Auschwitz and absence
August 25th 2006 03:53
My first experience of Auschwitz was of omission. Page after page of absence. Dearth of evidence. This building housed the ovens, but it is just a plain, rustic building. These are crowds of people. These are piles of shoes and prayer shawls. These are the liberating Soviet troops. But where is the atrocity? Where is Auschwitz?
The SS dismantled structures, burned documents. And of those few, blurry, grainy images that claim to be Auschwitz, you can question their location, or their authenticity, or their interpretation. What really is sayable to the denier?
There are emaciated survivors at other camps, piles of bodies, but it's as if here, in the heart, in the pure symbol, there are none.
… The chill with which these things can happen, and leave no trace, as if nature can't bear them. Excised from space time. Penrose once thought that you weren't allowed to see a black hole, that God abhors a naked singularity.
A person dies in our country, and it is front page news. But did 100,000 die at Nanking, or 300,000? Did five million die in the Shoah, or six? We are overwhelmed by the practical task of attempting to account; justice for each death is impossible; we do not try. And, worse still, there's a sense in which we're unable to care. What is the difference between 100,000 and 300,000, between five million and six? You can't track the tragedy; it loses meaning at that scale. You might as well say twenty million, or a hundred.
One person dies, and it is a fact. But how terrible, ironic, and comic that the greater the tragedy, the more incomprehensible, the more unbelievable, the more deniable. There are no dead, says Garcia Marquez. It didn't happen.
The impossibility of Auschwitz.
"I don't know the first thing about the Holocaust," said Isaac Bashevis Singer.
The Shoah is grief and pain and injustice and madness -- but, for relatives, isn't it also present as absence? As missing? Family disappeared, societies wiped away. As that which cannot be spoken of, as that which you don't know and don't presume to know.
And the survivors? Did they see the black hole? And could they really speak of it if they wanted to?
The SS dismantled structures, burned documents. And of those few, blurry, grainy images that claim to be Auschwitz, you can question their location, or their authenticity, or their interpretation. What really is sayable to the denier?
There are emaciated survivors at other camps, piles of bodies, but it's as if here, in the heart, in the pure symbol, there are none.
***
… The chill with which these things can happen, and leave no trace, as if nature can't bear them. Excised from space time. Penrose once thought that you weren't allowed to see a black hole, that God abhors a naked singularity.
***
A person dies in our country, and it is front page news. But did 100,000 die at Nanking, or 300,000? Did five million die in the Shoah, or six? We are overwhelmed by the practical task of attempting to account; justice for each death is impossible; we do not try. And, worse still, there's a sense in which we're unable to care. What is the difference between 100,000 and 300,000, between five million and six? You can't track the tragedy; it loses meaning at that scale. You might as well say twenty million, or a hundred.
One person dies, and it is a fact. But how terrible, ironic, and comic that the greater the tragedy, the more incomprehensible, the more unbelievable, the more deniable. There are no dead, says Garcia Marquez. It didn't happen.
The impossibility of Auschwitz.
***
"I don't know the first thing about the Holocaust," said Isaac Bashevis Singer.
The Shoah is grief and pain and injustice and madness -- but, for relatives, isn't it also present as absence? As missing? Family disappeared, societies wiped away. As that which cannot be spoken of, as that which you don't know and don't presume to know.
***
And the survivors? Did they see the black hole? And could they really speak of it if they wanted to?
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