Ian MacMillan, 23 October, 1999.

Dear Ian
[. . . ] While, as you say about the Bielas boys story, you can always say '
this is a work
of fiction'(incidentally, I have always felt that this lets fiction writers avoid, far too
easily, their responsibility for everything except their artistic ability), this does not apply
to your foreword. I hope you will not take offence, but I am now going to be
presumptuous and try and persuade you to amend the foreword before the book is
republished. What concerns me is one of the examples you provide of a '
verifiable'
event where you write: '
It is true [Franz'
s announcement of the resumption of transports
brought on] a sustained cheer from the starving workers.'
There is evidence from at least one survivor that this was not the case. Richard Glazar
(author of Trap with a Green Fence) describes this episode at least twice. To Sereny he
said, '
And do you know what we felt? We said to ourselves, '
Hurrah, at last we can fill
our bellies again'
'(p.213). In Shoah, he said 'We didn't say anything. We just looked
at each other, and each of us thought: '
Tomorrow the hunger will end'
'(my emphasis,
p.137). I believe Glazar to be a reliable witness, but if there is conflicting testimony and
you choose to reject Glazar'
s account, I still think it would be going too far to argue that
it is indisputably '
true'that the prisoners cheered. You may think this a pedantic point,
but there is a big difference between the prisoners having such feelings, and their
expressing them openly in front of Kurt Franz. I am not, of course, suggesting that there
is anything wrong with including the '
cheer'in the body of your novel; but its use in the
foreword is a different matter. The review of your book by Carol Herman in The
Washington Times, for example, describes the foreword as where you '
lay down the
parameters of what is true'and goes on to quote the '
cheer'passage from the foreword
uncritically.
I hope you don'
t mind, but I'
ve a few further questions:
1. I understand from a reviewer'
s comments that your earlier novels Proud Monster and
Orbit of Darkness cover the '
atrocities and horrors of the eastern front'
. You refer to
Village as part of a trilogy. In what ways is it connected to the other two parts, and why
did you pick Treblinka as the subject for the third part?
2. Did you have a particular type of reader in mind when you wrote Village? What level
of knowledge of the Holocaust, and of Treblinka in particular, did you assume your
readers would have?
3. You say that photographs were important resources. Which particular
photographs had the most impact on your work?
4. Which of the survivors identified Steiner as fiction, and described his book as being
'
political'for describing religious solidarity?
5. You wrote that '
the secret is locating oneself inside the mind of the fictional character
looking out at the reality (taken from historical accounts) ...'Does it worry you that

248

these historical accounts are themselves inevitably representations of '

the reality'
, and
therefore far from unproblematic, and especially so in a case like Treblinka where
documentary evidence is almost non-existent and the historians'primary source is
eyewitness testimony from survivors? I am not referring here to the problem of dealing
with Holocaust deniers, but to the broad question of how historical representations
relate to the reality of the past.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Best Wishes
Alan
6. Email from Ian MacMillan to Alan Polak, 28 October 1999.
Dear Alan,
Just a quick note, because right now I'
m pressed for time & I only
have email here at the University. So it'
ll take a few more days to
answer the questions. About the '
true'stuff in the foreword, I suppose
that the various perceptions of that one event would by necessity differ,
hence that truth would be different from the Bielas-Berliner one. So I
mentioned it to my ed. at Penguin, who said she'
d see where the book was
in production. I just suggested adding a short clause at the end of the
sentence that would qualify the word cheer.
Best, Ian M.

7. Email from Ian MacMillan to Alan Polak, 4 November 1999.

Dear Alan,
Here are responses to your questions:
1. The first two books are made up as follows: Proud Monster is
composed of seventy vignettes, or short stories, with no repeating
characters, a kind of panorama focusing more on '
normal'people, with no
important historical figures (except for Himmler in one story). The idea
was to picture mid-Europe during the war from multiple perspectives.
Midway through that book is one three-page story set at Treblinka. The
second book, Orbit of Darkness, is made up of fifteen pieces, fourteen
stories each about fifteen to twenty pages, with one longer story
fragmented and interspersed, that of Maximilian Kolbe, the Jesuit priest
who volunteered to take a man'
s place in a starvation chamber at Auschwitz
in 1941. It took him fourteen days to die, and he had a sort of
psychologically traumatic effect on his captors. Again the fourteen
stories mentioned above are set in different places, and are meant to be a
more developed panorama, but with fewer settings than PM. Midway through
Orbit of Darkness is a story set at Treblinka, called "The Dentist". My

249

approach to these books was to be democratic in my selection of

characters, to more or less represent the human cost according to what
history tells us the breakdown in human cost was, so there was no
intentional focus on the Jewish experience, but rather inclusion of it
more or less according to numbers. But then halfway through Orbit, when I
saw the placement of the two treblinka stories in the first two books, I
saw them leading upward, that is one seventieth of one book, one fifteenth
of the next, leading to 1, so to speak, so the third book became
Treblinka. It is meant as a trilogy of World War II in Middle Europe, and
the final book is Treblinka because the greatest extremity of horror and
the most horrific legacy of that war ends up being genocide. It just made
sense to me both in terms of aesthetic logic and theme.
2. I wanted my audience to be anyone who is interested in the
subject, and anybody else who might stumble over the books. Everyone ought
to be interested, because it is one of those mysterious things about the
human being that makes it apparently possible for that horror to
continually repeat itself.
3. Photography---I grew up on grainy documentary footage either
in the movie theaters or on TV (Victory At Sea, for example). I used to
hide in the school library and look at old photograph books of the US
civil war, World War I, and II. It always fascinated me that even this
photo, of, say, the bloodspattered interior of Archduke Franz Ferdinand'
s
coach in Sarajevo just after Princip assassinated him, was an image
produced by a device that cast the image on celluloid and preserved it.
I would run across pictures that were shocking in their brutality, of,
say, a German soldier shooting a woman holding her child in the
back of the head, aiming his Mauser at close range. You'
ve probably seen
this picture, from shortly after the September '
39 invasion. How can a
person see pictures like that and not lose sleep over the idea that the
picture is an image cast on celluloid at the moment this event actually
happened? Photographs always made a greater impression on me than text,
and I think it'
s the fiction writer'
s mind that is the cause. The
imagination automatically animates the frozen image, and once it does, the
understanding it produces can'
t be ignored. So I looked at
thousands of photographs, without looking for anything particular. When I
wrote the books I was looking for everything: the fit of a Russian
officer'
s uniform, the insignia on uniforms, the plants around houses, the
exact shape of the nets used to catch fish in the Pripet Marshes, the
look of a human body in decomposition.
4. This one stumps me, because I can'
t find any notes, and am not
sure if I ever wrote down who it was, because Village sidesteps the center
of planning for the revolt.
5. True, there is little '
documentary'evidence about T., and we
have to depend on eyewitness accounts. But the problem arises with all
historical events not directly recorded on film with sound. Can we be
sure that any documents connected to any historical events are accurate?
'
Document'is of course problematic. I suppose even filmed events can end
up being problematic. This, I suppose, is the key point that keeps the
revisionists going, and because they keep at it, we have to also.

250

I'
ll quit here. Let me know what you think.
Best, Ian
8. Email from Alan Polak to Ian MacMillan, 9 December, 1999.
Dear Ian
I'
ve now had the chance to read your earlier books and have a few questions.
1. In '
Horror Stories'in Proud Monster who are Jan Kratko and Anton
Zydovska? Are they supposed to be Ukrainians? If so, how could they be
working with corpses in the extermination area of Treblinka when the
Ukrainians were employed as guards and only Jewish prisoners were used as
slave labour? At the time the story is set, summer 1943, the burning of
corpses from the pits was being completed and new corpses were not being
buried, but were taken direct to the roasts.
2. There also seem to be anomalies in '
The Dentist'in Orbit of Darkness
which seems to be set too early given that the first transport was on 23
July 1942. The reorganisation which included the setting up of the Blue and
Red Commandos did not take place until September. Until late August the
Jewish slave/prisoners were mostly shot on a daily basis. Kurt Franz didn'
t
arrive until late August or early September. I know these are works of
fiction, but I'
m sure most readers will assume that the historical facts are
accurate.
3. Would you agree that '
The Dentist'is more directly influenced by
Steiner'
s view of Treblinka than Village? Unlike in Village, in '
The
Dentist'you use imagery likening Treblinka to a machine: '
He was a worker
insect in the gigantic machinery of death. The Doll, tall and handsome, was
the operator of the machine.'Lopatyn'
s sexual abuse of the dead to amuse,
and so try and ingratiate himself with, the SS seems to exemplify the
extremity of degradation reached by the prisoners but without Steiner'
s
redemption via the uprising. Was that your intention?
4. What I am unclear about, more generally, is whether you think that there
is any redemption available for those caught up in the type of total war
fought in eastern Europe (which you so vividly describe), other than that
suggested by Kolbe'
s example. Are you suggesting, particularly in Orbit of
Darkness, that there is a human propensity to commit atrocities in the
absence of constraints on such behaviour (or where atrocities are actually
sanctioned by the state)? If so, what constraints do you think are
required - political or religious? Was Nehring right to believe that if the
inmates had been '
magnetized by the example of [Kolbe'
s] extreme, willful
selflessness, then the system would topple'
?
5. What is your own view of Dr. Schacht'
s (and Stangl'
s) argument: '
Do you
think that those camps where we get rid of the Jews are for some patriotic
ideal? That'
s what we tell people like you. But of course in reality we want
nothing more than their money.'Dr. Schacht also argues that: '
Without the
invasions, we would long ago have run out of people whose money we could
steal and whom we could torture and kill for our pleasure. That is what
conquest is all about.'Would I be wrong in thinking that this is not too

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far from your own view?

Best Wishes
Alan

9. Email from Alan Polak to Ian MacMillan, 26 January, 2000.

Dear Ian
I think I may have identified where the '
cheer'story originated. Did you
read Tzvetan Todorov'
s'
Facing the Extreme'as part of your research for
Village? On p.33 he misquotes Richard Glazar, despite specifically citing
Sereny p.213 as his source. Sereny quotes Glazar in conversation with her as
saying: '
And do you know what we felt? We said to ourselves, '
Hurrah...'
'
Todorov has Glazar saying: '
Do you know what we did? We shouted '
Hurrah,
hurrah!'
'
A generous explanation might be that the translators of Todorov'
s work into
English may be at fault, but I haven'
t yet consulted the original French
version.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Best Wishes
Alan

10. Email from Ian MacMillan to Alan Polak, 5 February, 2000.

Dear Alan,
Finally I got to the point where I can give those questions some
thought:
1. You'
re right about the dates. In a reprint, they would
naturally be changed. Names too.
2. The dentist is ditto, on the date at least.
3. The dentist is probably more influencec by Steiner because my
familiarity with Treblinka was probably based on his book alone, at least
at the time I was writing that book. Lopatyn'
s abuse of the dead, for me,
was no more than a person facing an absurdity in which the only response
left is obscene jocularity. He '
comes out of it'when he sees the dead
children.
4. Kolbe'
s example of selflessness is the logical response to the
extreme in brutality and selfishness represented by his opposites. He was
'
dangerous'in that his humanity could not be compromised. If
compromising humanity is a key to success in brutal mass domination, then
Nehring has perceived one weakness his (Nazi) movement was vulnerable
to.
5. Stangl'
s statement, as you know, is questioned by G. Sereny as
an oversimplification, and my Dr. Schacht is a character who has

252

'
discovered'absolute free will and has allowed it to run its course. I
suppose the latter pictures an extreme in one direction, Kolbe being an
extreme in the other. Note the end of the book, that before being hanged,
the young German soldier says to the hangmen, "What a rich few days this
has been for you. You'
re going to watch me die and you love it. This is
the acting out of your deepest private dream." Very deliberate on my
part, of course. Then, when he says, "We are countrymen. This is a
collaboration," it is meant to suggest that all the murder and domination
has finally come to a strange end, the beast eating itself.
Best, Ian

11. Email from Alan Polak to Ian MacMillan 6 February, 2000.

Dear Ian
Thank you for your answers.
You may already be aware of this, but the nature of Kolbe'
s humanity is open
to question; it did not prevent him from publishing the '
virulently
anti-Semitic'daily newspaper, Maly Dziennik, from 1935 to 1939.
[. . .] If you are busy a simple '
yes'or '
no'on whether you read the Todorov is all I need.
I see Penguin are publishing Village in the US at the beginning of May. I
hope it sells well.
Best Wishes
Alan

12. Email from Ian MacMillan to Alan Polak, 6 February 2000.

Dear Alan,
Actually I don'
t recall having read T. Also, I didn'
t know about
the Kolbe publication you mention. I did read parts of one book about
him, title escapes me now, though. But it'
s interesting how much
contradiction there can be in the life of one person.
Ian

13. Email from Alan Polak to Ian MacMillan, 6 April, 2000.

Dear Ian
I'
ve just obtained the Penguin edition of Village. [. . .]
I attach the latest version of my work on Treblinka. You will see from page
26 that I have now discovered that there are different versions of Glazar'
s
account of the '
cheer'story in different editions of Sereny'
s'
Into That
Darkness'
. I have been unable, so far, to find out why the change was made.

253

My guess is that your source is one of the earlier editions of Sereny.

I would welcome your comments on this, or on any other aspect of my work if
you have the time to read it.
Best Wishes
Alan

14. Email from Ian MacMillan to Alan Polak, 30 May 2000.

Dear Alan,
[. . . ] I'
m having one of my grad students use the original essay (yours I mean) in a
directed reading. [. . .]
Just a couple minor quibbles: The footnote referring to my
response to the information about Kolbe is called '
weak and cliched'
, to
which I suppose I can say only that whenever I am accused of this, I smile
amiably and repeat word for word what I said. '
Be kind'is also a cliche,
I suppose.
The other, which puzzled me somewhat, was the reference to the
'
bright doll'simile. This picture is not in Wiernik only, and I don'
t
know if I saw it in Weirnik, because I read '
some'of his
account(s?). It'
s mentioned elsewhere too. I don'
t keep very good
records of what I read, but there is one account about Auschwitz that may
have this picture. '
Aesthetic exploitation'of the Holocaust, is
something almost anyone writing about it could be accused of. Try reading
Thomas'
s'
embellishment'of Kuznetsov'
s'
Babi Yar'
, particularly the guard
with the knife. Now there'
s gratuitousness for you. When I read Thomas,
I got to that part of the book and realized that I'
d read it before,
because I had in '
Babi Yar'
.
In any case, a simile is simply a means of visual
clarification. And the forty or so reviews that seemed to stress the
book'
s restraint and objectivity would appear to disagree. So if I were
writing this again, I would describe the same way.
All in the spirit of constructive dialogue. [. . .] By the way,
Village won the PEN USA (west) Fiction Award. '
West'simply means west of
the Miss. River, while the Pen Fauklner Award is East of the Miss.
Hope all goes well for you.
Best, Ian MacMillan

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