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Holocaust Literature MAGILL’S CHOICE Holocaust Literature Volume 1 The Accident - Letters and Papers from Prison Edited by John K. Roth Claremont McKenna College SALEM PRESS, INC. Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey Cover photo: © iStockphoto.com/Jason Walton Copyright © 2008, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or repro- duced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, elec- tronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews or in the copying of images deemed to be freely licensed or in the public domain. For infor- mation address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, Califor- nia 91115. The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Essays originally appeared in Magill’s Literary Annual (1990-2007), Masterplots,Re- vised Second Edition (1996), Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition (2000), Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction Series (1987), Masterplots II: Christian Literature (2008), Masterplots II: Drama Series, Revised Edition (2004), Masterplots II: Juvenile and Young Adult Biography Series (1993), Masterplots II: Juvenile and Young Adult Fiction Series (1991), Masterplots II: Juvenile and Young Adult Litera- ture Series Supplement (1997), Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series (1989), Masterplots II: Poetry Series, Revised Edition (2002), Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edi- tion (2004), Masterplots II: Women’s Literature Series (1995), Masterplots II: World Fic- tion Series (1987), and World Philosophers and Their Works (2000). New material has been added. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holocaust literature / edited by John K. Roth. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58765-375-9 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-376-6 (vol. 1 : alk. pa- per) — ISBN 978-1-58765-377-3 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939- 1945), in literature. I. Roth, John K. PN56.H55H655 2008 809’.93358405318—dc22 2007051349 printed in canada Contents Contents Publisher’s Note . vii Editor’s Introduction . xi Contributors . xix Nazi Concentration Camps . xxi Holocaust Chronology . xxiii Complete List of Contents . xxxix The Accident—Elie Wiesel . 1 After Auschwitz—Richard L. Rubenstein . 6 Albert Speer—Gitta Sereny . 12 All Rivers Run to the Sea—Elie Wiesel . 18 And the Sea Is Never Full—Elie Wiesel . 24 “The Angel of History”—Carolyn Forché . 30 Anya—Susan Fromberg Schaeffer . 35 At the Mind’s Limits—Jean Améry . 40 Auschwitz and After—Charlotte Delbo . 44 Austerlitz—W. G. Sebald . 48 “Babii Yar”—Yevgeny Yevtushenko . 53 Badenheim 1939—Aharon Appelfeld . 57 Constantine’s Sword—James Carroll . 65 “Daddy”—Sylvia Plath . 71 Daniel’s Story—Carol Matas . 76 “Death Fugue”—Paul Celan . 80 The Deputy—Rolf Hochhuth . 85 The Destruction of the European Jews—Raul Hilberg . 92 The Diary of a Young Girl—Anne Frank . 96 The Double Bond—Carole Angier . 100 The Drowned and the Saved—Primo Levi. 105 Eichmann in Jerusalem—Hannah Arendt . 111 “Elegy for N. N.”—Czes aw Mi osz . 118 Enemies—Isaac Bashevis Singer . 123 Europe Central—William T. Vollmann . 129 Explaining Hitler—Ron Rosenbaum . 135 v Holocaust Literature The Fall of France—Julian Jackson . 141 Fateless—Imre Kertész . 147 The Fifth Son—Elie Wiesel. 152 Friedrich—Hans Peter Richter . 157 The Gates of the Forest—Elie Wiesel . 161 Ghetto—Joshua Sobol. 166 God’s Presence in History—Emil L. Fackenheim . 170 Gone to Soldiers—Marge Piercy . 176 The Hiding Place—Corrie ten Boom with John and Elizabeth Sherrill . 182 The History of Love—Nicole Krauss . 187 History on Trial—Deborah E. Lipstadt . 192 Hitler—Ian Kershaw . 197 The Hitler of History—John Lukacs. 204 Hitler’s Willing Executioners—Daniel Jonah Goldhagen . 210 The Holocaust in American Life—Peter Novick. 216 Holocaust Politics—John K. Roth . 223 Holocaust Testimonies—Lawrence L. Langer . 227 House of Dolls—Ka-tzetnik 135633. 234 I Will Bear Witness—Victor Klemperer . 238 In Kindling Flame—Linda Atkinson . 244 “In the Blue Distance”—Nelly Sachs . 249 Incident at Vichy—Arthur Miller . 254 An Interrupted Life—Etty Hillesum . 259 Into That Darkness—Gitta Sereny . 264 Jews—Arthur Hertzberg and Aron Hirt-Manheimer . 268 The Journey Back—Johanna Reiss . 274 “Journey Through the Night”—Jakov Lind . 278 The Last of the Just—André Schwarz-Bart . 282 Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed—Philip P. Hallie . 286 Letters and Papers from Prison—Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 291 vi Publisher’s Note Publisher’s Note The personal accounts are horrific beyond belief. Survivor David Berg- man, a boy at the time of his first deportation to Auschwitz from Czecho- slovakia, recalled how he was “crammed in an open cattle car with 150 liv- ing skeletons headed for another concentration camp”: One by one they fell down and were trampled. After half died, it was possi- ble to sit on the dead. Someone fell on me—he was dying. I hadn’t had any food or water in four days. With all my remaining strength I pushed the body off and fell on top of him. He tried to push me away, but we were both too weak. In a final effort, he bit my leg and then died. Survivor Alice Lok Cahana, from Hungary, recalled arriving at the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp: Nothing ever in literature could compare to anything that Bergen-Belsen was. When we arrived, the dead were not carried away any more, you stepped over them, you fell over them if you couldn’t walk. There were ago- nizing . people begging for water....Dayandnight. You couldn’t escape the crying, you couldn’t have escaped the praying, you couldn’t escape the [cries of] “Mercy,” it was a chant, the chant of the dead. It was hell. And of course, as Leo Schneiderman remembered, there were those who did not survive: It was late at night that we arrived at Auschwitz. When we came in, the min- ute the gates opened up, we heard screams, barking of dogs, blows from... those Kapos, those officials working for them, over the head. And then we got out of the train. And everything went so fast: left, right, right, left. Men separated from women. Children torn from the arms of mothers. The elderly chased like cattle. The sick, the disabled were handled like packs of garbage. They were thrown in a side together with broken suitcases, with boxes. My mother ran over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, and she told me “Leibele, I’m not going to see you no more. Take care of your brother.” Between the rise of Nazi Germany in 1933 and the end of World War II in 1945, six million Jews—and hundreds of thousands of Roma Gypsies, disabled persons, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, and others who did not fit the Nazi regime’s plan for a “master Aryan race”— perished in a state-sponsored program of persecution and murder. Their civil rights, their human rights, and ultimately their lives were progres- vii Holocaust Literature sively, and legally, relegated to nonhuman status. Now known as the Ho- locaust, this systematic destruction of “degenerates” lasted so long, reached so far, and destroyed so many that its horrors are hard for some to accept, both then and now. The world looked away while the evil spread. Even today, some self-described “revisionists” deny that the Holocaust ever took place. State documents, however, remain; they list, in nauseating, bureau- cratic detail, the statistics of death. Those who managed to survive have re- corded their experiences on videotape and in oral histories maintained by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and other archives. And those who personally witnessed the hell of the Holocaust have generated a rich and thought-provoking body of memoirs, analyses, social criticism, novels, plays, and poetry to mark an event that threatened not only hu- mankind but also humanity—the humanity of both the persecuted and the persecutors. Holocaust Literature offers literature reviews of more than 100 core works about the Holocaust. In these two volumes, editor John K. Roth, Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, has succeeded in identifying the most important works on the Holocaust by both first- and second-generation survivors as well as by philosophers, novelists, poets, and playwrights reflecting on the Holo- caust today. Teachers and students will find the key works here, from Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. Core works of nonfiction—histories, biographies, memoirs, diaries, survivor testimonies, reflections on religion, philosophy, ethics— form two-thirds of the list, joined by literary fiction, poetry, and drama: classics such as Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, and Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open. Also represented are more recent works, such as Joshua Sobol’s play Ghetto (1984), Wladyslaw Szpilman’s The Pianist (1999), Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biog- raphy Hitler (completed in 2000), Deborah E. Lipstadt’s History on Trial (2005), William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central (2005), and Heather Pringle’s The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (2006). The resulting set of essays introduces the literature of one of the defining events of our time, essential reading for all serious students of history, literature, social psychology, ethics, and philosophy.