Holocaust literature a reminder never to forget

June 25, 12:31 PMBaltimore Literature ExaminerAnna Horner

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The recent shooting death of a guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., by an alleged neo-Nazi indicates that hatred still persists more than 60 years after the liberation of the concentration camps at the end of World War II.  Many Holocaust survivors and their children recognized the importance of the written word in remembering the atrocities committed under Hitler's rule to prevent them from happening again.  The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night are some of the best known writings about the Holocaust, and more memoirs and novels are being added to this genre all the time.  One of the newest Holocaust memoirs is A Lucky Child:  A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal, an International Court judge in The Hague.  Buergenthal lived his early life in the Ghetto of Kielce and arrived at Auschwitz at age 10, but he waited decades to tell his story.  He details the events that made him "lucky" and saved him from death numerous times, along with his eventual reunion with his mother after the war and the events of his adolescence that led to his becoming a human rights activist.

Survivors also have written fictional stories of the Holocaust, such as The Seventh Well by Fred Wander, which was first published in the early 1970s.  Wander's nameless narrator journeys between numerous concentration camps (Wander himself spent time in 20 camps from 1938 to 1945) and focuses on the pre-war stories and sufferings of the forced laborers he has befriended, the social hierarchies among the prisoners, the thoughts of the walking dead, and even the many ways to eat meager bread rations.

Children of Holocaust survivors are contributing to the genre as well.  Dave Clarke incorporates stories told by his parents in Keeping Hannah Waiting, a fictional account of the painter Marc Chagall, his love affair with a young woman destined for the camps, and the quest of another young woman in the present day to reunite Chagall's painting of his true love with its rightful owner.

These books, along with other accounts of the Holocaust, are sad, brutally honest, and sometimes even graphic in their descriptions of the Jews' experiences during the war, but they each aim to present the truth and offer a glimmer of hope for the future.