The Washington Post’s not quite du jour but reliably de la semaine Holocaust-related article for this week is a book review of a little-known, recently republished memoir by a Hungarian Jew who spent the last year of World War II in Auschwitz. The book is Cold Crematorium by József Debreczeni; the reviewer is a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Harvard (where else?) with the intriguing name “Susan Rubin Suleiman”.
Ms. Suleiman begins her piece by lauding others who penned autobiographical memoirs of their time in German camps, including the Patron Saint of Holocaust Horrors, Elie Weisel (appropriately pronounced “weasel”). I wonder if she is aware that Weisel, in his seminal contribution to Holocaust hysteriography, Night, makes no mention of gas chambers at Auschwitz (Nor does Debreczenci apparently, as Suleiman does not mention it and she surely would). She goes on to laud Claude Lanzman for his nine-hour, unintentionally comedic documentary, Shoah (another name for the Holocaust), which features Abraham Bomba, “The Barber of Treblinka”, who recounts how he and other hairstylists gave the condemned a last haircut in the gas chamber (!) without mentioning to them (even close relatives) that they were about to become a statistic. On a tight schedule there being so many customers in line, the whole process of cutting the hair, barbers withdrawing, victims gassed, bodies removed, barbers returning, next batch let in was repeated every 15 minutes, according to Bomba. You might think I’m grasping at straws, literally, offering up an outlandish straw man who is obviously either delusional or a liar, but Bomba is featured on the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Our dual-Abrahamic reviewer encourages us to read Debreczeni’s reminiscences despite the plethora of similar tomes already out there, as it still has “the power to shock as well as enlighten”. True enough, if read properly, but in this case what is most enlightening is Suzy Jewzy Muezzly’s review. She relates that Debreczeni spent the last six months of the war in a hospital camp “where sick and dying prisoners were sent”. A hospital for those who were to be exterminated? Not exactly the classic Holocaust narrative. She attributes Debreczeni’s survival to the fact the Nazi’s had earlier dismantled the gas chambers “to hide evidence of their crime”. Who needs gas chambers to exterminate? A bullet to the head would suffice and be quicker and cheaper. Speaking of hiding the evidence, Suleiman unsurprisingly hides the evidence the Nazis worried about future prosecution as there is no such evidence. In fact, one purported gas chamber (with wall-to-wall windows!) was still intact when the camp it was in was liberated (as was the gas chamber at Dachau, if you believe that post-liberation construction shown to gullible tourists was actually built by the Nazis).
Suleiman can’t resist tossing in her own horrified aside: “The Nazis dehumanized inmates in their camps by assigning them numbers, obliterating their names.” Oh, the inhumanity! Is our ex-scholar so senile in her twilight years (she’s 84) that she’s unaware of the practice of assigning a number to inmates in our prisons, which becomes their primary form of identification? At least she’s not delusional, just out of touch with the real world.
Despite Suleiman’s horrified asides, the value of Debreczenci’s work peeks through. She pays a probably unintended compliment to his honesty when she admits that, according to him, inmates “died there in great numbers from starvation and illness.” What with Germany’s young men being slaughtered in their millions, its cities reduced to rubble, and its transportation infrastructure bombed to smithereens, nothing surprising there. This is the true story of the Holocaust, not women and children being sent off to be gassed upon arrival at a camp (a la Sophie’s Choice).
Debreczenci also offers enlightenment when he describes the “brutishly cruel” treatment some Jews, those chosen by the Nazis to be “kapos” responsible for keeping the inmates in line, handed out to their fellow inmates. “The best slave driver,” Debreczenci opines, “is a slave accorded a privileged position.” Not all the dead are to be mourned nor all survivors to be honored. For his perceptive insights into human behavior under the worst circumstances, I am tempted to read Cold Crematorium for myself.
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* For those of you who are not familiar with the so-called Holocaust deniers’ argument (which is probably most all of you since they’re banned from speaking in public fora), I’ll introduce you to it. But first let me make my own confession of faith: I believe that during the Second World War masses of Jews were uprooted from their homes and confined in camps where they died in droves. If you think that absolves me of the charge of being a Holocaust denier, you’d be wrong.
There are three key points on which Holocaust believers and skeptics differ: (1) How many Jews died; (2) Was the Final Solution an extermination or deportation plan; and (3) Were there genocidal gas chambers. On the first point, I do not take a position. We all know about the canonical 6 million, but I’ve seen estimates ranging as high as 12 million and as low as several hundred thousand. Whatever the true count, I do think historians should be free to come up with their best estimate without fear of being imprisoned if they come up with too low a number (as happens in Europe). On the second point, I go with the deportation option. The Nazis talked openly about a Final Solution, but always meaning the forced deportation of Jews to make Europe Judenrein. There’s no evidence that that plan ever morphed into an extermination plan. And finally, I adamantly maintain there were no genocidaI gas chambers, but you’d have to read my other postings on the subject (8, 38, 43, 89) to begin to understand why I make that claim.
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