The concrete slabs cut a jagged silhouette. Over the course of eighty years, they have sagged, buckled, then snapped under their own weight, plunging into the void beneath. It took me a moment to grasp what they were, or had been: a block of pit latrines. Here, prisoners in Birkenau were forced to relieve their bodily functions, the discharges that human survival requires. Guards beat anyone thought to tarry too long. As I tried to fathom the horror inflicted in this place, a blur of motion startled me.
It was a hare, its head raised above the concrete. It pattered through the fractured earth, then vanished in the ruins. To my surprise, I was shaking. The sight of animal life only deepened my sense of transgression. What right had I to tread this ground soaked, as another FASPE fellow had lamented, “in blood and ashes”?
I was at Birkenau alone. Though I had planned to spend the afternoon at Auschwitz I, something led me to take the bus one stop farther. This essay attempts to honor my experience there—three hours that I have struggled to put into words. The night after I left Poland, I tossed and turned, dreaming of a grid that stretched forever. When I awoke, I knew at once that it had been rows of chimneys.
Birkenau exposes the false premise of neutrality. I cannot, and never could, give a neutral account of being there. The Haitian-American anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot explains why: whatever narrative I might tell about the past will inherently exercise power. Trouillot’s famous 1995 book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, contends that “power itself works together with history.”1 Their entanglement, Trouillot argues, begins the moment that present becomes past. It implicates us. We inscribe subjective histories, namely those that reflect our positionalities of race, gender, class, and other facets of identity. Far from preserving events “as they happened,” the notion of fixed historical truth amplifies narratives born of power—and suppresses those that are subaltern.2
To demonstrate this truth, Trouillot traces how ‘history,’ the sort told in textbooks, disregards the Haitian Revolution. He considers its erasure in relation to other acts of historical corruption, Holocaust denial among them. Power, Trouillot finds, courses undetected through it all. “We now know that narratives are made of silences,” Trouillot warns, “not all of which are deliberate or even perceptible as such within the time of their production.”3
If I say that clergy, journalists, and doctors had to choose whether to “collaborate” with or “resist” the Nazi regime, I assume that they could have undertaken only one of two actions: one moral, one immoral. I conclude that their ethics were not already compromised, that they were not already complicit in Nazi rule. Those claims reveal as much about me as they do about my subjects. I have a stake, after all, in presupposing that collaboration and resistance excluded each other. This binary suggests that I—a white, non-Jewish man—could have chosen resistance and thus kept myself innocent. That assumption flatters me.
To be clear, professionals in the Nazi era did have to choose between good and evil. I believe that “resistance” and “collaboration” rightly describe that crossroads. But those extremes do not represent the flip of a switch. People did not simply cleave to one or the other. A single decision—decrying the Nazi war effort while failing to defend one’s Jewish neighbors—betrays just this intersection. Writing about apartheid, Jacob Dlamini stresses that a “fine line” always separated resistance from collaboration.4 Was that line any thicker during the Holocaust?
To pit the two stances against each other disguises assumptions rooted in power. If I define resistance as a state of moral purity, then a “resister” must have defied the Nazi regime in no uncertain terms. Who do I take to meet that bar?
The historians Vesna Drapac and Gareth Pritchard write, “the predominant image of the resister remains individual, heroic and masculine.”5 They critique “a gendered resistance/collaboration paradigm” that predominates in scholarship about the Nazi era.6 This narrative renders only political acts of a public nature—those available to men who held authority—legitimate as resistance.
What of the choices made by women? What of the choices made by laborers who lacked professional status? What of the choices made by those who could not afford to leave
11
4. Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010), 8.
5. Vesna Drapac and Gareth Pritchard, “Beyond Resistance and Collaboration: Towards a Social History of Politics in Hitler’s Empire,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 4 (2015): 875. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shv006.
6. Drapac and Pritchard, “Beyond Resistance and Collaboration,” 870.
Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
The concrete slabs cut a jagged silhouette. Over the course of eighty years, they have sagged, buckled, then snapped under their own weight, plunging into the void beneath. It took me a moment to grasp what they were, or had been: a block of pit latrines. Here, prisoners in Birkenau were forced to relieve their bodily functions, the discharges that human survival requires. Guards beat anyone thought to tarry too long. As I tried to fathom the horror inflicted in this place, a blur of motion startled me.
It was a hare, its head raised above the concrete. It pattered through the fractured earth, then vanished in the ruins. To my surprise, I was shaking. The sight of animal life only deepened my sense of transgression. What right had I to tread this ground soaked, as another FASPE fellow had lamented, “in blood and ashes”?
I was at Birkenau alone. Though I had planned to spend the afternoon at Auschwitz I, something led me to take the bus one stop farther. This essay attempts to honor my experience there—three hours that I have struggled to put into words. The night after I left Poland, I tossed and turned, dreaming of a grid that stretched forever. When I awoke, I knew at once that it had been rows of chimneys.
Birkenau exposes the false premise of neutrality. I cannot, and never could, give a neutral account of being there. The Haitian-American anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot explains why: whatever narrative I might tell about the past will inherently exercise power. Trouillot’s famous 1995 book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, contends that “power itself works together with history.”1 Their entanglement, Trouillot argues, begins the moment that present becomes past. It implicates us. We inscribe subjective histories, namely those that reflect our positionalities of race, gender, class, and other facets of identity. Far from preserving events “as they happened,” the notion of fixed historical truth amplifies narratives born of power—and suppresses those that are subaltern.2
To demonstrate this truth, Trouillot traces how ‘history,’ the sort told in textbooks, disregards the Haitian Revolution. He considers its erasure in relation to other acts of historical corruption, Holocaust denial among them. Power, Trouillot finds, courses undetected through it all. “We now know that narratives are made of silences,” Trouillot warns, “not all of which are deliberate or even perceptible as such within the time of their production.”3
If I say that clergy, journalists, and doctors had to choose whether to “collaborate” with or “resist” the Nazi regime, I assume that they could have undertaken only one of two actions: one moral, one immoral. I conclude that their ethics were not already compromised, that they were not already complicit in Nazi rule. Those claims reveal as much about me as they do about my subjects. I have a stake, after all, in presupposing that collaboration and resistance excluded each other. This binary suggests that I—a white, non-Jewish man—could have chosen resistance and thus kept myself innocent. That assumption flatters me.
To be clear, professionals in the Nazi era did have to choose between good and evil. I believe that “resistance” and “collaboration” rightly describe that crossroads. But those extremes do not represent the flip of a switch. People did not simply cleave to one or the other. A single decision—decrying the Nazi war effort while failing to defend one’s Jewish neighbors—betrays just this intersection. Writing about apartheid, Jacob Dlamini stresses that a “fine line” always separated resistance from collaboration.4 Was that line any thicker during the Holocaust?
To pit the two stances against each other disguises assumptions rooted in power. If I define resistance as a state of moral purity, then a “resister” must have defied the Nazi regime in no uncertain terms. Who do I take to meet that bar?
The historians Vesna Drapac and Gareth Pritchard write, “the predominant image of the resister remains individual, heroic and masculine.”5 They critique “a gendered resistance/collaboration paradigm” that predominates in scholarship about the Nazi era.6 This narrative renders only political acts of a public nature—those available to men who held authority—legitimate as resistance.
What of the choices made by women? What of the choices made by laborers who lacked professional status? What of the choices made by those who could not afford to leave