While the anniversary of the discovery of the extermination camps has
given rise to several important publications, other works on theextermination of the Jews have also allowed for further reflection and
improved knowledge on this topic. Three major themes structure them:
first, the living conditions of Jews during the war and extermination,
and survival; and finally, memory. Surviving Two books analyze the
conditions of survival. The reissue of Léon Uris's work is interesting
for its content as much as for its way of narrating the repression of
the revolt. It is inspired by the Chronicles of the Warsaw Ghetto by
ghetto historian Emmanuel Ringelblum and the Ghetto Diary by Hillel
Seidman, who successfully concealed the ghetto archives and, after his
death, partially wrote history. The historian, under another name, is
even one of the central characters in the novel. Mila 18 is one of the
first accounts of the history of the Ghetto.
The author exalts the revolt to dismantle the then-popular theme of Jews
resigning themselves to extermination. Against a real historical
backdrop, Uris invents the characters. 18 Mila Street was indeed the
headquarters of the revolt. The novelist lets Christophe de Monti, an
American journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War, recount the
revolt. In four parts, he describes the occupation of Warsaw, the
implementation of discriminatory measures, and the imprisonment in the
Ghetto. The second and third parts, entitled Twilight and Darkness,
describe the deportations. The last, Dawn, describes the revolt:
bare-handed fighters against tanks. A heroic tale, but one with
undeniable verve and talent. At the same time, Hillel Seidman's diary,
first published in French some thirty years earlier, is being reissued.
It was first published in Yiddish in 1947. The author, a practicing
Orthodox Christian and a historian by training, began taking notes from
July 1942 until March 1943, when he was arrested. Released, Hillel
obtained Paraguayan nationality. His diary describes daily life in the
ghettos, the suffering, the daily humiliations, the extermination by
starvation, and then the gatherings at Umschlagplatz, the Warsaw
marshalling yard. He also evokes the first forms of organization that
would lead to the insurrection. The edition is not limited to the simple
publication of the diary. It is remarkably well-contextualized and
accompanied by a voluminous documentary file written by historians
Nathan Weinstock and Georges Bensoussan. The publication of Alter
Fajnzylberg's testimony is essential, as he saw the Nazi extermination
system from the inside. The work is not limited to the publication of
his diary. Indeed, Fajnzylberg was born in Poland in 1911. At a very
young age, he joined the Polish Communist Party. Arrested several times,
he left Poland for the International Brigades. The book publishes his
file, preserved in the Comintern archives in Moscow. A fighter, he
became a political commissar, and as a zealous Stalinist, he applied the
line, considered by his superiors as a perfect activist until his
internment in Gurs and then in Argelès. In the camps, the assessment of
the Comintern's hierarchs was less positive. He was said to have
demonstrated indiscipline. He managed to escape and joined the Communist
Resistance after June 22, 1941. Arrested in 1941, he was first interned
at Drancy and then Compiègne before being deported to Auschwitz in 1942
in the first convoy of Jews from France. He survived the war there.
Forced by the Nazis to join the Sonderkommandos, who were obliged to
carry the bodies from the gas chambers to the Krematoria and burn them.
For several months, he and several of his comrades managed to hide a
camera and take four pictures of the extermination. He managed to escape
in January 1945. By the end of that same year, he testified before the
commissions of inquiry into the camps. He settled in France where he
regained his PCF card and wrote his testimony about his concentration
camp experience, which has now been published, accompanied by the
original documents. The book is supplemented by his son's memoirs and
numerous biographical documents he kept until his death in 1987.
Living and surviving in Auschwitz is the subject of Piotr M. A.
Cywinski's remarkable work, Auschwitz, a monograph on humanity (see also
Francis Pian's review in his column). The author's successful gamble is
to restore the full humanity of those whom Nazism sought to destroy
through death or through a slow process of destruction of minds and
bodies. The author is the director of the Auschwitz Museum, a polyglot,
with access to a considerable number of testimonies, even if his modesty
leads him to admit that he cannot account for all the writings, as he
does not speak all languages. He offers a book of rare rawness, but also
of rare humanity, as the survivors' testimonies express it.
Auschwitz begins with the arrival of the trauma of triage. Almost all
the deportees were immediately murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau.
Only the few survivors remain, locked in the concentration camp section
of Auschwitz. They must face daily death, the smell of burning flesh,
the screams and violence of the guards and kapos. The living conditions
are deliberately inhuman: hunger and especially thirst tear at the
bodies and tear at the souls. The author does not hide any aspect of
life in the camps. While sexual violence by the guards is widespread,
there is also sexuality among the inmates. It also reveals, with
multiple testimonies, the Nazi bestiality and savagery against newborns,
the sick, the wounded, and ultimately all the inmates.
Survival in the camp is the primary form of resistance. Human capacities
to overcome inhumanity are staggering. Another aspect underscores this
extraordinary resilience. The chapters on hope and empathy are exemplary
in this regard. Likewise, friendship and brotherhood saved some people:
"staying strong meant helping others," helping them to the point of the
supreme sacrifice: giving one's life to save that of another.
In addition, the book by Boris Czerny and Claire le Foll, based on an
academic meeting, offers a localized analysis of the extermination of
the Jews in Belarus, allowing us to approach the extermination through a
geographical area. The book includes several historiographical
perspectives on the conditions of the extermination of 700,000 Jews, a
total population of 950,000 living there before the war. The book
analyzes the mechanisms of extermination by starvation in the ghettos,
by the Holocaust by shooting between 1941 and 1943, and the
deportations. It also analyzes the difficulty of writing this history in
a country where the dictatorship blocked most access to information and,
above all, constructed a national narrative where only the exaltation of
the country mattered, without taking into account the specific nature of
the genocide. The authors show how historians nevertheless managed to
circumvent official rules to ultimately analyze the reality of the
genocide and the traces of a vanished world.
Judging and Surviving After the Camps
Jean-Marc Dreyfus also evokes the fate of Marcel Petiot in a fascinating
historical work, plotted like a detective novel. His trial was dubbed
Auschwitz in Paris. A psychopathic criminal, this was the first time
that the deportation of Jews was discussed in France. Initially, nothing
suggested a possible link between Petiot and the Holocaust. Born in 1897
in Auxerre into a small family of employees, he began studying medicine
and then joined the army in 1914, discharged for psychiatric disorders.
He resumed his medical studies, which he passed with flying colors. He
was convicted several times for petty theft (electricity meter
manipulation, shoplifting). He moved to Paris in 1936 and managed to
acquire a private mansion in 1941. This is where his murderous saga
began. He managed to attract his mostly Jewish victims, promising them
that he could make them leave France. Jean-Marc Dreyfus shows how
Petiot's trial was a metaphorical trial of persecution, with the
prosecution repeatedly emphasizing the persecution suffered by Jews.
A tiny minority of Jewish children survived in Poland. Journalist Anna
Bikont, a former member of the KOR (Workers' Defense Committee) and a
member of the Polish dissident movement before 1989, examines their fate
after World War II. She studies the various bodies that sought to
identify surviving children. In total, the names of 147 children were
identified between 1945 and 1959 by the Central Committee of Polish
Jews, an umbrella organization for various Jewish associations. Between
May 1947 and August 1948, the Committee entrusted Leib Majzels, whom the
author does not identify, with the task of finding children it knew had
survived. Using the research notebooks, Anna Bikont set out to find the
children to understand their subsequent whereabouts once they were found
by the association. She eventually found thirty of them. Their fates are
contrasting. First, some of the families who protected the children do
not want to entrust them to the organization. The reasons vary: some
believe they turned these children into true Christians out of
anti-Judaism; others, a minority, believe they cared for them as if they
were their own. The other aspect of the investigation is the children's
fate: some leave for Israel, others for the United States, to find other
family members who survived; some orphans remain in Poland and pursue
careers in the state apparatus. The investigation also provides another
element: most of them knew little or nothing about their history. The
author brilliantly portrays this confrontation between history and memory.
Memories of the Shoah
The Shoah has since been the subject of commemoration and educational
work. Haïm Korsia and Adeline Baldacchino have conducted a reflection
based on their experience visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Having
become a central site of Western memory, the authors accompany their
text with a significant number of photographs of the sites, memorial
objects, and schoolchildren who visited the camp. The book is also
accompanied by student accounts, juxtaposed with those of former
deportees, and drawings and artworks that seek to represent the
catastrophe on the one hand and its memory on the other. They explain
the different phases of a journey: the discovery of the camp by
schoolchildren, marked by shock and contemplation, and then the
testimony of visitors. This is an important reflection on memorial
journeys in which preparation and reflection remain central.
Memory is also the subject of academic work. Two groups of authors
examine the modalities of representation. They examine literature,
exploring works that may seem secondary but are in fact central, such as
the novels of crime writer Joseph Bialot, and also classics of
concentration camp literature such as Primo Levi's If This Is a Man or
Robert Antelme's The Human Species. They also analyze texts previously
unpublished in French, such as Hertha Legeti's The Stars Don't Die. They
seek to demonstrate the difficulty for witnesses turned writers in
making the inconceivable understood. This analysis also includes cinema,
such as Laszlo Nemes's Son of Saul, which seems to have definitively put
an end to the idea that extermination, gas chambers, and crematoria
could not be depicted.
Other papers, however, highlight that this theme is evoked in the works
of Polish director Krzysztof Kislowski. An article highlights that,
contrary to what one might have imagined in the German Democratic
Republic, several films also addressed the subject, even if the memory
of anti-fascist deportees prevailed over that of racial deportees.
The authors also question survival strategies in the camps through
individual choices, such as that of the heroine of Army of Shadows,
Joseph Kessel's novel, adapted into a film by Jean-Pierre Melville, in
which Simone Signoret, arrested, is forced to speak. Neither Kessel nor
Melville judge her for letting her pain carry her away. The authors also
return to the difficulty of communicating upon returning from the camps,
cloaking themselves in silence or, on the contrary, attempting to convey
the difficulty of surviving the camps and, in several cases, the
impossible choices imposed by the Nazis, or even the moral choices that
are akin to tragedy, taken in the Greek sense, from which one never
recovers and which remains etched ad memoriam in the body and mind. The
papers on doctors and the Sonderkommandos testify to this difficulty in
expressing and remembering reality, each person trying to survive as
best they could, reconstructing their memory to survive even if reality
may have been different.
While some papers are not easy to understand, often marked by literary
analysis, they evoke the important theme of trauma and, above all,
memory, which continues to haunt our societies.
Mila 18
Léon Uris
Les Belles lettres, 2025, 672 p. EUR17.50
Hillel Seidman
From the depths of the abyss
Les Belles lettres, 2025, 718 p. EUR21
What I saw at Auschwitz. Alter's notebooks
Alter Fajnzylberg
Seuil 2025, 380 p. EUR33
The Holocaust in Belarus
Boris Czerny and Claire Le Foll
Honoré Champion 2025 134 p. EUR30
Anna Bikont
The Price to Pay
Noir sur Blanc 2025 592 p. EUR27
Fragments of Memory. Journeys to Auschwitz-Birkenau
Haïm Korsia and Adeline Baldacchino
Flammarion 2025 144 p. EUR26
Writing the Holocaust. Trauma and Representation
Aurélien Demars, Monica Garoiu, and Ana-Maria M'enesti
Garnier 2025 326 p. EUR38
Choices under Constraints. Surviving and Deciding in the Concentration
Camp Universe
ENS éditions 2025 270 p. EUR24
https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8379
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