Holocaust Literature - Essay Example

? Grossman’s novel consists of four parts, first of which tells a story of a child whose live goes on surrounded by the survivors of Holocaust. A little, nine-year-old boy attempts to understand the past, or rather to restore the picture of the past which is not accessible to him. His family members and other adults around are keeping the pact of silence, and the boy constantly has a feeling that something happened in the recent past which united all the adults in this unspoken pact of silence. He can not spot even the place where this unspoken past is hidden: his family refers to the lands they came from as “Over There” – “a place you weren’t supposed to talk about too much” (Grossman, 13) Despite the silence regarding what happened “Over There”, the presence of that “Over There” is felt by the young boy, and the world around him seems to be saturated by the consequences of this unknown past. The characters of people around him are directly influenced by something that happened in the unspoken past. A woman in the neighborhood, whom Momik used to hate, proved to be a victim of those circumstances. Momik finds out that she “never dreamed when she was born that this is how she would end up”, just like many others. (Grossman, 15) But to uncover those events that changed this woman so much is not only impossible – it is dangerous. (Grossman, 16) The enduring presence of the past in the Momik’s imagination is manifested by his conceptualization of the numbers that he saw on the arms of his family members. He tried to wash away such number on the arm of his newly found Grandfather but the number would just not go away. Momik imagined that this number was not written from outside but from inside. The overwhelming presence of the secret past made Momik see the manifestations of this past as intrinsic, as something that can not go away, but became part of those who went through that past. In order to restore the picture, he tries to put together all the multiple events and facts that happen around him. He is using his imagination to reconstruct the story of the past in the fictional way. He goes around his Grandfather at home, and realizes that Grandfather is trying to tell a story – just like his late Grandmother did. He manages to find out that Grandfather’s daughter and wife were killed “Over There”. But Momik’s parents keep trying to distract Momik from his efforts. Moreover, his parents are afraid that older people, like his Grandfather, do not control their minds and speech completely and would say something that no one wants to think about. When Momik tried to speak about his discoveries about Grandfather to Bela, she immediately tried to suppress the memories that such a story could have brought and normalize the situation by bringing Momik and herself back to the present-day problems: “now, you are pale and scrawny, a real little fertel, how will they ever take you into the army”. The strategy of escape from contemplating on the past was used by many adults, and Momik became an infant terrible, who disturbs the adults with questions that everyone prefers to avoid asking or thinking about. Therefore, after the conversation between Momik and Bela, she was “glad to hear he’s stopped thinking about ‘Over There’”. (Grossman, 20-21) Momik, as a young but talented child, did not miss that fact that overall silence of the adults – their “secrecy in the kingdom” – implied certain rules, and one of them was to abstain from expressing any emotions, whether about the past or the present. In this setting, Aunt Idka seemed to contrast other adults in the secret pact. Momik described her as “different from Mama and Papa”, a very cheerful person. It is not surprising then that Aunt Idka once told Momik’s mother: “What harm is there in a little laughter” – as if she was apologizing for the fact she publicly displays positive emotions. The pattern of silencing we saw in the Grossman’s novel is somewhat reminiscent of the way characters are trying to cope with the presence of horror in Marcie Hershman’s novel “Tales of the Master Race”. But, unlike the Holocaust survivors in the first novel, the characters in this one have to cope not with past but with present. The stories in the novel are set in of fictional city of Bavaria where the Aryans Germans have to live their lives in relevant piece next to multiple manifestations of war and genocide happening at the same time. These Aryan Germans are not devoted Nazis; moreover, we see that they are not necessarily happy about what was happening around them. It is exactly the focus on those who did not fall the victims of the Third Reich that helps us to grasp the perspective of the bystanders, of those who had to live and somehow to reconcile with ever-present manifestations of atrocities. Those people, like Targood Stella or Gelber, have become parts of the Nazi machines of murder and propaganda respectively without any special desire to do it. They are not intrinsically evil, they even feel that there is something wrong happening. But both of them succumb to the pressure of the surrounding social world. Targood Stella and his wife constantly try to avoid talking about his new duty which is to participate in the beheadings of political prisoners. Both of them try to switch the topic whenever they feel that they might encounter the necessity to face the truth. It was necessary, as Targood himself said, in order “to believe in our innocence”. (Hershman, 11) Hershman efficiently reproduced the picture of Nazism as everyday reality. The girls at the clothing factory might have a little fight and soon continue working as noting has happened. But they would be sewing the Nazi uniforms. The musicians might be arguing who is going to lead the musical parade. And this parade would be a celebration of the Nazi occupation of Poland, which cost millions of lives. Both Grossman and Hershman depict similar strategies that people use to avoid thinking about Evil. While the Jews in 1950s’ Israel tried to focus on the present-day issues, and not contemplate on the recent past, so the Aryans in 1940s’ Germany tried to immerse into the routines of everyday life. The responsibilities and burden of the two groups, however, are completely different. Holocaust survivors tried to forget what was done to them, and in this way tried to suppress the trauma; the Aryans, contemporaries to Nazism, tried to avoid thinking about responsibility. They tried to avoid thinking what they were doing, not what was done to them. Targood described one of this days at work in the following manner: Then I watched him walk from the room. Fewer than five minutes later, the guards brought back a body and paced it on the scale and I weighted that. The head was weighted separately. I also recorded where, on the length of the neck, the blade had done its work. At the end of the day, I took home out blue pot. (Hershman, 20) In this paragraph, Hershman depicts the process of killing as a part of everyday activity, just like bring back a kitchen pot home. Despite the attempts to distance themselves from the presence of Evil and to maintain the seeming innocence, the characters’ struggle with Evil is manifested through their occasional reluctance to participate in those very routines which contribute to the Evil. Gelber desperately tries to resist participation in the parade as a leader. He rationalizes his desire to resist by his own professional incapability to lead the parade. But the emotional struggle that he was going through suggests that the roots of his stubbornness at the opening of the parade go to another level of his conciseness which signals him that there might be something really horrible happening now. It is not coincidence that he paid so much attention to the multiple Nazi slogans and the presence of the minister of propaganda. His thoughts were actually preoccupied by the political meaning of the surrounding setting, and thus his resistance to lead the parade was rather a passive resistance to participate in the celebration of Nazism - resistance which he, as a bystander, did not rationalize since had he rationalized and recognized the need to resist, he would have faced a dilemma on how to live further on. He would not have been able to live a quasi-peaceful life once he stopped being a bystander and became fully conscious of the need to resist. Targood and his wife faced similar dilemma. They were not unaware of what was happening in the cellar of the office, but never actually talked about it between them because as Targood himself put it, “…once we began it, we wouldn’t be who we wanted to believe that we were”. (Hershman, 25) But the implicit resistance is still present in Targood’s mind. When his wife suggested giving a dishtowel as a present to Targood’s boss Terskan, he got enraged by the very ideas that his wife thought Terskan was so sentimental to appreciate this little gift. His rage against his wife was actually a rage against himself and his boss. Targood could play innocence at work since it was part of his duty. However, when his own wife, pat of his private life, tried to depict Terskan as a human being, who might be pleased by a dishtowel, Targood immediately rejected this idea. It was his self-protecting mechanism to keep the evil away from himself, to have as little to do as possible with what was happening. He had to tolerate the Evil at work, as in his logic, he had little choice. But he could not have allowed his life to willingly get closer to this Evil apart from those work duties. Neither Targood nor Gelber were devoted Nazis. They got engaged into the events in the novel mostly by accident, and none of them really desired it. They even tried to resist what was ascribed to them by others. But they failed to get out of the role of a bystander. They failed to see a direct connection between their activities and greater Evil happening around. They felt that this connection existed to a certain extent - hence, their attempts of passive resistance to the routines which constituted this greater Evil. But their failure to consciously recognize their involvement in the greater Evil and to feel the responsibility for it is representative of a difficult moral dilemma faced by the bystanders. Jorge Semprun, as a Holocaust survivor, is known to be a pioneer of a specific approach to Holocaust memoirs. He stands on the position that experience in the concentration camps can not always be conveyed through documents, photos or videos. For him the problem is not how to talk about his experience. He has plenty to say. The problem is how to make sure that you are not only listened to, but heard as well. He, unlike the characters in Grossman’s and Hershman’s novels, wants to talk about “Over There”, about that Evil which contemporaries could not have comprehended. Apparently, resolution to speak did not come immediately – this novel was published in 1994. This new generation of Holocaust literature built upon the already existing body of evidence – documentary or fictional – about Shoah. Semprun original contribution springs from his conviction that a writer can use fiction to convey the truth about one’s real experience. Camp experience, documented and recorded, still does not convey the entire truth because “it’s unimaginable”, and as one of the former camp inmates sarcastically noticed, “it’s so unbelievable that I myself plan to stop believing it, as soon as possible!” (Semprun, 124) Semprun provided his understanding of the silence with which the victims of Holocaust surrounded their wartime experience. He referred to being a camp inmate as permanent living with death in the neighborhood. It made the lives of camp inmates principally different from other people. While others in their regular lives anticipate for death at a certain unknown moment of time in the future, the camp inmates knew that death was a permanent part of their everyday lives. The British officers got so scared and paralyzed by the look of released inmates not because of their exhaustion, but precisely because of this specific presence of death in the inmates’ gaze. With the liberation of the camps, and the need to live regular lives after such experience, former inmates were encountered with the problem how to move away from the presence of death: …these dreadful and fraternal dead needed no explanation. They needed us to live, quite simply, to live with all our strength in the memory of their death: any other kind of life would uproot us from this exile of aches… (Semprun, 122) With decades passing by, more and more Holocaust survivors became capable to speak up about the atrocities they faced. This is when Semprun suggested something that he described in the conversation of former inmates on the ruins of Buchenwald shortly after the end of the war. He suggested that those experiences can not be simply described with standard tool of media. The point is not to convey the information about the facts that took place - the point was how to talk about the pure Evil which, as Nazism showed, humans are capable of committing. To sum up, both three novels raise the issue of surviving the Evil or the memory of Evil from different perspectives. While Grossman and Hershman vividly show the different strategies that victims and bystanders used to cope with the presence of Evil and horror in their lives, Semprun offered a way to deal with it and talk about it from the artistic perspective. Semprun suggested that through art and fiction rather than pure encounter with facts we can try to get closer to understanding or at least getting an insight into the emotions and tragedy, connected to immensity of Evil that Grossman’s and Hershman’s characters preferred to silence. Read More