The Holocaust as Apocalypse
Well I just finished my summer classes, as of like five minutes ago, so I figured I would post the paper I wrote for my final project for my apocalyptic film class. The idea of prisoner’s identity within the camp vs the outside “real world” is something that I think I’m going to spend a lot of time researching. Check it out.
Thoughts of an apocalypse strike people in so many different ways. The end of the world can come through natural disasters, deadly viruses, nuclear radiation, monsters or zombies, animal uprisings, psychological crisis, etc etc. Just the fact that many of the potential causes for the destruction of our world are rooted in humanity itself is a frightening thought. The human race is essentially suicidal, or at least in a sense cannibalistic. We have already come close to annihilating a group within our own species: the Jews. Not to mention the other genocides that plague our history. The German Nazi’s preyed on those weaker than them, considering the Jews to be less then men. They also captured, tortured, and killed many people from other nationalities including Italians, Pollocks, Russians, Hungarians etc that were criminals. They wanted to rid the world of the filth, the dirty, the undeserving people. It was survival of the fittest and only the best and most beautiful races of humans were spared from their torturous death camps. However, their psychological health was not spared.
A Nazi work camp was probably the most fear-drenched place that ever could exist. How does one endure the punishments, the unreasonable work, the lack of food, and the psychological strain? Primo Levi was a Jewish-Italian chemist that survived the Holocaust. He has written several books about his year-long imprisonment in Auschwitz death camp. In his book Moments of Reprieve, he tells stories not directly about his treatment in Auschwitz, not about the Nazi guards and the threat of gas chambers, but about the people he met there. The men he struggled for survival alongside. He writes that,
Without any deliberate effort, memory continues to restore to me events, faces, words, sensations, as if at that time my mind had gone through a period of exalted receptivity, during which not a detail was lost. I remember, for example, as they would be remembered by a tape recorder or a parrot, whole sentences in languages I did not know then, and don’t know now. A few years ago I met, after thirty-five years, a fellow prisoner with whom I had not had any special friendship, and I recognized him immediately in the midst of a great number of unknown faces, although his physiognomy was greatly changed. Smells from “down there” startle me even now. It seems to me obvious today that this attention of mine at that time, turned to the world and to the human beings around me, was not only a symptom but also an important factor of spiritual and physical salvation (Levi 11).
This is a common trait among all people faced with imminent death and the severe lack of hope for survival. It is often through the mutual encouragement and support of other victims of disaster that one can hold on to the will to live. We’ve seen it within every film we have watched this semester. When the world is going to end, or already has, people bind themselves with other people. In Safe, Carol admits herself to the Wrenwood center, not only for the clean environment but to also be with others that understand her issues. In The Dawn of the Dead, Fran, Peter, and Roger work together to set up a new life in the mall. In The Road Warrior, although Max usually goes his own way, he sticks around to help the oil clan escape from the outside rangers. Although it is very hard to trust people in these extreme life-or-death situations, the victims always find someone to rely on. This is what Primo Levi, and all other death camp prisoners, did during the Holocaust.
Levi tells the story of his last Christmas in Auschwitz. All of the prisoners (political, social, criminal, homosexual, etc), except the Jews, were allowed to receive packages from outside the camp for Christmas. Somehow, Levi’s family managed to smuggle a package from person to person across country and through the barbed wire to his hands. What a gift! Levi knew he had to split it up with another person. He could not eat it all at once, and he could not keep it safe from the guards and other prisoners by himself. His friend Alberto, another Italian, was the one he could trust with these highly prized possessions. They sewed hidden pockets to the inside of their jackets and hats to hold the treats. One day, Levi’s jacket was stolen while he was in the showers, losing half of their “gold”. However, Alberto was so trustworthy that he gave back half of the share Levi had given him (Levi 85-96). The victims of the Holocaust knew that they only had each other, and that is where their hope for survival resided.
Another example of this act of bonding together in a fight for survival is the story of the Bielski brothers. Their story, as shown through the film Defiance, is one of courage, community, and fighting back against the German Nazi’s. After their parents were killed, they fled to the forests. More and more Jews came to them, from the Jewish ghettos, for help and protection. They eventually built a camp in the forest, organized and assigned tasks to each “member” of their new community, and fought back against the Germans in conjunction with a group of Russian partisans. Daniel Craig’s character, Tuvia Bielski, says in the film, “We may be hunted like animals, but we will not become animals (Zwick).” This is absolutely true. They all felt a need to fight, to survive, to have family. Because they set up an actual community and had relationships with others in their camp, they lived. This goes beyond the actual physical act of being alive, of breathing and having a beating heart, but actually having some sense of life, of purpose and passion. This is what made the difference in their fight. They faced their opposition as people, not the animals that their enemies were.
Besides the fact that being treated as a slave laborer is extremely taxing on one’s physical body, it also takes its toll on the psychological health of a person. Having your entire life being taken from you, your family and friends, your hard earned money and possessions, your dreams and ambitions, is a huge blow to a person. Everything you once knew is gone and now here you are, captured by many people that hate you just because of your race or religion. The Nazi’s didn’t treat their prisoners as people at all. They had no names, only numbers sewn onto their jacket as a way to identity and categorize. Constantly being referred to as vermin, less than a person, and filth can get inside people’s heads and eventually they will start to believe that it is true, that they are not worthy to live as a free person, if at all. This concept of identity is another huge aspect of apocalyptic cinema. The film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is entirely centered around this idea. Safe deals with the psychological apocalypse of an individual. The scientists in 12 Monkeys treated their prisoners as guinea pigs for the scientific research and experiments, without the consideration that they were people too. The psychological strain of being in the death camps has a much longer lasting effect than any of the physical strains that they endured.
Mauricio Lasansky is an American printmaker that, although he was not a victim of the Holocaust, is an extreme empathizer for the Jews. From 1960 to 1966, he worked to complete a series of thirty drawings called “The Nazi Drawings.” He said,
Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man’s dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi [mode of living] by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what The Nazi Drawings are about (Lasansky).
Lasansky, through his drawings, is there in the camps understanding the horror that the Jews faced. He examines what people do to each other when they lose all human, moral, and spiritual values. His drawings are a continual remembrance of what it meant to survive that nightmare. They show what it means to be alive or dead, or at the point where it does not even matter which side of the line you are on (Honig).
Viewing his drawings, most life size, sucks one into the head of a Holocaust victim. They are heavy, cold, gripping, and absolutely full of emotion, drama, horror, and anxiety. They are dark and tell a sad story of the abuse and death of innocent people.
These drawings show the permanent psychological harm that the survivors of the Holocaust live with everyday. This is something that can break through any sort of protection. Their trust and relationship with other prisoners in the camp can give them the will to live and survive and escape the camp itself, but they can do nothing for the psychological state of imprisonment they will live with forever.
Lasansky’s drawings matched with Levi’s comment about his heightened memory of exact conversations, descriptions, and actions that occurred in Auschwitz show that the apocalypse did not end when the prisoners were released. The Jewish population was not threatened with extinction anymore, but they were left in shambles. The individual survivors from the camps were not starved and beaten anymore, but they were left with memories from that living nightmare. Lasansky’s drawings not only tell of the struggle of Jews during the Holocaust, but also give us a glimpse into what the survivor’s thoughts and memories must look like.
Each prisoner was freed from the barbed wire fences, only to be imprisoned again inside their mind, fighting the memories.
Well, it has been observed by psychologists that the survivors of traumatic events are divided into two well-defined groups: those who repress their past en bloc [all together], and those whose memory of the offense persists, as though carved in stone, prevailing over all previous or subsequent experiences (Levi 10-11).
Either the survivor manages to completely wipe this horrible time in their lives from the memories, or can recall it as clearly as if it had happened five minutes ago. This first group of survivors, although has forced themselves to forget the horror of their persecution, still lives with that chunk of their lives that is missing. This black hole will continue to haunt them no matter what. The second group, of which Primo Levi belongs to, must learn to live with the horrendous memories just as they learned to live within the death camps.
This psychological harm is something that can break through any sort of protection. The survivors’ trust and relationship with other prisoners in the camp gave them the will to live and survive and escape the camp itself, but they can do nothing to ease the pain of the psychological state of imprisonment they will live in forever. Those people that they created a community with inside the camps, in order to survive, are now what plagues their dreams. The survivors often remember the people they encountered in the camp the most clearly and having vivid clear faces appear in their dreams and memories makes it so much more frightening than just remembering the events. A new apocalypse threatens their sanity. They will never be completely free from the fear associated with the Holocaust.
The Holocaust itself is a topic that no one really likes to talk about. It is a dark spot on the timeline of the history of humankind, as well as many individual’s history. However it carries with the horror, a message to be heard. Films, books, and fine art are drawn to issues like these because there is still always something to said about the issue. Even though it is a gruesome history, it is one that interests us like nothing else. We, as humans, always carry with us the fear of the unknown, the fear of death, the fear of annihilation, the fear of the apocalypse. In our history, there are events that did bring us close to “the end of the world”. Nuclear war and genocide are dangerous, dangerous aspects of our existence and through studying our mistakes in the past, we can hopefully prevent the same mistakes from happening again in the future.
I deleted the images that are inserted within the paper but check out the “Nazi Drawings” here: http://www.lasanskyart.com/art/collections/nazidrawings.shtml
