Elie Wiesel At Auschwitz, not only man died,

but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge—many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.

Elie Wiesel

My Father Bleeds with History.

PpP

PLACES

HEROESVICTIMS

Episodes from Auschwitz - Love in the Shadow of Death

The first historical comic book about Auschwitz

• In 1986, in an interview with the New York Times, Spiegelman said: “Comics is a language of signs, and by using these masklike faces on top of what are real people, the metaphor remains useful, and adds to the story a resonance it wouldn't have otherwise”.

Were The Poles Pigs or Swines?

The history of Polish-Jewish relations is controversial because there is a perception among some Poles that Jews in the eastern part of the country welcomed the Red

Army and collaborated with the Soviet occupation forces.

Conventional wisdom holds that Jews killed in Poland immediately after World War II were victims of ubiquitous Polish anti-Semitism. This book traces the roots of Polish-Jewish conflict after the war, demonstrating that it was a two-sided phenomenon and not simply an extension of the Holocaust. The author argues that violence developed after the Soviet takeover of Poland amid post-war retribution and counter-retribution and was exacerbated by the breakdown of law and order and a raging Polish anti-Communist insurgency. Meanwhile, Jewish Communists fought to establish a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist regime. Some Jewish avengers endeavoured to extract justice from Poles who allegedly harmed Jews during the War and in some cases Jews attempted to reclaim property confiscated by the Nazis. These phenomena reinforced the stereotype of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy, and Poles reacted with violence.

Between the memories of a survivor andtheir portrayal in words, even his own, there exists anunbridgeable gulf. The past belongs to the dead andthe survivor does not recognize himself in the imagesand ideas which presumably depict him. A novelabout Auschwitz is not a novel, or else it is not aboutAuschwitz. The very attempt to write such a novel isblasphemy, as is any attempt to explain or justify, forany explanation is a form of justification.

Here ignorance borders on falsehood and deceit. This you must know, if you haven't understood it yet: Auschwitz means death, total, absolute death — of

manand of all people, of language and imagination, of

timeand of the spirit. Its mystery is doomed to remain intact.

der Ewige ‘Judes’

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjvL2UbED3Q

Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno

Andreas Huyssen

The most radical alternative to any particular representation of the Nazi genocide is not a different or contradictory one – but the possibility of not having written at all; that is the writer’s decision for silence.

And this then provides a minimal but decisive standards by which all writing about the Nazi genocide can and ought to be judged, a standard that poses itself in the form of question: Would silence not have been preferable, more valuable, than what was written? No writer should dispute the point of this question: in it, the stakes of writing are made proportionate to the weight of its subject.

Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide By Berel Lang

Interview in Vogue, December 1969: "Writing becomes not easier, but moredifficult for me. Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence andnothingness.

Democritus pointed the way: 'Naught is more than nothing.'"

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”

Samuel Beckett

The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning

Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social.–

(Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. Holocaust)