The Afterdeath of the Holocaust

Abstract

This essay explores various ways that memory and imagination have found to confront or evade what might be called “the killing reality of the Holocaust.” It begins with a discussion of Charlotte Delbo’s distinction between “deep memory” and “common memory,” the twin sources that continued to inspire her life after her return from Auschwitz. Deep memory reawakened the sensations and physical imprints of her camp experience, one version of what I call the afterdeath of the Holocaust. Common memory recalls the events of her daily existence unrelated to her past, and the tension between the two reflects a dilemma that lingers in the consciousness of those who did not share Delbo’s experience but wish to find ways of imagining what they can never “know.” The essay examines various ways of entering and evading the deathscape of the Holocaust, with an emphasis on the comparative value of the historical investigations of a French priest determined to discover all the killing sites in Belarus and Ukraine and the literary work of a French author concerned with a parallel theme. Over a period of years the priest has interviewed elderly witnesses of the mass murders, uncovering proof that many of the victims were buried alive. His detailed descriptions encourage the power of the imagination to enable readers to become virtual witnesses to the slaughter. The writer’s novella, also set in Ukraine where French prisoners of war are forced to prepare a cemetery for their companions who die in captivity, reaches a stunning conclusion when they accidentally uncover a mass grave containing the bodies of murdered Jews from a nearby village. Their differing approaches that invite the reader into the landscape of death provide a dramatic illustration of how history and literature can collaborate in opening up to future generations avenues of insight into one of the world’s greatest catastrophes.

When the exiled and the dead outnumber the living, it is the dead who start talking instead of the living. There are simply not enough of the living left to be able to maintain a whole reality.

Steve Sem-Sandberg, The Emperor of Lies