NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY POPULAR

HOLOCAUST FICTION

By Andrea Gapsch

April 2021

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A Thesis presented to The Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University

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In partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation from the Honors Tutorial College

with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Camp Sisters: Representations of Female Friendship and Networks of Support in

Rose Under Fire and The Lilac Girls

Chapter Two

Families and Dual Timelines: Exploring Representations of Third Generation

Holocaust Survivors in The Storyteller and Sarah’s Key

Chapter Three

The Nonfiction Novel: Comparing The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Librarian

of Auschwitz

Conclusion

Gapsch 3

Introduction

As I began collecting sources for this project in early 2020, Auschwitz celebrated the 75th anniversary of its liberation. Despite more than 75 years of separation from the

Holocaust, American readers are still fascinated with the subject. In her book A Thousand

Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, Ruth Franklin mentions the fear of

“Holocaust fatigue” that was discussed in 1980s and 1990s American media, by which she meant the worry that Americans had heard too about the Holocaust and could not take any more (222). This, Franklin feared, would lead to insensitivity from the general public, even in the face of a massive tragedy such as the Holocaust. After all, in his 1994 book Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics, Berel Lang estimates Holocaust writing to include “tens of thousands” texts, spanning fiction, drama, memoir, poetry, history monographs, and more (35). The sheer amount of Holocaust writing threatens to overwhelm readers, not to mention the enormity of the suffering these texts describe.

However, despite the vast amount of Holocaust fiction that is already in existence, authors continue to write these texts, and readers continue to read them. The New York

Times Best Sellers list— which claims to be the “authoritatively ranked lists of books”— was littered with Holocaust fiction through the 2010s. In fact, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a polarizing historical fiction title, spent more than a year on the paperback Best Sellers list (“Paperback Trade Fiction.”). There is something about World War II, and specifically the Holocaust, that confounds and inspires novelists and readers alike.

The History of Holocaust Fiction Gapsch 4

Early Holocaust authors included Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Tadeusz

Borowski, all of whom were survivors of concentration camps. Their memoirs and novels contain a blend of their personal lived experience of the Holocaust, with some embellishments for narrative or privacy, as Franklin argues in A Thousand Darknesses.

Franklin notes that the Holocaust was described as “unknowable,” and that many believed that it could not be represented in literature by those who did not experience it themselves (5). Elie Wiesel most famously took this point of view, and as Wiesel was seen as an authoritative figure for the Holocaust in America, his position was generally accepted (Franklin 85). Thus, early Holocaust literature “belonged” to those who experienced some aspect of the Holocaust themselves, as they were believed to have the sole authority to write on the subject sensitively and accurately.

However, by the 1970s, Holocaust literary critics were beginning to accept the fact that non-survivors were writing Holocaust fiction. Lawrence Langer, who has written extensively on Holocaust literature, tackles the issue of Holocaust fiction in his book The

Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. Langer argues that the literary critic should no longer question if Holocaust fiction could be written. Rather, Langer calls for Holocaust scholars to examine existing Holocaust fiction to “judge [it] for its effectiveness and analyze its implications for literature and for society” (Langer 22). Additionally, Langer begins to notice trends and motifs in Holocaust literature, such as disjointed timelines, the depiction of disrupted childhoods, and the juxtaposition of life and death (Langer xii).

Furthermore, Langer discussed the fact that the Holocaust was a unique event and thus genre-breaking when depicted in literature. This concept was also explored by Ruth

Franklin, who discusses the “nonfiction novel” in her book, by which she means a novel Gapsch 5 that has a true story at as its basis, but which uses the genre devices of fiction (18). A popular example of this is Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally, which was developed into the Steven Spielberg movie Schindler’s List. Franklin writes extensively on these

“nonfiction novels,” arguing that fiction is not entirely false, as it is often based or inspired by real events, and conversely that memoir is not entirely true, as memory is known to be inaccurate (116). Thus, the Holocaust can be seen as ushering in this specific genre-breaking form. Overall, Franklin is a proponent of Holocaust fiction, writing that fiction and imaginative works can broaden our understanding of historical events (13).

She describes an “emotional attachment” that comes with fictional works that can be hard to innately create with documentary footage or primary source accounts (159). Her analysis of these foundational Holocaust fictional works helps readers to understand the purpose of Holocaust fiction, as well as fiction in general, and why both are necessary.

However, historical fiction that is inaccurate (either with the accumulation of minor inauthentic details that slowly disrupt the story, or with sweeping historical inaccuracies) can damage the reader’s understanding of history. Many popular Holocaust works are used in the classroom or are specifically written for younger audiences, with the idea that these works will lay the foundation of the reader’s historical knowledge about the Holocaust. Even something as small as continuing to emphasize the blue- eyed/blonde-haired Germanic ideal during Nazi regime can confuse the reader into thinking that’s what the Holocaust was “about.” This narrow view neglects to address the anti-Semitism in Germany that preceded the Holocaust, as well as anti-Semitism that unfortunately continues today. Gapsch 6

In opposition, stories that are read as the most realistic or “true” appear to take their narrative arc and plot directly from survivor testimony. Lang argues that Holocaust literature is “bound” to history, meaning that works aspire to be realistic and should be grounded in history first (Lang 20). Lang believes this is a moral duty of the author, perhaps because Holocaust literature always carries an obligation to the memory of all the victims of the Holocaust as well as to the trauma of Holocaust survivors. Thus,

Holocaust novels that include plots and relationships such as the above examples are grounded in history, though they are still fictionalized and imaginative.

The Categories of Holocaust Fiction

There are several ways to characterize Holocaust fiction, and often these categories overlap. First, there is genre: Holocaust fiction is, by nature of writing an event that occurred in the past, historical fiction. Additionally, there is age range: these are the categories of children’s, young adult, and adult fiction. Last, a final category I include is that of “popular” literature. This has more to do with the commercial success of a novel after its publication, rather than the actual construction of a novel (every author wishes their novel to be “popular,” after all). However, these different categories all put pressure on Holocaust novels, including the critical reception of these texts.

The genre of historical fiction has often been characterized as a “women’s genre,” as is discussed by literary critic Diane Wallace in her article “Difficulties, Discontinuities and Differences: Reading Women’s Historical Fiction” (207). In this piece, Wallace considers how the genre of historical fiction is usually seen as a women’s genre and how, as a result, the genre can be quite polarizing: viewed as “middlebrow” or “escapist” Gapsch 7

(207). Wallace points out that going back to the seventeenth century, the genre of historical fiction has always been a place for women writers and readers (207). She also discusses how historical fiction appears oxymoronic, with its blend of fact and fiction as the framework, and how this hybridity has led to harsh criticism of the genre as a whole

(208). Furthermore, Wallace discusses the idea that historical fiction is a “bastard” genre, citing Bonnie G. Smith’s ideas from The Gender of History (1998) that the field of history is positioned as “masculine” and “scientific,” thus opposed to “feminine” and

“amateur” qualities. The view was that women should not engage with history for fear of tainting the study (209). However, the fact remains that many historical fiction readers are women, in addition to the many female authors of this genre. Of the six novels I engage with, five are written by women, including Jodie Picoult, Heather Morris, and

Tatiana de Rosnay. The only text not authored by a woman is The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe. However, the protagonist of this story is Dita Kraus, a female

Holocaust survivor. These texts largely focus on female protagonists, and as I discuss in chapter one on the unique relationships between female characters.

Along the same lines that historical fiction is deemed “middlebrow,” the genre of young adult fiction has been considered to be “low-brow or middlebrow” and not of interest to an academic audience because it is explicitly written in simpler language for young readers. However, though these texts are written with a smaller vocabulary than their adult counterparts, the texts obviously are not “simple” in terms of theme and content, as evidenced by the fact that these young adult books focus on the complex and weighty subject of the Holocaust. There are some additional differences in adult and young adult fiction, likely stemming from the idea that historical young adult fiction has Gapsch 8 a clearer intention to educate, given that the text may be a student’s first experience with any Holocaust writing.

For example, the narrative technique I discuss in chapter two is that of separate narrators with separate timelines. This technique is more common in adult Holocaust novels than young adult or children’s fiction. Children’s Holocaust stories are more likely to have protagonists who live through the Holocaust or World War II themselves. For example, two of the most popular children’s and young adult Holocaust novels are Lois

Lowry’s Number the Stars, a story about a young Danish girl who helps her Jewish friend escape the Nazis invading Denmark, and The Book Thief, which features a young German girl living through World War II while her foster family hides a young Jewish man. The protagonist of controversial The Boy in the Striped Pajamas directly experiences the

Holocaust, in which he dies in the concentration camp where his Nazi father works.

Perhaps young adult and children’s authors prefer to immerse the younger entirely in the older time period, while adult readers are expected to handle the limbo between timelines. Furthermore, adult readers are more adept at handling the repercussions of the past entering the present (which is a theme found in these dual timeline novels), whereas the role of young adult historical fiction is to largely introduce younger readers to these histories in the first place.

Finally, in selecting titles for this thesis I also came upon the category of

“popular” books, or those that are widely consumed and read by the general population.

This category differs from genre and age range, in that popularity is only determined after a novel has already been written and published. For that same reason, the popularity of a work has little to do with the differentiation between lowbrow, middlebrow, and Gapsch 9 highbrow classifications. For example, Pulitzer winners are both highbrow works as well as popular works. On the other hand, romance novels are deemed lowbrow, but many are best sellers.

I determine the popularity of Holocaust fiction largely based on these works’ position on the New York Times Best Sellers lists upon their release. The vast majority of the titles I am examining placed somewhere on these lists, at times even reaching the coveted Number 1 spot. The New York Times has been rather vague in explaining how they collect data for the list, but the main source seems to be simply pulling from sales at a variety of bookstores (The New York Times, Best Sellers Staff). There has been some controversy surrounding the lists, because some authors have been known to “buy” their way onto the Best Sellers lists by purchasing large numbers of their books in secret to make their sales appear much greater. The Best Sellers staff try, to the best of their ability, to exclude authors who are making these secretive bulk orders of their own books from the Best Sellers lists (The New York Times, Best Sellers Staff). Thus, I believe that the Best Sellers list is a good gauge of what the average reader is consuming. The reasoning for including this category is that I can select books that allow me to see what kinds of information the average reader is learning about the Holocaust.

Memorialization and The Purpose of Historical Fiction

A prominent trend in historical studies is an emphasis on personal narratives. In his article “The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies,” Jay Winter coins the term “memory boom,” or the interest in memorializing and focusing on memory, as a new basis of historical study, one that’s even more important than previous interests in Gapsch 10 identity studies such as class- or gender- based analysis (52). However, that is not to say that identity politics are unrelated to the “memory boom.” Rather, Winter argues that the

“creation and dissemination of narratives about the past arise out of and express identity politics” (54). Essentially, the disseminators of these narratives wish to establish a collective memory by sharing the stories of individuals and their specific experiences due to their identities. Winter highlights the role of authors (“storytellers” as he refers to them) as architects in this “memory boom,” as he believes that they have a large role in

“public understanding of traumatic memory” (65). I consider these works of historical fiction as efforts to establish communal memorialization of the Holocaust. As I discuss in the three chapters, these texts place a heavy focus on the role of the individual in history, which aligns with Winter’s concept of a “memory boom.” Thus, just as these authors engage with history and the lived experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors to write these fictional works, they are also continuing the writing of history itself, by contributing to the general public’s conceptualization of the Holocaust.

Methods

An underlying thread between my chapters is an analysis of narrative style and choice of protagonist. Narrative theory is grounded in the idea that the choices authors make in plot, characterization, setting, and narration style are influential in the reader’s understanding of the author’s argument. In particular, I am looking at general trends and motifs in these Holocaust novels, find narrative structures that influence the development of these novels, and thus our understanding of the events in history they are representing.

Like Lang, I do not believe that Holocaust literature is above criticism simply because it Gapsch 11 is writing on a difficult subject (10). However, by focusing on the specific genres of historical fiction as well as the category of young adult fiction, I defend these genres as valid by considering the literary techniques of these books. I aim to further legitimize these texts by analyzing them in a scholarly way, when other scholars choose to ignore them in favor of the more canonical authors.

Additionally, I will be grounding my literary analysis within historical context. I have researched the true lived experiences of Holocaust victims, especially women’s experiences. I will be drawing from historical monographs and articles such as Zoe

Waxman’s Women in the Holocaust: a feminist history and Rochelle Saidel’s The Jewish women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp to compare the history with these fictional portrayals of the Holocaust. As Lang believes that Holocaust fiction should be grounded in history, I incorporate a brief history of the various terms I am discussing in each chapter, such as the second generation and third generation of Holocaust survivors, or the classification of the nonfiction novel genre. Finally, just as Winter believes that novels influence society’s collective memory and understanding of historical events such as the

Holocaust, I explore how the real lived experiences of individuals in history influence the ways that authors tell similar stories. My analysis of these several contemporary historical novels will emphasize both avenues of influence and understanding. I look at several Holocaust novels from the twenty-first century, examining tropes, narrative technique, and plot similarities between them. While each of these works participate in the “memory boom” as described by Jay Winter, they do so in different ways.

In chapter one, I engage with Holocaust novels about female bonding in concentration camps—Lilac Girl by Martha Hall Kelly and Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Gapsch 12

Wein. I argue that these works bring women’s experiences to the genre of Holocaust fiction, specifically showcasing how women brought their gendered roles into the camps and used these skills for survival. In chapter two, I work with two novels that portray the third generation (grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders) as well as the inclusion of two timelines (past and present) in these works. These novels are

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay and The Storyteller by Jodie Picoult. In chapter two, I argue that these novels highlight the necessity of telling a marginalized individual’s story, even if the repercussions are uncomfortable for family members. Finally, in chapter three,

I discuss two popular “nonfiction novels,” (The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris and The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe) and the reception of these texts. I argue that The Librarian of Auschwitz is a more successful Holocaust novel, for its more imaginative writing style.

Chapters one and two of my thesis are focused on analysis of their respective novels, and I incorporate close readings of books and look at plot structures and narrative techniques to consider how twenty-first century Holocaust novels are written. This builds to chapter three, where I spend considerably less time analyzing the novels themselves, and instead focus on the criticism and praise both novels received. After all, these texts do not exist in a vacuum, and in studying these texts we must consider the lived history of

Holocaust victims and survivors, the novels themselves, as well as critics’ and historians’ reception of the novels.

I am most interested in the purpose of historical fiction, questioning why this genre exists when memoirs and historical monographs already exist. As Lang and canonical authors like Wiesel write, there are limits that should be imposed on Holocaust Gapsch 13 fiction authors. They should consider both what authority they have to write about the subject, and what their duties are—to history, to the victims, to survivors—when they choose to write about the Holocaust. With this project, I intend to establish what is a

“good” example of Holocaust fiction in terms of its representation of history as well as the fictional liberties authors take while still fulfilling their duties to history and the memory of victims of the Nazis.

Gapsch 14

Chapter One

Camp Sisters: Representations of Female Friendship and Networks of Support in

Rose Under Fire and The Lilac Girls

Introduction

For even those with limited knowledge about the Holocaust, it is understood that the Nazi concentration and extermination camps were dehumanizing and life-threatening spaces. Though concentration camps were not set out to be death camps, but rather prisoner work camps, limited nutrition, abusive guards, unsafe working conditions, and lack of shelter from the elements all contributed to an environment that was incompatible with life. However, despite all of these factors and others, some prisoners of Nazi concentration camps survived. Specifically, female prisoners formed close relationships with one another as an act as survival. This theme is found both in primary source accounts, historical monographs, and now, popular twenty-first century holocaust fiction.

These scenes depicted the phenomenon known as “camp sisters,” a term coined by

Holocaust historians that describes foster families formed in concentration camps (Saidel

208). These women were bound by location more primarily than by familial relation, and they cared for one another emotionally and physically in order to survive the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes.

In this chapter, I will first describe the historical contexts for these close female relationships. Then, I will explore their representations in Holocaust fiction. I will look at both a Young Adult novel (Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein) and an Adult fiction novel (Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly). Both titles have different genre conventions due to the audience of the book, however their representations of concentration camp Gapsch 15 prisoners are very similar. To truly understand this phenomenon of “camp sisters,” we need to look at gender: at the unique experiences of women in concentration camps and in the fictional portrayals of their experiences in camps. Canonical works such as the memoir writings by Primo Levi portray concentration camps places without companionship, situations in which survivors were only able to survive alone. However, primary source documents and historical research reveals that was more typically a male experience of internment, and that women frequently formed the bonds known as “Camp

Families” as an act of survival. As several historians argued in the 1970s and 1980s, women had different experiences in concentration camps than men. They experienced sexual abuse, amenorrhea (the ceasing of menstruation) and ensuing fears of infertility, and medical experiments at the hands of the Nazis. It is in response to these attacks that women used their socially constructed gender roles as nurturers to comfort and save one another in the camps. Through the focus on female bonding and companionship in concentration camps, these novels present the resilience of women who utilized their learned gender roles inside concentration camps in order to survive. Furthermore, contemporary fiction works such as Lilac Girls and Rose Under Fire add to our understanding of concentration camps by bringing in women’s experiences to the genre of Holocaust literature and our memory of the Holocaust.

Historical Background: Women’s Experiences in Nazi Concentration Camps

In concentration camps, prisoners were separated into men’s and women’s sections within a larger camp system (such as Auschwitz in Poland) or female prisoners were sent to the all-female camp, Ravensbrück, in Germany. Historian Zoe Waxman Gapsch 16 writes in her book, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History, that though many facets of personal and social identity were stripped by the Nazis, institutions of gender remained intact (94). She writes, “gendered behaviors and pre-war morality still mattered” in the camps (Waxman 18). Though many survivors describe a dehumanization in the camps, gender disappearing was not part of that process (for women) because Jewish women were discriminated against for their ability to bear Jewish children. Jewish women were sexually abused in camps, were sterilized without their consent, and were killed if they were pregnant (Waxman 11). Writing on sexual violence women experienced during the

Holocaust, historian Helga Amesberger asserts that because reproductive rights were revoked for Jewish women and men, the Nazis took away their “self-determinism”

(Amesberger 141). This rights revocation is often overlooked in lieu of other, more obvious violations of rights the Nazis committed.

Many of these violent acts against Jewish women were unique to women’s experiences of the Holocaust, and thus are not often found in canonical works by Eli

Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Tadeusz Borowski. It was certainly frustrating to historians and scholars that the general public’s view of the Holocaust was specifically through a male lens. Issues of abortion, sexual assault, and even the phenomenon of “camp sisters” were simply not discussed until the 1980s, when historian Joan Ringelheim explicitly outlined that women experienced the Holocaust differently than men. She argued that the entire study of the Holocaust should be reexamined through the perspective of women, as previously it was men who told stories of rape, abortion, and prostitution (Ringelheim 73-

4). However, as Waxman notes in Women in the Holocaust, there was fervid backlash to

Ringelheim’s assertion of the need to tell women’s histories. Other historians argued that Gapsch 17 if scholars take a feminist approach to study women’s experience of the Holocaust, the inherent Jewishness of the Holocaust would be lost or displaced. (Waxman 2). It did not help that Ringelheim was very radical in her assertions— she declared that women

“survived better than men, due to their specific ability to form bonds with other prisoners” (Ringelheim 70). However, scholars such as Ringelheim, Marion Kaplan,

Myrna Goldenberg, Sarah Horowitz, Rochelle Saidel, and many others take an intersectional view to history by writing on Holocaust victims’ experiences as both women and Jews (Waxman 4). Twenty-first century historians such as Waxman and

Saidel are not as explicit in stating that Jewish women survived “better” than men, and they also refute homogenizing women’s experiences (Waxman 9). However, modern historians still argue that women’s histories can be different from men’s due to their gender roles and thus gendered experience, and that the relationships between women in concentration camps were an act of survival.

In primary source documents, this idea of “camp sisters,” foster families, and close female relationships can take on many forms. Historian Joan Ringelheim argued that Jewish women had “different survival capabilities, different work, roles, and relationships,” which prepared them to assume maternal and nurturing roles in the prisoner community, roles that men were not prepared to undertake (Ringelheim 70).

Though women certainly faced specific adversity due to their gender (such as sexual assault and pregnancy), Saidel argues that “there were positive aspects related to gender that enabled women to better struggle against the subhuman conditions of degradation, deprivation, terror, and death” (Saidel 22). For example, Saidel highlights the homemaking and “nurturing skills” that enabled women to create foster families, and Gapsch 18 within those families, care for one another and maintain health routines such as hygiene and medicine that would help with survival (Saidel 22). Ringelheim describes this particular skill of women in the camps of being “able to create or recreate ‘families’” as thus constructing “networks of survival” (Ringelheim 80). Furthermore, Waxman writes that “women responded to the suffering they were forced to endure by trying to maintain familial or emotional bonds… women even “adopted” children to look after” (Waxman

105). Saidel coins the term camp sisters to describe “blood sisters, other female relatives, or unrelated women who had bonded to help each other survive in concentration camps

(Saidel 208). Specific examples of coming together to care for one another in camps included women babysitting for a mother on a work detail, or even adopting orphaned children (Saidel 208). In Ravensbrück, where women had no access to weapons, Saidel describes other means of resistance through which women kept up their spirits (Saidel

53). For example, women would share recipes, make small gifts (including poetry, cards, embroidery, drawings) and teach language skills (Saidel 53). These tasks of homemaking were not just about simple physical survival, but also about fulfilling emotional needs.

Literary Background: The First Fictional “Camp Family”

Alongside historians’ interest in women’s experiences in the Holocaust came the literary world’s interest in fictional portrayals of women. In his work The Holocaust

Novel, Efraim Sicher lays out the development of Holocaust novels over time. He points out the 1969 novel An Estate of Memory by Polish-Jewish survivor Ilona Karmel as one of the first novels written from a female perspective, as well as a novel that included

“small acts of mercy that often go unnoticed in the annals of Nazi brutality” (Sicher 15). Gapsch 19

He uses the same language as Holocaust historians to describe this novel, writing that the main character “finds female bonding and solidarity, a sort of surrogate family, amid the humiliation and hardship” (Sicher 15). Thus, we can find the trope of the “camp sisters” not only in the nonfiction memoirs by female survivors and in historical monographs on the Holocaust, but also in creative fiction written by female survivors. Furthermore, in the field of Holocaust literature, survivor writing (fictional or otherwise) is held to be authoritative.

Another example of an exceedingly popular work contemporary historical fiction similar to Lilac Girls and Rose Under Fire is The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, published in 2015. This novel still placed on the New York Times Best Sellers List for paperbacks as of August 2020, indicating its endurance of sales and readership. The

Nightingale is written from two perspectives, both French women, and only a slim portion of the novel is set in the concentration camp Ravensbrück. Perhaps Hannah understood her own limitations in writing exclusively a concentration camp story, or she simply decided on focusing largely on occupied France in her writing. However, the fact remains that the most popular of these three similar novels (Nightingale, Lilac Girls, and

Rose Under Fire) has the least amount of time in the camps. Thus, I will not be focusing on The Nightingale in this exploration of concentration camps in literature, but it is worth noting simply for the American reader’s continued interest in the general topic of

Holocaust fiction and women’s histories.

The Canonical View of Concentration Camps: Primo Levi Gapsch 20

To understand the surprising nature of this trope of intense and nurturing relationships among women in concentration camps, it is necessary to go back to the standard view of the Holocaust. Perhaps the two most authoritative Holocaust survivors are Eli Wiesel and Primo Levi, who both authored multiple works of Holocaust literature.

Night by Eli Wiesel and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi are frequently utilized in middle school, high school, and university classrooms as an introduction to the

Holocaust. Additionally, the body of scholarship on Wiesel and Levi’s works is extensive. Thus, when one thinks of the Holocaust, the first ideas are usually descriptions given by Wiesel or Levi.

A line of thinking given by Levi in Survival of Auschwitz is that of the dual roles of prisoners in concentration camps— the Drowned (or “musselmen”) and the Saved.

The Drowned are the more passive of the two— they go through the drudgery of camp life without reaction. Levi bluntly writes as if they have beaten spirits and no will to continue; he describes them holistically as “an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen.”

(90) The Saved, however, are the prisoners that are more likely to survive the camp.

And if someone, by a miracle of savage patience and cunning, finds a new

expedient for avoiding the hardest work, a new art that yields him an ounce of

bread, he will try to keep his method secret, and he will be esteemed and

respected for this, and will derive from it an exclusive, personal benefit; he will

become stronger and so will be feared, and he who is feared, is, ipso facto, a

candidate for survival. (Levi 107) Gapsch 21

In this passage, the idea of a Holocaust survivor is someone who operated alone. Levi uses terms like “exclusive” and “secret” to evoke an idea of individual survivor, one who did not share his assets with other prisoners. Additionally, if the Saved is a person

“feared,” there is no connection among surviving prisoners. The Saved is “respected,” but ultimately is not a source of support for other prisoners. Levi’s description of camp life is a dog-eat-dog system.

There is no denying that Levi’s descriptions of Auschwitz are true. However, there exists a multitude of concentration camps and Holocaust victims. As Zoe Waxman argues in her research, the Holocaust was not one singular universal event, “but was rather a series of different—and differently experienced—events.” (9) Thus, when one looks only to Levi or Wiesel for an understanding of camp life, this perspective is limited. Neither Levi nor Wiesel came into consistent contact with female prisoners.

They were not privy to the phenomenon of “camp sisters.” The novels that I describe in this chapter are an effort to broaden American readers’ knowledge of the Holocaust and

Nazi atrocities. Though these novels consistently deploy the “camp sister” trope without much differentiation, the very existence of this trope contradicts the general understanding of the Holocaust brought forth by the canonical authors such as Primo

Levi. While female memoirists such as Ruth Kluger brought attention to the existence of

“camp sisters” (Kluger’s mother essentially adopted another daughter while they were imprisoned), the knowledge of this bonding and friendships and camps would not have extended to the general public and readership until popular authors such as Wein and

Kelly incorporated it in their novels, adding another title to the vast genre of Holocaust literature. Gapsch 22

Twenty-First Century “Camp Family” Novels

The two contemporary novels I examine in this chapter are Lilac Girls by Martha

Hall Kelly and Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein. Lilac Girls was quite successful in its first year of publication (2015), earning a spot on the New York Times Best Sellers

List. Rose Under Fire is a Young Adult novel, published in 2013. The novel was commended in reviews from Publishers Weekly for Wein’s ability to “[weave] research seamlessly into narrative” (Publishers Weekly). Additionally, the Kirkus Review recommended this book for its “rich detail” and emphasis on the “resilience of human nature and the power of friendship and hope” (Kirkus Review). Rose Under Fire also won the American Library Associations’ Schneider Family Book Awards, “for books that embody an artistic expression of the disability experience” (Roback). Though Lilac Girls made the New York Times Best Seller’s List, it received a mixed review from Kirkus—

“Kelly vividly re-creates the world of Ravensbrück but is less successful integrating the wartime experience of Caroline, whose involvement with the surviving Rabbits comes very late” (Kirkus). Holistically, these reviews all indicate critics’ and readers’ interest in accuracy and realism in historical fiction, as well as a balance of historical truths with human interest stories.

The main similarity between these two novels is they are set partially or entirely in Ravensbrück concentration camp. The camp was built in 1938 and relied almost exclusively on the slave labor of its female prisoners (Saidel 13). The female prisoners at

Ravensbrück were most frequently political prisoners of varying nationalities, having been sentenced for rebelling against the Nazi government in some manner, though also Gapsch 23 imprisoned were Jews, “asocials,” and Jehovah’s Witnesses (Saidel 13). Though

Ravensbrück was not a death camp (it did not exist solely to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe), women were murdered through starvation, shooting, medical experiments, torture, lethal injection, and eventually gas chambers (Saidel 19).

A Brief Term Clarification: “The Holocaust: versus “The Era of the Holocaust”

An important distinction to make is that not all victims of Ravensbrück were victims of the Holocaust— the term “Holocaust” is exclusive to the Nazis’ intentions to murder all of the Jews. While the protagonists of these novels are not Jewish themselves, and thus not victims of the Holocaust, the novels do display the further atrocious acts of the Nazis. The novels feature Polish prisoners in Ravensbrück, which the Nazis particularly abused due to their belief that the Slavic race was inferior to the Aryan race.

For the purposes of this chapter, I will employ the phrase victims of the “era of the

Holocaust,” which is what the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum uses to describe victims of Nazi crimes who were not Jewish, but still were explicitly targeted by the Nazis due to their supposed racial inferiority (United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum).

Historical Fiction: The Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

Lilac Girls follows three first-person narratives during and after the Second

World War— a Polish woman imprisoned in Ravensbrück (Kasia), a New York socialite and activist (Caroline), and a female doctor and perpetrator at Ravensbrück (Herta).

Kasia, a Polish teenager, is sent to Ravensbrück for her involvement in the Polish Gapsch 24

Resistance. While at Ravensbrück, she is experimented upon by the Nazis without her consent, joining the group of women known as the “Polish Rabbits.” The socialite in this novel, Caroline, was a real historical figure who campaigned for the “Polish Rabbits” to visit the United States to receive medical treatment after the war. The strongest parts of this novel are certainly the scenes which take place in Ravensbrück, as the narratives that feature the socialite pale in comparison to the fierce displays of friendship in the camp.

Though Kasia is not “real” figure, her character was based on several of the Polish rabbits.

Inside Ravensbrück, Kasia immediately experiences shocking brutality and injustice. Kasia is struck by the hypocrisy of the Nazi regime, when the guards complain of the Polish prisoners’ smell. She thinks, “They give us one small bucket to use and complain we smell?” (153). With this brief line, Kelly gets right to Nazi protocol— limit a group’s access to “human” necessities (through minimal cleaning supplies and insufficient nutrition, for example), and then complain the group was subhuman all along.

Furthermore, Kasia describes the entrance to the camp as particularly violating to her as a young woman. When her hair is shorn, she thinks, “Thank God Pietrik [her boyfriend] wasn’t there to see that” (157). This loss of her femininity is traumatic for Kasia, especially during a time in which the gender roles required women to have long hair. She is also examined by a prisoner acting as a gynecologist. Kasia is most upset by the fact that the other prisoner is unabashed and unaffected by this, thinking “She acted with no regard for the fact that I was young and she was violating me in a way that could never be undone” (157). For Kasia as a young woman, this is a defining moment she has had yet to experience. She particularly views it as a loss of virginity, saying “I had little time to Gapsch 25 mourn my lost virginity…” (157). Again, this violation is particularly traumatic for women at this time, as gender roles dictated that women were to guard their virginity

(and thus, their morality) until marriage.

Despite these obstacles— and the later gross violation of human rights with the

Nazi medical experiments— Kasia establishes a routine and connections in Ravensbrück.

Kelly writes, “many of our fellow prisoners shared their own precious food with all of the

Rabbits” and “the women in our block had voted to allow us to have a bottom bunk to ourselves in light of our situation as Rabbits” (254). This is striking when considered with Kasia’s earlier statement about the camp, that she “quickly learned that survival at

Ravensbrück revolved around one’s tin bowl, cup, and spoon, and the ability to safeguard them” due to the prominence of theft in the camp (Kelly 160). Food and comfortable sleeping spaces were potentially the most valuable objects in the camps, yet these prisoners selflessly gave their own possessions for the sake of near strangers.

Another example of the bonding that took place in this novel is the humor and amusements the prisoners entertained themselves with. Though the work in camps was brutal and exhaustive, it was certainly not mentally engaging. As a result of this lack of divertissement, the Kasia and her fellow prisoners came up with a game in which they would compete for the funniest item to bring with them if they were sentenced to death at the shooting wall. This is shocking in its morbidity, and Kasia even acknowledges that:

“Strange as it may sound now, we too comfort in many such morbid games…. tired and terribly hungry as we all were, after twelve hours of work, it helped to laugh at it all”

(193). While this doesn’t necessarily fit into the category of “nurturing” like many other examples given in this chapter, this game still qualifies as bonding that aligns with Gapsch 26 testimony from real concentration camp survivors, in which they tried to keep up one another’s spirits by engaging in activities that were not intended just for survival.

Historical Fiction: Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

Rose Under Fire differs from the previous titles in that it is Young Adult historical fiction, meaning there are different expectations for the genre. There are generally fewer scenes of violent or explicit nature in Young Adult literature, the sentence structure and word usage can be less complex so as to fit with middle and high school reading levels, and the age of the characters is almost always less than twenty years old. Despite the limitations on content through this genre, Wein still accurately portrays the traumatic experience of concentration camps with her protagonist Rose, an

American pilot who is imprisoned in Ravensbrück after her plane goes down. In the camps Rose experiences starvation, beatings, frigid weather, and intense work. The novel is spliced between Rose’s time in the camps, and her immediate post-war experience in

France. Wein also delves into the role of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in freed prisoner’s lives, as Rose is terrified to leave her hotel in France after her escape from

Ravensbrück.

Young Adult novels often feature more character growth and development than adult novels, which mirrors their teenage readership’s own fast-paced development. For example, there is a scene in Rose Under Fire in which another prisoner organizes (steals) three pairs of stockings for Rose. In turn, Rose passes along a pair to a “Rabbit.” Roza, and her “camp mother,” Lisette. It is not until writing her recollection later that she realized she could have passed along the third pair elsewhere, rather than keeping it for Gapsch 27 herself. This could be argued as a selfish moment— Rose says she is “almost ashamed to write it down” (178). However, there is also a sense that keeping herself alive and warm is vital in order to continue as important as helping fellow prisoners in this environment.

Rose says “[the stockings] were mine and my feet were cold,” and the other prisoners were either capable of organizing their own stockings or would be affronted at the act of charity (178). Thus, we can see Rose’s thought process and justification for her actions in a way that adult novels usually do not spell out. Additionally, Wein brings in a complex scene that most readers would not experience themselves, but by having Rose consider the moral dilemma, the young readers are invited to consider what choice they might have made in such a situation.

However, to take a Holocaust theorist’s approach to this particular scene, this would fall under the category of a “choiceless choice.” Lawrence Langer coined this term in his book, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays. Langer writes “these victims, who were plunged into a crisis of what might call ‘choiceless choice,’ where critical decisions did not reflect options between life and death, but between one form of

‘abnormal’ response and another, both imposed by a situation that was in no way of the victim's own choosing” (Langer 224). This term is critical to understanding the motivations and conditions of victims and survivors of the Nazi regime. Though Rose had the choice of keeping the stockings, she was only put in that situation through her imprisonment in the concentration camp system by the Nazis.

In further catering to the genre, Rose is eighteen years old when she enters

Ravensbrück. Additionally, her nationality as an American differs her from many other concentration camp prisoners and thus, concentration camp novel’s protagonists. Gapsch 28

However, Wein acknowledges this discrepancy throughout the text, as Rose mentions her own limited contact with the violence of the war before entering Ravensbrück. She is even briefly ousted by the Polish prisoners for admitting her lack of belief when she heard of their story before coming to Ravensbrück. Rose says, “‘We didn’t do anything…We just thought it was anti-German propaganda. No one believed it” (Wein

150). The prisoners are furious with Rose for this statement— her previous disbelief seems flimsy when she is regaled with the horror of the medical experiments done by the

Nazis. Rose says, “Listening to the Rabbits talk about their operations was like watching a horror movie in a foreign language. You sort of hope you’d misunderstood what was going on, and then when you figured out what was really going on, it was worse than you’d thought” (Wein 152). With this simile, Wein assists the younger reader in comprehending the trauma of these experiences through comparison to something more familiar— a horror movie.

In a way, Rose acts as a stand-in for the young American reader— an outsider who abruptly enters this world of violence previously unknown to them. Rose also mentions in time as a Girl Scout (another topic likely familiar to the young reader).

However, she does so in contrast to a Polish Rabbit’s experience, who was “arrested for being a Girl Scout” because her troop delivered bomb parts (Wein 154). In response,

Rose thinks of her childhood (not that long ago): “We took to the Brownies on a picnic to the Conewago Grove Lake. We were not smuggling explosives and we were not being arrested by the Nazis” (Wein 155). The contrast is distinctive here, and there is almost a sense of guilt from Rose for her idyllic experiences in Girl Scouts compared to Roza’s highly politicized and dangerous experiences. This also lends to differentiate Rose from Gapsch 29 other concentration camp novel protagonists such as Kasia— she was not an active member of the resistance movement in Nazi occupied territories, but was accidentally captured while piloting a plane for the Allies. She did not reach adulthood in Nazi- occupied terrorizes like Roza in the novel or Kasia in Lilac Girls, gradually learning of

Nazi policies. Rather, Rose had the misfortunate of learning the exact details of Nazi crimes— the gas chambers, the medical experiments, the needlessly severe punishments in camps— all at once.

In response to the torture the Nazis inflicted on female prisoners, the prisoners bonded together. Though Rose was initially an outsider for her inexperience with the

Nazis (and not necessarily for her youth), she was soon taken into the prisoners’ ranks.

Like Kasia in Lilac Girls, Rose develops close bonds with her fellow prisoners. Though

Rose befriends several “Rabbits,” she is not experimented upon herself, and the experiments have ended by the time Rose arrives in Ravensbrück near the end of the war.

However, that does not mean life in the camps was any less harrowing. Rose says, “You were dead if you didn’t have someone looking out for you. But I never worried about having to find a teammate. I was so lucky. Lisette’s bunkmates in Block 32 weren’t just a team— we were a proper Camp Family, with Lisette in the role of Lagermutter, Camp

Mother” (141). In Ravensbrück, Rose was starving, and beaten, and made to create goods for soldiers who were fighting against her own people, among countless other hits against her humanity. However, she finds love, and beauty, and family in the camps. Rose writes of her new friend Irina, “She had the most beautiful hands!” (174). This is such a small line, but to find beauty in a concentration camp is rare and precious. Gapsch 30

Wein’s use of the historical terms “camp family” and “camp mother” show the research she did in preparation for this novel, as does Rose’s belief that these networks of support are not simply friendships of circumstance, but rather survival skills.

Furthermore, Lisette’s role as “camp mother” is framed as a result of her role outside of the camp— she had three children who were murdered because of their Jewish father.

Their loss and her later imprisonment in the camp was an intense blow to her sense of self. Wein writes as a result, “She needed people to mother. It was how she stayed sane.”

(Wein 143). Like many of the real prisoners of concentration camps, Lisette took her outside role as nurturer and mother into the camp, and she used those skills not only to assist others’ survival, but also to comfort and save herself but maintaining a sense of personhood, purpose, and normalcy.

Gender Essentialism

It would be essentialist to state that these examples (fictional and historical) of female bonding occur because of an innate quality in women towards mothering and comforting. In no way are the historians or novelists writing on this subject trying to argue that women “bring a female touch” to the harsh Nazi world. Simply, these women took the resources they already had— their socially constructed gender roles— into the concentration camps. In 1940s Europe, women had relatively strict gender roles, and as

Waxman points out, the gender roles followed women to the camps (Waxman 18).

However, at the same time as these victims of the Holocaust found survival through forming networks of support, other women turned to violence. Every protagonist discovered sadistic kapos (prisoner guards) and brutal female Nazis upon arrival in the Gapsch 31 concentration camps. The phenomenon of camp sisters was common, but it was not prescriptive of every woman involved in the Holocaust or era of the Holocaust.

Why Is Representation Important?

There is a specific reasoning for these kinds of stories— representation in literature and storytelling. The argument that there is a need for women’s history and women’s story is not simply for historical accuracy’s sake. Rather, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of victims and survivors of the Holocaust want their family members’ stories witnessed. In an article for Ms. Magazine, feminist writer

Andrea Dworkin describes her personal relation to the Holocaust— family members that shared their trauma of sexual assault (Dworkin). Yet when she went to the United States

Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., she lamented the lack of information of women’s experiences (Dworkin). She points out that Jewish women were not just

“abstractly” attacked by the Nazis, but rather had an embodied experience (Dworkin).

When this article was published in 1994, Dworkin called for more research on women’s histories, and more memorialization of women’s experiences in particular:

I want the suffering and endurance of women--Jewish or not Jewish, in Auschwitz

or Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen or Dachau, Majdanek or Sobibor--reckoned with

and honored: remembered… I want this museum changed so that remembrance is

not male. I want to know the story of women in the Holocaust (Dworkin).

Dworkin stakes her claim personally, discussing her family’s experience earlier in the article, but also desires recognition of all Jewish women. While historians certainly answered this call for women’s histories, we can also view these novels that feature Gapsch 32 women’s stories as an act of memorialization through fiction. The representation of women in Holocaust fiction, and their experiences with the Holocaust through friendships and companionships, continues the memory of the real women who lived through the

Holocaust and era of the Holocaust.

Conclusion

In the 1970s and 1980s, historians had to fight for women’s histories to be included in the study of the Holocaust. This was not only vital to discovering a more complete view of history, but also necessary for the memory of the victims and survivors that were women. Women had different experiences, because the Nazis purposefully attacked Jewish women as women, limiting their reproduction capabilities and enacting sexual abuse. In response, women banded together, as an act as survival. In concentration camps, women formed close networks, and this has translated to fiction by survivors, and now, fiction about the era of the Holocaust. This is completely different from our understanding of the Holocaust from male, canonical writers such a Primo Levi, who characterizes survivors as surviving the Holocaust alone. While this could be seen as simply an American tendency towards looking for positivity in stories (known as the the

“Americanization of the Holocaust,” as coined by Alvin Rosenfeld), this phenomena of

“camp sisters” and “camp families” existed outside the genre of Young Adult fiction and adult historical fiction. Hundreds of real women forged these relationships despite (or maybe because) the Nazis limited their lives in almost every way possible. Thus, we read these stories not only because it’s nice to hear about humanity in a time in which humanity seemed to disappear. Rather, we read to remember and memorialize the women Gapsch 33 that did the unimaginable— loving and caring for one another in the Hell on earth that was concentration camps.

Gapsch 34

Chapter Two

Families and Dual Timelines: Exploring Representations of Third Generation

Holocaust Survivors in The Storyteller and Sarah’s Key

Introduction

A common stylistic feature of early twenty-first century popular Holocaust fiction is multiple narrators. In the previous chapter, I discussed one title already that included multiple narrators— Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly. Lilac Girls, however, differs from the titles I focus on in this chapter in that it features narrators from the same time period.

This chapter focuses on dual timeline narratives, or narrators that live in separate time periods. Not only can these separate narratives provide more than one presentation of an event, but the chronological gap in the narratives with these dual timeline plots allow for a rapid switch between past and present, as well as revelations on the past encroaching and influencing the present. Thus, the two titles I am including in this chapter—The

Storyteller by Jodi Picoult and Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay— can be categorized as both historical fiction and contemporary fiction, as they take place in the early twenty- first century and in the 1940s during the Second World War. However, these works do not feature strangers straddling two timelines, but rather protagonists learning about their family members’ experiences with the Holocaust. In some books, the protagonist is a child or grandchild learning of their grandparents’ time in concentration camps.

However, in other titles, the protagonist must grapple with their relative’s role as a silent beneficiary of Jewish persecution in Nazi-occupied zones, or even as a perpetrator of the

Holocaust. Thus, these works bring the past into the present, with the protagonist’s understanding of the Holocaust unfolding alongside the reader’s. These works also bring Gapsch 35 to light our modern conundrum of Holocaust remembrance in a time in which many survivors and perpetrators have passed away. However, the children and grandchildren of both players are still alive and grappling with conflicted views of their relatives. Through this focus on discussing stories of the past, these books position individuals’ stories as vital to the historical record, no matter the discomfort that outsiders and perpetrators may feel.

Historical Background: The Second Generation

As Efraim Sicher discusses in his book The Holocaust Novel, the term “Second

Generation” was originally used by “clinical psychologists and therapists for children of

Holocaust survivors who have in various ways been affected by the after-effects of their parents’ experience of…forms of persecution by the Nazis” (Sicher 133). However,

Sicher also points out there is not a “consensus that members of the ‘second generation’ share a pathology” and that not all second generationers require or seek out professional mental health advice (135). Just as one women’s experience with the Holocaust does not describe all women’s experiences, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors had diverse encounters with their relatives’ personal histories. Some Holocaust survivors were more open with discussing their time in concentration camps or in hiding. Others rarely discussed their experiences during the Second World War. Sicher argues that survivors’ reticence to discuss their past was logical, as they lived “in a postwar world that was largely indifferent to their fate and branded them with the stigma of refugee immigrants or passive victims” (Sicher 134). Many survivors felt the world was either too hostile or too inquisitive towards their suffering in the World War, and simply did not Gapsch 36 discuss their experiences with close friends and family. Though there is not much research on the third generation (the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, bystanders, or perpetrators) as of now, there is a focus on this generation in contemporary Holocaust fiction, including the two titles in this chapter.

Multiple Timelines Within the Genre of Historical Fiction

Diane Wallace discusses in her article “Difficulties, Discontinuities and

Differences: Reading Women’s Historical Fiction” how historical fiction, though seemingly about one point in time, is actually involving a multiplicity of cultural moments. She writes, “In reading any historical novel we are engaging with at least three different historical moments. There is the period in which the novel is set, the period in which is it written, and the period in which we are reading it” (Wallace 211). For contemporary historical fiction such as the books selected in this thesis, the period of writing and the period of reading is essentially the same— the twenty-first century. As

Wallace argues, the setting of the novel is always in conversation with the authors’ and readers’ own time period. For example, in the twenty-first century, the grandchildren of

Holocaust survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders came of age. For many people, understanding their adult life necessitates understanding their roots and their family’s history. Thus, we see stories of grandchildren learning of their grandparents’ involvement in the Holocaust, simultaneous to real grandchildren learning real histories. Purely anecdotal evidence of this is how before I went to college, I asked my grandfather about his time in the Philippines after serving in the Navy in the Second World War. As I entered adulthood, I was curious about my family members’ experiences in their late Gapsch 37 teens and early twenties as well. Furthermore, the parallel plotlines found in these novels display Wallace’s argument in a very obvious manner, as they deal directly with the past influencing the present, and the present time period engaging with actions and characters of the past.

Third Generation Holocaust Fiction

The two novels I am focusing on primarily in this chapter are The Storyteller by

Jodie Picoult and Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. The Storyteller was published in

2013 and reached the first spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list. The Storyteller follows Sage, a third-generation Holocaust survivor through her aging grandmother. Sage is a social recluse after experiencing her own trauma (unrelated to the Holocaust), though she befriends an older man, Josef, who is respected in their community. However, Sage eventually learns that this supposedly upstanding man was a Nazi, and then Josef requests that Sage assist him in committing suicide. The Storyteller mediates on of the ethics of punishment after a crime has been committed many decades previous. Throughout the story, Sage works with Leo, an employee of the US Justice Department, to pursue a case against Josef for his time as an SS leader. In this context, Sage is tasked with finding preliminary evidence to prove that Josef was a Nazi. The narrative is also segmented with

Sage’s grandmother’s (Minka) experiences in the Holocaust, shared for the first time with

Sage, which provides the dual narrative of past (Minka) and present (Sage). Additionally,

Josef narrates several scenes, as well as Leo. The novel concludes with Sage fulfilling

Josef’s request for death by poisoning him, only to learn Josef had switched his narrative—the actions that Josef described throughout the book were actually those of his Gapsch 38 sadistic brother. Sage learns that though Josef still felt guilty for his own involvement with the Nazi party, his crimes were nowhere near as heinous as his brother’s.

Sarah’s Key was originally published in 2006 with an English translation released in 2007. It also was very popular, selling more than five million copies in dozens of countries, placing on the New York Times Best Sellers list for two years, and it was adapted into a feature film (The Wall Street Journal). This novel follows Julia, an

American journalist living in Paris, who married into an established French family. She is tasked with researching the Vel d'Hiv Roundup that occurred during the Nazi occupation of France, in which thousands of French Jews were rounded up and housed in the

Velodrome before being sent to concentration camps. The property of these Jews was swiftly taken by French gentiles, including Julia’s grandparents-in-law, who took over the apartment of a Jewish family. In the course of her research, Julia discovers Sarah, the young Jewish girl who used to live in the apartment. De Rosnay intertwines Julia and

Sarah’s narratives throughout the text— Sarah describes her Holocaust experiences while

Julia learns of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, Sarah, and her own beloved in-laws’ complicity in the Holocaust.

Survivors, Perpetrators, and Bystanders

The rough three levels of Holocaust involvement are victims, bystanders, and perpetrators. Victims of the Holocaust include the Jewish people, as well as those killed during the “Era of the Holocaust.” Perpetrators were the Nazis and the various other people living in Nazi-occupied zones who carried out the orders of the Nazis. The most morally grey area is bystanders— neither victim nor perpetrators, but yet those that still Gapsch 39 witnessed and thus permitted Nazi actions, sometimes even benefiting inadvertently through material gain.

In his article “Holocaust Literature and the Taboo,” Matthew Boswell explores the various taboos concerning Holocaust literature, highlighting two: the portrayal of perpetrators in fiction, and the production of Holocaust fiction by non-survivor authors

(181). He underscored that these taboos exist to protect the Holocaust from

“falsification,” and that the existence of these taboos were certainly not intended to hide the truths of the Holocaust (181). The purpose of the perpetrator taboo in particular existed to avoid justifying the actions of perpetrators, or to avoid making them seem sympathetic. However, a counter point to this is that exploring perpetrator psychology can lead to establish “warning signs” of those in contemporary times who are displaying alt-right and neo-fascist ideals. Understanding Nazi rhetoric and ideology can allow one to pinpoint similar rhetoric and ideology in modern speeches, writing, and other venues of communication.

Overall, Boswell argues that these taboos should be broken, as this discussion is a part of the German process of “working through” the events of the Holocaust. Boswell ends with the note that literature on the subject of the Holocaust will likely (and should) progress through taboos, because to remain stagnant would be a “dangerous ‘final resting place’ where the objective truths of mass killing no longer matter” (196). In other words, even if Holocaust literature looks very different from that produced by the original

Holocaust authors who experienced the Holocaust themselves, it is still vital for readers and authors to explore the topic and not accept the genocide as “inevitable” or

“understood.” Writers will never be able to put down their writing utensils and state that Gapsch 40 the genre of Holocaust fiction is completed, that the work is done, and there is no more writing to be made because the survivors have all passed away. In the case of non- survivor writing, if the genre of Holocaust literature is going to continue, eventually the contemporary authors of Holocaust fiction will entirely be non-survivors. Thus, breaking these taboos of exploring perpetrators’ psychologies and non-survivor authorship are portrayed by Boswell as the next steps in Holocaust literature, as the work will never be finished, and authors and readers must always seek to question and criticize genocidal regimes and those that participate in genocide.

The tone of these second-generation novels is vastly affected by the role of the family members’ experience during the war. The two novels I am focusing on in this chapter— The Storyteller and Sarah’s Key— feature slightly more digestible family plotlines than novels that feature family-as-perpetrators plotlines. A novel featuring a granddaughter learning of her grandmother’s persecution by the Nazis involves less moral complication at the family level than a novel regarding family involvement as perpetrators. Though this was difficult to discuss and hear, Sage does not ever worry that her grandmother made immoral or wrong choices during the Second World War. While

Sarah’s Key and The Storyteller do not engage with the topic of family members who were Nazis (an example of this would be The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert), they are still working through this taboo of perpetrators and bystander psychology. The Storyteller works through Josef’s role as a Nazi, and the ensuing punishment for his actions. The novel even features several sections from Josef’s perspective, which is exactly the taboo that Boswell discusses. Sarah’s Key features the level of bystanders, in which a woman learns that French in-laws took over an apartment recently vacated by French Jews who Gapsch 41 were evacuated to concentrations camps. While the French family were not Nazis and they did not take any part in evacuating French Jews, they still benefitted materially from the deportations. Finally, these works also engage with the taboo of non-survivors writing

Holocaust fiction, furthering the idea that the genre of Holocaust fiction has not ceased to exist with the passing of Holocaust survivors. Rather, the families of these survivors still exist, and there is even interest in gentile authors and readers in learning about the

Holocaust and the effects it continues to have on future generations.

Narrative Techniques in Holocaust Writing: Multiple Perspectives and Parallel

Timelines in Sarah’s Key

In the two novels I am discussing in this chapter, the plotlines that are set in the past are not mere flashbacks, but rather have almost equal narrative standing with the present-day protagonist. For example, Sarah’s Key opens with the 1942 Vel’ D’hiv

Roundup. The novel is named after Sarah, not the present-day expatriate who learns of

Sarah over the course of the novel. De Rosnay opens, “The girl was the first to hear the loud pounding on the door.” (1) The “girl” is Sarah Starzynski, a young French Jew living with her parents and young brother. Most readers recognize this aspect of the

Holocaust— the night raids of Jewish households that led to arrests and evacuations.

However, this action only lasts three pages, before the reader is suddenly dispatched to the early 21st century, to Julia Jarmond’s entrance. She leads on a much more quotidian note— “Bertrand was late, as usual.” (4) Her exasperation with her husband’s tardiness is sharply contrasted to the terror and confusion of Sarah’s earlier narrative. Eventually, the Gapsch 42 reader and Julia learn that the very apartment in which Julia is introduced was the same apartment Sarah’s family was forced to vacate.

Less than ten pages in occurs the most haunting tragedy of this book, and the source of the title. Sarah hides her young brother in a cupboard hiding place in their bedroom and locks the door. She promises him, “‘I’ll come back for you later’” (9).

However, she does not know her family will not return to their apartment, because they are being sent to concentration camps. In a parallel structure, Julia’s succeeding chapter highlights a different situation of hindsight. In thinking back to a social faux pas she committed with her in-laws (shaking the hand of a French woman, instead of kissing her on the cheek), Julia says, “But I hadn’t known that, yet,” revealing her lack of knowledge in one moment, as well as a future correction of her previous ideas (11). This represents much of Julia’s character development throughout the novel, the correction of misconceptions or simply general ignorance about French history and her family’s history. These two errors— Julia’s faux pas and Sarah’s confusion— are just two pages apart in the text, take place in the same apartment, and feature a character unintentionally making a mistake in the presence of their family. With this small moment, the past bleeds into the present with the parallel structure of these scenes. However, for Julia, this situation is but a minor gaffe. For Sarah, the effects are much more devastating when she learns that her family cannot go back to release her brother.

Narrative Techniques in Holocaust Writing: Multiple Perspectives and Parallel

Timelines in The Storyteller Gapsch 43

Similarly, The Storyteller features multiple narrators, with Sage certainly being the novel’s protagonist, but still much attention is paid to the other points of view from

Sage’s grandmother (Minka), the CIA agent (Leo), and the former Nazi (Josef). The book features typographic styles to differentiate the multiple narratives. For example, the font of Josef is similar to that of a typewriter, reflecting that his narrative takes place in the

1940s. Sage’s chapters are typeset in a more contemporary font, in line with her modern setting. Another key aspect of this novel is the story-within-a-story trope that is the folk tale that Minka wrote during the 1940s. This story, of a girl named Ania living in a village, was Minka’s way of escaping the persecution against Jewish people in her home country of Poland. The story of Ania is not labelled with a character name like the other chapters, foreshadowing to the reader that these brief sections might correspond to another character’s narrative. Additionally, the reader is first introduced to Ania’s story, and only later learns of the authorship of Ania’s story. This is aligned with many

Holocaust survivors’ inability to tell their personal story of survival to their families, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. The reader and Sage are eased into learning Minka’s full story.

Eventually, Sage and the reader learn that Minka continued writing Ania’s story while imprisoned in Auschwitz, and even received extra provisions from Josef, a Nazi guard, for doing so. The writing of this story in Auschwitz begins simply as way to distract Minka’s friend in the camp from physical pain, but Minka realizes the act of telling a story can soothe emotional pain as well. Picoult writes, “I realized that these women wanted to hear the story I had written, the one I had used to calm Darija the night before. If it had worked as an anesthetic, why wouldn’t it numb the pain of hearing this Gapsch 44 mother weep for her baby?” (298). With this plot point, Picoult demonstrates the importance of storytelling (hence the title of the book, The Storyteller), and points to the ability of storytelling to salve and maybe even heal emotional wounds. There are stories that are ones’ own tale of survival, and sharing these can be an act of catharsis. But even stories unrelated to one’s life, such as Minka’s creative writing escape, can act as a distraction from current pain. Minka even argues that stories can be life sustaining, as she believes that “sometimes all you need to live one more day is a good reason to stick around” (299).

Picoult also writes about the importance of family stories. Minka was assigned to

Kanada, where the confiscated possessions of Jewish prisoners were collected after the prisoners were sent to the gas chambers. When going through these collected items,

Minka heartbreakingly comes across her father’s suitcase, proving to her that he was killed in the chambers. However, she finds small comfort in the possessions of her family, particularly a sweater made by her mother. Minka thinks, “I couldn’t let someone else wear this, someone who didn’t know that every inch of it told a tale. This yarn lived up to its second meaning— a tale— with every knit and purl part of the saga of my family” (286). Picoult plays on the multiple meanings of “yarn” with this description, how the textile fiber can be turned into clothing and thus protection from the elements.

Minka views knitting as an intimate, loving action done for another. Yet the second meaning of yarn, as a story passed down, applies to Minka as well. Picoult uses the sweater as a symbol for family and a collection of family stories, which sustain Minka in the concentration camp. Picoult writes, “There is a reason the word history has, at its heart, the narrative of one’s life” (287). With this, Picoult argues for the individual stories Gapsch 45 that comprise history, how even something as menial as a family story or a schoolgirls’ creative writing piece are integral pieces of our understanding of history holistically.

Narrative Techniques in Holocaust Writing: Hiding the History in Sarah’s Key

Though these plot lines are very different in the protagonist’s family members role in the Holocaust, there is one plot device that is interestingly found in each story— another character’s anger at the protagonist’s unveiling of the past. Julia’s husband in

Sarah’s Key— the grandchild of the French family that moved into Sarah’s vacated apartment after her family’s deportation— cannot understand Julia’s interest in Sarah’s story. He cries, “‘Why did you have to bring all this back? This stuff happened sixty years ago! It’s all dead, it’s all forgotten” (206). Though Bertrand is correct in his statement that many key figures are deceased— Sarah’s family died in the Holocaust, and she died herself before Julia discovers her story. However, Sarah’s brother is a specter in this story, the reader and protagonists never forgetting of his existence in the apartment cabinet. Thus, Bertrand is only half-correct— the Holocaust was not forgotten.

It’s not just Bertrand that wishes to let go of the past, but rather Julia perceives almost all of gentile France wishing to forget. An unnamed character delivers this statement once in person, and again in Julia’s memory: “‘Nobody remembers. Why should they? Those were the darkest days of our country” (184). Meaning, the entirety of

France wishes to forget its role in the Holocaust as bystanders and even perpetrators during the Occupation. This is due to several factors, with the word “dark” in that character’s statement alluding to a sense of shame of the Nazis power over the French and shame at the actions of the French against the Jewish population. However, there was Gapsch 46 also a victimhood the French took on, similar to the Polish response to the postwar period in framing the country as whole (not just the Jewish people of that country) as victims of the era of the Holocaust and Nazi terror. The discussion of this period in French history is incredibly difficult, as the French can be viewed as both perpetrators and victims. While that means for some people such as Bertrand and other citizens a need to disengage from the discussion of the past, others such as Julia view it as more reason to learn the history of the Second World War.

Other characters openly question Julia’s interest in Sarah’s story, confused at an

American’s insistence of learning the unfortunate history of her in-laws’ apartment. The family of the French gentile who hid Sarah after her escape from the concentration camp in particular is confused by Julia’s obsession. Most importantly, the novel does not provide an exact answer to this question. Julia responds that she “could not forget the roundup, the camp, Michael’s death, and the direct train to Auschwitz that had taken

[Sarah’s] family away forever,” and though she did not have any direct guilt for these occurrences due to her nationality as an American, that she was “‘Sorry for not knowing’” (192). Julia was embarrassed and shocked at her ignorance on the subject; however, her penance for this ignorance was much more than simply learning the facts of history. Rather, Julia took it upon herself to grow attached to the figure of Sarah.

The novel ends with Julia leaving her husband and France, after having met

Sarah’s adult child. Julia’s life completely changed through her discovery about husband’s family, as well as her disappointment in her husband’s disinterest in his own history. While back in America, she thinks, “Sarah. She never left me. She had changed, forever. Her story, her suffering. I carried them within me. I felt as if I know her” (278). Gapsch 47

The staccato syntax is similar to the passage of time— incessant, ceaseless, with even pacing. The language of these lines is also very simplistic, but it conveys a deep bond between Julia and Sarah. Though Julia’s explanation of her obsession seems confusing to outsiders, the truth is that her character is deeply sympathetic to Sarah, and invested in sharing the trials of the past and ultimately the truth. Perhaps this is also influenced by

Julia’s profession as a journalist— no matter how difficult, how painful, or how long ago a story occurred, it is vital to tell the story.

Narrative Techniques in Holocaust Writing: Hiding the History in The Storyteller

Though the characters in The Storyteller do not display as much vitriol as those in

Sarah’s Key, many characters in The Storyteller are still shocked when Josef is revealed to be a Nazi. His role in the community was that of an upstanding man, supposedly the complete opposite of ‘Nazi.’ When Sage brings her case against Josef to the police, the local detective says “‘He goes to my church. Sings in the choir. He led the Fourth of July parade last year, as the Citizen of the Year. I’ve never even seen the guy swat a mosquito’” (61). Sage also struggles with the image Josef presents while simultaneously discussing the Holocaust. She thinks: “How could someone who murdered innocent people look so… so… ordinary?” (164). The slow build to the word “ordinary” displays the juxtaposition of the everyday with genocide. Josef’s community cannot believe that such a kind, dedicated, and involved man could commit murder, because their perception of Nazis was that of overtly racist and violent militants. For this reason Sage believes the community will try to hide this information, and not investigate the claims against Josef.

Similar to the characters in Sarah’s Key, Sage believes the community will try to cover Gapsch 48 the past. Even when Sage argues to the detective that the Nazis did not all just disappear after the war (that many returned to their daily lives), the detective points out in return that the war was “nearly seventy years ago” (61). This highlights a viewpoint of those that wish to hide history because of its supposed irrelevance, being so far in the past.

However, Sage reveals that seventy years is not ancient history, because her grandmother still lived to tell her story, as did Josef.

The fact remains that many Nazis were ordinary Germans and continued to appear ordinary seventy years in the future. Sage only reveals the true events of Josef’s past— not only was he a Nazi, but that he was a less overtly violent Nazi than originally portrayed— after she enacts her punishment on him. She says about Josef, “He might have killed prisoners at Auschwitz, and even if he didn’t, he was a cog in the killing machine… I knew he had beaten my grandmother, as well as others, badly” (458). She still questions her role in his murder, not quite reconciling whether she had the authority to play juror, judge, and executioner. However, the book ultimately is not entirely sympathetic to Josef, even though he is revealed to be the “less-worse” Nazi. The

Storyteller makes very clear that Josef was still a Nazi, that his actions in the camp were violations of human rights, and that he contributed to the genocidal regime as a whole.

Breaking the taboo of exploring Josef’s position as perpetrator did not excuse his actions, but rather reveals that the “ordinary” man can still be a perpetrator, and that perpetrators do not always take the appearance of an overtly brutal racist. This lesson is vital for readers to absorb, because as Sage points out, both Nazis and neo-Nazis continue to exist into the twenty-first century, as does the religious persecution of the Jewish people.

Gapsch 49

Conclusion

Similar in many ways, The Storyteller and Sarah’s Key meld the past and the present with their use of multiple narrators and two settings in time. All in all, these multiple narrators allow the reader to move through the story with the protagonist, the protagonist learning of a relative’s experience or actions during the Holocaust, and simultaneously, the audience reads the relative’s first-person account. Both stories also feature the plot point of survivors’ hesitancy to discuss the past with their family members (as historically many survivors struggled with the same issue). Furthermore, these stories grapple with the difficulty of revealing the past, by introducing characters who wish to quiet discussions of family members’ or community members’ role in the

Holocaust. Even entire nations are portrayed as uncomfortable with bringing up trauma and the perpetrators of that trauma. However, The Storyteller and Sarah’s Key both have a through-line that uncovering and discussing the past is vital for both survivors, children and grandchildren of survivors, and even random bystanders. Both texts engage with the past and the present, and the ways in which the past almost invades present day. Ignoring perpetrators and victims from the past because of a taboo will only stunt the any idea of progress of the present. Finally, The Storyteller and Sarah’s Key also focus on individual stories, writing about one survivor’s tale, whether that survivor be a family member or a complete stranger. Thus, both novels highlight the role of the individual in history, as history is simply comprised of many individuals’ choices and experiences. These texts argue that every individual deserves to have a record of their experience in the Holocaust

(or during the Holocaust era), no matter how difficult that may be to those still alive.

These books also place an importance on children and grandchildren’s knowledge of such Gapsch 50 events, even though they did not live through the experience. This gives the idea that remembrance of past events like the Holocaust can be in grand-scale memorials such as museums and memoirs, but equally important are the smaller scale memorials of a grandparent sharing their stories at a kitchen table countries and decades away from when and where that story originally took place.

Gapsch 51

Chapter Three

The Nonfiction Novel: Comparing The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Librarian of

Auschwitz

Introduction

Writers of historical fiction draw inspiration from a variety of sources. Many authors create characters based upon people and situations described in historical documents. Examples of entirely fabricated characters can be found in previous chapters, such as Sarah in Sarah’s Key, Rose in Rose Under Fire, and Kasia in Lilac Girls. Though there are real historical figures in these texts, such as Josef Mengele in the concentration camps, the protagonist is not based on the experiences of one real person who lived through the Holocaust. However, some authors chose to write what has been coined the

“nonfiction novel,” or, to use the language of dust jacket designs, “based on a true story” novels. These novels directly pull from a real person’s experience, but they are not ghost- written memoirs or biographies. The authors of these novels are quite explicit in calling their work fiction.

In this chapter I will explore two contemporary nonfiction novels, The Tattooist of

Auschwitz by Heather Morris and The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe. I will compare these works though the supplementary materials of authors’ notes provided in both American editions of these texts as well as close readings of scenes set in

Auschwitz. I will also explore the public’s reaction to these two novels, including substantive criticism of The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Ultimately, I bring into question the techniques of writing nonfiction novels. I find this analysis a more helpful way of establishing a successful nonfiction novel than the method employed by many critics Gapsch 52 cited in this chapter, which is to focus largely on the historical inaccuracies in these novels. Though a general sense of historical accuracy is important, especially when dealing with sensitive and timely topics such as the Holocaust, I believe the writing style of these texts is the key indicator of success. I define the successful nonfiction novel as one that employs a more imaginative writing style (as employed by Iturbe) versus a more journalistic writing (as used by Morris), as imaginative styles fulfill the purpose of the nonfiction novel genre itself.

The Nonfiction Novel and Schindler’s Ark

Though many literary scholars would balk at the term “nonfiction novel,” as it appears to be oxymoronic in its very name, the term is quite common within the body of

Holocaust literature theory and criticism. This phrase was popularized with the text

Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally, which was later turned into the 1990 film

Schindler’s List directed by Steven Spielberg. In her analysis of Holocaust fiction, Ruth

Franklin discusses Schindler’s Ark as a “hybrid of uncertain genre,” noting Kenneally’s penchant for describing his work as a “nonfiction novel,” and others similarly using the phrase “documentary novel” (Franklin 147). Many have advanced the fictional aspect of

Schindler’s List by focusing on its use of fiction techniques. Franklin points out the book

“begins in medias res, with a dramatic scene…. and throughout it is heavy in atmospheric detail and dynamic action” (Franklin 149). These are key characteristics of the text that warrant the designation of “novel,” in addition to plot devices that were used to move the story along in lieu of complete historical accuracy. This method of writing is directly opposed to that of historical monographs, which generally keep a steady pace, moving Gapsch 53 chronologically, with a focus on fact over embellishment. (Though it must be noted that even historical monographs are not immune to providing a sense of narration, as historians are telling a story when they write their books. I think it can be argued, though, that novelists are more devoted to telling a story artistically than historians.)

In his book The Holocaust Novel, Efraim Sicher discusses some of the concerns regarding this genre of fiction. He writes that the nonfiction novel “employs the rhetoricity of historical fact and testimony as a device to obscure any boundary between fact and fiction” (Sicher 126). Meaning, these are not simply true stories shelved as novels in a bookstore, but rather the authors make persuasive choices to blend a real lived experience with embellishment, hiding any fictionalization with the guise of research.

Sicher seems most concerned with the idea that these nonfiction novel authors can “have it both ways,” to use colloquial language. Meaning, these authors can include inaccuracies in their texts (such as explicit factual errors, time jumps, mistakes in the characterization of Nazi characters, etc.) by calling their work fictive. However, at the same time these works can be valued by certain readers as authoritative, because the texts are marketed by their author or publisher with language such as “documentary,” “real,” and “true.”

For many settings of historical fiction, this blend of truth and fiction is not so concerning. For example, a Tudor historical fiction work at this point does not affect the recent memory of survivors or current memory of the descendants of survivors and victims of the events. However, the Holocaust still lives in current memory. Sicher writes that these nonfiction novels can be viewed as harmful because of several factors including readers’ “sensitivity to misappropriation of Holocaust memory, the importance Gapsch 54 of preserving the facts in order to educate against racism, the growth of neo-Nazism, and the implied desecration of the memory of six million” (127). All of these factors lead to an increased duty on the author to stay as close as the truth as possible. At the same time, these authors make a choice to fictionalize these real events, and thus also have an obligation to balance the qualities of a work of fiction with historical accuracy. It is clear that there is an intense scrutiny on Holocaust fiction writers for all of these reasons, as well as a need for delicacy and accuracy in the writing of these hybrid works of fiction and fact. It must be said that this chapter does not seek to provide definitive answers on the duty and role of the Holocaust fiction author, but simply seek to shed light on why some works of contemporary Holocaust fiction are commended, and others are roundly criticized.

Summary and Press: The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a nonfiction novel, written by an Australian gentile author telling the actual story of a Holocaust survivor, Lale Sokolov. Lale, originally from Slovakia, was imprisoned in Auschwitz in 1942, and became the worker who tattooed numbers on hundreds of prisoners. This position gave him several privileges, including additional food rations and relative movement in the camp. Lale also befriended prisoners who worked in Canada (a place in the camp where the new prisoners’ confiscated items were sorted), giving him access to material wealth. Lale fell in love with a fellow prisoner of Auschwitz, Gita, when he tattooed her arm. The novel follows his time in the camps, the struggle for both him and Gita to survive, and a brief period after the liberation of Auschwitz. The Tattooist of Auschwitz has experienced Gapsch 55 immense success, with several translations, worldwide publications, and millions of copies sold (Kenneally). In 2018, The Tattooist of Auschwitz hit the #1 New York Times

Best Seller List and spent more than one year on the Paperback Trade Fiction list

(“Paperback Trade Fiction”).

At the same time, the novel has been placed under scrutiny for historical inaccuracies by the Auschwitz Memorial Museum. The museum’s magazine In Memoria published an article “Fact-checking The Tattooist of Auschwitz” written by historian

Wanda Witek-Malicka, who took the opportunity to closely examine Morris’ work for accuracy. Witek-Malicka leads her article with the statement that Morris’s book “contains numerous errors and information inconsistent with the facts; as well as overinterpretations, misinterpretations and understatements on which the overall inauthentic picture of the camp reality is built” (6). She continues to correct Morris’s depiction of train pathways, block numbers, the number of Auschwitz tattooists, Dr.

Mengele’s experiments, prisoners with gunpowder under their fingerprints, and many more issues throughout the novel (7-10). However, it is important to note that Witek-

Malicka explicitly takes affront with the way publishers describe the novel as

“documentary” and “meticulously researched,” not necessarily the presence of these continual errors in work of fiction. In other words, she does not disagree with the novel’s fictionalization of historical events, but rather the fact that the book was marketed and perceived as entirely historical fact. Witek-Malicka writes that this book should “be perceived as an impression devoid of documentary value on the topic of Auschwitz, only inspired by authentic events. The proportion between testimony and factography and the narrative fiction are definitely shifted towards literariness.” Her language here indicates Gapsch 56 that she believes the Tattooist of Auschwitz consists of mostly fictional attributes

(“literariness”). This is opposed to “testimony and factography,” which would consist of

Lale’s raw memory of events (unembellished by Morris), other survivors’ descriptions of events, as well as facts and truths confirmed by years of historians’ work on the

Holocaust.

In a sense, there is a turf-war between historians and publisher/author teams.

Publishers market books such as The Tattooist of Auchwitz by speaking highly of the research put into the book, perhaps because this appears to elevate the book beyond a mere novel. However, historians such as Witek-Malicka take affront to this marketing, highlighting the ways in which authors actually engaged in very limited research. It does appears as if Witek-Malicka believes that these components of history and fiction can exist together in a work such as the Tattooist of Auschwitz, but that she takes most offense with them being hailed as nonfiction sources. I would even argue that these historical fiction works do not need to be elevated with marketing language that speaks to research and documentation, because these books already have a place in literature through their unique combination of history and creativity

Even those who aren’t scholars of the Holocaust take issue with Tattooist of

Auschwitz. In her article, “‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz and the History in Historical

Fiction,” Christine Kenneally questions the duty of the author to remain true to history, especially when writing a Holocaust story. She cites Morris and her publisher, Harper

Collins, who claim that The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a novel, and thus does not need to be “fact-checked” (Kenneally). However, Kenneally lays several of the inaccuracies that

The Tattooist of Auschwitz has been criticized for since its publication. One major issue is Gapsch 57

Gita’s (the future wife of the protagonist) number. In the novel, her number is written as

34902, which was as Lale remembered tattooing it. However, Gita testified several times that her number was 4562. Kenneally questions Morris’s decision in using Lale’s memory of Gita’s number, when her own accounts differ (Kenneally). Other issues are the misspelling of Lale’s name (according to his son, he only used the spelling Lali)

(Kenneally). Alternatively, Kenneally brings up the soccer match that takes place in the novel, which has been subjected to criticism by other critics for being “absurd,” only to, as Kenneally points out, have actual historical basis (Kenneally). Kenneally argues that

Morris, by including several historical inaccuracies in her text, has lost the faith of her readers (Kenneally). Even when Morris is technically accurate, such as the issue of the soccer match, her previous record of inaccuracies leads the reader to constantly question the scenes Morris portrays. All in all, this does not lead to an enjoyable reading experience, or at least in the case of Holocaust fiction, an experience in which the reader can entirely immerse themselves in the story presented. According to Kenneally, readers find themselves “doubting” the accuracy of the story as they read (Kenneally). I would further argue, that instead of handling inaccuracies as they come up, readers are prepared for inevitable inaccuracies in The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and thus find themselves on more edge throughout the story than they would with other historical fiction.

Summary and Press: The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe, translated by

Lilit Thwaites

The Librarian of Auschwitz does not have the level of popularity nor the level of notoriety as The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Iturbe’s novel has not placed on the New York Gapsch 58

Times Best Sellers List, but it also has not been criticized in the journal published by the museum of Auschwitz. The Librarian of Auschwitz was originally published in Spain in

2012, with an English translation released in the United States in 2017. Like The

Tattooist of Auschwitz, the Librarian of Auschwitz is based on the story of a Holocaust survivor. However, The Tattooist of Auschwitz was completed posthumously for Lale, while the protagonist of The Librarian of Auschwitz was still alive as of its publication. In fact, the book starts with a letter from Dita. From there, Iturbe takes over, fictionalizing

Dita’s experiences in the “family camp” at Auschwitz. The story flashes back to the beginning of the war and Dita’s time in the ghetto before arriving in the concentration camps. For several months, Dita guards a selection of eight books that were snuck into

Auschwitz. Dita lends the library books to fellow prisoners who try to establish normalcy in the Holocaust by continuing the education of young prisoners. Both texts feature a plotline of finding humanity in Auschwitz, with Lale finding reason to live with his love for Gita, and Dita choosing to survive in order to protect the small library.

Author’s Notes and Other Publishing Paraphernalia

A feature of twenty-first century novels is additional material at the end or beginning of text. This can include interviews with the author, a note from the author, guided discussion for book clubs, questions for classroom usage, and more. Furthermore, authors post similar material on their website or blogs, such as playlists, pictures, and other behind the scenes materials. Many historical novels include information on research, either the materials they used or further reading. Finally, with increased print- on-demand usage, authors are able to release several editions of their novels more easily, Gapsch 59 including minor revisions or supplementary material. Gone are the days of Errata: instead, enter Author’s Note.

Interestingly, several of the inaccuracies in The Tattooist of Auschwitz that were pointed out by scholars and journalists such as Witek-Malicka are addressed in a 2018

American paperback edition of the novel. Regarding Gita’s number, a section titled

“Additional Information” following the novel includes the lines “Gale’s number was

4562, as stated in her testimony from the Shoah Visual Archive. Lale remembered it as

34902, and this has been faithfully recorded in previous printings of this book” (9). Thus,

Morris enters the conversation on the topic of historical accuracy and defends her previous usage of the number as aligning with the protagonists’ (Lale’s) memory. In the

2018 edition (in which this note appears), Gita’s number was supposedly reverted to her testimony, as 4562. However, the text was not entirely amended, as Gita’s number alternates between 4562 and 34902 throughout this 2018 paperback edition. Though this likely just a sloppy copyediting mistake, it does allow the novel to fully lean into the issue of memory accuracy, which often is discussed in Holocaust writing.

Similarly, The Librarian of Auschwitz includes supplementary material. However, this title has the fortune of the protagonist still being alive at publication, and thus it leads with a note from Dita Kraus herself. Her note is concise, consisting of only one page long in comparison to Iturbe’s more than 400 pages fictionalizing her life. She details her connection to Iturbe and their correspondence, and then concludes with these lines: “He used much of what I told him, but he also diligently collected facts from other sources.

Still, despite the historical correctness of the narrative, it is not a documentary. It is a story born both from my own experiences and the rich imagination of the author” (x). Gapsch 60

Thus Dita brings attention to the hybridity of this text, as well as authorizing it for its accuracy and research. The phrase “historical correctness” stands opposed to

“documentary,” when usually these two concepts are linked together. However, Dita is arguing with this note (the note that grants the reader access to this story, in a way) that this text is accurate, but in a form different from a documentary. She argues that a novel, though fictionalized and imaginative, can still contain historical truths. In a way, Dita’s note gives a survivor “stamp of approval” for the text that follows. Not only does she give leeway for any inaccuracies due to the nature of text as “imaginative,” but she further authorizes the text with her position as survivor and main character of the story.

Stylistic Choices within the Nonfiction Novel Genre

There are two stylistic paths an author can take with their nonfiction novel: writing the novel with a journalistic style or utilizing a more ornate, lyrical style often associated with fiction. Journalistic style, or reportage, consists of simple sentences and features less aestheticized prose. On the other hand, a more ornate style would include considerable figurative and descriptive language. Below, I will compare two extremely similar scenes in The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Librarian of Auschwitz to display how these authors utilize different writing styles within the same genre. Morris, the author of Tattooist, prefers the more pared-down method, while Iturbe writes more embellished language. Of course, one method is not “more literary” than the other—

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are both venerated, for example. However, within the context of this niche genre of Holocaust nonfiction novels, I argue in favor of the more elaborate writing method employed by Iturbe, because it makes clear to the Gapsch 61 reader that these are works of fiction, preparing them for the author’s potential creativity with historical facts.

Close Reading The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Tattooist of Auschwitz

When directly comparing The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Tattooist of

Auschwitz, there are similar scenes due to the nature of these texts as “camp novels.”

Both novels feature a scene in which minor characters are rounded up from a labor sector of Auschwitz and sent to the nearby gas chambers. While both texts consist of third- person narration, Morris and Iturbe have their own take on this scene. Writing from the perspective of Dita in the women’s barracks, Iturbe writes,

And then the night explodes. Shouts, whistles, sobs, pleas, cries to an absent God

erupt in the camp next door. And then the sound of truck doors being slammed is

heard again, immediately followed by the screech of metal bolts. Cries of panic

have given way to the sound of sobs and pitiful moans, the sound of hundreds of

voices intermingling in a confused storm of screams. (Iturbe 251)

Morris writes from the perspective of Lale, detailing a similar scene.

Late one night Lale is woken by yelling SS, barking dogs, and screaming

women and children. He opens his door and looks out to see the men,

women, and children in his block being forced from the building…. He

follows them all outside and stands, stunned, as all around him the other

Romany blocks are also emptied. Thousands of people are being herded

onto nearby trucks. (Morris 196) Gapsch 62

For the purpose of this exercise, I selected similarly sized passages, to accurately compare the two novels. In addition to the similar plotlines, both authors utilize passive voice such as people “being forced” from their beds (Morris 196) and doors “being slammed” (Iturbe 251). But, on the exact nature of their craft, Morris and Iturbe greatly differ.

Iturbe’s writing is much more varied syntactically, with different sentence length and structure in just this short section. Morris, on the other hand, describes the action occurring as one moment after the other— Lale wake up, opens his door, exits the barrack, and stares. Furthermore, Iturbe uses more emotional and vivid language. He uses descriptive language to describe the reaction of those being deported, “shouts, whistles, pleas” (Iturbe 251), whereas Morris simply uses the word “screaming” (196). Iturbe describes the scene in fuller detail using the phase “confused storm of screams” (251).

This use of figurative language lends the reader to imagine the sounds that Dita hears in this moment. Morris relies on numeric language (“thousands of people herded”), however this does not have the same effect as Iturbe’s metaphorical descriptions.

Historical Accuracy versus The Nonfiction Novel

Going back to the broader scope and the reception of these novels, The Tattooist of Auschwitz’s reception was very polarized, receiving negative reviews from journalists and scholars, but placing on the New York Times Best Sellers list, showing its success with the everyday reader. The Librarian of Auschwitz, in turn, did not receive the negative press, but rather select positive reviews and awards. However, it was also notably absent from the Best Sellers List, which is based solely on book sales. Though Gapsch 63 scholars have pointed out several issues with the Tattooist of Auschwitz (including sloppy edits in the American paperback edition that only partially addressed key issues such as

Gita’s tattooed number), the primary issue is not that of historical accuracy, but of the reader’s experience with the novel. Both authors made clear in their supplementary material that their purpose in writing a Holocaust nonfiction novel was not to simply document these events, but rather to explore the events in imaginative ways (the note in

Librarian of Auschwitz, again, was authorized by the survivor herself). It is in the fulfillment of the promises made in these notes where where Morris failed, and Iturbe succeeded. This is because the style that Morris employs signals to reader that it is a journalistic piece when compounded with the language of “documentary” and “based on a true story.” Though the novel was marketed and written as a novel, it was perceived as nonfiction (drop the novel). In comparison, the reading experience of Iturbe’s novel is more in line with that of a traditional, highly descriptive novel, even though it is at its heart, a true story.

Though ultimately these are two different stories, the skill level of the authors and their viewpoint in writing these novels is quite clear in comparing the two novels scene by scene. Overall, Iturbe layers on stylistic choices in this moment, whereas Morris relies on the events themselves to emotionally effect the reader. Iturbe understands his purpose as Holocaust fiction writer— describing these events as they have not been described before. Morris, on the other hand, appears to view this exercise as simply reporting the events as Lale described them to her. I would argue that the entire purpose of writing

Holocaust fiction is to bring in the reader’s and authors’ imagination to these scenes. I am not against the writing style of pared-down language and concise prose in novels in Gapsch 64 general— this writing has its time and place. But within the genre of Holocaust literature, which consists of thousands of titles, there is already a space carved for reportage style writing— biographies, memoirs, and historical monographs. If the term “nonfiction novel” is to truly exist, the nonfiction novel must do what nonfiction cannot do. These novels must bring unique insights to the genre of Holocaust literature, they must lead the reader through these events in artistic manner that is unique to the genre of fiction.

Sometimes fictional stories can even invite a reader into the frightening and traumatic world of Holocaust literature with the promise of an artistic reading experience. Thus, this issue is ultimately a question of the classification of these novels. If nonfiction novels are based on a true story, if they contain considerable historical accuracies, and they also use the techniques of journalistic writing (such as Morris did), then why do we call these books “novels,” except to excuse a few wayward inaccuracies with “creative license”?

The authors of nonfiction novels should not use the genre classification of nonfiction novel to excuse lack of in-depth research. Additionally, using the classification of

“nonfiction novel” alongside journalistic writing only confuses the reader into taking the novel as entirely accurate and real.

Conclusion

As Morris demonstrated, factual errors can easily be addressed in subsequent editions of a novel. However, Morris’ more subdued and journalistic writing style cannot be edited in later editions, thus her text pales in comparison to Iturbes’ fluid writing. It is not a question of historical correctness within this genre, but rather the craft of novel- writing itself, as well as the purpose of this specific genre of nonfiction novel. Many Gapsch 65 journalists and historians are familiar with the topic of fact-checking fictional stories, and thus it is easier to objectively say that several components of Morris’ writing are simply incorrect. However, the fact remains that both authors began with a similar premise of the

“nonfiction novel,” a common formulation within the genre of Holocaust fiction, but differed in their approaches to writing the story. Though Morris succeeded in sharing

Lale’s story with an incredibly large audience (as well as securing a sequel to the text),

Iturbe succeeded in adding to the genre of “nonfiction novels” a work that embodies the characteristics of fiction (imaginative) and nonfiction (true).

Gapsch 66

Conclusion

Anti-Semitism has not disappeared with the defeat of the Nazis at the end of the

Second World War, nor has it been left in the twentieth century. In fact, in December of

2020, the only Anne Frank memorial in the United States was vandalized. Neo-Nazis left a swastika on the memorial, along with the ominous message “We are everywhere.”

(Aspegren). This proved true with the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol, in which legions of white supremacists stormed the Capitol in retaliation to the House of

Representatives confirming Joe Biden as president. Present in the crowd was a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt, which included the phrase “work brings freedom” (Li and Walters). The Times of Israel writes that the back of the sweatshirt said

“staff,” thereby discounting any idea that this man was Jewish and wore the sweatshirt in a twisted sense of solidarity (Friedman). These expressions of white supremacy leave many minorities and marginalized people anxious for their safety.

Yet, there are instances in which judicial systems are working against both

Nazism and neo-Nazism. As with the plot of The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult, now-elderly

Nazis are still facing justice for their activities during the Second World War. In February

2021, a 95-year-old woman was indicted for more than 10,000 murders while she worked at a Nazi concentration camp as a secretary (Chappell). Unfortunately, as the second impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump reveal, those who are not involved in the political system can take little legal action against Nazis and white supremacists.

Many of us are simply bystanders to these trials, fervently hoping that judicial authorities will actually convict these criminals. Still yet, bystanders always have the obligation to Gapsch 67 witness these events unfolding and to put pressure on legal authorities to indict both

Nazis and neo-Nazis.

In the face of waves of current white supremacy, however, authors continue to bear witness to the events of the Holocaust. Heather Morris published a sequel to The

Tattooist of Auschwitz, another nonfiction novel called Cilka’s Journey in late 2019, which focuses on Cilka Klein’s experiences in concentration camps. An example of dual narrative, third-generation novel was just released in 2021, Send for Me by Lauren Fox

(Knopf, 2021). This novel is about the granddaughter of a Jewish woman who escaped from Germany just before the Holocaust began. There is also continued interest in women’s histories, including women’s acts of resistance, as evidenced by the upcoming publication of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in

Hitler’s Ghettos by Judy Batalion (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2021). Thought not a novel, this title has already been optioned by Steven Spielberg for a film. Thus, each of the themes I discovered in early twenty-first century Holocaust fiction are progressing into the decade of the 2020s.

Of course, the stories I selected for this thesis and the stories that are hitting shelves soon are largely stories of survival, which was unfortunately not the standard for this mass tragedy. Perhaps it’s an American tendency to focus on the stories with a happy ending, this so-called “Americanization of the Holocaust,” in which individual tales of bravery and fortitude may eclipse the larger picture. However, this may be the effort of these authors to do exactly as the protagonists of these stories and many survivors themselves did— to find the meaning, the beauty, and the stories of human bonding in cruel places. These small and large acts of resistance in every novel— Jewish and Polish Gapsch 68 characters surviving against the Nazis’s will, fleeting moments of happiness and meaning, romances and friendships and familial bonds formed in concentration camps where the expected outcome was for prisoners to turn on one another— are just as vital to our understanding of the Holocaust as are the stories of loss. After all, it is argued that this is one of the purposes of Holocaust fiction, why we need fiction in addition to memoirs and biographies: fiction allows for the imaginative engagement with the full range of lived experiences. This imaginative engagement allows for authors and readers to create emotional bonds with characters through reading the story. Fiction also allows for authors to transcend the typical narrative structure of memoir (which is told most frequently through only one point of view) and speculate how multiple characters perceive an event. Though these stories are grounded in facts and real experiences, there is also room for authors to tell a story in unique ways, to put their own artistic take on these events. These fictional works serve as acts of memorialization, by committing to communal memory through storytelling the events of the Holocaust.

But rather than just artistic purposes, Holocaust fiction has even higher ideals.

I believe that one of the purposes of contemporary Holocaust fiction is to actualize in bystanders— many of them gentile and white— a sense of injustice towards white supremacy. Much of the post-Holocaust literature and storytelling hinges on the idea of simply “bearing witness,” or listening to the stories of survivors and victims of crimes such as the Holocaust. Bearing witness serves several purposes for the storyteller (the survivor of the event), such as a brief moment of catharsis and satisfaction that their story had been received. The listener or reader, though, continues to carry that story with them into their daily life. As Ruth Franklin argues, fictional works in particular can illicit a Gapsch 69 specific connection to the characters, what she calls an “emotional attachment” (159). It is this attachment that causes Holocaust novels— whether told through nonfiction novel or a completely fictionalized account simply inspired by real people— to remain with the audience, and re-surface when present day anti-Semitism takes place in public. In other words, through education on events of the Holocaust, these fictional works encourage later generations to reconcile this tragedy within the context of their own time.

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