The Use of Language to Describe Genocide

I argued in chapters I and II that writers used different techniques when attempting to communicate the reality of the Holocaust to their readers. Some felt no qualms about describing the actions of perpetrators in writing. Others tried to find a middle path between ignoring perpetrators and confronting them head on. Some of the diarists I have discussed resorted to using linguistic mechanisms like metaphor,

synecdoche, and jokes to partially conceal their persecutors – and to express meanings that might not be readily apparent upon a cursory reading of the sources. Others, like Janusz Korczak, however, could not bear to allow the perpetrator into their writings – at least any more than was possible given the events transpiring around them.

It has been suggested that one reason Nazis might not appear in diaries is that, in everyday, practical terms, the victims did not have much actual contact with perpetrators and so might not have thought about them that much.8 As discussed in the introduction, however, this argument seems unlikely. It is important to recognize that perpetrators,

8 _{I would like to thank Professor Bernard Wasserstein of the University of Chicago for bringing} this possibility to my attention again in a personal interview on 31 March 2006.

whether in full-view or as part of the background, were a part of diarists’ lives at the time. Indeed, they were the one unavoidable fact of the victim’s existence, and it seems inexplicable for them not to show up at least as a kind of antagonistic imaginary. In fact, for perpetrators not to appear (or to appear minimally) should give readers pause and make them wonder at this apparent aporia or paradox in Holocaust diaries: namely that the people who represented the most concrete fact in these writer’s world fail to appear in writings which were created for the purpose of leaving a record of Nazi cruelty and atrocity behind. In Korczak’s case, the record clearly establishes that he dealt with Germans personally and directly on at least several occasions. The relative absence of perpetrators in his diary is therefore not the result of his ignorance of perpetrators individually or as a group9. It must mean something else. Another reason for this omission might be that the diary was one final place of control and autonomy – a haven in which the elimination of the perpetrator represented a last stand against an implacable enemy. If this is the case, the exclusion of perpetrators in Holocaust diaries is another form of resistance, much like the use of metaphors and tropes seen in the previous chapter, and should be analyzed as such.

The type of language with which they chose to communicate is the only means by which we can understand writers of Holocaust diaries today. There were as many styles as there were diarists, but they shared one common aspect. They were all in some way trying to come to terms with what Charlotte Delbo called “l’inconcevable.”10 As we have seen so far, victims alternately described perpetrators in what I call “journalistic” or

9 _{In a diary that is, today in its published form, composed of roughly 111 typed pages, spanning,} off and on, more than two years, Korczak only mentioned perpetrators four times.

10 _{Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After (translated by Rosette C. Lamont, New Haven: Yale} University Press, 1995), p. x.

“photographic” terms – eliminating an analytic component – or they transformed them through the use of tropic devices into metaphors symbolically representing something more than mere individuals. In some diaries, victims ignored perpetrators almost completely – negating them textually even as perpetrators were attempting to negate these authors physically. While the act of writing and documenting Nazi actions is viewed by most scholars as an act of resistance, the diarist’s excision of perpetrators is highly significant and suggests an active and aggressive but not necessarily conscious form of mental resistance to Nazi genocide. Janusz Korczak’s writings seem to be a case in which the victim struggled to shut the perpetrator out of his mind, only to have him reappear one last time, but only when the need for defense mechanisms was obviated. In cases like Korczak’s, it seems likely that the negation of the Nazi perpetrator was a form of psychological resistance to the trauma the victim endured. It is considered a truism among Holocaust historians that a multiplicity of psychological mechanisms existed whereby Nazis were able to dehumanize their victims, and therefore distance themselves from them. It does not seem far-fetched then, to look within gaps or absences in the diaries (where one would expect to find accusation, recrimination, hate, fear or other emotions directed at the perpetrator), for psychological mechanisms used by victims to dehumanize and negate perpetrators. In fact, it is possible to speculate that this dehumanization or negation of the hostile “Other” was helpful, if not necessary, to the continued functioning and mental health of those diarists as they struggled to survive. For example, in every diary examined in this thesis, the authors try to establish some kind of distance – whether through direct aggression, resort to dehumanizing metaphors, or by holding the perpetrators at arms length by sticking to a strictly factual style. The only

exception to this is Janusz Korczak’s final entry, which will be discussed in greater detail below.

In Korczak’s case, the collapse of these interior defense mechanisms, as

indicated by his final diary entry, seems to have led to a final symbolic volley directed at the perpetrators once the possibility of survival was all but extinguished. When Korczak became aware that he had no way out, or that there were no choices left that were

acceptable to him, interior defense mechanisms became obsolete, and freed him to act in a way that performed several important functions. First, his actions preserved his dignity, and that of his children, by interfering with the Nazi goal of transforming them from people into objects. Second, these actions prevented his children from becoming just another mass of anonymous victims, thereby preserving some of the individuality the Nazis were trying to take from them. It is precisely because of the decisions Korczak made during those last frantic hours that the obliteration, or negation, the Nazis

envisioned for their victims was not entirely successful in the case of the orphans in his care.11

Korczak’s diary is a valuable tool because it helps historians establish the logic of his actions that final morning – actions which followed, at least to some degree, from the thoughts he expressed in writing. For the Nazis, genocide meant more than just murder. It meant that victims were objectified and stripped of their individuality before they were subjected to the cold disgrace of an anonymous death. The “final march” of Korczak’s

11 _{Of course, in the most fundamental sense, the Nazis were successful – Korczak and the children} died, naked and degraded, with hundreds of others in the gas chambers at Treblinka. However, it could be argued that from a more historical perspective that Korczak accomplished a great deal. In an environment in which death was not only familiar, but ubiquitous, the doctor succeeded in indelibly engraving the memory of these particular individuals into the minds of those who were present to the extent that today they remain both tragic exemplars of the Holocaust, as well as individuals whose singularity is preserved as well. Romcia, Szymonek, Giena, Eva, Halinka, Jakub, Leon, and so many others are not anonymous numbers because Korczak did what he did. Lifton, The King of Children, p. 340.

children, while it did not prevent death, prevented the complete success of Nazi intent – something Korczak foresaw - and this is why it was such a profound act of resistance.