Another Beginning

I have not written posts for this blog for many months. A year ago Mark and I embarked on our trip to Europe to visit some of the sites of the Holocaust. I wrote about this experience before, during, and afterward. I was profoundly affected by our journey, most particularly by the day that we spent at Auschwitz. When we returned to Toronto, I wrote for awhile longer about seminars that I attended at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the U of Toronto and about some authors that I was reading. When we went to Puerto Vallarta for the winter I took along a number of books related to the Holocaust but found myself disinclined to read them. Back in Toronto in the spring I started another blog, Letters From the Annex, focussing mainly on my life back in the Annex area, its resources and pleasures, other books that I have been reading, and incidents related to my family and friends.

A couple of weeks ago Mark was away for the day visiting some of his buddies in Orillia and enjoying time on the lake. It was a quiet day for me. I spent some time walking about my “library” of books in the built-in shelves in our livingroom, pulling out and thinking about books that I have read and ones that are awaiting some attention. I recognized a sense of wariness in myself about tackling ones that relate the painful stories of Holocaust survivors. It felt as though to read them I would be reinserting myself into that place of anguish that I experienced for some time after being at Auschwitz. I knew at that moment that I had in some ways put away my connection with and interest in the Holocaust to protect myself. I also knew that if I was to be true to myself, I would have to put my caution to one side.

I began by selecting a slim volume entitled Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz by Isabella Leitner, as well as a larger volume, The Dentist of Auschwitz: A Memoir by Benjamin Jacobs. I read these two books within a few days, beginning then on Laurence Rees’ book Auschwitz: A New History. Published in 2005, it is dedicated to the 1.1 million men, women, and children who perished at Auschwitz. The vast majority of these people were Jews, but their number also included Roma people, Poles, homosexuals, political dissidents, and Soviet prisoners of war. Rees’ book is of particular interest to me as he has had the advantage of research pursued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Using documents previously unavailable, Rees is able to look more closely at what ultimately evolved into the “final solution” of the “Jewish question” and the role that Auschwitz played therein. He shines a clearer spotlight on Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz from its inception as a concentration camp throughout its years as the primary death machine of the Nazi party, as well as on others who played major and minor roles in the attempt to exterminate the Jews. I plan to study his book more closely and to summarize and reflect upon his findings in this blog.

It may seem to many an anomaly for a person like me to embed herself so deeply in an area of interest that is in many respects distant from her own time, place, and culture. Born in Canada of Scots and Irish parentage and brought up as a Roman Catholic, I am an unlikely candidate to be viewing myself as a witness to the Holocaust. And yet despite the chasms of time, space, genealogy, and cultural heritage, I do experience myself standing in that place. The Holocaust of the Jews and all of the components of racism and hatred that facilitated its enactment belong not just to one period of time and geography but in a very real way to all of us who live and who have ever lived. It touches upon our human capacity for good and for evil. I have inklings about the sources of my interest and concern about this period of history, still reverberating as it is in many ways within our contemporary world, though there are undoubtedly aspects that I do not understand. Be that as it may, I nonetheless intend to pursue the line of inquiry and of self-learning upon which I embarked in a consistent fashion about a year and a half ago. I welcome any commentary or questions along this path.