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MEMOIR
Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
Jozsef Debreczeni
Jonathan Cape, $36.99
Every year brings more memoirs of the Holocaust, known to Jews as the Shoah. This is a good thing as we inhabit a culture of selective memory and pragmatic forgetting. There are people getting around in black uniforms who need to be sat down and made to listen.
Jewish prisoners during their liberation from the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945. Credit: Jewish Holocaust Centre
These books all bear witness to a profound historical trauma and, in so doing, encourage others to speak of other traumas. I have visited a large Jewish school in Melbourne for Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). The living witness of survivors was bracing. So too was the way the service embraced survivors of other historical darkness: Indigenous Australian, refugees, climate casualties, Anzacs. A list was shared of all the places in need of peace. The sense of shared humanity is the bridge to the future.
Survivor memoirs fall into several categories. Of recent times, books that use the experience to salvage something for the present have found a wide audience. The best known is Eddie Jaku’s The Happiest Man on Earth (2020), a title with only a tinge of irony. Adam Goldberg’s The Strength of Hope: A Holocaust Survivor’s Guide to Love and Life (2022) is another.
Goldberg writes, “Some find it hard to understand how I have kept my positivity and how I can see the good in people after what I went through.” Jaku’s parting note is “make yourself a friend to the world.” These books have lessons to teach.
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Another category of memoir asks existential questions. One of the earliest, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), is like this. He famously proposed that the people best equipped to survive Hitler’s attempted genocide were those who had a strong reason to survive, a deep purpose. He observes the fate of those who lost the will to live.
Elie Wiesel’s Night (1960) tugs in another existential direction, describing the author’s loss of trust in other people and, ultimately, inability to believe in God. The fate of God in the camps, the most existential question, varies widely. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas had the mirror experience of Wiesel’s, recognising human dignity as sacred and radical hospitality as the hallmark of the divine. Australia’s Jacob G. Rosenberg dealt exquisitely with the subtlety and nuance of these experiences in books such as East of Time (2005).
A third category encompasses memoirs written by the friends, children, and grandchildren of those who suffered, often after long meditation. Hannah Pick-Goslar’s recently published My Friend Anne Frank (2023) is an example. Australia’s Arnold Zable is a shining light of this kind of reflection: in Jewels and Ashes (1991) he tells of his search for family members who perished. In more than 30 years since, he has become an advocate for many other groups who have also been traumatised.