Parallax

Auschwitz was a world unlike any other because it was created and governed according to the principles of absolute evil. Its only function was death. The first question, then, is whether we see Auschwitz as the epitome of life itself, an incarnation of the darkest principles of Machiavelli and Hobbes, or whether we see it as a mirror image of the true life, a Satanic perversion of some divine plan that we have not yet discovered. From that central enigma, flow all the lesser contradictions that still bedevil anyone who seeks to understand the mystery of Auschwitz. Did it represent the ultimate evil of the German nation, and was that the evil of German rationality or of German irrationality? Or did it represent, conversely, the apotheosis of Jewish suffering? And was that suffering simply the result of centuries of anti-Semitism, or was it part of the fulfillment of the prophecy that the tormented Jews would someday return to Palestine, return, as Ezekiel had written, to “the land that is restored from the ravages of the sword, where people are gathered out of many nations upon the mountains of Israel”?

It can be argued that Auschwitz proves there is no God, neither for the Jews nor for the Catholics, neither for atheists nor for Jehovah’s Witnesses, who all went equally helpless to their death. “If all this was possible,” wrote one Hungarian survivor, Eugene Heimler, “if men could be herded like beasts toward annihilation, then all that I had believed in before must have been a lie. There was not, there could not be, a God, for he could not condone such godlessness.” But such declarations have been made at every moment of extreme crisis by those who see God only in success and happiness. Since all efforts to prove or explain God’s purpose demonstrate only the futile diligence of worker ants attempting to prove the existence of Mozart, Auschwitz can just as well prove a merciful God, an indifferent God, or, perhaps best, an unknowable God.

From The Kingdom of Auschwitz by Otto Friedrich

Reviews

This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia

Edited by Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic

“‘We didn’t know.’ For half a century, Western politicians and intellectuals have so explained away their inaction in the face of genocide in World War II. In stark contrast, Western observers today face a barrage of information and images, from CNN, the internet and newspapers about the parties and individuals responsible for the current Balkan War and crimes against humanity. The stories, often accompanied by video or pictures of rape, torture, mass graves and ethnic cleansing, available almost instantaneously, do not allow even the most uninterested viewer to ignore the grim reality of genocide… This volume punctures once and for all common excuses for Western inaction.”

Publisher: NYU
Paperback: 320 pages

To Tell at Last: Survival Under False Identity, 1941-45

Blanca Rosenberg

“The harrowing story of a young Jewish mother who evades the Nazis from one Polish city to the next until she winds up in Heidelberg, Germany, where she works as a maid until liberation… One of the finest, most authentically dramatic and richly detailed memoirs written by a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.”

Publisher: University of Illinois
Paperback: 178 pages
Illustrated

The Warsaw Ghetto in Photographs: 206 Views Made in 1941

Edited by Ulrich Keller

These 206 rare photos recreates ghetto life during the early years of World War II—the internal ghetto administration, ghetto police, children, street scenes, worship, etc. “The crowd is largely composed of shocking caricatures, of ghosts of former people, of wretched rags and miserable ruins of past humanity…”

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 160 pages
Illustrated