Zdjęcia w artykule: Andrzej Rudiak
StElimelekh i Tamar Landau. Fot. Yad Vashem
routine decimations as part of collective responsibility for the escape of a prisoner. Over time, the conditions of the prisoners' accommodation improved slightly, for example, in the main camp the prisoners initially slept on a straw-lined floor, later on, pallets, and finally on three-story bunks. In contemporary popular literature, these changes are not reflected and often describe phenomena inadequate to the time of the event (e.g. cesspits in Birkenau in the second half of 1943, the drowning of new-borns in a buckets in 1944, etc.). It creates a false image of the camp as a place of static reality, which - contrary to logic - did not undergo any modifications regardless of changes in the war situation.
The phenomenon of the sexualisation of the subject matter of the camp is new and perhaps surprising. All of the novels mentioned above have threads referring directly to sexuality, nearly always presented in a brutalised and purely carnal context. Both the blunt erotic scenes and the more subtle interjections, which are somewhat on the margins of the main thread, give the reader the utterly wrong idea that sexuality plays a significant role in the camp and that satisfying erotic need is one of the main concerns of the people imprisoned in the camp. Meanwhile, both survivors' accounts and medical as well as social science investigations unequivocally prove that as a result of hunger, exhaustion from work and cachexia, and as a consequence of living under chronic stress and constant threat to life, the issues of sexuality and eroticism waned beyond the perception of most prisoners. As the prisoners were starving, and exhausted by murderous daily work, their sexual drive faded away, and most of them felt virtually no erotic need.
In this trend, the rapes of female prisoners by SS crew members are a common theme. The novels create the false idea that such acts are not only common but also permitted. In reality, however, all forms of such contact were strictly forbidden and condemned by the SS authorities. It was impossible to maintain long-term sexual relations between a female prisoner and an SS man. There are known cases in the history of Auschwitz in which SS-men accused of a crime of racial dishonour were punished (the most famous example is Gerhard Palitzsch).
This sexual discourse about Auschwitz is based on the shifting of emphasis - a marginal phenomenon draws the attention of the recipient, creating an illusion of its universality. It is easy to convince the reader that the issues discussed so far are deliberately concealed or marginalised by researchers. The sexual discourse seems to be a procedure designed to create an effect. It is supposed to attract the readers, make them believe that they have peeked under the surface of camp life and become custodians of some sensational secrets previously protected. Such a narration certainly makes sexual issues more attractive to the mass audience, unfamiliar with the history of the camp. The emphasis on eroticism does not so much falsify history as it creates an alternative version, inconsistent with reality.
A dangerous phenomenon that can be seen in popular literature seems to be the creation of an unreal image of the SS crew members. Here one can observe a certain two-way approach. On the one hand, the demonisation of SS men is clearly visible, consisting in presenting them as a bunch of depraved, bloodthirsty, degenerate beasts, devoid of emotion and incapable of feeling remorse. The main occupation of the SS crew members is the brutal rape of female prisoners and the unprecedented murder of prisoners in the camp. Among the SS men, whose main attributes are violence, cynicism, and aggression, it is impossible to distinguish ordinary people with a normal life outside Auschwitz, where they function as normal as possible under the conditions of war - they have wives, children, and ageing parents, write letters home, plan their future, have fun, and show sympathy or aversion to their companions.
Though one cannot deny that the SS men in the camp abused their power by stealing, bullying and killing - yet reducing such behaviour to personal predispositions and explaining it exclusively through the prism of internal sadistic and psychopathic tendencies sets back the discussion about the human ability to do evil by decades, simplifies it enormously, and in fact puts an end to the possibility of understanding how so many people agreed to participate in the genocide committed at Auschwitz.