In this topic we must acknowledge the central importance of two memoirs, Elie Wiesel's (1928- ) Night (1958; trans., 1960) and Primo Levi's (1919-87) Survival at Auschwitz (1947; trans., 1958). In 1944, both writers were prisoners in Auschwitz III (Buna), Wiesel as a 14-year-old boy, Levi as a young man in his 20s. Although there are strong similarities in their accounts, there are also striking differences. Wiesel was an intensely religious boy, for whom the experiences in the camp led to a profound spiritual crisis, a stricken cry of pain and revulsion for a God who would permit the Holocaust. Levi was a trained scientist, with an analytical mind and an artist's gift for language, shocked by the fragility of all civilized values and normal instincts when human life is reduced to the animal instinct to survive. Wiesel's title Night captures his dominant theme, the depth of darkness and despair of a world abandoned by God; Levi's original title (changed by his American publishers) If This Is a Man explores the inhuman conditions that strip away the layers of habit and culture that we use to define ourselves, leaving us with, in the words of Shakespeare's King Lear, "unaccommodated man . . . a poor, bare, forked animal."

Sustaining young Wiesel in Auschwitz was the presence of his father, but on the death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, the boy became the father, driving the totally exhausted older man to keep walking. Once they arrived, the father died, painfully and humiliatingly, of dysentery. The loss of his father cut his connection to life. From that point until his liberation, he describes himself as a living corpse. Levi stayed in the infirmary of the abandoned camp, where he rediscovered the defining human characteristic, a conscience.

Tadeuz Borowski (1922-51) was a non-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, whose searing collection of short stories This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1948; trans., 1967) is a brutally honest examination of the ways in which the horror and inhumanity that created the atmosphere of Auschwitz filtered into the minds and hearts of its victims, so that they in turn absorbed some of the heartlessness and amorality of the Nazis. At Auschwitz, Borowski was a foreman in "Canada," the prisoners' term for the inmates assigned the task of unloading and transporting to a warehouse all of the belongings brought to the camp by the waves of new prisoners, who arrived on freight trains, having been told that they would be allowed to keep their suitcases, clothing, and other valuables.

In three of the stories in the collection, the narrator is named Tadeuz. As the Polish critic Jan Kott has written, "The identification of the author with the narrator was the moral decision of a prisoner who has lived through Auschwitz--an acceptance of mutual responsibility, mutual participation, and mutual guilt for the concentration camp." Kott is here calling attention to Borowski's refusal to hide behind a fictional persona in recounting his role as both victim and victimizer. As a non-Jewish Pole, he was one step above the Jews (although one step below the German criminals who functioned as "Kapos") in the camp. In the world of Auschwitz, you could only survive by becoming an accomplice, and even then your chances were slim. Moral chaos was the norm, and This Way for the Gas captures that chaos without flinching. The title story is a present-tense description of the arrival of a trainload of prisoners, a descent into hell that the "Canada" people gladly enter because they will be allowed to take all the food that the passengers have brought with them. "Auschwitz Our Home" is written as a series of letters by a man being trained as a medical orderly, another privileged position and one that gives a sense of the overall life in the camp, somewhat removed from the horror of the transport's arrival. The author's cynical tone, reflected in the very title of this collection of stories, reflects his point that, although some survived Auschwitz, none survived unscathed.

The Babi Yar massacre is the subject of Anatoli Kuznetsov's (1929-79) Babi Yar (1967), which bears the subtitle, "A Document in the Form of a Novel." As a young boy of 12, Kuznetsov witnessed the slaughter at Babi Yar and wrote down "in a thick, home-made notebook everything I saw and heard about Babi Yar as soon as it happened." A heavily censored version was published in the Soviet Union, in which, according to the author, "the whole sense of the book was turned upside down," but Kuznetsov persisted in his determination to call attention to Babi Yar and to protest against the unstated, but strong, opposition of the Soviet authorities, at a time when anti-Semitism pervaded the Communist Party. Kuznetsov prevailed upon the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko to visit the site. The result was Yevtushenko's poem "Babi Yar," which electrified Soviet audiences when he read it in public in 1961, but the government would not allow the poem to be reprinted in any collections of Yevtushenko's poetry. Nevertheless, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich used the poem as the basis of his Thirteenth Symphony.

Reading Kuznetsov's Babi Yar led the British poet and novelist D. M. Thomas (1935-) to integrate the massacre into his very successful and controversial The White Hotel (1980). An artfully crafted novel, The White Hotel consists of several distinctively different, yet thematically repetitive, sections. The first is a series of letters to and from colleagues of Sigmund Freud, discussing a female patient of Freud's, an opera singer named Lisa Erdman, who is suffering from asthma and mysterious pains in her left breast and left ovary. The next section contains a highly erotic poem written by Lisa, describing an imaginary affair with Freud's son at a "white hotel." Following this section is the patient's journal, recasting the poem in prose. Her journal also refers to a persistent dream vision of a white hotel, which Freud interprets as "the mother's womb"; he analyses her yearning to return as an expression of the death instinct, or what he calls Thanatos.

But even Freud is mystified by her seemingly telepathic gift, one that sees sexuality and death fused in an intense interrelationship. With her therapy complete, Lisa returns to her career as an opera singer. Eventually she unlocks the secret of her hysterical illness: As a child, she came upon her mother engaging in sex with her mother's sister and brother-in-law. She marries Victor Berenstein, a Russian opera director, and becomes the stepmother of his young son, Kolya. The Babi Yar section of the novel opens with Lisa living in poverty in Kiev, her imprisoned husband, a victim of Joseph Stalin's Great Terror. The German authorities have posted a notice that all "Yids" must report for deportation. Lisa, who is half-Jewish, can pass as a gentile, but her son Kolya cannot, and she has no intention of abandoning him. A graphic description of the massacre ensues, culminating in a grotesque scene in which, pretending to be dead, she becomes the prey of two Ukranian workers assigned the task of covering over the mass grave. One worker rapes her by inserting a bayonet into her vagina. Her horrific demise confirms the truth of her earlier premonitions about the fusion of sex and death. In the final section, the author depicts Lisa, whom we know to be dead, as a happy survivor along with her son, her family, even Freud himself, in a settlement camp in Palestine.

When first published in England, the novel received faint praise and was generally overlooked. In America, however, it attracted an enthusiastic critical response that led to its becoming a best-seller. Not a small part of the book's appeal is the convoluted effects of each section: An intense, psychoanalytic experience morphs into a horrifying, realistic depiction of a historical event, which ends, finally, in a quasi-religious portrayal of an afterlife. Asked about his reasons for writing the novel, Thomas has asserted that "the motivation was to write about the real history of the 20th century, which flows through the humanism of Freud into the desolation of the Holocaust." For many critics, this is precisely what the novel achieves. For others, particularly feminist critics, Lisa's violent death is an expression of male sadism indulged in for sensationalist effect, and some question the optimism of the final chapter, which abandons the realism of the rest of the novel to affirm a transhistorical reality.

Added to the controversy attached to The White Hotel is the charge that Thomas incorporated, without attribution, material from an eyewitness account of the massacre as it appeared in Kuznetsov's book.

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