Preempting the Holocaust

Abstract

Abstract The search for words to convey the deathlife that was Auschwitz turns up in witness testimony, memoir, and fiction, as all three conspire to find a language appropriate to an experience that is utterly alien to most audiences and that is not based on research from written documents. Historians are slowly coming to agree that survivor accounts are a crucial source of evidence for appreciating the unortho-dox and unprecedented moral universe of the Holocaust.Writers as diverse as Char-lotte Delbo, Imre Kertész, Arnošt Lustig, and Aharon Appelfeld find ways of strip-ping a rhetoric of meaning from the chaos of mass murder to illuminate, explicitly and implicitly, the horrors that lay at the heart of the Holocaust universe. I remember, more than ten years ago, watching an interview with a woman survivor ofAuschwitzwho at a certain point paused, looked at her interlocu-tor, and asked herself as well as her audience, ‘‘How shall I explain to you what Auschwitz really was?’ ’ Between her wish to describe and our desire to hear falls a hiatus of silence, emerging from the absence of analogy to a place where she has been and we have not. She knows in advance that languagewill fail thismission, but she bravely tries anyway, obviously strug-gling with her sense of the impossibility of her task: Auschwitz, if I would like to describe it, I would say there is—there has not— there has not been—people—people did not invent an expression what Ausch-witz was. It was hell on earth. And the silence of Auschwitz was hell.The nights were hell. And the days—somehow we—we got up at three o’clock in the morn-ing, and at four o’clock summertime or four–thirty, when the sun came up, it was not like the sun—I swear to you! It was not bright. It was always red to

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