My Life with Holocaust Death

Abstract

This essay traces the author’s initial intellectual and imaginative encounters with Holocaust atrocity, beginning with his visit to Dachau in 1955 long before Nazi camps had become a tourist destination. He describes in detail his response to the landscape of death, the impact of its crematorium and small gas chamber, and his attempts to establish a connection with the history of a site which provided almost no signage and about which he knew virtually nothing. He continues with accounts of his visits to Mauthausen (1963) and Auschwitz (1964), still responding more to the visual impact of the sites rather than to a familiarity with how they operated. The essay continues with the author’s reflections upon attending the war crimes trials of SS General Karl Wolff (Himmler’s adjutant and liaison to Hitler) in Munich and of 20 Auschwitz personnel in Frankfurt in the summer of 1964. This leads to a consideration of the value and the limits of “justice” as a response to the monstrous crimes of the Third Reich, as he watched defense attorneys belittle the testimony of Holocaust survivors while the defendants smiled in the dock and denied everything. This leads to a consideration of how survivors have tried to describe their ordeal outside the legal confine of a courtroom, and to the further realization that conventional moral concepts are insufficient to support their efforts. When one survivor exclaims, “What horror! This death without dying, this prolonged living death,” she introduces an idea that threads through most of the chapters in this volume. The essay concludes with a brief analysis of how Holocaust literature can help to shape a new vocabulary for our understanding of the event.