Horror and Hope: Studying the Holocaust

Bad Arolsen Journal

June 18, 2008

Yesterday my team members began working with the incarceration collections during World War II. The collection holds information on Gestapo activities and prisons, on a range of concentration camps and prisoners, and on some death camps. It includes envelopes for prisoners with elaborate information, including their personal cards and histories and postwar military interviews. There are transport lists to and from the camps and to other camps, which include information on birth dates, towns of origin and nationality of the prisoners, zugangsbucher (arrival books), with arrival dates and block assignments, and blockbucher (block books), recording where prisoners were bunked or transferred and where they were sent for slave labor. It is a first introduction to the enormous Nazi system of camps, the bureaucratic routines and terror-filled aspects of life there, and what happened to the mass of prisoners in the system.

We split up to try to get an overview of what’s in the enormous collection and what its uses might be.  Elissa Maelander-Koslov, who is interested in exploring the practical aspects of Nazi terror, looked at Gestapo documents and the prisons in Nazi Germany. Jessica Anderson Hughes looked at some of the camps near Berlin, starting with Ravensbruck, the women’s camp, and hoping to move to Sachsenhausen. Alexander Doulout looked at the French transit camps, ante-rooms for the French Jews and for French prisoners into the Nazi system. I started with Buchenwald, like Jessica examining prisoner envelopes, then seeing if transport lists, zugangsbucher, and blockbucher could be linked to follow what happened to people from similar towns, children and youths, and those arriving at specific times in the camp.

There is a literature on the Nazi concentration camps that views each camp as “a world apart,” set off from the universe outside the gate, part of a separate “concentrationary universe,” and which sees in the Nazi camp the most absolute form of terror, indeed a new “order of terror” beyond anything before.  In this portrait, the Nazi camp was a regime of absolute power and prisoners were a coerced and seriated mass, their bodies and selves completely transformed by humiliation and persistent terror, and their existence reduced to an horizon-less present and an all against all war for survival. I think many of us want to test and probe the materials to see whether this useful portrait goes too far, suppressing key differences among different camps and underestimating prisoner abilities, within narrow limits, to exert modest agency even in the camps. We are interested in the ability of prisoners to size up their situation, use information, and adapt adjustment strategies to Nazi terror.  

Above all, we are worried at the size and ambition of what we have to do and the little time to do it. An added layer is learning the new computer-based search system for the materials in the collection already digitized and now at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I practiced on the system yesterday, looking for information on the three youngest children at Buchenwald – Janek Szlajfstajn and Stefan Jerzy Zweig, who were three years old, then four just before liberation, and Idele Henechowicz, who was two and a half years old and three at liberation at Bergen Belsen. I also spotted the beginnings of the child rescue operation at Buchenwald aimed at Jewish children and youths when, in August 1944, as a large number of youths arrived from the Hasag munitions operation at Skarzysko Kamiena, they were selected out of the flow of prisoners and clustered in a new Jewish block in the main camp, block 23, at the same time most prisoners were marked SB for “special handling” and were moved to brutal slave commandos at Schlieben, Schwalbe, Niederohschul, Wille (Troglitz) and elsewhere.

Later today, we’ll be back into the primary materials, still trying to get an overview of what’s there and how what’s present might be used in the future. What more do we wish to know about these places of terror and about the responses by human beings to conditions of terror and tyranny? We’ll also be meeting briefly and sharing preliminary insights with our hosts about the potential of and problems with the collection.

Kenneth Waltzer
Bad Arolsen, Germany

 

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