An Introduction to Holocaust Studies by Michael Bernard-Donals

Author:Michael Bernard-Donals [Bernard-Donals, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Modern, 20th Century, Holocaust
ISBN: 9781315507910
Google: WqxrDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-13T01:41:39+00:00

The passage is remarkable for several reasons. It displays a complexity of observation that is rare in such reports. Perhaps because she is older and more mature than Anne Frank—she was 28 when she wrote this entry—her understanding of the circumstances of the destruction is far more complicated. Though clearly aware of the horror visited upon Rotterdam, perhaps seventy miles away, and of the individual lives that are being destroyed by the destruction, she is also fascinated by the attraction that such destruction exerts: why would she note, in the same stroke of the pen across the page, the noise of the bombs (“there were planes, ack-ack fire, shooting, bombs—much noisier than they have been for a long time” [80]) and the “powerful and glowing” Bach record, if she did not admit to a certain fascination with the combination of pleasure and pain herself? As she says later on in that same entry, she would like to be able to say “Yes life is beautiful, and I value it anew at the end of every day, even though I know that the sons of mothers, and you are one such mother, are being murdered in concentration camps” (81). In Hillesum’s diary and letters her act of witnessing seems to take in what she calls an alternative to “textbook history”: “ ‘It’s probably worth quite a bit being personally involved in the writing of history. You can really tell then what the history books leave out” ’ (109). The complexity of observation in the diary is almost an aesthetic one, where the didactic function of Anne Frank’s diary—which she rewrote in order to preserve her observations of suffering—seems to be, at least for a time, subsumed to its purely observational, and very consciously written, mode. Hillesum seems very aware of the limits of writing.

In a letter dated 22 August 1943, only a little more than two weeks before she would be transported to Auschwitz, she writes to her family about the children waiting for the transports at Westerbork:

I met a slightly built, undernourished twelve-year-old girl in the hospital barracks. In the same chatty and confiding manner in which another child might talk about her sums at school, she said to me, “I was sent here from the punishment block; I am a criminal case.” […]

What children here say to each other is appalling. I heard one little boy say to another, “You know, the 120,000 stamp [in one’s identification papers, signifying ‘pure Jew’] isn’t really any good; it’s much better to be half-Aryan and half-Portuguese [i.e., a sephardic Jew].” And this is what Anne-Marie heard one mother say to her children on the heath: “If you don’t eat your pudding straightaway, then Mummy won’t be with you on the transport!” (Letters from Westerbork 121)

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