Holocaust Journey

Rating:
Summary: A Rich Vitamin Supplement
Review: Although reading Martin Gilbert's book will do no harm if you are just beginning to study the Holocaust, it will certainly be more difficult to appreciate. What you are buying in this book is a detailed travel journal, not meat-and-potatoes Holocaust history. It is a rich vitamin supplement of insights and prepared readings delivered during a 1996 excursion which Gilbert and his students took to former sites of Jewish deportation, genocide, and Nazi occupation. Roughly outlined, the journey starts in London and passes through Brussels, Berlin, Theresienstadt, Prague, Auschwitz, Krakow, Belzec, Sobibor, Lublin, Majdanek, Treblinka, Warsaw, and Chelmno. The travel entries, while thoughtful and considered, do not lack spontaneity and can even be startlingly raw.

While this book has much to offer, how to most benefit from it is something of a conundrum. It is likely best to refer to "Holocaust Journey" after having read about or visited a particular site mentioned in the travelogue. Basic background and history should be gotten elsewhere, as what Gilbert largely documents here are impressions, feelings, and observations. Reading Gilbert prior to confronting these geographic locales ourselves, either in person or via the printed word, may well taint our own first impressions and rob us of a more pristine emotional state from which to experience our own responses. My now-dilapidated hardcover copy of "Holocaust Journey" traveled with me to the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lublin, and Krakow, and to the concentration camps and memorials of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and Treblinka in early 2002. When I read Gilbert's book prior to my arrival at a site, I found myself wanting to experience what Gilbert experienced, as impossible as that clearly is. Our responses to the Holocaust are as different as the individual stories which comprise it. On the other hand, having traveled alone much of the way, I found this book a comforting companion and empathetic sounding board after I had visited a site, sometimes even expressing my own feelings, thoughts, questions, or fears.

The readings and brief background notes which Gilbert supplies at each location are extremely well researched, relevant, and poignant. While there are too many to mention in a review, I will remark that those providing insight into the mind and heart of educator and orphanage director Janusz Korczack proved particularly moving. Rather than allow them to meet their fate alone, Korczack chose to be deported along with his orphans to the extermination camp at Treblinka. "Holocaust Journey" directed me to Korczack's memorial stone at Treblinka and the courtyard of the still-present orphanage in Warsaw. For me, a handful of words in Korzac's diary aptly captured the grotesquely distorted existence under Nazi rule. For Korzac daily life had become "a stock exchange quoting the weight of conscience."

Rating:
Summary: Personal Guide Book
Review: I took this book with me on the same trip thoughout Eastern Europe in November. This was the second visit to Eastern Europe with American Jewish Congress. This is the book to read before the trip, and then to take with you when you visit these horrible places. Nothing can prepare one to see what was once full of Jewish life, and is now empty of Jewish life. However the personal comments and views of Martin Gilbert explain what was once full of a Jewish life, and is now no more.

This is a book that one must read to understand the Holocaust.

Rating:
Summary: You really go on a journey through the holocaust
Review: The strength of this book, as is the case of all of Professor Gilbert's books, is his ability to take one to that time and place. Further, he has the unique ability to convey man's inhumanity to man through the telling of individual histories, be they short or long. I wish that I had been privileged to go along on this journey with him and his students, as somehow The Holocaust became alive for me in a manner I have not heretofore felt. I hope some day to make the journey myself and see where these momentous events occurred. Every person, of Jewish roots or not, should read this book and remember how easy it is for racial hatred to occur. When this book becomes available in paperback, I will use it in my Honors Seminar on Medical Ethics and The Holocaust. This is a 10 star book, a must read.

Rating:
Summary: A book that changed my life
Review: This book inspired me to take nearly the same journey as Gilbert and his students. Gilbert puts a lot of material in this book, and should be read by anyone who wants to understand the scale that these event took place on.

Rating:
Summary: Revisiting Darkest Europe
Review: This volume is atypical amongst Sir Martin Gilbert's profusion of histories, documentary collections and historical atlases. It is an account of a journey Gilbert undertook with students to the locales of the Holocaust.

Gilbert uses no cunning literary devices to conjure up the time and place of little pieces of the holocaust puzzle - unless, terse and authoritative commentary is such a device. He charts the journey from the sites of Berlin's government ministries and residences, synagogues, hospitals and other sites which, for one reason or another, became associated with the Nazi policy, to the stark fields, hamlets, townships, woodlands and camps in Poland, where much of the killing was carried out.

Throughout much of the book, Gilbert simply recounts the journey, often reproducing in extenso diary entries he made along the way, together with accounts of various survivors. This proves sometimes too much to bear especially accounts of indescribable and incredible Nazi brutality and sadism.

The most mystifying and disturbing feature is the unbridled sadism of the killers, leaving Gilbert's companions to wonder, as at least some victims and survivors did, whether these men had children of their own. This conundrum is, in effect, the subject of the controversial book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, and it would be premature to say that the matter of 'willing executioners' has been cleared up. One remains as mystified as ever after reading this book.

Many of the stories are not new - Kristallnacht, the burning of books, the Wannsee Conference, slave labour camps and extermination centres - but some are less well known, as for example, the demonstration of several thousand German women in Berlin's Rosen Strasse in March 1943. These women, all gentiles, were protesting the arrest and scheduled deportation of their Jewish spouses. Thousands more joined them as the protest swelled in intensity. Goebbels relented, placed the Jewish males under 'protected persons' status and they survived the war, all because ordinary Germans protested: a useful reminder that not all acts of resistance and protest were futile.

Wannsee, described in the 1912 Baedeker as a 'fashionable villa-colony, the handsome houses of which hare grouped in a wide-curve on the high banks of the picturesque Wannsee' was in 1942 the scene of the conference authorising the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Today, the room in which it all happened is an exhibit of photographs and profiles of the people involved, 'most of them professional civil servants of the highest degree of bureaucratic competence'. The exhibits include an original telegram, dated 30 July 1943, concerning the dispatch to Auschwitz of a consignment of Zyklon-B.

This book almost can be read, place by place, as a concise history of the Jews in Eastern Europe. It is not unusual for Gilbert to provide a potted history of a town or village, indicating when Jews first appeared (often as early as the Middle Ages, if not earlier), noting the rise of Church edicts and restrictive measures shortly afterwards, providing a long tale of Jewish life punctuated by massacres and expulsions. Blood-drenched as the chronicle is, Jewish life proves resilient until the Nazis come, with only a few lines necessary to indicate how an average of 90% of the Jews in question met their fate.

The care taken to prevent myth and anecdote occluding into fact is valuable. Readers are likely to find that they had digested a few. That Jews were turned into soap is one, easily believed even by survivors, who frequently heard Poles giving expression to this unfounded misconception of what the Nazis were up to. And good and successful as the Danish monarch and people proved in protecting their Jews, the episode in which King Christian appeared under Nazi occupation wearing a yellow star in defiance of German efforts to single out Danish Jews never occurred.

No less than in ordinary life, certain moments in the journey stand out for distinctiveness not apparent on the surface.

For me, the village of Osowa is one. Hardly a site of special Jewish interest: perhaps a dozen Jewish families, all farmers, inhabited it between the wars. The Germans set up here a slave labour camp, and Jews from neighbouring districts were concentrated here, many worked to death, many more dying through ill treatment. 'At some point in 1943', writes Gilbert, 'all those held at Osowa were sent to Sobibor and murdered. They must have been marched through the woods.' 'At some point'; 'must have been', strikes the reader. For much of the narrative, there is normally at least a tid-bit of record, a memoir, a recollection, an inscription, which tells the gruesome story. Here, at 'such a God-forsaken place' in the words of one of Gilbert's party, the scale of destruction had been so complete that nothing remains even to indicate when or how the deed was done.

Encountering a party of young Polish skinheads, local schoolchildren, is another such moment. They talk of 'Poland for the Poles' and their particular ethnic dislikes, with Jews low on the list, so they say, seeing there are now so few to trouble them. It was the 'hooligans', not they, who recently desecrated the Jewish cemetery. But one of Gilbert's party, a Polish-born survivor of the Holocaust, is able to quote to the skinheads the start of a nationalist ditty of fifty years earlier, which one of the skinheads effortlessly completes. It is, as Gilbert puts it, 'an incredible connection across time', am index of the resilience of hatreds.

This last must have been a poignant moment for the travellers as well, for Gilbert himself singles it out in his diary at journey's end, speeding with his 'fellow journeymen' towards Waterloo Station.

Some will doubtless prefer never to pick up this volume, but it remains a compelling account and few who start will really wish to put it aside incomplete, whatever the temptation.