Authors who first wrote about the phebinhvanhoc.com.vn/en were almost always victims of National Socialist persecution. Their texts usually took the form of diaries or letters. When they were written, the authors very rarely intended them to be published. Often, they appeared in published form after the end of the Second World War and, in many cases, after the writer had been killed in a Nazi camp or ghetto.
Watching: Holocaust literature
Diaries
Diaries offer us an insight into day-to-day life during the war, during occupation, while in hiding, during imprisonment in ghettos, and during imprisonment in concentration camps. Entries may stop suddenly. The break could mark the arrest, imprisonment, or even death of the writer.
Diaries can be adapted into other literary forms such as plays or novels.
Diaries reflect events as experienced by one individual. They are both a record of these events, and an attempt, through the act of writing, to come to terms with them as they happen. Because they are written in the present tense, there is no anticipation of events that we, readers today, know will happen later in time. The Diary of Anne Frank Anne Frank was born into a Jewish family in Germany in 1929. With the coming to power of the Nazi Party, the Frank family fled to Amsterdam. In May 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands.
On 6 July 1942, the family went into hiding in a secret annex above the Opekta Works in Amsterdam. The were assisted by employees of the Opekta Works. On 4 August 1944, the hiding place was stormed by the Nazi authorities. The family was taken to Westerbork camp (Holland) and then Auschwitz. From there, Anne and her sister were sent to Bergen-Belsen. Here, they died of typhus shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945. Anne kept a diary between 12 June 1942 and 1 August 1944. It was addressed to “Kitty”, whose identity has not been fully clarified. The diary charts Anne’s relationship with those around her, her reactions to isolation and to anti-Semitism. |
The diary, first published in Dutch in 1947, was translated into several languages. In the 1950s, it was the most-sold paperback in West Germany. Today the diary is one of the most widely read examples of phebinhvanhoc.com.vn/en literature and has been adapted several times into films.
Despite this prominence, it has provoked controversy. Before its publication, Anne’s father Otto removed parts of the diary in which Anne chronicled her sexual awakening, or criticised those around her – including Otto. An unabridged version was published in 1995.
Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) Victor Klemperer was born into a Jewish family. In 1912, he converted to Protestantism. He received a Distinguished Service Medal as a volunteer in the German army during the First World War.
His diaries chronicle his experiences in the Third Reich under a racial system which deemed him Jewish – a label he rejected. He survived the war for two principal reasons: he was married to a non-Jew and his Gestapo records were destroyed during the Allied bombing of Dresden. Between 1998 and 2003, English translations of his German-language diaries were published in three volumes: I Will shall Witness (1933 to 1941), To The Bitter End (1942 to 1945), and The Lesser Evil (1945 to 1959). They are valued for their insights into the experience of anti-Semitism during the Third Reich. They also shed light on the behaviour of German civilians and officials towards Jews.
His poem “First They Came” was first published in 1955 although it is believed to have been adapted from a 1946 speech. It highlights the dangers of not speaking out against injustice.
“Death Fugue”, Paul Celan (1920-1970) Paul Celan was born into a Jewish family in Romania. His parents died in an internment camp in Transnistria. Celan himself was imprisoned in different work camps during the war. Readmore: Top 10 Greatest Couples In Literature, Top Ten Dynamic Duos In Literature
Critics are divided about how to categorise the book. Most agree it is not an eyewitness account. It is part autobiographical, part fictional. As a first-generation novel, it is often described as an autobiographical novel.
The writing ofNight reflects the transnational character of the phebinhvanhoc.com.vn/en and its aftermath: written in Yiddish, first published in Spanish-speaking Argentina, it recounts the experiences of a Romanian Jew and became known worldwide after its French translation. If This Is a Man, Primo Levi (1919 – 1987) Primo Levi, an Italian Jew and a member of the Italian resistance who survived Auschwitz, wrote If This Is a Man in 1946. In it, he discusses his feeling of guilt at having survived when others perished, and the sense of shame. In 1986, Levi published The Drowned and the Saved. Here, he examines what he calls the “grey zone”: in the case of those prisoners who collaborated with the Nazis, it is difficult to draw a categorical dividing line between victim and perpetrator.
His 1995 novel, The Reader, centres around two characters: Michael and Hanna. Michael is introduced as a fifteen-year-old boy who embarks on a sexual relationship with Hanna, a thirty-six-year-old woman to whom he reads classical literature. Michael subsequently encounters Hanna again as a university student – and discovers she is on trial for crimes committed during the phebinhvanhoc.com.vn/en.
One central theme is: can we still love someone after we discover that they have committed heinous crimes? But in the novel, Hanna’s illiteracy appeared to excuse her slide into criminality, while the main victim on whom The Reader focused is not a Jew, but a young German. |
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne (1971-)
In John Boyne’s 2006 novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Bruno is the nine-year-old son of an SS officer. He befriends a Jewish boy, Shmuel, who is a prisoner in the nearby concentration camp run by Bruno’s father. The book was criticised for its numerous historical inaccuracies. It implies, problematically, that perpetrators, or their family members, were also victims. But it has nonetheless become a bestseller and is frequently used in schools.
“What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pyjamas and which people wore the uniforms?” (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) |
Fabricating Memory There has been relatively little controversy about who can write about the phebinhvanhoc.com.vn/en. There is one exception: when authors pretend to have a personal link but in fact have none. The Belgian writer Misha Defonseca claimed in Misha: A Mémoire of the phebinhvanhoc.com.vn/en Years (1997) that she had survived the phebinhvanhoc.com.vn/en as a young girl. Readmore: Reading And Writing About Literature: A Portable Guide, Literature Review (2010) It subsequently transpired that she was neither Jewish nor incarcerated during the war. There are a number of similar examples.
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