Tea at Trianon: The Limits of Holocaust Fiction

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 12, 2024

The Limits of Holocaust Fiction

From Smithsonian:

In a scene from the novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, two Jewish prisoners sneak a few moments alone together behind an administration building at the eponymous Nazi camp complex. Lali, the protagonist, asks Gita, his love interest, for her last name. She refuses to answer, insisting that she is just a number. “You should know that,” she tells him. “You gave it to me.”

Like most prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Lali and Gita have identification numbers that were forcibly tattooed on their arms. Gita’s tattoo happens to be Lali’s handiwork. He is the concentration camp’s tattooist, a role that affords him a greater chance of getting out alive. Gita, meanwhile, cannot imagine life after Auschwitz. “Outside doesn’t exist anymore. There’s only here,” she says. “I am prisoner 34902 in Birkenau, Poland.”
There’s just one problem with this scene: The real Gita, whose last name was Furman, was never prisoner 34902.

While Heather Morris’ 2018 novel is a work of fiction, it’s based on the memories of an actual Holocaust survivor, Lali Sokolov, who met Gita while they were both imprisoned at Auschwitz. But when the novel debuted, historians found a number of puzzling factual inconsistencies. Based on existing evidence, including a 1996 interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, Gita’s number was 4562.

“Popular books only seemingly present the history of Auschwitz and the fate of its victims,” says Wanda Witek-Malicka, a researcher at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, per a translation by a colleague. “In reality, they are representations of the author’s imaginings about this history, often very distant from factual realism. We cannot understand the reality of concentration camps and genocide if, instead of reliable knowledge about them, we receive a collection of inauthentic imaginations.” (Read more.)