We actually don’t know how many people helped victims of persecution. If you think of an account like this, Marie Jalowicz-Simon was helped by numerous people. And many of these stories of people who went underground— untergetaucht is the German word they use; some called themselves ‘ U-Boote’ or ‘submarines’—show that you could generally only stay with any given person or in any given place for a short period of time and then you had to move on. There’s a memoir called Prisoners of Fearby another survivor from Vienna, Ella Lingens-Reiner, who was a medical doctor imprisoned for trying to save Jews. She talks very much about just being in a more privileged position: not having her hair shaved, not having a number tattooed on her arm, not being so fully dehumanized, having slightly better rations, being respected for her intellectual and technical expertise as a medical doctor. She comments on how Eastern European Jews who had lived very hard lives as peasants were able to withstand the ordeal better than Western European Jews who’d had bourgeois existences and didn’t have the same kind of survival skills. There are many, many other things going on, but I find Victor Frankl’s account very fascinating. I don’t think it’s possible to be dispassionate, actually. This does really challenge notions of historical objectivity. I simply don’t think it’s possible, for all sorts of reasons which include the selection of examples and the style of writing, as well as the arguments developed. It is possible to be historically accurate, writing an account that is true to and commensurate with the evidence, and yet at the same time be personally engaged with the material. History-writing is as much a creative act as an intellectual outcome of scholarly research. I chose this for several reasons. She was a quite remarkable female resistance fighter in France, who was transported to Auschwitz after having to witness the murder of her husband. (The men were shot; the women were taken to Auschwitz.) She was on a convoy of 230 women sent there. They entered the camp supposedly singing the Marseillaise.

Best Holocaust Novels (183 books) - Goodreads

You asked about the issue of putting perpetrators on trial this late—but not too late—that Germany mounted. That really came about as a result of a change in the law that took effect with the conviction of John Demjanjuk in 2011 (when the former concentration camp guard was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for acting as an accessory to murder, although he died while his appeal was still pending). The effect was to establish that working in a place, the primary purpose of which was putting people to death, was by itself sufficient to prove that individual to be an accessory to murder. Had they done that in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, we could have put a vast number of perpetrators on trial, but they didn’t.Finally, let’s move on to Marie Jalowicz-Simon’s Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany. I’d never heard of her, but this is probably the most extraordinary story of all the ones that you’ve mentioned. Tell us about it. A massive extermination system, Auschwitz-Birkenau, or “Auschwitz II,” was installed by the SS as part of the systematic, continent-wide genocide of European Jews which began in late 1941-early 1942. With its apparatus of gas chambers (made to look like showering facilities) and four crematoria, Auschwitz II could literally murder 15,000 people per day.

The best books on Auschwitz - Five Books

I’ve got an issue with the predominant focus on Auschwitz because I think that, important though it is and horrifying though it is, it may inadvertently serve to displace attention from the multiplicity of other experiences and contexts. The Auschwitz story of arrival on the train and selection on the ramp for the gas chambers or slave labour has become the patterned narrative that we expect from a survivor. We don’t expect the miserable homosexual emerging after the war, too ashamed to talk about it. We don’t know the stories of those who are just shot into a mass grave outside their village in Eastern Europe. Top image is of the entrance to Auschwitz, 1945, courtesy of Bundesarchiv B 285 Bild-04413, KZ Auschwitz, Einfahrt.

Smoke Over Birkenau

A lot of the West German public didn’t follow the trial at all, and even those who followed it were pretty hostile to it. But I think that it was terribly important in bringing the issue so vividly to public attention that it could no longer be ignored. It galvanized a younger generation into feeling that there was a generational fight that they had to take on. Darrell wrote: "Is it just me, or does the name of this list sound like an oxymoron? The words "best" and "holocaust" just don't go together very well..."