A
Theatre of Cruelty and Horror
Heather
Dunne Macadam. The Nine Hundred: The
Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Transport to Auschwitz. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2020. xxv +
438 pp. + 14 pages of black and white illustrations. Foreword by Caroline
Moorehead.
Reviewed by Norman Simms
***** Introduction *****
While
it is the extraordinary cruelty[i]
of the Nazis and their local Slovak collaborators that makes this book so
powerful a confirmation of what we know of the Shoah, it is the Jewish women
whose testimonies and story are told that adds a new perspective to that
history. Unlike what the subtitle tells us, however, the teenage girls and the young
female adults were chosen for destruction precisely because they were not extraordinary. The insidious and
vicious evil of the Nazis designated for the first trial transport to Auschwitz
the most innocent, naïve, and vulnerable victims. The adolescents were confused
by what was happening to them when shoved into the trains taking them away from
home, off-loading them in out-of-the-way
places where they were insulted and maltreated as they progressed towards
Poland, and shocked by what lay in store
for them at the as-yet-uncompleted death camp. The commercial puffery on the
paperback cover therefore does little credit to the author, the editors, and
the informants who made this book possible, when it calls the nine hundred
extraordinary. Rather, what is most significant about the story of these young
Jews is the re-creation of their emotional and inner lives. Macadam reveals how
ordinary people were shocked[ii]
into a realization of evil[iii]
in the world.
Heather
Dunne Macadam’s book seems on first reading rather confusing. It does not follow
chronological developments, but appears to switch from one to another of the several
young women—of the nearly one thousand who made up of the first transport of Jews
from Slovakia to Auschwitz—who are focused on; and he occasionally introduces
girls and even men from later death-transports. Then, from time to time, there
are discussions with the survivors who are now in their eighties or nineties
interviewed by the author and her own descriptions of how the various sections
of the concentration camp looks now. Further still, in what seems like a twisted
tale of digressions and forward glances, these current views are interspersed
with remarks on what Auschwitz the place and its constituent units appeared
like before it was fully developed as a killing machine. Readers learn what the
original wave of female victims could not know about Auschwitz, of the older
farm houses razed to the ground and the local villages not yet torn down or
redeveloped as barracks for the German troops, huts for the inmates, and
crematoria that replaced burning pits for those killed in one way or another. To
add to what looks to be a state of confusion in the text, the author herself
sometimes intrudes into the book as a self-identifying actor collecting,
synthesising, and interpreting information from informants; and sometimes she
seeks a more unobtrusive presence, seeking a neutral tone, almost objective in
address, occasionally distancing her personality with medical or legal
terminology; yet at other times she waxes overly sentimental and flowery in her
language, appealing directly to the reader’s emotions and sympathies.
Adding
to the consternation and nervousness we feel about the nature of the book, in
almost all the early chapters, we are told about the Slovakian towns and
villages where the girls came from, what their parents and siblings did prior
to the war and the Nazi conquest. Readers learn how Christians, including those
who were friendly and those who were hostile and even those who were
indifferent, all profited from the Shoah. They bought and sold looted household
goods, urban and rural properties suddenly made available, and wore the
clothing and other personal items of the dispossessed and dead. Nevertheless the
author also explains how some ordinary non-Jewish Slovaks reacted with humanity
to what gradually began to be perceived as an attempt to make the whole of their
newly created Nazi puppet-state Judenrein.
Is
this confusion real—or is it a deliberate attempt to put the reader off
balance, to force him or her to re-examine what they think they know about the
Shoah? As he or she attempts to make
sense of what is going on, it starts to dawn on us that this bizarre structure
of narration, description and commentary mirrors the breakdown of narrative
logic, common sense and reality in the people described. It was, of course, the
young, naïve and innocent Jewish girls who in the very first hours of their
ordeal realized with a shock (in other words: the trauma) that their expected short journey to respectable jobs was
something quite otherwise. The shock came in the rude and rough treatment
accorded them on their train ride into Poland, the physical and psychological
insults to their dignity, the whippings and the starvation imposed on them with
no recourse to complaint or escape. It was also often only a few hours later,
but usually a few days afterwards, that their own families started to
understand that something quite different from what they assumed was taking place.
They looked around at the changed
behaviour of their Christian neighbours and colleagues, they understood that
they themselves were quickly losing not only status, but also their civil and
human rights; and their whole sense of security in the world crumbled away.
Under such conditions, as happened to their daughters, sisters and cousins, their
trust in the ordinariness, orderliness and honesty of the police, politicians
and other officials, could not be relied on. Everything now appeared hostile
and threatening. This is a book about a crisis that turns ordinary people’s
view of the world upside down.
When
we look back at the text again, we see that when the young Jewish girls first arrived
in Auschwitz, they saw the prisoners already there in the concentration camp
shuffling about in dirty, tattered clothing, heads shaved and babbling. They feared
they had been sent to work by mistake in a lunatic asylum. By the time the next
train arrived, a day later, however, with the second consignment of adolescent
girls, they themselves were no longer what they thought they were and appeared to
the newcomers to be the inmates of a madhouse. And when one of the fathers came
a few days later with what he thought was a valid document to have his daughter
released on the grounds that an administrative error had occurred, he was
unable to recognize her. He too imagined he had come to a prison for crazy
people.
Within
a matter of months, the father and the rest of his family and many other Jewish
families would be forced to make the railway journey jammed into crowded cattle
cars to Auschwitz. By then there was no longer any doubt as to the malignant
intentions of the Nazis and their collaborators. It was obvious that the whole
complex of buildings in Auschwitz was not only an absurd (or pseudo-mechanistic
and illogical) killing institution, but that all that those running the camp
and their masters in Berlin were utterly out of their minds, a pack of
psychotic mass murderers. The author has made us realize that Auschwitz and the
other concentration camps were part of one encompassing lunatic asylum called
the Third Reich.
Heather
Dune Macadam inserts herself into the history of the nine hundred plus females
on the first transport to Auschwitz, not just as someone narrating their
story—and in particular several dozen of these adolescent girls and young women
she focuses on—but as someone who interviewed many of the survivors or their
children and other close relatives. Therefore she appears as an editorial voice
that compares contrasts and consolidates their accounts of who the victims were
and what happened to them. She also inserts herself into the published text as
someone who describes the places she has visited—the towns and villages in
Slovakia, the site of the concentration camps, the homes of the survivors and
the former neighbours she visits to ask questions of, the libraries, archives
and other research facilities in Europe, America and Israel. In a sense,
Macadam is possessed by the voices of these survivors and by the ghosts who no
longer have voices to tell their stories. She makes the transition for us by
retelling what she has heard and what she has read, but also by what she goes
to see with her own eyes, and then she gives the whole a new story an imaginary
life.
This
kind of self-denominated editorial presence is common to many of the latest
genre in Holocaust literature. These books undertake a second-hand quest to
uncover missing data, and to discover the names and personalities of victims
who left no heirs to their stories and survivors who, for various reasons,
decided to keep their children and grandchildren ignorant of their experiences
during the Shoah. Without being a close relative or former friend of any of
them, Macadam takes a slightly different stand vis-à-vis the women who endured the horrors of Auschwitz.
In
one sense, Macadam manifests herself as a sensitive, imaginative directing presence
who recreates whole scenes, speeches, thoughts and feelings based on a few
phrases, vague allusions and fragmentary memories garnered during formal and
informal conversations. These scattered and often emotionally fragmented
details are supplemented by suggestions found in previous memoirs, historical
compilations and even fictionalized versions of what transpired to Jewish men,
women and children when they were trapped in the horrible machinations of the
Holocaust.
In
another more rhetorically formal sense, though, her active participatory presence
adds to the generic and conceptual confusion of the book. What it is, is not always clear. When does
she paraphrase or synthesize personal statements of other people and when does
she invent, by analogy or guesswork, what they probably saw, felt and
remembered? To be sure, she names many
of her sources, but in terse references listed in a late section of the book
where one would expect there to be a formal bibliography and a set of
explanatory annotations. These late entries into the book are often given only as
cryptic statements and abbreviated references, and once in a while (and
inconsistently) given in short paragraphs of explanations of how the author went
about recreating imaginary scenes and conversations.[iv]
When
the imagination is called into play and allusions to fictional accounts of
Jewish experience during the Holocaust stand as sources of emotional shock and
stress are acknowledged, it should be clear (but not always is) to the
reader—professional historians, general readers, and naïve first-timers, as
well as hostile Holocaust Deniers ready to pounce on errors and
inconsistencies—that the ordinary and innocent young Jewish girls were suddenly
wrenched out of their normal lives and tested to the extreme in their ability
to withstand violence and other insults to their upbringings within loving,
nurturing households. Macadam’s interpretive comments often are not described in
a neutral or objective manner; but they are perceived through traditional modes
of storytelling, literary character-creation and intrusive mood-setting. The
imagination becomes an even more complicated and problematic faculty.
Ordinarily,
the imagination is taken to be that faculty of the mind that understands
reality and even hysterically-induced unrealities through the passionate
imagery of cultural memories. It is constituted by what the German-Jewish
cultural historian Aby Warburg called Pathosformel.
These passionate forms are highly cathected mental images which express otherwise
inconceivable and unimaginable traumatic experiences. Here it is those of the
adolescent girls, their parents and others in the death-camps, as well as of
the shocked and increasingly empathetic author who is seeking to track down the
emotional content of their lives during the Shoah. The terms used in this book are
similar to those found in novels, short stories and dramatic plays written in
Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Key words that are
repeated in both discursive genres, such as horror,
shock, terror, hysteria and paralysis
are at once vague yet at the same time powerful triggers to passionate events.[v]
As the older novelists in French, English and German sought to ground their
fictional characters in the modernity around them, they sought for stimulating circumstances, sensational responses and
heightened expressiveness—and thus to go beyond the conventional classical types
of rhetoric and moralistic vocabularies. These nineteenth century authors
created Gothic landscapes, ghastly and nightmarish adventures, drug-induced
hallucinations, and mysterious crimes of passion. However, what were then for
them and their readers exercises in literary form, by the 1940s became horrible
and terrible realities for the victims of the Holocaust, shocking and traumatic
breakdowns of common sense and conventional wisdom—and for the children of
survivors trying to understand their parents, for scholars addressing
circumstances that undercut academic niceties of objective and document-based
evidence. By the close of the twentieth century, it seems, many intelligent and
educated readers, Jews and non-Jews, started to feel a painful alienation from
past notions of what was real and true, as well as natural and logical.
At
one extreme, during the nineteenth century, such literary exercises in evoking
a sense of terror and disorientation could be found in the grotesque theatres
and wax museums of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and during early
twentieth century, after the Great War of 1914-1918, another extreme was reached in the optical
tricks of silent cinematography and later, in theorized forms, such as Antonin Artaud’s
theatre of cruelty or the Dada movement’s surrealistic theatre of the absurd. Whereas
such dramatic farces and poetic satires sought to laugh or shock the world back
into sanity and good order by exposing reality as seen from back to front,
inside out or upside down, these new rebellious literary modalities of the
1920s and 1930s offered no moral or psychological comforts to the spectators,
but only the sense of disorientation and perpetual confusion. Yet the
inefficient, clunky machinery of the Final Solution[vi]
offered no comforts, soothing reassurances of an underlying morality or even of
an eventual closure to humiliation and agony—only of psychological and physical
degradation, of death without meaning or dignity, of absolute absurdity and
horror without end.[vii]
While
no written text can ever reproduce exactly the extended and confused horror—the
pain, the humiliation, the hopelessness—of the experiences of more than nine
hundred young Jewish women in Auschwitz, this book provides a respectful and
sympathetic set of narratives and comments on the living hell the victims
suffered—those who died and those who survived. Unlike a personal witness
scribbled down in the midst of things, as certain hidden fragments of diaries provide
us with, and memoirs, interviews and historical reconstructions all to one
degree or another imposing syntactical and narrative order where there was in
reality only disorder; and give, if anyone is to read sensibly, a semblance of grammatical
and conceptual clarity where there was actually only the inadequacy of normal,
everyday language and the impossibility of making any sense out of madness.[viii]
But
it was not alone the superficial lexicon that changed for purposes of
propaganda or deception, with both the terminology used by the Nazis and their
collaborators to hide the meaning and consequences of their actions, and by the
girls in the camp to communicate between different groups and with parents and
other relatives in the few postcards they were forced to send as part of the
huge deception of the Holocaust.
…when the girls were forced to write
cards again, they were given several to write at once and told to post-date
them in advance…It was a ruse to ensure that families still in Slovakia would
get cards at home and think their girls were alive and well. (p. 139)
Yet
the deception could be deliberately breached if the girls occasionally worked
out codes messages by omission of some names in a greeting or reference to
fellow inmates, allusions to private domestic relationships that would recall painful
incidents in their past. They also tried to reveal illness, fear or distress
through ironic juxtapositions of sacred and profane acts or objects, shifts in
tone, multilingual puns. That kind of subversive system of communication could
only have worked if there were no sustained interruptions and gaps in the
exchange of messages.[ix]
At best, the young women hoped that much later, after there was some return to
normalcy, the postcards would serve as reminders to themselves of the
overwhelming shifts in mental outlook they could feel they were undergoing. In
the event, those of their parents who received the few cards that did get
through to them, were puzzled by what was written and they attempted to read the
best out of them. Then, in their own answers, the mothers and fathers showed that
they missed the point of the cryptic cards. “Prisoners were often so cautious
with coded messages,” says Macadam, “that they were indecipherable. But we can
guess…” (p. 261)
How
can we guess?
Macadam is aware of some changes in the ordinary
lexicon used by the girls and their parents.
She especially examines the language of the official documents posted to
assuage the anxieties of the Jewish populace and to fool the outside world into
thinking there was no organized Shoah in progress. Macadam focuses on the
attitudes these propaganda notices express, going so far as parse the original
expressions:
Here we must pause and consider the
phrase Soznam darujúcich zmlúv, which
translates to “List of Donation Contracts.” The Slovaks did not want anyone to
know that they were using slave laborers, so the official line was that the
girls were contract volunteers, “donating” their time to work for the
government. In this way the Slovak government was able to skirt the illegality
if deporting its Jews. (p. 81)[x]
It is important to watch the shifts in
the words used, the things refereed to and the allusions attempted by the young
women in the camps. There are, however,
also deeper questions on the loss of normal consciousness, a shared aphasia
induced by shocking (traumatic) circumstances and loss of physical integrity, and
consequently a hallucinatory regression into childish babble and pre-linguistic
utterances. Basically there are two kinds of wordlessness described. In the
course of events, for instance, we are told: “Numb, the girls of Canada watched
the Hungarians walk to their deaths”; while, in another instance, long after
the experiences. “Many survivors…were never able to speak about their
experience” (p. 287).
It is not just that the crimes committed
against Jews were unspeakable, unimaginable and inconceivable in the rhetorical
sense of being at the very extremity of normal speech, common sense and everyday
logic; but that the actions were beyond the ability of the conscious,
subconscious and unconscious mental faculties of ordinary human beings to process.
They overwhelmed the deepest levels of the psychic system.
He
[SS officer Gottfried Weise] ran after the child, tore the bottle out of the
child’s hands, and threw it away. Then he tossed the child into the sky and
thrust the bayonet into him as he fell, grabbed the boy’s arm and “smashed the
child’s head against the wall.” A woman screamed. Then silence. (p. 289)
At that extreme point, the scream and
the silence become assimilated: they are the same thing. The uncontrolled and
high-pitched sounds not only cancel out all other noises, but absorb anything
that might be considered a verbalized message or culturally-coded emotive cry;
like a black hole in space, the sheer horror of absolute humanity sucks
everything into the abyss of meaninglessness—even the silence of shock, disgust
and despair.
Macadam
comes close to indicating this profound interference in the normal processing
of emotions and even of nervous sensations:
The girls were already suffering
significant trauma from being uprooted, treated like criminals, and starved.
Living in the barracks in Poprad had been the first step in a psychological
process of “deculturation.” But being locked into the cattle cars and treated
as cargo was about more than cultural identity. It was about their place in
humanity. No one knew what to believe any more. All of their expectations were
being crushed under the wheels of the transport. (p. 98)
This
is true insofar as “deculturation” is understood by the term anomie. But to understand such a virtually
non-verbal language of total despair and helplessness, one must do more than
read between the lines (if there are any lines to read between) or listen with
the third ear as Theodor Reik suggests (if one could record or transcribe
dream-talk and provide insight and intuition as to how the patient, interviewee
or text produced in extremis lived
with the sensorily and organically embedded affects).[xi]
Macadam
makes one fairly daring suggestion to understand the physiological basis for
the shifts in the expression of personality of the girls and their parents. She
proposes that a kind of transpersonal communication of feelings was possible
between the minds of the traumatized girls seeking to communicate their mental
state of being in the death camps and their parents trying to understand the
puzzling statements and gaps in their children’s postcards. She offers a
dubious explanation for the intuitive connection between the mother’s
consciousness and that of the daughter, setting it off from hard evidence with
a wished-for connection she calls “scientific”:
Despite the paper assurances, many
mothers must have begun to feel a deep sense of unease, anguish, and desperation.
There is scientific evidence that a mother’s brain carries her child’s DNA in
her brain after the child is born. (p. 140)
Even
if this were true about the retention of some genetic material active between mother
and child, it doesn’t follow that anything particular can be communicated over
great distances, and this is indicative of a mystical superstition—a
rationalization of intuition or “gut feeling” after the fact not scientific
proof. Her references at the back of the book point to three secondary reports
in respectable magazines but not professional journals: Scientific American, the New
York Times and National Geographic
(p. 394, notes140 and 141). These sources, by the way, are talking about plants,
e.g., bamboo blooms, not human beings.
There
are, however, real evidentiary proofs of neuroscientific groundings for the changes
manifest in the brains of people placed under intense and sustained trauma. A great deal of hard scientific study on
intergenerational influences on the expression of shared genetic materials as
well environmental pressures shows how new states of consciousness are created
by psychological pressures on people sharing similar experiences.[xii]
Such interconnectedness has to do with preverbal and non-visual sensations,
with sensitivity to embedded injuries and insults to the stimulation of growth
and the wasting away of chemo-neuronal connections. They have nothing to do
with specific knowledge or memories. No words, no pictures, no concepts.
Calling it “maternal intuition” or hinting at mysticism seems inadequate.
Even
with a great deal of imagination, sensitivity and contextual knowledge, readers
are left with the problem of how far to trust the reconstructed voice,
narrative or “facts” as documentary proof presented in the text as scenes and
conversations. As the author herself puts it, “My goal is to build as complete
a picture as I can of the girls and young women of the first “official”
transport to Auschwitz” and then adds, “One of the devices I have used to
accomplish this is dramatic license”; and, further, “I only do this when
conversations or arguments were mentioned in a [later] testimony but not elaborated upon” (p. xxi, italics in
original). The primary argument to justify such a procedure is that, not only
has the author absorbed herself into the experiences she is piecing together
from her many oral and written sources, but that she has been “accepted into”
families of the survivors, their children and grandchildren and their friends.
This book is not an objective, dispassionate work of academic scholarship, but
a passionate, involved and empathetic labour of love.
On
the other hand, what Macadam does has a genuine historical purpose. In this
period of history when the final genuine witnesses and confessional voices begin
to be replaced with the testimony of the next two generations and with the
traumatic memory traces passed on to the Jewish community as a whole, the role
of fictionalized versions—purely fictional novels, documented accounts aided by
imaginative and insightful analysis—raises its own questions that may be as
much rhetorical or literary as historical and psychohistorical. How is an outsider (sometimes designated
simply “you”, at other times “dear reader”) to know where imaginative
recreation begins and factual and historical evidence ends? If we (general
readers in the future or scholarly researchers now) who are not privy to the
circle of the Macadam’s friends and informants, how can we trust her word? Can
we have faith in ourselves to answer her many rhetorical questions aptly or
correctly; or to interpret her subjunctive constructions in accord with the few
established facts?[xiii]
There are, unfortunately, Holocaust Deniers and trivializers ready to pounce on
any hint of error, exaggeration or doubt in order to discredit such books.
These questions have serious implications.
American
novelist and literary critic Henry James commented on the nineteenth-century Russian
writer Ivan Turgenev’s fiction, an author who claimed to begin first with a
sense of the characters he wanted to group together and their imagined
biographies, and then observed them through a sequence of complicated actions
that exposed and tested their moral and psychological strengths.
The thing [short story or novel]
consists of the motions of a group of selected creatures, which are not the
result of a preconceived action, but a consequence of the qualities of the
actors….in which the evolution is that of a dance—a series of steps the more
complicated and lively the better, of course, determined from without and
forming a figure.[xiv]
This
is not an exact assessment of how Macadam created her book, but it is “good
enough” to help us understand what we are reading. The “motions” are social
actions and emotions, deriving from their deepest unconscious as well as those
generated by reaction to increasingly shocking, disorientating and dispiriting
external events. In a world of absurdity, stupidity and evil, there are no nice
ways to forgive and forget: we have to recognize that there is no logical,
common sense, or sentimental response to what the Nazis and their toadies were
doing. Those who survived the Holocaust through a mixture of grit and luck were
neither ennobled by what happened to them nor granted special insight into the
mysterious ways of divine justice. The
rest of us have no right to judge the victims, but we do have the right and the
duty to judge the perpetrators of evil—and never to forgive them.
[i] As we shall see, such words as brutality, cruelty, barbarity and so
forth are used to describe the way in which SS guards, kapos, local fascist militias
and other Nazi-type figures behaved towards Jews, who were deemed more than
just enemies of the state, but as infectious vermin, sub- and non-human. However, these words still fail, even cumulatively,
to capture the cold-bloodedness and even officiousness of the torment the
victims of the Holocaust were subjected to from the moment they were caught and
murdered or driven to suicide.
[ii] The “shock,” which is used as a
metaphor of an electric charge, or rather discharge, along the nervous system,
has been in use since the nineteenth century, and comes to be used as a synonym
for the milder “surprise” and the more powerful modern technical sense of
“trauma”, both a physical and psychological shock. I point out the importance
of such seemingly commonplace words to indicate the “current” of preverbal
sensations and memories that runs through both first-hand and second-hand
accounts of the Holocaust.
[iii] In a non-theological sense,
evil refers to the thoughts, feelings
and actions of people who, for different reasons, find their only joy and
purpose in life is in making other people miserable, ruining their social and
personal lives and killing them.
[iv] In both the reconstructed
conversations, imagined thoughts and shared response to terrible events, as
well as in descriptions of people, places, things and events, the occurrence of
anachronistic terms can be jarring, not just because they are neologisms (e.g.,
“rehoming” “referencing,” “maintain a moral compass” or “killing fields”) and
Americanisms (e.g., “hamburger,” “fake news” or “care package”) but because
they project into the past types of experiences and responses that could not
have taken place for people unused to fast-foods, television, digital communications
and modern sexual mores or political correctness. Technical expressions such as
“metastasize” and “genocide” did not yet exist, let alone become common to
general educated speech, and even the designations Holocaust or Shoah would not
appear until several years after the Second World War.
[v] This is another run of
highly-charged terms that appear often in the confessions, testimonies,
diaries, memoirs and letters of the victims of Nazi atrocities. Rather than
having any specific technical meaning, such words signal states of heightened
anxiety, fear and confused feelings, often with a loss of motor control or
emotional display: e.g., violent outbursts of weeping, laughing, crying,
trembling, loss of bladder and sphincter control, as well as babbling,
muteness, catatonic states and somnambulism.
[vi] After 1942,“…kapo Luise
Mauer reported that ‘the murder machine now ran on full steam” (p. 157). In one
sense it was a machine, a big, awkward and clunky steam, engine producing death
night and day; in another sense, it was too complicated by competing ambitions,
prejudices and stupidity to be as efficient as it might have been under any
other control than that of the Nazi thugs in the SS and the higher party
echelons in Berlin. This is what made it possible for a small proportion of the
girls who were on the first transport to Auschwitz to survive to the end of the
war, partly because they were just plain lucky and partly because they were
desperately clever.
[vii] There are several close but yet
distinct questions that arise when dealing with laughter inside the
concentration camps during the Shoah; on one side, there is the question of
literary or comic laughter, including farce at one extreme and satire at
another, with tragedy appearing to be interwoven between them; sometimes
laughter bursts forth in a hysterical manner, an almost purely physical
excitement that obscures all consideration of meaning or significance, at other
times, this nervous outburst signals a cry of extreme disorientation; while on
another side, there is the rationalization that “tears were not enough” and
mark out an aporia, a point beyond which logic cannot go, a black hole into
which empathy and compassion are drained into, an absence of reflection beyond
the reach of verbal or visual memory, a desperation broken by the lack of any
hope, where :human decency was already dissolving…We laughed hysterically because
there was nothing else we could do” (p. 118).
[viii] The two
main authorities I call on for this are Nachman Blumenthal, Slowa Niewinne (1947) and
Victor Klemperer, LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii:
Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947). They
recorded and studied the changes in language around them, some by party
officials among the Nazis, some by ordinary people in the street.
[ix]
In my studies of the communication between Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus while they
were separated by his exile to Devil’s Island during the 1890s, despite
censorship of their letters and long delays between epistles from Paris and
from South America, husband and wife worked out a way of mutually indicating
their Jewishness, their continued love, their faithfulness and aspirations for
release from false imprisonment. Repetition of key phrases from each other’s
notes, seemingly oblique allusions to past events and use of liturgical phrases
allowed them to encourage each other’s courage in times of near despair. See
Norman Simms, Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and
Midrash (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012).
[x] Some Holocaust deniers ask
why, if the Nazis were so proud of their policy of extermination, they sought
to hide what they were doing from their own people, as well as the rest of the
world fighting against them. The answer is that the Germans and their allies
did not form a coherent and consistent group and the party officials were often
as confused and stupid as their agents in the field and in the camps. Except
for the most die-hard Nazi ideologists in the party, most people, as Sebastian
Haffner shows in his Germany: Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde written in England in 1939, were either opportunists,
weak-willed, frightened or unable to mount an effective opposition to Hitler.
[xi] Memories are not all verbal or
visual, but can be of basic sensations, rhythmic pulsations of the blood and
nerves, stored up traumatic shocks to the system.
[xii] Holocaust studies of psychological passing on of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome have been going on for more than fifty years (e.g., Patricia Dashorst et al., “Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust on Offspring Mental Health: A Systematic Review of Associated Factors and Mechanisms” European Journal of Psychotraumatology 10: 1 (2019) 1654065; but there are also studies of identical twins who actually do share DNA yet who are not exactly identical (e.g., Clare Blumer, “Truth about Twins: Do they Feel each other's Pain, have ESP or Share the same DNA?” ABC News (6 August 2016) online at https:www.abc.net.au/news/health/ 2016-08-06/myths-and-facts-about-twins/7694586l. However, it takes more than “microchemimeric cells” to share the memory of specific events or to communicate an awareness of current pain or injury. A recent review of the problem may be found in Sinuhe Hahn et al., “Feto-Maternal Microchimerism: The Pre-eclampsia Conundrum” Frontiers in Immunology
Darwinian processes of killing off
of unwanted nerve cells. Published online 2017 Feb 28. doi: 10.1007/s00787-017-0967-1PMCID: PMC5532412. PMID: 28247068 More
significant are the neuroscientific studies of the role of mother-infant gazing
on the Darwinian processes of arboration in the emergent brain of the child and
the reactive force on the incomplete or defective patterning of the mother’s personality;
see e.g. R. Bedford et al., “The Role of Infants’ mother-directed Gaze,
Maternal Sensitivity, and Emotion Recognition in Childhood Callous Unemotional
Behaviours” European Child & Adolescent
Psychiatry 26:8 (28 February 2017) doi: 10.1007/s00787-017-0967-1; online
at https://www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov/ pmc/articles/PMC5532412.,
(29 March 2019) | https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2019.00659 More
relevant are the neuroscientific studies based on mother-infant gazing helps
shape the pattern of synoptic arboration through Darwinian stimulation and
inhibition.
[xiii] For example, “Once the afternoon
market was open to Jews, Edith’s mother would
have arrived with Irena Fein’s mother…” (p. 18, italics added).
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