Ramblings on my latest essay
Mar. 2nd, 2012 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skull_bearerNormally I'm not one for Holocaust piety. Quite the opposite, Eli Weisel's philosophy of unimaginability, unknowbility, and a host of other negatives sometimes makes me want to rub his face in something smelly, but this one is sorta testing even me. A literaty interpretation of the Auschwitz Scrolls.
(for the mercifully unknowing, the Scrolls were written by the Auschwitz sonderkommando, a group of people who had to burn the bodies of those killed in the gas chambers, lead the latest deportees into the gas chambers, sort the belongings of the dead, and after three months they'd be gassed in turn... yeah, so they wrote them and buried them around the gas chambers. Fuck know how many there were, I think we've found about six or something.)
I mean, I'm not about say 'no damn, that's awful, try again' or anything like that. Actually, for a bunch of people who were living literally hell on earth, and barely had time to eat, and would have been shot if they'd been caught writing, and weren't sure if this time when they went in the gas chambers they wouldn't be locked in and killed, they writings are really, really good. Zalman could give Lovecraft a run for his money for the use of purple prose to illustrate the unimaginable, and I really love Leib, he writes as though these are just things he needs to remember for a future time, Loewenthal is an exercise in focus, since just about every other word is missing (you bury a manuscript in a tin can for nearly thirty years and see what happens), but is a brilliant example of proto-survivor testimony, the structure is almost identical - except, you know, the survivor bit :'(
Anyway, the thing is, these texts? Worthy of serious respect. I really, really don't want to put a foot wrong on this, because then it would be ugly. And that's bloody hard, ebcause for some unfathomable reason, these texts, which should be more important than Primo Levi, Weisel and Borowski combined (and I love Borowski) are almost impossible to find anything about. The British Library has one crumbling book (I managed to beg some photocopies from a tutor who sold his soul for a copy of the same book) and even the internet falls down on this. I think I'm going to have to email the bloody Auschwitz-Birkenau museum for more details. Maybe Yad vashem might help too.
(for the mercifully unknowing, the Scrolls were written by the Auschwitz sonderkommando, a group of people who had to burn the bodies of those killed in the gas chambers, lead the latest deportees into the gas chambers, sort the belongings of the dead, and after three months they'd be gassed in turn... yeah, so they wrote them and buried them around the gas chambers. Fuck know how many there were, I think we've found about six or something.)
I mean, I'm not about say 'no damn, that's awful, try again' or anything like that. Actually, for a bunch of people who were living literally hell on earth, and barely had time to eat, and would have been shot if they'd been caught writing, and weren't sure if this time when they went in the gas chambers they wouldn't be locked in and killed, they writings are really, really good. Zalman could give Lovecraft a run for his money for the use of purple prose to illustrate the unimaginable, and I really love Leib, he writes as though these are just things he needs to remember for a future time, Loewenthal is an exercise in focus, since just about every other word is missing (you bury a manuscript in a tin can for nearly thirty years and see what happens), but is a brilliant example of proto-survivor testimony, the structure is almost identical - except, you know, the survivor bit :'(
Anyway, the thing is, these texts? Worthy of serious respect. I really, really don't want to put a foot wrong on this, because then it would be ugly. And that's bloody hard, ebcause for some unfathomable reason, these texts, which should be more important than Primo Levi, Weisel and Borowski combined (and I love Borowski) are almost impossible to find anything about. The British Library has one crumbling book (I managed to beg some photocopies from a tutor who sold his soul for a copy of the same book) and even the internet falls down on this. I think I'm going to have to email the bloody Auschwitz-Birkenau museum for more details. Maybe Yad vashem might help too.