The Aftermath: Right after Liberation, Silence Begins

Geva, Agi. “The Aftermath: Right after Liberation, Silence Begins.” Echoes of Memory (blog), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, November 13, 2018. https://www.ushmm.org/remember/holocaust-reflections-testimonies/echoes-of-memory/the-aftermath-right-after-liberation-silence-begins

Themes: silence | Embodied survival | Post-liberation reorientation | impossibility of return | Gratitude

Keywords:  Holocaust | Liberation | Survivor memoir | Hungary | Silence

This personal essay by Hungarian Holocaust survivor Agi Geva describes liberation on April 28, 1945, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, and the onset of what she names a fifty-year silence. Written 73 years after the event, it is a primary source document — survivor testimony in the author’s own voice — and is included because it demonstrates, from the inside, the dimensionality the reviewed scholarship argues is at stake. Geva’s account of the lipstick request and the mirror, of the fifty-year silence beginning in Innsbruck, and of a daily prayer maintained for 73 years constitute, in practice, the irreducible texture of testimony that AI cannot process and that human-led encounter must be designed to receive.

“I already felt the period of what eventually became the 50-year silence begin.” (Geva, 2018, n.p.)

“I thought that the lipstick would improve my appearance.” (Geva, 2018, n.p.)

“Today, 73 years after my liberation, I still recite a silent prayer...” (Geva, 2018, n.p.)

Night

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Ed. Robert McAfee Brown. 25th anniversary ed. Toronto; New York: Bantam Books: 1986. 

Night is the account of a young boy’s divorce from life where all familiar traits of life brutally and instantly disappear in face of modern atrocity. – and nihilistic death triumphs over life. 

Moshe the Beadle who is Wiesel’s Torah teacher manages to escape and comes back to his village to tell of the murder of babies and Jews digging their own graves – yet no one, including the narrator of Night, believes him…. 

Other than the Diary of Anne Frank, no Holocaust literature has been as cited nor had more copies published than Night.

Elie Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945. He came from a small town in Transylvania called Sighet. Having also being in Birkenau, Auschwitz, and Buna, Wiesel imposed a 10-year vow of silence upon   before trying to describe what happened to him and over 6 million other Jews. He had trouble finding a publisher for his first work Night. Night in the end became the most influential book in forcing people to confront the Holocaust. It forces the reader to accept responsibility for our past and to learn from that post for the sake of our future.

Page 92. (Langer)Elie Wesel‘s Night - gives a path between actuality (the facts of what happened (babies being hurled into a pit of fire alive, a young boy left to hang, etc etc and Reality –“ the attempts of the mind to absorb such events into a “new dissonance that will make them endurable to the imaginative ear…” There is a real fear that readers can be seduced into accepting the abnormal as normal….intellectually conscious of the atrocities in the background, but emotionally relieved that they happened to ‘others’….

See Langer: Pages 75-88.

Page vi. In Night, we learned the geography of “the Valley of the shadow of death” and “Elie Wiesel by his Deliverance was condemned to tell the story to an unbelieving and uncaring world.”. “ He tells the story, out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn the living” 21 that it could happen again and that it must never happen again.

 At the end of Night the immediate devastation has ended, the war is over the camps liberated the author is alive. But the ongoing devastation has begun, the devastation that will never end, devastation imposed by memory that makes the line between life and death a thin line indeed. The descriptive term imaging the author at the end, is that of a corpse."

These are the words that Wiesel used to describe his arrival in Auschwitz:

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in Camp, which I turn my life into one long night, seven times past and 7 times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent Blue Sky. Never shall I forget those Flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and myself and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never. "

After liberation, Wiesel makes a huge effort to look at himself in the mirror. He had not seen himself since the ghetto (he was 15.) – 

Page 116 – Night. “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.”

Wiesel comments that “our senses were blunted…everything was blurred as in a fog.”

Page 76. (Langer, Holocaust and the Literary Imagination) “Wiesel initiates the reader into death rather than life – where death has replaced life as the measure of our existence.”

Page 76., Langer: “After reading Night –“ a world lies dead at our feet – a world we have come to know as our own as well as Wiesel's and whatever civilization may be rebuilt from its ruins, the silhouette of the visage will never look the same.” 

The Sunflower

Wiesenthal, Simon. The Sunflower. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.

By the end of the War – Wiesenthal and his wife had lost 89 relatives to the Nazi Holocaust- he was also brought to the deathbed of a German soldier who wanted his forgiveness…..

The Sunflower is the short narrative of an historical incident in the life of a Jewish prisoner in his mid-thirties. After marching by the sunflowered graveyard, he is randomly pulled out of formation by a nurse nun and compelled to hear the deathbed confessions of a repentant Nazi. …

“Our column suddenly came to a halt at a crossroads. I could see nothing that might be holding us up but I noticed on the left of the street there was a military cemetery. . . And on each grave there was planted a sunflower, as straight as a soldier on parade. I stared spellbound ... Butterflies fluttered from flower to flower. Were they carrying messages from grave to grave? Were they whispering something to each flower to pass on to the soldier below? Yes, this was just what they were doing; the dead were receiving light and messages. Suddenly I envied the dead soldiers. Each had a sunflower to connect him with the living world, and butterflies to visit his grave. For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance above my dreadful tomb. (pp. 13-15)

This work demands much of each reader:

It demands of the reader to face such questions as: Is a young rank and file Nazi owed, or rightly given, a hearing? Is he owed sympathy for his wounds and shattered conscience? Pity? As a dying man, or as one who merely "took orders"? How does one come to volunteer for a career of murder and then to repent?  

What would it mean to atone for such crimes? Ought forgiveness be requested, and if sought, extended? In whose name, by whom and with what authority? What answer would you have given?

When the Danube Ran Red

Zsuzsanna Ozsváth. When the Danube Ran Red. Ed. Inc ebrary. 1st ed. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2010.

This is a powerful memoir, written by a mature woman many years after the events narrated. It embodies a child’s-eye view of the Holocaust in Hungary. In this story, Ozsvath describes what Literature to her really meant: that literature by its coherence, brightness, and energy, it implies what life Might be…

In 1944, as the Russians laid siege to Budapest, Ozsvath finds herself abandoned, hiding in the closet of a house under artillery bombardment and watching Jews being shot and flung into the Danube by Arrow Cross Nazis.

Article for reference: 

• Alexander, Edward. “Murder in Plain Sight.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 119, no. 4, 2011, pp. 669–673. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41337767.

Yehuda Bauer argued that information and knowledge are not the same thing… "The information was there all the time, including information regarding the ways in which the Nazis were misleading and fooling their victims," he says. "The point is that this information was rejected, people did not want to know, because knowledge would have caused pain and suffering, and there was seemingly no way out."

Zsuzsi Abonyi (now Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, professor of literature and intellectual history at the University of Texas) received a child’s version of this information in 1940, when she was in the third grade. At a birthday party in the Hungarian town of Békéscsaba, while standing in line for a slice of the cake, she met a girl named Hanna, who had arrived in Hungary after escaping from Poland with her mother. In fluent Hungarian, she told Zsuzsi about German roundups of Polish Jews, separation of children from parents, old from young, Nazi sadism in all its infinite variety, and raw murder - including the shooting of Hanna’s father and grandfather in the marketplace. Could this happen in Hungary too? "We don't live in a ghetto! . . . Are there ghettos in Hungary? Will the Germans build some for us?" That marketplace would haunt Zsuzsi s imagination like fate in a Greek tragedy from this time through the terrible year of 1944. Her father, whom she loved and trusted, told her that "what the Germans did in Poland could never happen in Hungary. He was so wrong.

Five Chimneys

Lengyel, Olga. Five Chimneys. London: Granada Pub. Co., 1972. 

One of the few women to survive working in the infirmary where Mengele operated…

Page 114. Here the author describes how she and others killed new born babies in order to save mothers from immediately being sent to die by being thrown alive into the gas chambers.

The author spares nothing in her descriptions.

Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land

Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara. Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land. Eds. Roslyn Hirsch, Eli Pfefferkorn, and David H. Hirsch. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. 

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk stored her Holocaust experiences in memory.

Page 172. She manages to subordinate the horrors of Auschwitz in delineating her individual women characters - . At the same time, she manages to heighten the readers’ awareness of the complexity of the moral and ethical problems posed at Auschwitz….

Page 167. In the editor’s afterward he writes “the Challenge to the witnessing writer is to use traditional mimetic forms to convert the repugnant, intolerable reality he witnessed into an intimation of reality that can be both accepted and tolerated by sensitive, normatively oriented reader.”

Page 168-169. 

Yet Sara did survive to draw her disturbing vignettes, where she managed to make the grotesque reality believable. She had a startling ability to convey the most depressing materials without totally depressing the reader. She created the illusion of vibrant life and the will to live even in the Kingdom of death, making her characters live in the reader's imagination. 

Her characters exist as constituents of the death camp reality. Each of her characters are anchored in a cam happening it is therefore the aggregate of the individual vignettes that structures the Incarnation Camp experience. one story in particular about a young girl called Fella (p.169-170) . In that story Sara exposes some of the grimmest aspects of camp life; where sick, starving prisoners beat each other to stay alive; an economy in which every scrap of bread was taken from someone else. Sarah writes in the tradition of the Yiddish folk tale though her stories are simply told they stimulate the reader to contemplate complex issues.

Page 174. “Sarah's ability to walk the fine line between memory and Imagination, document and fiction, opens up New Perspectives on Holocaust literature.”

Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers

Müller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Eds. Helmut Freitag and Susanne Flatauer. Stein and Day, 1979.

This is the first-person account of one of the few prisoners to survive out of a Sonderkommando unit – responsible for working right inside the gas chambers / burial pits. Filip Muller spares his readers nothing. Every ghoulish task he was ordered to carry out or that he witnessed others carrying out, is described in factual, excruciating detail.

Page 48. Here he describes meeting up with his father – and a few days later, watching the cremation of his own father in the ovens. He writes:

“I had come to believe that that one no human feelings left inside me. But while my team-mates recited the Kaddish my soul mourned in pain and grief. As the Flames busily devoured the mortal remains of my father, the words of the traditional prayer gave me solace in this hour of sorrow.”

Auschwitz and After

Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. 

Charlotte Delbo was born in Vigneux-sur-Seine near Paris in 1913. Working with her husband in the Resistance, they were both arrested in March of 1942 by French Police and turned over to the Gestapo. Her husband was summarily executed and she remained in prisons till January o 1943 when she was transported to Auschwitz. In January of 1944 she was transported to Ravensbruck. After liberation, the Red Cross took her to Sweden to recuperate.

In writing about the Nazi death camps- the phrase that best describes her motive is: “il faut donner a voir - - they must be made to see )

Page x. 

Page xiv. in the first volume of her trilogy Delbo does not rely on external memory to convey her experience of Auschwitz. Auschwitz and After Delbo's first volume of a trilogy, (None of us will return Useless Knowledge and The Measure of our Days) she shuns "the narrative impulse with its dependence on reflection, and forgers instead a style of direct confrontation into the Maelstrom of atrocity while simultaneously drowning intellectual defenses."

Page xiii. 

Deep memory teaches us that the Nazi interlude is one Abyss that we cannot pause over with at Perimeter into the future.... the language of discourse that nurtures Delbo's common memory, the traditional sense that the past can be remembered in a constructive and hopeful way. But as Delbo admits, we pay a price for sailing towards this even as inner turbulence threatens our journey.... over dreams the conscious will has no power. And in those dreams, I see myself I was hardly able to stand on my feet, my throat tight, my heart beating wildly; frozen to the marrow, filthy, skin and bones; the suffering I feel is so unbearable, so identical to the pain endured, that I feel it physically I feel it through my whole body which becomes a mass of suffering, and I feel death fasten on me, I feel that I am dying."

In talking more about memory and refining the opposition between common and deep memory Delbo develops a parallel distinction between Memoir Externe or what we might call thinking memory and memoir des sens - sense memory. Because when I talk to you about Auschwitz she says it is not from Deep memory my words issue they come from external memory the memory connected with the thinking process. search memory, I would add may allow us to imagine the worst, but only sense memory, which preserves and tries to transmit the physical imprint of the ordeal, enables us to approach the unthinkable. External memory gives us access to the heroic exploits of a man such as Jean Moulin, the legendary leader of the French Resistance, who was captured tortured and executed by Klaus Barbie, but only sense memory can give us a glimpse of the unimaginable anguish leading to his death.

Survival in Auschwitz, The Nazi Assault on Humanity

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz, The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Translated by Stuart Wolf. Touchstone, 1986.

Primo Levi spent a year in Buna-Monowitz, a munitions labor camp associated with the main extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. “Retrospectively Levi acknowledged that the ordeal suffered by him and all prisoners would never be erased from their consciousness but would afflict their sensibilities permanently and transform their responses to life, awake and in dreams.” (Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination.” Levi experiences a gulf in between Planet Auschwitz and the ‘normal world’ – that brings about silence and requires new ways of communicating not yet created….

Article Ref.

• Druker, Jonathan. “Primo Levi's ‘Survival in Auschwitz’ And ‘The Drowned and The Saved’: From Testimony to Historical Judgment.” Shofar, vol. 12, no. 4, 1994, pp. 47–58. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42942346.
• Parussa, Sergio. “The Shame of The Survivor: Judaism and textual memory in Primo Levi, Günther Anders and Franz Kafka.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Vol. 7 Issue 1, p91-106. 16p. March 2008. 

Survival in Auschwitz was Primo Levi's first book. It is a memoir describing an horrendous year in captivity in Auschwitz from February 1944 to January 1945. It was Written in 1946, immediately after the end of the War and at a time when the details and dimensions of the Holocaust were not well known. Survival in Auschwitz is an unadorned, very personal, factual account of Primo Levi's own death camp experience. Later in life, Levi had this to say about how and why he wrote this memoir the way he did: 

 “When describing the tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge. I thought that my account would be all the more credible and useful the more it appeared objective and the less it sounded overly emotional; only in this way does the witness in matters of justice perform his task, which is that of preparing the ground for the judge. You, my readers, are the judges.”

 and "The Dispute Among German Historians. The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays 

Quote from the Druker article: “As one long committed to wider public recognition and comprehension of the Holocaust, Levi's perception of his role as a survivor-writer evolved with the passage of time and the historicization of the events. There are dramatic differences in content and rhetorical structure between his early and late Holocaust texts which raise important questions about the relationship of survivor writing to post-Holocaust history. What effect does evolving historical perception, an intellectualized form of memory, have on the process of writing about the Holocaust? And how, if at all do survivor- writers like Levi, as opposed to professional historians, respond to the illegitimate but nonetheless menacing challenges of Holocaust revisionism?” 

Shivitti: A Vision

 Ka-tzetnik 135633. Shivitti: A Vision. Translated by Eliyah De-Nur and Lisa Herman Harper and Row. 1989.

The Holocaust survivor who calls himself Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (Concentration-Camp Inmate 135633), used this pseudonym as to him, it forced readers to confront what he presents as the one and only significant aspect of who he is…

The author who calls himself Ka-Tzetnik was born in Poland in 1917 as Yehiel Feiner. Like many survivors who made their lives in Israel after the war, he marked his new life by assuming a new Hebrew name, Yehiel De-Nur.

He started publishing his experiences in the deathcamps as early as 1946 – with a first volume, Salamandra being published in Hebrew – 

His frankness about the details of the physical horrors and emotional humiliations inflicted on all inmates of the camps, was the first ‘success’ in getting through to second generation survivors in Israel – who before then lived in a wall of silence…

Article to refer to:

• Popkin, Jeremy D. “Ka-Tzetnik 135633: The Survivor as Pseudonym.” New Literary History, Vol. 33, No. 2, Anonymity (Spring, 2002), pp. 343-355

Page 344-345. 

The name? the basis of individuality? is gone, and the Ka-Tzetnik camp slang for prisoner is reduced to part of an anonymous mass. Devastating as it was, however, this experience conferred one privilege: it made Ka-Tzetnik part of the collectivity of prisoners. If he could no longer claim the right to speak of his individual experiences, he had gained the right to speak for the group as a whole. By insisting on retaining this (non) identity even in the post-Holocaust world, Ka-Tzetnik brings the reality of "planet Auschwitz" to that other planet, Earth, whose inhabitants have such difficulty conceiving what Holocaust victims went through.”

At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

Amery, Jean. At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Indiana University press, 1980.

This is a firsthand account of a Jewish resistance fighter – One of the key differences about this work is that this person identifies as a Jew BUT saw himself primarily as a Victim and at the same time he makes explicit both the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew. The author provides chillingly minute details relating to his torture by the Gestapo in Belgium after he was captured. He discusses in depth “how much home does a person need? – And the fundamental issue of ongoing Resentment he never loses.

AFTERWORD 104-111-The entirety of Jean Amery's work is auto-biographical, and full of self-interrogation. In this work, he examines the human condition and focuses on what it was like to be an Intellectual and an inmate of Auschwitz. The author was born Hans Meyer, in 1912, in Vienna; the only child of a Jewish father and Catholic mother. He knew he was Jewish, but he was not brought up as a Jew – but as an assimilated German…

He saw himself as a victim, confronted with the immorality of history. He resolved to fight against it after escaping from a camp and going into the Belgium Resistance. It was his identity as a Jew that touched the core of his being. Amery committed suicide in 1976 - seeing that act as the last path to freedom...

The focus of this work by the author is to speak on "the intellectual in Auschwitz." ...And in the "necessity and impossibility of being a Jew." He explains early in the work why it was far more difficult to survive as an intellectual in the death camps - where physical strength counted far more than intellectual strength....

Page 2 In defining the intellectual the author writes: "this is a person who wrote that the intellectual lives within what is a spiritual frame of reference in the widest sense. His realm of thought is an essentially humanistic one, that of the liberal arts...He has a well-developed aesthetic consciousness..." 

The author presents himself in a double capacity as a Jew and as a member of the Belgium resistance movement besides being in Bergen Belsen and still other concentration camps he also spent a year in Auschwitz more exactly in the auxiliary Camp Schmidt the author looks at the external situation of the intellectual …

...the author of this book posed the following question did intellectual background and an intellectual basic disposition help a camp prisoner in the decisive moments? Did they make survival easier for him? See Page 5. Paragraph – He answers NO.

the author isolated discusses the position of the intellectual in different death camps. For example, in Bergen Belsen and in Dachau how the prisoners had “in principle the possibility to oppose the SS state, the SS structure, with an intellectual structure’ that he says “gave the intellectual there a social function even if this manifested itself in political religion religious or ideological ways and only in rare cases as not Niko Rost the same time philosophical in...

I-10. when contemplating analytical thinking in the face of Terror … that that kind of thinking, rational analytic thinking in the camp and particularly in Auschwitz is it was of no help but it leads straight into a tragic dialectic of self-destruction. Intellectuals did not so easily acknowledge the unimaginable conditions as a given fact as did the non- intellectual.

Page 12. The author discusses how the intellectual in one way or the other was helped in decisive moments by their political or religious beliefs. they survived better they also somehow manage to reach a point where. Page 40 

Page 14 the author states that a believing person transcends himself. He is not the captive of his individuality; he is out of a spiritual continuity that is interrupted no we're not even in Auschwitz. he is estranged from reality and closer to it than his unbelieving comrades. there was little on the standing between the two types the Believers and non-believers quote you must realize one thing, a practicing Jew once told me, quote that hear your intelligence and your education worthless. But I have the certainty that our God will avenge us. they transcended themselves and projected themselves into the future. 

in discussing what intellectuals in Auschwitz about death, death was Omni present. The intellectual and especially the intellectual of German education and culture, bears this aesthetic View of death within him. 

Page 17. The intellectual inmate did not occupy himself with death but with dying. In the term the intellect in its totality declared itself to be incompetent as a tool to

Page 19 We did not become wiser in in Auschwitz, if by wisdom one understands positive knowledge of the world. the author goes on to say quote we did not leave Auschwitz wiser and deeper but were no doubt smarter. Quote profundity has never clarified the world. Clarity looks more profoundly into its depths. this is a quote by Arthur Schnitzler. see Page 20. 

Page 24. The author also speaks of torture. Was tortured by the Gestapo in Brussels the offer on Page 30, states that torture was quote the essence of national socialism that the Third Reich materialized in Old the density of its being. the author on Page 40 goes on to state that whoever has quote second to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of the destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow but in the end on the torch fully will not be regained.

age 43. After liberation. The ulcer talks about homesickness. but the homesickness was alienation from the south. The past was buried and one no longer knew who one was. 

Page 47. They also discuss what how much home does one need? he talks of home as meaning security. But for those exiled by the Third Reich Jenny's home quotes with falsified papers and stolen pedigree. We had to mind what we were but have not the right to be. Page 51. Paragraph in the years of Exile our relationship to our homeland was a kid to that toward our mother tongue. the author on Page 52 speaks of a crumbling away of the Muppet on in words rather of speaking of its shrinking. 

Page 54. they also try to examine and track down the meaning of the loss of home and mother tongue for all those who were exiled by the Third Reich. 

Page 57 the also remarks that aging makes us dependent to an increasing degree on the memory of the past. Young people can somehow think of the future but the credits of the person who is aging depletes. Quote he is only who he is. the future is no longer around him and therefore also not with him

Page 58. The person who was expelled from the hood right looks back since the future of the old is something that is in-store only for the younger ones and therefore benefits them and he does not detect himself anywhere. he lies unrecognizable in the ruins of the years 1933 to 1945. 

Page 60. They also comment that a Survivor ages badly in Exile. Because a human being needs a home. How much of one? How much home a person needs, cannot be Quantified.

babe 63. We also state that he speaks quote as a victim and examine my resentments. End quote 

Page 68. Rosa rights that quote resentment is not only an unnatural rule of a logically inconsistent condition. It Nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past. Resentment blocks the exit to the genuine human Dimension the future I know that the time sense of the person trapped in resentment is twisted around disordered if you wish, come up for it decides to impossible things regression into the past and patient happened 

Page 70. He also talks about revenge but if he has searched his mind properly, it is not a matter of Revenge. The experience of persecution was, at the very bottom, is that extreme. 

Page 74. Quote from a poem by a German poet titled out Brown that describes the nightmare of the brown majority:

"and if some both in relation to many and to all are in the minority then they are much more so in relation to all that in relation to many and all for my stronger majority in relation to some than in relation to many"

Page 75. He also discusses his resentment. He discusses the fact that he is burns with Collective guilt but not the Germans. he states “that the world which forgives and forgets has sentenced him not those who I like me are the S blood yes how did it go by the way Shylocks, not only morally condemnable in the eyes of the nations, but already cheated of the pound of flesh too.”

Page 77. The author also discusses how to resolve resentment and how the German people can still live with their past as survivors also have to do. he believes that the problem could be settled by permitting resentment to remain alive in the one camp and aroused by itself mistrust in the other. Solely by the Spurs of resentment and not in the least by a conciliatory Nest that subject in Lee subjectively is almost always dubious and objectively hostile to history. the German people would remain sensitive to the fact that they cannot allow a piece of the National History to be neutralized by time but must integrated he goes on to write is Germany's past present and future but if in the midst of the raised and also in its future Generations that it was not Germans who did away with the dominion of baseness. it would then as I sometimes hope to learn to comprehend its past acquiescence in the Third Reich as the total negation not only of the world that it played with war and death but also of its own better Origins it would no longer repressed or hush up the 12 years that for us ever really were a thousand but claim them as its realize negation of the world and itself as its own negative possession.

Page 78. The also goes on to say on the field of History two groups of people the overpowered and those who overpowered them would be joined in the desire that time be turned back and with it that history become moral. if this Demand were raised by the German people who has a matter of fact had been Victorious and already rehabilitated by time it would have tremendous weight enough so that by this alone it would already be fulfilled. The German Revolution would be made good Hitler disowned. And in the end Germans would really achieve what the people once did not have the mics for the will to do and what later in the political power game no longer appear to be a vital necessity the eradication of the ignominy. "

Page 79. Fuel states that he knows that despite all the were the efforts of German intellectuals all recognizable signs quote suggest that natural time will reject the moral demands of our resentment and finally extinguish them. The great Revolution Germany will not make it good and I will have been for nothing Hitler's Reich will for the time being continued to be regarded as an operational accident on history. find me however it will be purely and simply history no better and no worse than dramatically perhaps that also had its everyday family. What happened in 1945 so they will teach and say could have occurred under similar circumstances anywhere else... Page

Page 82. Deals r ends his work with a chapter entitled quote on the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew.

also asks himself weather he has a full mouth fits inmate still did not want to be a Jew. he says it is not because quote I do I don't want to be a Jew but only because I cannot be won and yet must be one. The necessity and impossibility of being a Jew that is what causes me indistinct pain. The author finds himself in an impossible situation because he does not believe in the god of Israel he knows very little about Jewish culture. he does not see himself in a synagogue. He did not know of the existence of the Yiddish language until he was 19 years old he knew that his neighbors regarded his family at Jewish and that no one in his

Page 83.the ulcer goes on to say if being a Jew implies having a cultural heritage or religious ties then I was not one of them can never become one. he understands that in theory he has the freedom to choose to be a Jew but he asks himself do I really have that freedom? He does not believe so.

Page 84. Realtor says when can we establish the link with a tradition that one has lost but one cannot freely have invented for oneself that is the problem. Since he says quote I was not a Jew I am not one and since I am not one I would be able to become one but since all the same I must be one and since this compulsion excludes the possibilities that might allow me to be something other than I do can I find myself? Must I acquiesce without a pause as a shadow of a universal abstract which does not exist and take refuge in the empty phrase that I am simply a human being? They also to say to be a human being you could only be a human being.

Page 86. In 1939, 

he also understood that to be a Jew meant for him from this moment on to be a dead man on leave someone to be murdered who only by chance was not yet where he probably belonged and so it has remained in many variations in various degrees of intensity until today. The death threat which he felt for the first time with complete clarity while reading the Nuremberg Laws included what is commonly referred to as the magic degradation of the Jews by the Nazis. formulated differently the denial of human dignity sound of the death rate daily for years on end we could read in here that we were lazy evil ugly. We were incapable of founding a state but also by no means suited to assimilate without host Nations.

Page 87. he also notes the day after World War II when streams of refugees pulled out of the various communist Rule and into the West the countries of the free world outdid one another in a willingness to not help the Jews. 

Page 88. He also discusses the degradation proceedings directed against the Jews which have begun with the problem of proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws and as a direct result let all the way to Treblinka met on my side with quote and equivalent proceedings age of the retainment of dignity. And quote for me until today this case is not closed he discusses the nature of dignity That was supposed to night to him in 1935 officially withheld until 1945 and that passed even today when does not want to bring me and that I must haves for a chain through my own efforts what is dignity really? 

Page 90. Elsa finally realizes or at least explain that his own human dignity lay in fighting back for reasons of courage and honor but only because he had grassed well that there are situations in life in which his body was his entire cell and his entire fate he felt that he was his body and nothing else and that when he fought back he was himself both for himself and for his opponent. He says that he became a person not by subjectively appealing to his abstract Humanity but by quote discovering himself within the given social reality as a Jew and by realizing himself as one.

93. States only those who have lived through a fake like his and no one else can refer their lives to the years 1933 to 1945. He suggests that while the Holocaust is truly the existential reference point for the sacrificed, can spiritually relive the catastrophic event as it was all fully picture it as it as it could be.

He goes on to say let others not be prevented from empathizing. Let them come to plate a fate that yesterday could have been and tomorrow can be there. the also goes on to say for me being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left arm I barely outfits number it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud, and yet provides more thorough information. It is more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. ‘To myself in the world including the religious and nationally minded Jews who do not regard me as one of their own I say I am a Jew then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are some job in the Auschwitz number.’ He goes on to say to be something can mean that one is not something else. As a known known you I am a Jew I must be one and must want to be one. But since being a Jew not only means that I bet within me a catastrophe that occurred yesterday and cannot be ruled out for tomorrow it is beyond being a duty - also fear.

Page 94. Every morning when the offer gets up he can read the outfit's number on his forearm something he says that quote touches the deepest and most closely intertwined roots of his existence and quote indeed he is not even sure this is not his entire existence. Then he feels approximately as he did back then when he goes to taste of the first blow from a policeman's fist. Everyday anew, he loses his trust in the world.

Without trust in the world, he faces his surroundings as a Jew who is alien and alone and all that he can manage is to get along with in his foreignness.

Page 95. The author finds himself alone each new day. He says he was unable quote to force yesterday's murderers and tomorrow's potential aggressive to recognize the moral truth of that crimes because the world in its totality did not help him to do it he is alone as he was when they tortured him. Although he gets on with his neighbors and he passes them with a greeting and without hostility he cannot rely on them only on a Jewish identity that is without positive determinants: his burden and his support. 

Page 97 Finally, the author States that:

there is no positive Community between himself and his fellow Jews that there remains only the intellectual more correctly the consciously perceived relationship of Jews Judaism and himself. With Jews as Jews he says practically nothing no language no cultural tradition no childhood memories. He lived in the region of and before the Holocaust his interest in Jewish things and Jews was so slight that with the best of intentions he could not say today which of his acquaintances at that time was a Jew and which was not. He had lived in an environment for years that just was not Jewish. yet the lack of Jewish self by no means stands as a barrier between himself and his solidarity with every threatened Jew in the world. in fact, solidarity in the face of threat is all that links him with his Jewish contemporaries the Believers as well as the number leave the nationally minded as well as those ready to assimilate. He knows the anti-Antisemitism made of him and that anti-Semitism Madness. yet anti-antisemitism is still a reality and its cool countries Austria and Germany it is a reality in England and the United States where Jews are tolerated but would not be unhappy to be rid of them. they also believe that a new Mass extermination of Jews cannot be ruled out as a possibility.

Page 99. the author recites the following definition of the Jew:

“a Jew can be described as someone who has more fear mistrust and vexation that his fellow citizens who would never persecuted. They also add.. for with good reason he awaits a new catastrophe at any moment and the offer goes on to say that the consciousness of his being a holocaust Jew is not an ideology. The author states that he finally feels that he cannot be a deeply stirred Jew; he can only be a Jew in fear and anger when in order to attain dignity; fear transforms itself into anger. "Hear o Israel" is not my concern only here wan ts angrily to break out from the six-digit number on my forearm demands it. That is what the awareness of catastrophe was: the dominant force of my existence, requires. 

Page 101The author, in his incessant effort to explore the basic condition of being a victim in conflict with the necessity to be a Jew and the impossibility of being one the author believes to have recognized the most extreme expectations and demands directed at us are of a physical and social nature. He believed that such knowledge has made him better equipped to recognize reality.