- Joined
- Oct 6, 2018
I think that is very insightful, and there is something else happening as well. The holocaust shocks us. It is so awful in its reality, we can't really make sense of it. I think it was Levi who talked about when he "was human", and Pilecki repeatedly talked about people outside the camp as "people back on Earth".
I can't remember the name of that Hungarian doctor forced to work with Mengele, but I remember in the forward of the book, some holocaust historian talking about Anne Frank, and how that is the one of the least inspiring and relevant accounts of Jews living under the Nazis and those witnessing the holocaust, yet it is the most promoted and valued. He talks about how people just want to make it all "business as usual" and cannot accept that all rules and meaning in reality can be completely erased in that sort of thing. How Frank and her father especially, just tried to "be a family" in hiding, when the writer's view was that ALL of the family would have lived if they accepted there was no more normal reality, and they needed to create a new normal by splitting up so they could survive. The Frank family died by insisting on business as usual, and readers insist on reading about people trying to experience it too.
The forward writer pretty openly compares holocaust deniers to the jews who didn't survive --- people unable to accept that "business-as-usual" disappeared --- and therefore create a fiction to live by. It's too ugly to actually mentally encompass, so they are all just holocaust deniers. It's just that some of them went into the ovens. Hell, language kind of fails when actually delving into the details of the holocaust, teaching it in our half-hearted education system which expects nothing from students and even less from teachers seems insurmountable. Frankl kind of gets at that issue of people who died and people who denied were people who couldn't accept that reality utterly disappeared and a new one arose. He included that many places in his account too, and it was ultimately what Man's Search For Meaning was about. He quickly battled to find a meaning, and did relatively well (by Auschwitz standards lol), and Pilecki went in with the meaning and mission to identify and exploit the new unreality. He never seemed to lose his sense or drive, nor his ability to see or admit to the unreality. Solzhenitszen was similar in his ability to face the new reality, and in a much easier way than any of them, that's what people still appreciate about Orwell.
I really don't expect much more from the class of smug pseudo-intellectuals whom we call teachers to have the minds of those, nor do I expect they would have more insight or a better response than a little girl in an attic. It's too huge of an aberration, and reducing it into the simple, mundane, and recognizable in their own lives concept of "bigotry", is the only real "bad" they see at all in their smug, protected Starbucks reality, so it's the only one they can explain.
That was autistic as fuck of me.
Also, since we on KF are supposed to be Nahtzees or whatever, I better toss in a "kill the jews" just to balance this post.
