Is It Possible to Overcome the Holocaust - Essay Example

The Holocaust Introduction The Holocaust came from the word destruction, and refers to the mass killing of six million Jews after the World War II by the Nazi Germany headed by Adolf Hitler. It was a period of time where all the Jews broke apart and severe destruction was made. This event marks a highlight on the history after which plenty of events followed by. It had a long lasting impact on many of the Jews and other nations. It was not only an attack on religion, or race but on the complete humanity. The following essay illustrates the literature and case studies on the holocaust in regard to the past events that were followed by. It assesses how holocaust literature was formed and many famous writers of that time involved in spending their time on writing over the event. The essay represents the work of Jean Amery and Primo Levi who were survivors of the holocaust. Their work held much significant value and had some similarities and differences. All in all the literature and historical reviews showed how the Jews got over the trauma and overcame the holocaust with reference to responses made by known writers of that time. Some books are also referred in this regard. The Holocaust The understanding to the holocaust is an important factor. It was recognized as a systematic and state-sponsored murder of six million Jews by the Nazi Germany and their collaborations. Holocaust may have several meanings in different contexts. From one of its origins it means sacrifice by fire and from the other, destruction. The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, and they believed that the Germans were superior to the Jews, who were inferior and a threat to the racial community of the Germans. The era of holocaust did not only target the Jews, but in fact the Germans also targeted many other groups due to their belief that they are racially inferior. The groups were targeted on political, behavioral, ideological and social grounds (Kremer, 2003, p. 12). The Jewish population of Europe in 1933 stood at over nine million. Most of these European Jews lived in Nazi Germany and tended to occupy and influence the World War II and its proceedings. Eventually by 1945, the German collaborators had killed two out of every three Jews. This was a part of the Final Solution which was a policy of the Nazi Germany to kill the European Jews. These Jews were deemed as a danger to Germany, and even then they were victims of the Nazi racism. Other victims of the killing were Roma (Gypsies), and also included some physically and mentally disabled patients who were Germans but they were murdered on account of the Euthanasia Program. Gradually, this tyranny spread throughout the Europe and the Nazi Germany killed millions more. Starvation, neglect, maltreatment and disease were the ways in which millions of Soviet prisoners of war were murdered. The non-Jewish Polish were targeted and millions of Polish were forced labor in occupied Poland or Germany. These Polish and Soviet civilians worked and died of bad and unfortunate conditions. Homosexuals were prosecuted on their behavior as it did not match their social norms; political opponents were also targeted and so were the religious dissidents. Millions of people died in this maltreatment and it marked one of the history’s most brutal killings (Ehrenreich, 2010, p. 134). The National Socialist government established the concentration camps to keep the opponents. In the years of the outbreak of the war, the victims of the ethnic hatred were incarcerated in these camps. In order to monitor the Jews, the Germans created transit camps and forced labor camps during the years of war. During these years also, the German police units killed thousands of Jews men, women and children. By 1944, German authorities deported Jews from Germany to killing centers where they were to be murdered in gassing facilities specially developed. As the war came to an end, there were forced marches called death marches where the Allied liberation was prevented of large numbers of prisoners. These Allied forces starting moving across Europe against Germany and encountered concentration camp prisoners. As the marches continued, the Germans surrendered to these Allies. As the Holocaust ended, the survivors took shelter in the displaced persons camps administered by these Allied powers. Following the time, thousands of Jews immigrated to Israel, including those displaced from Europe. Other Jews immigrated to other places such as the United States. This series was finally closed down in 1957. The Holocaust broke the Jewish communities from places of Europe and left them in a state of trauma for years. This pain and suffering was indeed presented in works of literary as melancholia of which Jean Amery and Primo Levi’s works are two of the best responses ever written regarding the holocaust (Senker, 2006, p. 32). The Holocaust literature The Holocaust had remained a wide and important topic in the American Jewish literature ever since the World War II. There are many writers who contributed to the effort of bringing the picture of the pain, melancholia and suffering to all the others. Many writers wrote to preserve the events that took place as a history of tyranny. Not only the writers but the Holocaust was adopted in the popular culture of that time. Poets, film makers and artists were eager to portray their imagination and memory from the time to their other generations. These contributors were mostly the survivors of the Holocaust (Gitlin, 2010, p. 98). The literary work includes many of the stories of the individuals who suffered at the hands of the Germans. Survivors have told their stories and their experiences in the form of their writings which reveal both the truth and the false of the Holocaust. They give the essence of the past and its philosophical, psychological and moral implications. Writing a variety of genres, even women explained their experience and memories of various themes that were present. The work of women about the holocaust was quite different than that of men. More writers, who were not present at the genocide, wrote about the holocaust later taking the inspiration from the other writings despite not being personally present there. These literary studies drew upon many other methodological approaches such as gender history, trauma history, psychology, religious studies and many others. Levi and Amery’s lives as survivors of the holocaust: Jean Amery was an Austrian writer whose writings usually reflected the experiences and events of the World War II. He was a philosophy and literature student. He was a survivor of the holocaust. One of his books At The Mind’s Limits received much praise and fame, and it deeply explored the holocaust nature. This made him one of the most highly influencing Holocaust writers. His response to the holocaust was comparing the government of Nazis to a government of sadism. In his words it is the sadist’s nature to try to nullify the world. Since he was a philosophy student, his experience and writing about the holocaust consisted of a philosophical viewpoint with the focus on terror and horror that he himself suffered. According to him the meaning of that era of suffering was not to resolve the trauma but rather to keep it alive so that it is not lost (Bodden, 2007, p. 76). Primo Levi was another great writer and chemist of his time. If This Is A Man is one of his great works in which he explained his experience of living as a prisoner in Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. When the Jews were deported, they were transported in camps of which one of the main was Auschwitz concentration camp. Before the camp was liberated, Levi spent eleven months in there. He was one of the only twelve left alive in the camps out of 650. He talked about the holocaust in many schools in Auschwitz. In his view, the holocaust was a horrible attempt to completely destroy a race made by those who saw themselves as superior and high. These writers have greatly played a role in ensuring that the tragedy of holocaust remains alive till date. Thus, the works presented by the survivors of Germany and Italy have witnessed the relevance of these events. These writings are not the same as each gives a varying theme presented in the holocaust and experienced by them. In fact, confrontations are made for the wide range of approaches and styles that have been followed. These writers have rendered the holocaust and dealt with the traumatizing events. Jean Amery and Primo Levi, in this sense are regarded as emblematic writers as they suffered the pain at first hand. But the descriptions of both of them in response to the Holocaust are not identical (Yeatts, 1998, p. 176). These two writers have put forward two different ways to respond to their holocaust experience. They also distinctively ensure that no superior race can exterminate the Jewish race. Both the writer’s works have been analyzed and compared and it shows that they lightened the Auschwitz experience in general terms. In recent times, the holocaust has become obscured in the competing fields of interest. Some of the topics such as that of the Palestine and Israel are bought in focus at the expense of the victims of holocaust. This response of the writers has concerned many survivors and none of them describe the tyranny as clearly and publically as Jean Amery. As a philosopher, he had already identified in the sixties that the holocaust was linked to a contemporary agenda. The reason why Amery and Levi are known to be the best of the writers of the holocaust is simply because of their experience at Auschwitz. Despite belonging to different backgrounds, different countries, they link each other through their interment in Auschwitz. Many new writers prefer their responses to understand the holocaust and the real picture in accordance to the different views. They allow the people today to reconstruct the experience at Auschwitz and show how difficult it is to overcome the holocaust and its aftermaths. Amery’s response of the Holocaust: Jean Amery’s response was best represented in his book At The Mind’s Limits. It is a narrative of his suffering with a philosophical aspect clearly showing the reality of terror and horror. While reading his response, the reader gets to understand the true picture in the form of a diary of an intellectual who believed that he and his fellows faced the worst for no reason and they had no support of others which merely increased their pain and misery. The response is not only covering the aspects and themes of the holocaust but also the witness of the brutal violence. In his response in the philosophical viewpoint, Amery first defines the intellectual to discuss the credibility and then by the end describes the treatment by the Nazi’s (Duchen, 1995, p. 263). In his writing, he argues that all the lawyers, doctors and engineers who are perfect in their fields, may not be designated as intellectuals. Intellectual, as he defines, ‘is a person who lives within what is a spiritual frame of reference in the widest sense’ ‎(Duchen, 1995, p. 263). His responsive text is a unique narration which philosophically shows the suffering from within. Amery lost his trust in the world around him because being a Jew meant tragedy, suffering, inhuman torture and violence. He survived the Auschwitz which was a death factory and a torture camp where humans were nothing. But most of his response from the holocaust described what he understood about life full of melancholia, which could never be healed. His descriptions make the readers imagine and visualize the picture of that time full of horror. It makes the readers understand what the feeling of pain and suffering would be like and how life changes after such an experience. His writing is a beautiful response of how the fear of the murderers disturbed the victims and they lost control from their selves. These victims had no sense of self and even if they did, it was fully crashed by the Germans. They were left with merely nothing, no physical power, no desires, no wishes, no intellect and no choice. As a philosophical thinker, after talking to other survivors who were with him, he soon realized that the Auschwitz terror had killed the minds and the intellects of the victims and they had no sense about the reality of the world. The Auschwitz camp had led to self destruction and completely ruined the analytical thinking of the human mind (Amery, Rosenfield, 1980, p. 69). A major part of his writing also describes his sorrows of being homeless which was, for him, a taken for granted security. He continually repeated the words that said his experience and pain made him loose the trust in the world, and trust meant in all sorts of things. In his philosophical framework, he related torture to death by proving it with an equation: Body = Pain = Death. His writing further explains how he has been suffering torture for 22 years followed as he believes that torture is never healed, it destroys the human dignity and faith in the world and this, is eternal. Amery’s essays and books tell the reader that the terror, horror and pain destroys the intellect, philosophical speeches and use of language. Levi’s response through his writings: Primo Levi is the writer who has described the soul of the Jews with the most eloquence than any other writer. He believed that anyone who would survive the torture and suffering would simply be lucky and nothing else. While his days in Auschwitz, he thought that no one outside the death camp would understand the situation and the reality of the pain other than those who were there. And even if they tried to tell, no one would believe, yet it was his voice that stands as a proof that one of the victims did survive to tell the outside world of what he had witnessed. His experience was concise and sober as per his lean style of reflecting his mind and thoughts. His observations were accurate and his scientific training as a chemist meant that is experience was away from emotionalism. His tone of writing his response of the holocaust did not add a touch of emotion and this was not because he had suffered less melancholia, pain or frustration, or he was not swayed by revenge. His tone of expressing his pain in a composed manner lighted the moral victory of Levi over the Auschwitz. His strong voice told that he did not only survive, but he also led down the Nazi’s attempt of dehumanization. In his book If This is a Man, he highlights the fact that no one has the right to treat someone in an inhuman way like the Germans did. He also writes and takes pride in the fact that he, despite the tyrannies and tortures, emerged still a man with moral integrity and humanity (Levi, Woolf, 2000, p. 147). As part of his response to the holocaust, he related the torturous experience to his aftermath where he was still able to uphold his mental abilities. One of the main factors of his response was the importance of communication that he realized during and after the holocaust. He believes that the holocaust experience taught him much about the human behavior that he never experienced before. He writes about those many prisoners who were sent to death immediately just because they did not understand the language and thus, failed to follow orders. According to his response of the holocaust, which is evident from his writing, he wanted to prove to the Germans that they were not successful in dehumanizing the Jews. His raised voice and his tone often depicted his attitude towards the failure of the Germans to eternally leave pain for the Jews. He wanted to show that he overcame it and was ready with his answer. His tone of writing showed his belief that it was impossible to overcome the holocaust and it would live in the hearts of the Jews forever, not to break them apart, but to strengthen them (Matthäus, 2004, p. 213). Conclusion: However, the respective responses from the writers show that they believed it was impossible to overcome the holocaust. Even though both the writers explained their experience in a different way, style and tone of writing, their silent message stated that they would never forget the tyranny and it would be preserved for generations to follow by their writings. Thus, through their writings, the pain, suffering and the reality of events was depicted clearly for the future to come. After reading the responses, the readers understand and imagine the situation and thus, they feel unpleasant about the holocaust. It was an event in the history which will not overcome in the years to come. References Amery, J. & Rosenfield, S. 1980. At the Mind’s Limits Bloomington. Indiana: U.P Bodden V. 2007. The Holocaust. USA: The Creative Company. Duchen M. 1995. After Auschwitz: responses to the holocaust in contemporary art. UK: Northern Centre for Contemporary Art. Ehrenreich R. 2010. After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture. USA: Rutgers University Press. Gitlin M. 2010. The Holocaust. USA: ABDO. Kremer S. 2003. Holocaust Literature. NY: Taylor & Francis. Levi, P. & Woolf, S. 2000. If this is a Man. NY: Random House. Matthäus J. 2004. Contemporary Responses To The Holocaust. USA: Greenwood Publishing Group. Senker C. 2006. Surviving the Holocaust. USA: Heinemann-Raintree Library. Yeatts T. 1998. The Holocaust survivors. USA: Enslow Publishers. Read More