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PARTISAN REVIEW
GT:
Did you travel to Auschwitz? Did you talk to survivors?
WS:
I went to Auschwitz in 1974, and I saw quite a few survivors in
Warsaw. I was incredibly moved by all of it. Especially Birkenau;
f
the vastness of it .
It
was so huge, the total sterilized area for that
camp. Birkenau and Auschwitz plus the outlying places which
~
were completely stripped of Polish inhabitants.
It
was a devastating
sight.
It
was horrendous. And you want to get out of there cer–
tainly by nightfall. To stay in Auschwitz after nightfall would be
unthinkable. So I went back to Cracow.
WS:
When you wrote about the camp you often made a juxtaposi–
tion between smoke which came out of the chimneys, and the
pasture and the cows and the healthy people who were also part of
the picture-the nonvictims . In a way, you do something which
Wiesel is arguing against-spotlighting, in the chapter on Rudolf
Hoss , the executioner, while the victims , the Jewish victims,
recede into the background. I'll read you the exact quotation from
Wiesel. He claims, "The Holocaust has turned out to be the latest
attraction; it is 'in,' as far as show business is concerned. There
are now docudramas, plays , musicals ; Adolf Eichmann? An inof–
fensive officer with courteous manners . Hitler? Crazy. The butcher
of Rome, Herbert Kapler, is to be pitied : a man with a keen sense
of duty.... All of a sudden, the emphasis has shifted from victims
to their executioners. They are being analyzed, dissected, ex–
plained: They are being shown to be 'human,' sensitive to art and
ideas ; everything is done to make us understand them. "
WS:
I read all that . I find that there is nothing wrong with that. Yet I
don't know what his point is . This is what Hannah Arendt was
consistently trying to impress on people- that they were human.
She hated them too, but her point, unlike what I assume was
Wiesel's, is that unless we are intensely aware that they were
human and often indeed responsive to art and so on, we tend to
put them in the category of monsters or something called the
supernatural. The danger is precisely that, being human like you
and me , they were capable of these horrors. This to me is where
Wiesel misses the point.
GT:
Are you familiar with the author Katzatnik? He is a survivor
of Auschwitz who lives in Israel. He wrote several books on
Auschwitz .
WS:
Yes, I have heard of him.
GT:
As you recall, he appeared in the Eichmann trial. He was the
one who fainted on the witness stand. When he was asked recently,
