Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust

314 Pages·2017·7.58 MB·English

by  Amos Goldberg

TRAUMA IN FIRST PERSON
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TRAUMA IN
FIRST PERSON
Diary Writing During the Holocaust
AMOS GOLDBERG
Translated from Hebrew by
SHMUEL SERMONETA- GERTEL and AVNER GREENBERG
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress . indiana . edu
© 2017 by Amos Goldberg
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The
Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the
only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of Amer i ca
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goldberg, Amos, author.
Title: Trauma in first person : diary writing during the Holocaust / Amos Goldberg ;
translated from Hebrew by Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel and Avner Greenberg.
Other titles: Traumah be-guf rishon. English
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2017] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017024825 (print) | LCCN 2017025462 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780253030214 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253029744 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Historiography. | Holocaust,
Jewish (1939–1945)—Personal narratives—History and criticism. | World War,
1939–1945—Personal narratives—History and criticism. | Jews—Diaries—
History and criticism.
Classification: LCC D804.348 (ebook) | LCC D804.348 .G6513 2017 (print) |
DDC 940.53/18072—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024825
1 2 3 4 5 22 2 1 20 1 9 18 1 7
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction: “If This Is a Man” 1
Part I. Reading Holocaust Diaries 31
1 Holocaust Diaries: Between Life Story and Trauma 33
2 Reading the Diaries as a Critique of Holocaust Historiography 55
3 The Dynamic of the Text between the Two Deaths:
A Theoretical Model for the Reading of Traumatic Texts 74
Part II. From Autobiographical Time to Documentation Time:
Victor Klemperer’s Diary 99
4 The Life Story of Victor Klemperer 101
5 The Disruption of Life- Story Time in the Klemperer Diaries 113
6 From Autobiographical to Documentary Diary 146
Part III. The Jewish Self under Nazi Domination:
Chaim Kaplan’s Warsaw Diary 173
7 Chaim Kaplan and His Diary 175
8 The Jews and Nazi “Law” 183
9 Between Perpetrators and Victims: The Gray Zone
of Consciousness in the Diary of Chaim Kaplan 214
Conclusion 247
Bibliography 263
Index 283

vi CONTENTS
PREFACE
J
osef Zelkowicz, born in 1897, was an intellectual, affiliated with the
Poalei Zion Left party (the Marxist Zionist Jewish workers’ party), and a
resident of Lodz. In May 1940, Zelkowicz was confined to the ghetto along
with the other Jews of the city, where he remained until his deportation to
Auschwitz and subsequent murder. He documented real ity in the ghetto
and in par tic u lar the lives of the people imprisoned there, their moods, and
their collapsing consciousness.
Zelkowicz understood that conditions of severe deprivation— terrible
hunger, mortality, disease, the extreme vio lence of the Nazis, the reign of
terror imposed by Judenrat chairman Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, and
devastating poverty— create a par tic u lar social structure and generate a
new kind of consciousness. Just like Primo Levi, he understood that harsh
conditions do not lead to solidarity and spiritual improvement but, on the
contrary, cause society to disintegrate and shatter the individual’s very self
and identity. They do not uplift p eople but, in most cases, debase them. With
this understanding in mind, Zelkowicz wrote the following while inside the
ghetto:
It is not only the external form of life that has changed in the ghetto. . . . It is
not only the clothing that has come to look tattered and the faces to wear
masks of death, but the entire Jewish trend of thought has been totally trans-
formed under the pressure of the ghetto. . . . The ghetto, the great negator of the
civilization and pro gress that p eople nurtured for centuries, has swiftly
obliterated the bound aries between sanctity and indignity, just as it obliter-
ated the bound aries between mine and yours, permitted and forbidden, fair
and unfair.1
And elsewhere, in a similar vein:

vii
Grave crimes w ere committed in the ghetto. The gravest of them was the
transformation of p eople who had worked for de cades to maintain their culture
and ways, the fruits of millennia of effort, into predatory beasts a fter half a year
of life u nder inhuman conditions. Overnight they were stripped of every sense of
morality and shame. Ghetto inhabitants pilfered and stole at every opportu-
nity, whether they needed the booty or not. Some rummaged in the trash
like pigs for leftovers, which they ate then and there. Some starved to death,
but o thers, exploiting the opportunities available to them, stole, pilfered,
gorged themselves, and drank themselves silly.2
However, not only social solidarity, moral consciousness, cultural values,
and Jewish ideals were utterly transformed u nder the conditions that pre-
vailed in the Lodz ghetto, according to Zelkowicz. The personal history and
identity of each and every individual were also completely undermined,
sometimes to the point of collapse. The story of the pious Yaakov Eli— a
deeply religious man, who made e very effort to preserve his h uman dignity
and pure faith, even in the ghetto— concludes with the following observa-
tion by Zelkowicz: “What’s the purpose . . . o f all the effort that Yaakov Eli
invested in himself for so many years, if a year and a half of life in the ghetto
has transformed his inner essence so drastically that he repudiates his entire
life?”3 In the harsh conditions of the Lodz ghetto, the need to survive was
many times linked to the repudiation of one’s former life, until one’s inner
self had been transformed beyond recognition. The brutal real ity imposed by
the Nazis on their victims rendered the latter virtually helpless— not only in
terms of external circumstances, controlled almost entirely by the Nazis, but
also in terms of their inner natures, their moral values, their individual traits,
and their very identities. The state of radical helplessness experienced by Jews
during the Holocaust also devastated their inner worlds. The most destruc-
tive consequence of this situation— beyond the blurring of the other distinc-
tions mentioned by Zelkowicz— was the fundamental blurring of the neces-
sary separation between “inside” (that is, the individual’s inner world) and
“outside” (the events and power relations occurring in real ity).
Faced with this extreme historical real ity, the discipline of history itself
would appear to stand helpless. Although the historiography of the Holo-
caust, written over the past seventy years, has been remarkably successful in
reconstructing Jewish life during that period, historians have found it diffi-
cult to contend with the full extent of the helplessness that the Jews experi-
enced. History is charged with describing what is— events, responses, sur-
vival, and strug gle, communal, personal, and family activity— not what is

viii PREFACE
not, such as helplessness. History deals with existence, not absence; with
the formation and preservation of identity, not its extreme negation; with the
construction and creation of frameworks and institutions, not their disin-
tegration; with the development of ideas and pro cesses of producing meaning,
not their erasure. How, then, should history deal with a period characterized
first and foremost by what it lacked, by its helplessness, without betraying its
most essential aspect? How can we write history about what is not, about
what is negated, about what has disintegrated or been distorted?
The question becomes even more pressing in the context of historical
consciousness and the collective memory of the Holocaust among Jews (in-
cluding Israeli Jews) and significant numbers of non- Jews for whom the
Holocaust acts as a central identity- founding event. How can identity be
founded upon an event at the heart of which stands the disintegration of
identity, negation, helplessness, and defeat?
Public consciousness in many places around the world appears at a loss
when it comes to this issue as, to a great degree, does the historiography on
the Jews during the Holocaust. Both tend to ignore the fundamental under-
mining of identity and deny the deep cracks in the image of the victim—
although these are amply and vociferously reflected in writings from that
period, such as those of Zelkowicz, cited above. The image of the Jews dur-
ing the Holocaust in popu lar and historical repre sen ta tions generally fol-
lows the optimistic paradigm, presuming the successful preservation—
with few exceptions (which naturally serve to reinforce the rule)—of social
values and human and Jewish identity, at least as long as circumstances per-
mitted.
History books thus dedicate numerous pages to Jewish institutions and
organ izations during the Holocaust and to the vari ous forms of endurance
and re sis tance. Museums shape the image of the victim as one who pre-
served human and social values, held on to personal beliefs, and conducted
a vibrant religious, f amily, and cultural life under all conditions— even in
the Auschwitz death camp. The social disintegration, the shattering of iden-
tity, and the internal rifts are hardly mentioned—as if the horrors of the
“outside” (persecution, hardship, murder, e tc.) failed to penetrate the Jew-
ish “inside” (values, identity, social, and psychological structures) during
the Holocaust. Paradoxically, the narrative of the Holocaust, from the per-
spective of its victims, is recounted as one of victory (of the spirit, vital force,
Jewish and h uman identity, e tc.) and not as a narrative of b itter defeat, al-
though the writings of the period treated in this book in fact attest to the very

PREFACE ix