Auschwitz: A History

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With regards to Holocaust literature, the canon has been pretty well established. Seminal texts like Elie Wiesel’s Night, Anne Frank’s diary, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, have been, almost exclusively, informing our notions of what the Holocaust was actually like.

We have many stories of ghettos, but even there, we sometimes see a kind of implicit hierarchy of suffering or heroism. We also have an implicit view of ‘survivor’, meaning someone who survived the camps. But I think we have to try to understand the full range and impact of experiences of Nazi persecution, including for those who managed to get out before the war. Sadly, too few were able to emigrate in time. Not at all. There were more trials of people who’d been involved in Auschwitz in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and there were several other major concentration camp trials in the 1960s and 1970s, going through to the Majdanek trial of 1975-1981 in West Germany. But all of them were bedevilled by this need to show subjective intent and excess brutality.What were the sort of compromises that he made that perhaps led to his survival? I know one of the books that didn’t make your shortlist was Filip Müller’s Eyewitness Auschwitz. He actually helped to run the gas chambers. Frankl obviously wasn’t doing that, but does he talk about the moral compromises within the prisoner community that went on in a fight to survive? Judged purely as a history, this book is good but not superlative. Rees does an admirable job of covering the broad sweep of the camp’s history, including many unexpected (and usually quite disturbing) details. However, the book’s brevity precludes any detailed examination, and I was often left wanting to learn more about certain aspects of the camp. Curiously, Rees also includes many stories that are outside the purported purview of the book—such as the story of how the citizens of Britain’s Channel Islands reacted to the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews—stories that are usually quite compelling, but which seem difficult to justify including in a book of this size. There's a huge, huge debate about whether the Allies could have ameliorated the suffering of the Jews by bombing Auschwitz. Books, essays, letters to the editor, this has been going on a while. It's the hectic part of a wider debate about what did the Allies know about the Holocaust and when did they know it. Rees slashes through the nonsense. He says – 1) the Allies knew about the final solution by late 42/early 43; 2) there was nothing they could have done which would have changed anything, either for Auschwitz specifically or anywhere else. But what about this damning quote from Anthony Eden during discussions in Washington in March 1943 about Hungarian Jews (all of whom were later murdered in Auschwitz) – he said it was important A question that had always bothered me was answered: Why didn't the Allies bomb the camp, or the railway lines? From pps. 244-245:

It's ironic that as I write this, my boy is watching "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" at school today, as part of their learning about the World War. It makes me sad that he is watching it, as despite being well made, the film is so utterly depressing, but on the other hand, I think he's at the age where he needs to know exactly what humans were capable of. We need to understand the machinery of mass extermination that allowed a camp like Auschwitz to be constructed and to function and have all the sub-camps and to have all the involvement of industrialists and employers in slave labour—but we also need to explore why it was that, under some conditions, people who were simply bystanders were actually able to turn into rescuers—and why others chose to remain passive, or were instead complicit, betraying those who tried to hide and those who tried to help. And there were variations in the character of surrounding societies across Europe that affected the capacity of the persecuted to survive in different areas. The human instinct for self-preservation can be more powerful than even our most deeply held convictions. When push comes to shove, the will to survive often trumps all else.That leads me on very neatly to my next question. How will the memory of the Holocaust and its recollection change as the last survivors die in the next few years? Of course, in that same timeframe, the perpetrators will all be dead as well, which perhaps may be more significant. None of us really knows that monster that lives within us. The "what ifs" are almost impossible to predict. The idea that only innately evil/bad people are capable of doing evil/bad things is naive and simplistic. Beliefs dictate our morality and thus draw the only lines in the sand that matter. Requests to bomb Auschwitz were also reaching London. When Churchill heard about them on July 7, he wrote to his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, saying - now famously- 'Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.' The Air Ministry examine