Holocaust and Memory: The Experience of the Holocaust and its Consequences, An Investigation Based on Personal Narratives PDF
Preview Holocaust and Memory: The Experience of the Holocaust and its Consequences, An Investigation Based on Personal Narratives
Holocaust and Memory This page intentionally left blank Holocaust and Memory The Experience of the Holocaust and Its Consequences: An Investigation Based on Personal Narratives BARBARA ENGELKING Edited by GUNNAR S. PAULSSON Translated by EMMA HARRIS Leicester University Press London and New York in association with the European Jewish Publication Society eejjpp.s Leicester University Press A Continuum imprint The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503 in association with The European Jewish Publication Society (EJPS) PO Box 19948 London N3 3ZJ www.ejps.org.uk First published 2001 Originally published in Polish as Zaglada i pamigć © Barbara Engelking and Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, Warsaw, 1994 Support for this translation gratefully received from the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies, University of Leicester Introduction and editorial apparatus © Gunnar S. Paulsson 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-7185-0159-4 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Engelking, Barbara, 1962- [Zaglada i pamieć. English.] Holocaust and memory : the experience of the Holocaust and its consequences : an investigation based on personal narratives / by Barbara Engelking; edited by Gunnar S. Paulsson; translated by Emma Harris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7185-01594 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Poland-Sources. 2. Jews-Poland- Interviews. 3. Holocaust survivors—Poland. 4. Poland—Ethnic relations. I. Paulsson, Gunnar S. II. Title. DS135.P6 E5713 2001 940.53'18'09438—dc21 00-069637 Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print & Design, Wales The European Jewish Publication Society is a registered charity which gives grants to assist in the publication and distribution of books relevant to Jewish literature, history, religion, philosophy, politics and culture. Contents Foreword, Zygmunt Bauman vii Editor's Introduction, Gunnar S. Paulsson xi Introduction, Barbara Engelking 1 1. The Ghetto, the 'Ayran Side', Concentration Camps: Wartime Experiences of Poles and Jews Compared 20 2. Daily Life in the Ghetto 81 3. Why Did It Happen? 215 4. The Psychological Consequences of Holocaust Experiences 243 5. The Legacy of the Holocaust 304 Bibliography 331 Index 341 This page intentionally left blank Foreword Zygmunt Bauman There are many books which try to keep the consciences of the living alert and vigilant by familiarizing them with the sufferings of the Holocaust victims, the cruelty of their persecutors and the callousness of many witnesses to the crime. There are many books which attempt to assure that the perpetrators of the crime and their inhumanity are not forgotten and do not go unpunished or escape condemnation. And there is also a fast- growing volume of books that monitor the success and failure, chances and limitations of both attempts, trying to find out how memory and forgiveness work and how, if at all, events that escape both logic and the expressive capacity of human language may be remembered, told and absorbed. This book does all three things, but it is unlike any book of any of the three categories. This book is, first and foremost, a Herculean effort to reforge the subjective, utterly personal experience of the victims into the joint memory of humanity and so to make the memorializing both feasible and viable, as well as aesthetically potent; a relentless search for a way to express the unshared experience in a form in which it can be shared; an effort to spell out the ineffable, to open the mind and emotions of the readers to an experience which defies reason and transcends the capacity of ordinary pity and commiseration. The author is a young person born long after the last furnace in Auschwitz had been extinguished. She was not herself marked for extermination, nor was she a child or a relative of the Holocaust victims and so she seeks neither vengeance nor compensation for the sufferings inflicted. No one in her family co-operated with the executioners or their henchmen, and if she feels the need to comprehend that past which was not hers, this vii Foreword is not in order to put the shame for the guilt to rest and to live with the unliveable. She was not a witness to the crime; not a bystander, scarred with the singeing memory of impotence or cowardice. In short, Barbara Engelking has no personal accounts to settle and no axe to grind - just the ordinary, all- too-human urge to take the side of the oppressed, the degraded, humiliated and hunted down, to see the world through their eyes and condemn what they saw for what seeing it had done to them. And her message is directed to people like her. So addressed, the message acquires crucial significance at a time when the executioners are too old to be brought to trial and the victims too old to testify. The author had set herself a truly daunting task. There is hardly a more formidable challenge to human skills and wits than the need to verbalize a throughly personal, lived-through experience in a way that allowed it to be lived through, vicariously, by those who did not experience it. One of the reasons the author undertook such a harrowing and excruciat- ingly difficult task might have been her wish to repay the moral debt which all of us, by the very fact of escaping the slaughter, knowingly or unknowingly bear to the victims of the horrifying crime and its incurably wounded survivors. There was, though, another reason as well, and one that seems to loom particularly large among the author's intentions: the recognition that without the understanding of the awesome potential of inhumanity which the experience of the Holocaust threw wide open, our life – the life of all those lucky not to have been ever earmarked for extinction and unscathed by its perpetration, would be both unsafe and ethically flawed. Barbara Engelking speaks on behalf of the victims; but - let me repeat - she speaks to her contemporaries, to people whom the experience of the Holocaust may disclose itself only in the form of other people's memory; and she speaks to them so that these alien memories might become their own. The book is the product of protracted, laborious and scrupulous research and draws on a most extensive and varied assembly of documents. But the archival evidence, factual accounts and even personal narratives would have remained remote, dry and cold if not for the author's remarkable gift of empathy. Barbara Engelking gives the witnesses of the Holocaust viii Foreword a voice which readers of this book will understand; but also a kind of voice which will make them feel the pain and the torments and the humiliation of the struggle for survival waged by people denied their human dignity. Under her pen, memories come alive again. This book is one long and deep insight into the darkness unrelieved by moral impulse and compassion, and into the horrors of abandonment and of the loneliness that stems from the neighbours' indifference. For that reason, this is a profoundly moral book; and a powerful warning that has lost little if any of its urgency and topicality. Many a reader would probably regret the spiritual comfort lost in the course of the reading. But that comfort is the last thing which any of us, concerned with making our world hospitable to dignified social life, can afford. Barbara Engelking understood that; and we must be grateful to her for helping us to do the same. ix
The list of books you might like
