Holocaust Narratives

Holocaust - hŏlˈəkôstˌ, hōˈlə–, name given to the period of persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany. Although anti-Semitism in Europe has a long history, persecution of German Jews began with Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Jews were disenfranchised, then terrorized in anti-Jewish riots (such as Kristallnacht), forced into the ghettos, their property seized, and finally were sent to concentration camps. After the outbreak of World War II, Hitler established death camps to secretly implement what he called "the final solution of the Jewish question." Extermination squads were also sent to the fronts: In one operation alone, over 30,000 Jews were killed at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. After 450,000 Jews were sent to death camps from the Warsaw Ghetto, news of their fate led the last 60,000 to rebel (1943), fighting until they were killed, captured, or escaped to join the resistance. The main Jewish resistance was spiritual: observing their religion and refraining from suicide, while Zionists evacuated some to Palestine. By the end of the war 6 million Jews had been systematically murdered. The Allies refused rescue attempts and American Jews were warned against attempting them. While the European churches were silent, some clergy and individual non-Jews saved many. The Danes sent all Danish Jews to Sweden in private boats in the face of the Nazi takeover.

After the war Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes at Nuremburg, and West Germany later adopted (1953) the Federal Compensation Law, under which billions of dollars were paid to those who survived Nazi persecution. In the mid-1990s a number of suits were filed against Swiss banks that held accounts belonging to Holocaust victims but had denied the fact and failed to restore the money. A settlement reached in 1998 established a $1.25 billion fund to be used to compensate those who can document their claims and, more generally, Holocaust survivors, the latter as restitution for undocumented accounts and for Swiss profits on Nazi accounts involving Holocaust victims' property. In 1998 the Roman Catholic Church issued a document acknowledging Catholic complicity in the long-standing European anti-Semitism that was background to the Holocaust. Under the terms of an agreement signed in 2000 by the United States and Germany, a $5 billion fund was established by the German government and German industry to compensate those who were slave or forced laborers or who suffered a variety of other losses under the Nazi regime.

The destruction of European Jewry has demanded a reevaluation by Jews the world over. The renascent Jewish community in the state of Israel, itself largely a byproduct of the Holocaust, now serves as a focal point for much of this energy. A vast literature consisting of histories, diaries, memoirs, poetry, novels, and prayers has emerged in an effort to understand the Holocaust in terms of its religious and secular implications. The secular materials attempt to explain how it happened and the reactions of the victims; some have suggested that an underlying and pervasive anti-Semitism in Germany was fueled by a deep and complete despair combined with a corrosive and unacknowleged sense of worthlessness that had been created by crushing and humiliating hardships and the disintegration of the Weimar Republic. The religious materials focus on the problem of whether one can still speak in traditional Jewish terms of a God, active in history, who rewards the righteous and who maintains a unique relationship with the Jewish people. Museums and memorials have been established in a number of cities worldwide to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.

See M. Buber, Eclipse of God (1952); E. Wiesel, Night (1960) and Legends of Our Time (1968); R. L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (1966); A. H. Friedlander, ed., Out of the Whirlwind (1968); L. Davidowisz, The War against the Jews (1975); D. S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust (1984); C. Browning, Ordinary Men (1992); I. W. Charny, ed., Holding on to Humanity—The Message of Holocaust Survivors: The Shamai Davidson Papers (1992); R. Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews (3 vol., 1985) and Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (1992); D. J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996); S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (Vol. I, 1997); W. D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue (1997); I. Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (1999); O. Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (2000); R. Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (2002); O. Bartov, Germany's War and the Holocaust (2003). See also C. Lanzmann, dir., Shoah (two-part documentary film, 1985).

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