Table Of ContentHolocaust and Memory
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Holocaust and Memory
The Experience of the Holocaust and Its Consequences:
An Investigation Based on Personal Narratives
BARBARA ENGELKING
Edited by GUNNAR S. PAULSSON
Translated by EMMA HARRIS
Leicester University Press
London and New York
in association with the European Jewish Publication Society
eejjpp.s
Leicester University Press
A Continuum imprint
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503
in association with
The European Jewish Publication Society (EJPS)
PO Box 19948
London N3 3ZJ
www.ejps.org.uk
First published 2001
Originally published in Polish as Zaglada i pamigć © Barbara Engelking and
Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, Warsaw, 1994
Support for this translation gratefully received from the Stanley Burton Centre for
Holocaust Studies, University of Leicester
Introduction and editorial apparatus © Gunnar S. Paulsson 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-7185-0159-4 (hardback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Engelking, Barbara, 1962-
[Zaglada i pamieć. English.]
Holocaust and memory : the experience of the Holocaust and its
consequences : an investigation based on personal narratives / by Barbara Engelking;
edited by Gunnar S. Paulsson; translated by Emma Harris.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7185-01594
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Poland-Sources. 2. Jews-Poland-
Interviews. 3. Holocaust survivors—Poland. 4. Poland—Ethnic relations.
I. Paulsson, Gunnar S. II. Title.
DS135.P6 E5713 2001
940.53'18'09438—dc21 00-069637
Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print & Design, Wales
The European Jewish Publication Society is a registered charity which gives grants to
assist in the publication and distribution of books relevant to Jewish literature, history,
religion, philosophy, politics and culture.
Contents
Foreword, Zygmunt Bauman vii
Editor's Introduction, Gunnar S. Paulsson xi
Introduction, Barbara Engelking 1
1. The Ghetto, the 'Ayran Side', Concentration
Camps: Wartime Experiences of Poles and Jews
Compared 20
2. Daily Life in the Ghetto 81
3. Why Did It Happen? 215
4. The Psychological Consequences of Holocaust
Experiences 243
5. The Legacy of the Holocaust 304
Bibliography 331
Index 341
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Foreword
Zygmunt Bauman
There are many books which try to keep the consciences of the
living alert and vigilant by familiarizing them with the sufferings
of the Holocaust victims, the cruelty of their persecutors and the
callousness of many witnesses to the crime. There are many
books which attempt to assure that the perpetrators of the crime
and their inhumanity are not forgotten and do not go
unpunished or escape condemnation. And there is also a fast-
growing volume of books that monitor the success and failure,
chances and limitations of both attempts, trying to find out how
memory and forgiveness work and how, if at all, events that
escape both logic and the expressive capacity of human
language may be remembered, told and absorbed. This book
does all three things, but it is unlike any book of any of the three
categories. This book is, first and foremost, a Herculean effort to
reforge the subjective, utterly personal experience of the victims
into the joint memory of humanity and so to make the
memorializing both feasible and viable, as well as aesthetically
potent; a relentless search for a way to express the unshared
experience in a form in which it can be shared; an effort to spell
out the ineffable, to open the mind and emotions of the readers
to an experience which defies reason and transcends the
capacity of ordinary pity and commiseration.
The author is a young person born long after the last furnace
in Auschwitz had been extinguished. She was not herself
marked for extermination, nor was she a child or a relative of
the Holocaust victims and so she seeks neither vengeance nor
compensation for the sufferings inflicted. No one in her family
co-operated with the executioners or their henchmen, and if she
feels the need to comprehend that past which was not hers, this
vii
Foreword
is not in order to put the shame for the guilt to rest and to live
with the unliveable. She was not a witness to the crime; not a
bystander, scarred with the singeing memory of impotence or
cowardice. In short, Barbara Engelking has no personal
accounts to settle and no axe to grind - just the ordinary, all-
too-human urge to take the side of the oppressed, the degraded,
humiliated and hunted down, to see the world through their
eyes and condemn what they saw for what seeing it had done to
them. And her message is directed to people like her. So
addressed, the message acquires crucial significance at a time
when the executioners are too old to be brought to trial and the
victims too old to testify.
The author had set herself a truly daunting task. There is
hardly a more formidable challenge to human skills and wits
than the need to verbalize a throughly personal, lived-through
experience in a way that allowed it to be lived through,
vicariously, by those who did not experience it. One of the
reasons the author undertook such a harrowing and excruciat-
ingly difficult task might have been her wish to repay the moral
debt which all of us, by the very fact of escaping the slaughter,
knowingly or unknowingly bear to the victims of the horrifying
crime and its incurably wounded survivors. There was, though,
another reason as well, and one that seems to loom particularly
large among the author's intentions: the recognition that without
the understanding of the awesome potential of inhumanity
which the experience of the Holocaust threw wide open, our
life – the life of all those lucky not to have been ever earmarked
for extinction and unscathed by its perpetration, would be both
unsafe and ethically flawed. Barbara Engelking speaks on behalf
of the victims; but - let me repeat - she speaks to her
contemporaries, to people whom the experience of the
Holocaust may disclose itself only in the form of other people's
memory; and she speaks to them so that these alien memories
might become their own.
The book is the product of protracted, laborious and
scrupulous research and draws on a most extensive and varied
assembly of documents. But the archival evidence, factual
accounts and even personal narratives would have remained
remote, dry and cold if not for the author's remarkable gift of
empathy. Barbara Engelking gives the witnesses of the Holocaust
viii
Foreword
a voice which readers of this book will understand; but also a
kind of voice which will make them feel the pain and the
torments and the humiliation of the struggle for survival waged
by people denied their human dignity. Under her pen,
memories come alive again. This book is one long and deep
insight into the darkness unrelieved by moral impulse and
compassion, and into the horrors of abandonment and of the
loneliness that stems from the neighbours' indifference. For that
reason, this is a profoundly moral book; and a powerful warning
that has lost little if any of its urgency and topicality.
Many a reader would probably regret the spiritual comfort
lost in the course of the reading. But that comfort is the last thing
which any of us, concerned with making our world hospitable
to dignified social life, can afford. Barbara Engelking understood
that; and we must be grateful to her for helping us to do the
same.
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