![]() ![]() We know that they carefully prepared the massacres by means of shootings. Sinnreich erdacht (ingeniously devised): we know that if the Germans did not exactly plan the deaths through disease and starvation in the ghettos, they at least welcomed the high mortality. The German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs clearly expressed this in one of the most famous lines to come out of the Holocaust: ‘O die Schornsteine / Auf den sinnreich erdachten Wohnungen des Todes, / Als Israel's Leib zog aufgelöst in Rauch / Durch die Luft –‘ (‘O the chimneys / On the ingeniously devised habitations of death / When Israel's body drifted as smoke / Through the air –‘). The concentration camp crematoria, therefore, can be interpreted as a symbol of the particularity of the German assault on the Jews. Cremation implied a wilful severance from the community. Ultimately, the community that existed in the Jewish burial ground represented the totality of a Jewish congregation at peace with itself. 8 One of the key reasons was the centrality of burial within the Jewish tradition. Ferziger, ‘an especially potent boundary marker, in part because it was a relatively new deviation against which a broad-based Jewish consensus could be built’. In the early twentieth century, the act of cremation became, in the words of religious scholar Adam S. Nevertheless, the question arose of whether there was a boundary short of conversion that those born as Jews should not cross if they were to remain acknowledged as Jews by orthodox Jewry. These discussions acquired greater urgency in the Age of Emancipation, when it became possible for a Jew to fully participate in civil society without having to take the radical step of conversion. From rabbinical times onwards, rabbis had tried to establish which acts of non-observance of religious law led to a separation between an individual and the Jewish community. The association with the medieval image of hell was direct:Īt the same time as Germany was rising as an economic power, Jewish religious authorities proclaimed an explicit injunction against cremation when it acquired increasing popularity in the late nineteenth century. Later in her memoir she described the nighttime scene during the Hungarian Action, when the crematoria ovens were overloaded and bodies were also burnt on large pyres, in terms that literally evoke the traditional iconography of the infernal part of the afterlife. Landau quickly internalized the Christian view. Sonia Landau recalled that when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, her friend Zosha remarked, ‘We've arrived in hell’, adding the question ‘do you think we'll roast?’ For the Polish-Catholic Zosha, who had been raised within the sacred topography of Christianity, the identification of Birkenau with hell was obvious. ![]() First of all there is the traditional association of the death camps, where half of the Jews were killed, with hell. Indeed, while 99.99 per cent of the bodies that were burned were the corpses of people killed by other means (mostly by gas), most authors who refer to the Holocaust choose to emphasize the importance of the act of burning within that genocide. One of the first memoirs of Auschwitz, written by Sonia Landau and published under the Polish-Christian name she had adopted after her escape from the Warsaw ghetto, Krystyna Zywulska, systematically conflated the killing and burning. 4 Often people refer loosely to the ‘gas ovens’ of Auschwitz, collapsing the gas chambers and crematoria ovens into one spurious umbrella concept that equates killing and burning. Yet burning has become the central icon of the event that, signifi cantly, has become known first in English and later in many other languages as the Holocaust, derived from a Greek word that means ‘something wholly burnt’. ![]()
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