At the risk of turning my blog into all Germany all the time, I wanted to put this up primarily as a teaching reference. Last semester, when my Modern Europe class had begun to study the Holocaust, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put up a post on how he and his wife had to reassess what they knew of her family’s experience of the Holocaust. She had thought that her great-grandfather had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen, when in fact he had died in Auschwitz. This moment occurred just as I was re-reading Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive, in which she describes precisely the same realization that her “mental furniture has to be rearranged” because while she had thought her father had died in Auschwitz, he had in fact had been transported to Lithuania and Estonia and “who knows how they were murdered” (40). That “these stories have no end,” as Klüger says is aptly demonstrated by Marshall’s update to the story, in which he shows his readers his wife’s great-grandfather’s death certificate:
The reason I’m sharing this with you is that the death certificate itself captures for me one of the paradoxes of the Holocaust. Why even keep death certificates? Auschwitz was after all a network of concentration and extermination camps. I’m not even talking about the fear of possible punishment after the war, though that’s another significant question. Just simply, why? These are people, a whole people, being sent into oblivion, to be erased from the earth and from memory. These were to be much less than ordinary deaths.
Read the whole thing, as they say.