My Life with Holocaust Death

ABSTRACT

The essay offers a chronological account of my introduction to Holocaust reality, beginning with visits to Dachau in 1955, Mauthausen in 1963 and the main camp at Auschwitz and Auschwitz/Birkenau in 1964, at a time when little was known about the concentration camps and the gassing procedures in the deathcamps. The sites would not become tourist destinations for many years, and in fact at Dachau there were only two other visitors present and at Mauthausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau none. Such a sense of desolation is unrecapturable today, and I was forced to deal with the knowledge that I was standing alone on some of the largest cemeteries in Europe. I focus on how I slowly learned to absorb the magnitude of the catastrophe we call the Holocaust, especially the murder of European Jewry. Viewing the crematorium and small (unused) gas chamber at Dachau, standing inside the used one at Mauthausen, and contemplating the ruins of crematoria and gas chambers at Birkenau quickly teaches one the value and the limitations of the imagination in trying to conjure up the fate of the victims and the cruelty of their killers. I was helped in this endeavor by attending the war crimes trials in the summer of 1964 of SS General Karl Wolff in Munich and an array of Auschwitz personnel at their prolonged trial in Frankfurt. Listening to testimony from shattered survivors while sitting no more than fifty feet away from their tormentors, remorseless creatures like Oswald Kaduk and Wilhelm Boger, left me much to reflect on, and these comprise a large part of the essay. History was made more personal for me by these experiences, and they became an unforgettable foundation for what would eventually become a lifelong effort to find ways of challenging the validity of what still today is often referred to as an unimaginable experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Dachau
• Mauthausen
• Auschwitz/Birkenau
• Frankfurt Auschwitz trial

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Lawrence L. Langer is U.S. scholar of Holocaust literature and professor of English emeritus at Simmons College in Boston. In his book ‘Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (1982) he elaborated on his idea of ‘choiceless choice’ to describe the disintegration of moral reality for camp inmates and the general unprecedented situations of conflict that Jews found themselves in during the Holocaust. Throughout his career he has published over ten books and received numerous awards and accolades. In 2016, Langer received The Holocaust Educational Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award in Holocaust Studies.

Notes

1 Herbert J. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1386), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

2 Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others before the Court at Frankfurt, trans Jean Steinberg (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 146.

3 Ibid., p. 147.

4 Hanna Leví-Hass, Diary of Bergen-Belsen: 1944–1945 (Chicago: Haymarket, [1946] 2009), p. 85.

5 Ibid., p. 89.

6 Hellmuth Szprycer, Interview 628, Segment 23, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation.

7 Jakov Lind, Soul of Wood, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 98, 102.