There are two testimonies from the concentration camps that are worth exploring, both containing troubling information on the daily struggle of survival in the camps. Furthermore, these testimonies also offer an investigation into the person’s psychological perspective and analytical framework from when they recorded their testimonies. It’s important to give special attention to testimonies, because they are often harrowing experiences being retold by the victims of atrocities. However, it’s also important to note that although these are incredible life experiences, they should be looked at with a certain level of scrutiny and historical analysis. The accounts in question are the testimonies of Charlotte Delbo and Ruth Kluger, two victims of Hitler’s concentration camps. Delbo’s testimony was written shortly after World War II and was published in the 1960s. Kluger’s testimony wasn’t published until the 1990s and was only available in German for a time. In their testimonies, both women write about the horrors of the Holocaust and the concentration camps where they were held prisoner, but while Delbo writes to an audience that has little firsthand account of the camps, Kluger is writing at a time where the atrocities are common knowledge in textbooks and skepticism is rampant, and her writing partially explores her life after the war. The unifying factor between the two authors is the knowledge that no one in their audience to fathom being in a place like Auschwitz.
Charlotte Delbo was a young woman when she came to Auschwitz. Although she wasn’t Jewish, she was a member of the French Communist Resistance group and was still subject to the persecution by the Nazis. She was loaded onto a train car in France and it took her 18 days in order to reach Auschwitz, a grueling journey in a cramped box car. In the first pages of her testimony, Delbo is describing the scene of getting off of the trains and setting foot at the camp for the first time. Prisoners of the Nazis were not prepared to enter death camps, and Delbo illustrates a chaotic scene at the camps’ station with mothers clutching their children and others holding their most prized possession with a death grip.
Delbo recreates her experiences of this initial stage of incarceration as a means to establish the loss that will be felt soon after. At this point, the prisoners of war are expecting terrible conditions to befall them and bringing along their possessions gives them a sense of comfort. Delbo says that “Everyone has brought his life along, above all it was his life that he had to bring along” (Delbo, 5). Here, Delbo is comparing material objects to the life that someone had lived before the war. People take comfort in bringing along their identity and a reminder of the home they left behind, in the form of an object. Moreover, the prisoners didn’t know what will be useful in a POW camp and possibly assumed that they would be able to trade with other prisoners or carry favor with the guards. Delbo quickly puts down these thoughts of dignity with the phrase, “they did not know that you could take a train to Hell but since they are here, they steel themselves and feel ready to face it” (Delbo, 6). This passage is significant because it gives the audience the chance to ponder this reality for themselves as they read further through the testimony. Delbo is asking the reader to imagine having your entire former identity take the shape of a lone object in your possession as you walk into Hell. The loss of your entire identify, only for it to be reduced down to a single material object, is a life experience that many people in Delbo’s audience wouldn’t be able to comprehend, yet Delbo asks us to imagine this very situation.
Ruth Kluger was only a child when she was taken to Auschwitz with her mother. Her testimony wasn’t published until the 1990’s, and at this point in history, there is an entire generation that did not experience the Holocaust or it’s immediate ramifications across Europe. Therefore, the world is populated with a generous amount of revisionist historians and Holocaust deniers. This is reflected in her testimony which is written through a literary lens to ensure the audience knows that these experiences are uniquely horrible, and they can never know what Auschwitz was like. Kluger accomplishes this by cutting between the events unfolding at Auschwitz and expands on them with commentary from her present self.
Unfortunately, the uniqueness of her traumatizing experiences at Auschwitz have left Kluger unable to speak about them, afraid of killing the mood while with friends. Throughout the reading, Kluger talks about the anxiety she feels when speaking about Auschwitz in a social setting. When discussing claustrophobia with her friends, Kluger has the experience of being trapped in a cattle car on route to Auschwitz, yet she cannot contribute to the conversation. “They would have been bothered, troubled, sympathetic, and thoroughly uncomfortable…They would have resented me as a spoilsport…and so my childhood falls into a black hole” (Kluger, 93). Kluger is writing this testimony a point in her life where her internment at Auschwitz has become her entire identity. Her childhood was spent inside the fences of Hell on Earth, yet she cannot talk about it freely because many people cannot begin to fathom what it must have been like in Kluger’s position. The thought of not being able to express the traumatic and absolute dehumanization that you encountered during your time at Auschwitz is a terrifying notion to think of. The images of fences and thousands of malnourished bodies are permanently burned into your brain, and yet you cannot speak about these experiences aloud because of their taboo nature. This is the reality that Kluger lives with daily.
She discusses this at length in the reading and seems to imply that having this experience has become a burden for her to carry in post-war Europe. As mentioned previously, Kluger is writing this at a time where skepticism in the Holocaust has become increasingly prevalent in revisionist circles and Kluger possibly wanted a chance to set the record straight. In a passage from her testimony, she is describing an imaginary interaction between her and one of her younger readers who have doubts about the authenticity of her testimony. This is likely a statement to potential Holocaust deniers who would be reading it. In her testimony, Kluger describes the horrific, yet almost giddy feeling that she felt when getting her identification tattoo. She says that the tattoo was indisputable evidence of the atrocities that she witnessed. It gives validity to her testimony and the pain inflicted on her, and that gave her hope for the future. “We didn’t want to live in the present, where time itself was a prison. We’ll be witnesses, we thought, meaning there’ll come a future when this will be over, and the number will be a piece of incontrovertible evidence, proof of what had been” (Kluger, 98). Ruth Kluger is writing to inform us that we will never come close to knowing the pain felt at the camp and the emotional toil keeping her experiences locked away has caused for her. She writes to provide a clear and descriptive recounting of the horrific conditions that she lived through, but Kluger’s main purpose of writing this testimony is to inform us that we cannot truly understand exactly how horrible the camp’s conditions really were.
The two women have authored incredibly thoughtful and provocative pieces of history, and it takes a lot of courage to open up about traumatic experiences that have come under scrutiny in recent years. Both women were survivors of Auschwitz, yet they give drastically different testimonies. Delbo uses a haunting poetic prose to convey the horrors of Auschwitz, opting for stanzas rather than paragraphs, in some cases. This is likely to help her control the pace in which the reader scans the page and absorbs her testimony. The haunting repetition on page 14 gives a glimpse into the psyche of the prisoners. “O you who know, did you know that one can see one’s mother dead and not cry; O you who know did you know that in the morning one wants to die that in the evening one is afraid” (Delbo, 14). Delbo uses poetic repetition to draw our attention to the horrific trivia of the death camp. Her use of repetition draws to underscore the realities that survivors of Nazi death camps face as their entire identity is changed. She acknowledges the horrific realities that survivors are confronted with and challenges the reader to imagine these conditions that she describes. Her repeated use of the phrase ‘O you who know’ can be interpreted to apply to the readers of Holocaust testimonies, and that fact that they can read about all the horrors, but will never truly know that reality.
Consequently, Kluger’s style of writing is more akin to literary works rather than a court transcript or poem. According to Kluger, she thinks in terms of literature and modeled her testimony like a tragedy (Kluger, 91). Therefore, she doesn’t relay events that she recalls as quickly as Delbo, rather she describes the repercussions of an event she experienced. Instead of moving chronologically through her time at the camp, Kluger chooses to be analytical of her time at Auschwitz and the effects that continue to traumatize her. The key difference in the testimonies of the two survivors is that Delbo documents her time at Auschwitz using a poetic format, while Kluger works through literature to discuss the trouble she has endured after leaving the gates of Auschwitz.
The psychological trauma that occurred at these camps is incomprehensible and the authors aren’t blind to this fact. Consequently, this is also the key unifying factor between the two authors. Both of the survivors discuss having life experiences that have no place in a civilized society as they describe the inhuman conditions they suffered through. Furthermore, both authors have been unsure of their place in a post-Auschwitz world, detailing regular trauma and the fact they can’t even talk about it. Delbo was 29 and Kluger was 12 when entering the gates of the death camp and that has brought psychological agony to them. Furthermore, the horrific experiences the two women went through went on to shape their identities after the war was over. Charlotte and Ruth are two incredibly strong individuals who were brave enough to share their testimonies with the world.
Wrapping up on Delbo and Kluger’s testimonies, it’s established that their writing styles are different, yet each author uses their medium very effectively. Moreover, Delbo writes for an audience who has never heard of Auschwitz, yet Kluger writes for one that is familiar with the horrific accounts and she includes the challenges that she faces in the present. The authors’ recounts of their youths required analysis of their testimonies side by side and a general knowledge of World War II context. Overall, the similarity between the two survivors is that none of their readers will be able to understand the true horrors that occurred under Hitler’s rule.
Works Cited
Kluger, Ruth. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. The Feminist Press, 1992.
Delbo, Charlotte. None of Us Will Return. Grove Press, 1968.
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