Why Read Books About the Holocaust?

Consider Kafka's advice for readers: I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, they why read it? . . . What we need are books that affect us like some really grievous misfortune, like the death of one whom we loved more than ourselves, as if we were banished to distant forests, away from everybody, like a suicide; a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. Franz Kafka. The Great Books Foundation uses this quotation from Kafka to promote its Adult Great Books Discussion Groups. Kafka's statement is even more fitting for books about the Holocaust. When I was 21 (or 26 or 35), I had little difficulty finding books with ideas that could stir me. At 45, I found stories and commentary on the Holocaust to best fit that need--like the ax for the frozen sea within us.

A Note of Caution: I do not recommend reading in this area of literature for individuals suffering from serious depression or suicidal ideation. A. Alvarez has written on some of the dangers in The Savage God. One should continuously assess his motives for studying the Holocaust

The following bibliographies include books of various types: memoirs, histories, commentaries, philosophical treatises, novels and poetry, anthologies. I recommend that readers continuously switch among these various types: read a woman's memoir of Auschwitz, then a broad history, then a theological commentary, then a Polish non-Jew's memoir of Auschwitz, etc. I point out the importance of reading memoirs of people from varied backgrounds and personal characteristics-- e.g., men vs. women, jew vs. non-jew, German, Polish, French, etc., prisoner vs captor--it is remarkable how different and enlightening are the memoirs of, say, Rudolf Hess, commandant of Auschwitz, vs. sondercommando worker Filip Muller. Can both be speaking of the same place? Memoirs are the truest of Holocaust books, although even here we confuse our own perspectives with the writer's perspectives with the reality of what happened. Irving Howe described this problem as such:

Memory can be treacherous among people who have suffered terribly and who must feel a measure of guilt at being alive at all. Nor can we be sure of the truth supplied by damaged and overwrought witnesses. For whatever knowledge we may claim about these matters is likely to come mainly from the very memoirs we find ourselves submitting, however uneasily, to critical judgment. . . . [As critical readers,] we are not helpless before the accumulated mass of recollection. Our awe before the suffering and our respect for the sufferers does not disable us from making discriminations of value, tone, authority. There remain the usual historical tests, both through external check and internal comparison; and there is still that indispensable organ, the reader's ear, bending toward credence and doubt. The test of the ear is a delicate and perilous one, entailing a shift from testimony to witness--a shift that, except perhaps with regard to the scrappiest of chronicles, seems unavoidable. Reading Holocaust memoirs, we respond not just to their accounts of what happened; we respond also to qualities of being, tremors of sensibility, as these emerge even from the bloodiest pages. We respond, most of all, to a quality that might be called moral poise, by which I mean a readiness to engage in a complete reckoning with the past, insofar as there can be one--a strength of remembrance that leads the writer into despair and then perhaps a little beyond it, so that he does not flinch at anything, neither shame nor degradation, yet refuses to indulge in those outbursts of self-pity, sometimes sliding into self aggrandizement, that understandably mar a fair number of Holocaust memoirs. But is not something shameful in subjecting the work of survivors to this kind of scrutiny? Perhaps so; yet, in choosing to become writers, they have no choice but to accept this burden.

See my bibliography.