BENGALURU: The year 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of World War II, probably the most revisited historical period ever. And yet this event with genocide at its heart continues to yield so many revelatory stories and inspire such exceptional writing that the Holocaust has become a genre in itself.
Today, we find it hard to imagine how, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, there was so little interest in studying the Holocaust. All of that changed with the publication of Raul Hilberg’s 1961 book, The Destruction of the European Jews. It opened the floodgates to a deluge of books and movies on the subject that continue to flow out at regular intervals. Those who feel they’re in danger of experiencing ‘holocaust fatigue’ should remember the philosopher George Santayana’s famous words: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
If you have to read just one book on the Holocaust, it has to be Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel’s powerful memoir Night. Wiesel was just 15 when he was sent to Auschwitz as “Prisoner A-7713”. He says in the memoir: “To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
Besides the well-known Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, other memoirs worth reading are The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku and Boy 30529 by Felix Weinberg. A Bookshop in Berlin is the memoir (originally published in French in 1945) of Francoise Frenkel who ran Berlin’s first specialist French bookstore and managed to escape from Germany in 1939. The book was forgotten for 60 years, then rediscovered in an attic, republished and translated.
MAUS by Art Spiegelman is a true American masterpiece (controversially under a non-fiction book category). The book narrates, through the eyes of a mouse, how the author’s parents survived the Holocaust. Humans are portrayed with animal heads; Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, American journalists as dogs, Poles as pigs and so on. The comic book format allows for the intertwining of past and present, with different panels (each a unit of time) available to the reader simultaneously. Another classic is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak where the narrator is Death, and the protagonist, a ‘book thief’ who is fascinated by the power of words.
Mengele by David Marwell is a gripping biography of the infamous Nazi doctor, by a former Justice Department official tasked with uncovering his fate. The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather is the biography of the Polish Resistance fighter Witold Pilecki who infiltrated the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. The tale of this towering Polish hero has finally gained a global audience and is bound to grab even more eyeballs, now that the book’s screen rights have been sold.
The most recent book that caught my attention was The Ravine by Wendy Lower, which is based on capturing the genocide through just one photograph. What moved me about this disturbing book was the idea that a single image can put things in motion and turn the wheels of justice.
During my visit to Israel in 2017, I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust History Museum. Elie Wiesel’s beautiful passage in Yad Vashem: Moshe Safdie - The Architecture of Memory sums it all up. “Whoever enters these walls and these pages will learn of its solitude, unparalleled in history, its sufferings, its struggle for dignity and survival in hostile surroundings, in hopeless conditions. Here the biblical and timeless commandment not to forget will reverberate for generations to come.”