Devlin, T. 2018 Rivers of Ink. Phd.Pdf (9.828Mb)

Title: ‘Rivers of Ink’: Searching for Authentic Representations of the Holocaust – Words, Pictures and the Stories they Tell Terry Devlin Student Number: 12172154 Ph.D. Thesis Mary Immaculate College University of Limerick Supervisor: Dr Eugene O’Brien Submitted to Mary Immaculate College: ______________________ i ‘Rivers of Ink’: Searching for Authentic Representations of the Holocaust. Terry Devlin The Holocaust haunts the European mind, and its reverberations continue to this day. However, for those of us who were not there, all our knowledge, understanding and experience of this event is expressed in representations of one form or another. We need to understand how these representations operate and how they impact on our sense of the event. The Holocaust is confused with other, similar programmes run by the Nazis. It is frequently seen as a new kind of evil, or a special case in the terrible history of human violence. However, we must be wary of how we designate it. The evil at the heart of the Holocaust is profoundly human. Any other categorisation risks making it seem non-human and therefore beyond the world ethical evaluation. Representations are texts like any other, and so operate in contexts. Using Derrida, Zelizer and Benjamin, forms of representation are explored. We seek an authentic representation of the lived experience of the Holocaust. There is a discussion of authenticity and how it can operate differently for different cohorts of people. There is also a discussion of the critical demands that seek to limit how we discuss or what we say about the Holocaust. The thesis considers the nature of factual, fictional and photographic representations. Each is subject of a critical appraisal that discusses their modes of operation, and how these impact on the representations they offer. Examples are explored to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches, which includes a discussing of gendered suffering and the dangers of falsifying what happened. No one form of representation is sufficient to represent the breadth and scale of the Holocaust. The only way to measure the authenticity of a work is against a context of other works and other formats dealing with the same issue. ii Declaration of Originality Declaration: I hereby declare that this thesis is the result of my own original research and does not contain the work of any other individual. All sources that have been consulted have been identified and acknowledged in the appropriate way. Signature of Candidate: ___________________________________ Terry Devlin Date: ___________________________________ iii Acknowledgements The advice and encouragement of my supervisor Dr Eugene O'Brien, along with his detailed feedback at every step of the way, has been an enormous support on this journey. It is impossible to acknowledge this enough. Not only is he a scholar, but he is a gentleman too. Thank you. Mary Immaculate College offers a very supportive environment for the post-graduate student. My thanks to all the staff at the English Department, the Research and Graduate School as well as the Library and Technical Support at the College. I am grateful to my son and daughter, Ben and Kate, who tell me that other homes are not full of books about the Holocaust. Who knew? They have been patient. Thank you both. Mike Finn and John Murphy also showed patience following me around South-West Poland as I muttered to myself trying to match a mental map to actual places. Mike Finn also generously has given permission to use some of his photographs. Thanks guys. My wife, Noreen Harrington, has been listening to me muttering to myself for much longer. For her patience and everything else, I am beyond grateful. iv Dedication For Ben and Kate, and especially Harri For my parents and my sisters, without whom… etc. Rett Syndrome is a genetic mutation that leaves its victims, almost all female, multiply and profoundly disabled. Even though it is a rare condition, simple arithmetic suggests that some 300 girls and women with this condition died at the hands of the Nazis. I do not know their names, but I remember them. v Table of Contents Declaration of Originality ........................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................................... iv Dedication ................................................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures ........................................................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: Europe after Dark ................................................................................................................................. 14 Chapter Two: Text and Context ................................................................................................................................. 59 Chapter Three: Making History ................................................................................................................................ 103 Chapter Four: Stories from the Dark......................................................................................................................... 151 Chapter Five: Photographing Night .......................................................................................................................... 206 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................................. 264 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................................ 277 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Shoes at the permanent exhibition, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Photo: Terry Devlin Figure 2: Shoes on the Banks of the Danube, Budapest. Photo: Terry Devlin Figure 3: The Citizen Betrayed: A Remembrance of Holocaust Victims from Hungary, Auschwitz- Birkenau State Museum. Photo: Terry Devlin Figure 4: Jew Action near Ivangorod (Detail). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Jerzy Tomaszewski Figure 5: Jew Action near Ivangorod. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Jerzy Tomaszewski Figure 6: Ethel The Bowery Queen. Photo: Erica Stone Figure 7: Ghetto residents being deported to the Chelmno death camp, 1942-1944. Photo: Henryk Ross Figure 8: Information Board, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Photo: Terry Devlin Figure 9: Information Board, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Photo: Mike Finn Figure 10: Permanent Exhibition, 'Sauna Building', Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Photo: Terry Devlin Figure 11: View towards Crematorium 5, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Photo: Terry Devlin Figure 12: The Auschwitz Album (The Lili Jacobs Album). Photo: Yad Vashem Figure 13: Information Board, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Photo: Mike Finn Figure 14: Women Driven to Gas Chambers, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum: Photo: www.auschwitz.org Figure 15: Women Driven to Gas Chambers (Detail), Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum: Photo: www.auschwitz.org vii Figure 16: Burning of Bodies, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Photo: www.auschwitz.org Figure 17: Burning of Bodies, (Detail) Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Photo: www.auschwitz.org Figure 18: Information Board, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Photo: Mike Finn Figure 19: Fencing, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Photo: Terry Devlin Figure 20. Crematorium 5 And Its Crematorium Pit. David Olére Reproduced in: van Pelt, 2002 p. 181 Figure 21: Clearing Out the Gas Chamber. David Olère. Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum Figure 22: The Auschwitz Album (The Lili Jacobs Album). Photo: Yad Vashem Figure 23: Unable to Work. David Olère. Beate Klarsfeld Foundation viii “If all the trees in the world became pens and all the oceans turned into rivers of ink, one could not write down and fully document what happened in the Holocaust.” Ya’akov Silberberg Survivor of the Birkenau Sonderkommando ix Introduction At the time of writing, it is the seventy-eighth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, when elements of the Soviet army arrived at the camp complex in South West Poland and found some seven thousand emaciated prisoners abandoned as the Germans fled west. Auschwitz- Birkenau was not the first concentration camp they liberated, or even the first death camp, but it does mark the point where Auschwitz begins to haunt the European mind, something that continues to this day. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history, but, even in a century marked by world wars, atomic weapons and famine engineered for political purposes, the Nazi assault on the Jews of Europe is, for many, the nadir of human activity. The nature, scale, aggression and cruelty of the programme has given pause to anyone who would describe or understand it. The Nazi assault on the Jews was not the first

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