Elie Wiesel At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge—many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.

Elie Wiesel

My Father Bleeds with History.

PpP

PLACES

HEROES VICTIMS

Episodes from Auschwitz - Love in the Shadow of Death The first historical comic book about Auschwitz

In 1986, in an interview with the New York Times, Spiegelman said: “Comics is a language of signs, and by using these masklike faces on top of what are real people, the metaphor remains useful, and adds to the story a resonance it wouldn't have otherwise”.

Were The Poles Pigs or Swines?

The history of Polish-Jewish relations is controversial because there is a perception among some Poles that Jews in the eastern part of the country welcomed the Red Army and collaborated with the Soviet occupation forces.

Conventional wisdom holds that Jews killed in Poland immediately after World War II were victims of ubiquitous Polish anti-Semitism. This book traces the roots of Polish-Jewish conflict after the war, demonstrating that it was a two-sided phenomenon and not simply an extension of the Holocaust. The author argues that violence developed after the Soviet takeover of Poland amid post-war retribution and counter-retribution and was exacerbated by the breakdown of law and order and a raging Polish anti-Communist insurgency. Meanwhile, Jewish Communists fought to establish a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist regime. Some Jewish avengers endeavoured to extract justice from Poles who allegedly harmed Jews during the War and in some cases Jews attempted to reclaim property confiscated by the Nazis. These phenomena reinforced the stereotype of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy, and Poles reacted with violence.

Between the memories of a survivor and their portrayal in words, even his own, there exists an unbridgeable gulf. The past belongs to the dead and the survivor does not recognize himself in the images and ideas which presumably depict him. A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or else it is not about Auschwitz. The very attempt to write such a novel is blasphemy, as is any attempt to explain or justify, for any explanation is a form of justification. Here ignorance borders on falsehood and deceit. This you must know, if you haven't understood it yet: Auschwitz means death, total, absolute death — of man and of all people, of language and imagination, of time and of the spirit. Its mystery is doomed to remain intact.

der Ewige ‘Judes’ D3Q

Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno Andreas Huyssen

The most radical alternative to any particular representation of the Nazi genocide is not a different or contradictory one – but the possibility of not having written at all; that is the writer’s decision for silence. And this then provides a minimal but decisive standards by which all writing about the Nazi genocide can and ought to be judged, a standard that poses itself in the form of question: Would silence not have been preferable, more valuable, than what was written? No writer should dispute the point of this question: in it, the stakes of writing are made proportionate to the weight of its subject. Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide By Berel Lang

Interview in Vogue, December 1969: "Writing becomes not easier, but more difficult for me. Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. Democritus pointed the way: 'Naught is more than nothing.'" “ Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness” Samuel Beckett

The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social.– ( Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. Holocaust )