Representing and Misrepresenting the Holocaust

The growing indifference to the details of the Holocaust encourages not only a spread in the habit of forgetting but also an increase in the ease with which misinformation is accepted without objection. A Letter to the Editor of a respected daily publication in 2014 begins: “My father was liberated when the American soldiers entered Auschwitz.” The opening paragraph of a 2011 study of The Science of Evil begins: When I was seven years old, my father told me that the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades.” It continues: “He also told me the Nazis turned Jews into bars of soap. It sounds so unbelievable, yet it is actually true.” Actually, neither claim is true, any more than is the assertion that American soldiers freed Auschwitz, which was in fact liberated by Soviet troops. This essay examines some of the consequences of such anecdotes spreading among audiences too uniformed to challenge them. The dilemma reflects not the failure but the absence of historical memory. As a result, the distinction between not remembering and never having known blurs and slowly disappears. One of the best ways to counter the accidental or intentional tendency toward misrepresentation is to focus Holocaust education on the texts and the voices of those who endured the atrocities themselves, who have found an explicit language to describe an abnormal world unrelated to the one we are familiar with. The rest of the essay explores examples of such persuasive representation. Consider the following, from Giuliana Tedeschi’s memoir of Auschwitz: “There is a place on earth, a desolate heath, where the shadow of the dead are multitudes, where the living are dead, where there is only death, hate and pain.” As we slowly became acquainted with, and then accustomed to this new reality of representation, we grow more qualified to discredit anecdotes that continue to mislead unwary audiences.