The difficult question of Auschwitz that remains unanswered

January 27 was formally designated Holocaust Memorial Day by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly in 2005. But how we remember the Holocaust has developed still unfinished.

“Dear Boy,” the brief handwritten note from 1942 begins, “I was very pleased with your May message. I am well. I hope I can stay here and see you again. I remain hopeful. Please write. Regards, your father”

The note is one of thousands of documents held by the Vienna Holocaust Library in London, one of the world’s largest Holocaust archives.

The Jewish man who wrote it was called Alfred Josephs, and he sent it to his teenage son Wolfgang, who had escaped with his mother to England. Alfred had been arrested and was held in the Westerbork detention camp in the Netherlands.

He was still at that time able to pass short messages through the Red Cross.

What Alfred did not know was that Westerbork was a camp whose inmates were to be transported to Auschwitz. Wolfgang never wanted to hear from his father again.

First, Auschwitz was used by the Germans to house Polish prisoners of war. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, it became a labor camp where many inmates were worked to death. The Nazis called this the “annihilation of labor.”

But what it became in 1942 is Auschwitz, which sits in our collective memory, because now it was an extermination camp whose main purpose was mass murder.

Newsreel filmed by the Allies after the liberation of Europe shows German civilians being forced to visit the camps by the troops.

“It was only a short walk from any German town to the nearest concentration camp,” says the American voice-over. The camera captures casual, smartly dressed Germans laughing and chatting as they make their way.

They walk past the bodies, piles of emaciated men and women, men and women who might even have been their neighbors, colleagues, friends in the past. The camera that had captured their relaxed, easy smiles before they entered the camps now registers their terror.

Shock registers on their faces. Some cry. Others shake their heads, fold handkerchiefs to their faces and look away.

Post-war Europe looked at this horror and recognized the depth of the suffering. But how did post-war Europe make sense to the perpetrators?

When we talk about industrialized killing, we don’t just mean the scale of it, huge as that was. We also mean the sophistication of its organization: the division of labor, the assignment of specialized tasks, the efficient marshalling of resources, the careful planning that was necessary to keep the wheels of the killing machine turning.

The same newsletters show well-born Nazi guards, both male and female, now in Allied custody.

What was the nature of the moral breakdown that made this horror a normality for the Nazis who ran these camps, a normality where mass murder became for them all in a day’s work?

This is a question that has been touched on many times before, but even now, approx. 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, is still not fully understood.

For years after the war, public attention turned away from this question, but also away from trying to understand the question of what had happened more broadly.

Although some Nazi war criminals were prosecuted, the new priority in a Europe divided by the Cold War was to transform West Germany into a democratic ally.

The Holocaust has all but disappeared from popular memory in much of the Western world. Post-war audiences wanted to turn the page on the war. In popular culture, for example in Britain, the appetite was for stories that could be celebrated and cheered up.

“The commemorative culture of World War II still emphasized heroism,” says Dr. Toby Simpson, the director of the Vienna Holocaust Library. “There was, for example, Emphasis placed on the Normandy landings.

“And in the stories that the survivors wanted to tell, there was very little heroism to be found in a story where they had been stripped of their humanity, agency, their choice. They had been turned into a non-person.”

The Italian survivor, Primo Levi, wrote his Auschwitz memoir, if this is a man, immediately after the war. He had been one of a few thousand still at Auschwitz when Soviet troops arrived on January 27, 1945.

Most prisoners had been forced to march west, towards Germany, in freezing winter weather. Already weakened by the camp conditions, many died en route in what became known as the death marches. Levi was too ill and Soviet troops found him close to death in the Camp Infirmary.

Today, If This Is a Man is considered a masterpiece of survival evidence and one of the most important memoirs of the entire era. But in 1947 Primo Levi found it difficult to find a publisher, even in his native Italy.

Finally, a small independent publisher in Turin published it in a printing run of 2,500. It sold 1,500 copies then disappeared. For publishers and for the public, it was still too early. Few, it seemed, would look.

“Primo Levi didn’t sell because the time wasn’t right and because he was too great a writer to give a heroic answer. His answer is bigger than heroism,” says Jay Winter, professor of history emeritus at Yale University. Many of Prof Winter’s mother’s family were killed in the Holocaust.

He adds: “Many people made Primo Levi a saint, but all you have to do is read the poem at the beginning of if this is a man to see that he does not forgive anyone – he does not forgive and does not forget”

“There was Holocaust Memorialization in the 1950s,” says Prof David Feldman of Birkbeck University in London, “but it was something that was done by the Jews themselves in small, fragmented groups.

“These were occasions to mourn more than the memorial. The idea that we now have from the memorial, that somehow there are lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, was not common yet”.

According to Prof. Winter: “The countries that reconstructed … needed a myth of resistance, of heroic armed conflict against the Nazis or Italian fascists.” This myth of resistance “had no place for concentration camp inmates”.

Not until the 1960s did it return to popular interest. When Israeli agents captured Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the extermination campaign, they put him on trial in Jerusalem and televised it. Now the Holocaust memorial began to reach the wider public.

Through the Eichmann trial, the new mass medium of television brought survivor testimony into the living rooms of the Western world.

It also coincided with a cultural shift in public attitudes toward war. A generation born in the aftermath of World War II came of age in the 1960s.

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem incorporated the words of the First World War poet Wilfred Owen – whose poetry had also faded from popular consciousness – for a new generation. Anti-war sentiment was fueled further by the US involvement in Vietnam.

“I would say that the Eichmann trial also brought perpetrators into people’s living rooms,” says Prof Feldman. “Survivor testimony and the emphasis that survivors were central to the Holocaust memorial came later. It developed slowly in the 1960s. By the 1990s it was well established.”

The Holocaust story – eventually – took its place in our collective consciousness.

From the 1960s onwards, Levi’s memoir found a global readership. Anne Frank’s father Otto had also struggled in the early post-war period to find a publisher for his daughter’s diary. So far, it has sold an estimated 30 million copies.

As for Wolfgang Josephs, as late as August 1946, he was still hoping against hope that he might find his father alive. He received a writing note from the British Red Cross. It informed him with regret that Red Cross officials in Europe had sought lists of survivors and his father’s name was not among them.

Wolfgang anglicised his name to Peter Johnson and settled in England, at a time when few in the Western world would hear the stories of those who had witnessed or survived the Holocaust. He donated his family papers to the Vienna Holocaust Library, which remains a vast repository of evidence for the darkest period in European history.

Now, 80 years later, there are so few survivors left that soon the duty to remember will pass to posterity.

“I think it’s even more important to remember that the Holocaust is even more important,” says Dr. Simpson, “because it happened on such a scale and with such an intensity of hatred that (there is still) the need for the broad event in which six million Jews were murdered.” And also there is still a need to fully understand, how to make sense of the perpetrators—and the nature of the moral breakdown that allowed this to take place.

As Primo Levi wrote: “The damage cannot be healed. It stretches through time.”

Top image credit: Getty Images

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