Auschwitz as Metonym
And the Impoverishment of the Memory of the Holocaust
Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 86-year-old Tova Friedman recalled having her head shaved and led to the gas chambers. Why she was spared she does not know, but her call was clear yesterday on the importance of remembering the Holocaust. Beyond simply remembering it, however, and to Tova’s point, it is important how the Holocaust is remembered. The increasing ignorance many have regarding the Holocaust is alarming not only because forgetting increases the chance of its repetition, but because distorting the Holocaust’s memory does the same. We have seen exactly this with its vile weaponization in justifying the extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza.
One of the primary distortions, however, has come as a result of (primarily the West’s) attempts at remembrance. That the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz coincides with International Holocaust Remembrance Day speaks to the extent to which Auschwitz has become a metonym for the Holocaust thus impoverishing our memory and understanding of it.
Often one hears Holocaust denying podcasters and Youtubers such White supremacist Nick Fuentes taking jabs at the impossibility of the gassing and cremation of 6 million Jews. The info-sphere in which denialists such Fuentes are making this claim is one wherein it is remembered that gassing was the only means of murder and Auschwitz was the only place it happened. The truth is, there were six death camps in total (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belźec, Chelmno and Majdanek). The majority of those killed in death camps were killed at Auschwitz (1.3 million), but it is important to note that by the time Auschwitz was built already more than half of the 6 million Jews that were be exterminated had been killed by way of mass shootings, pogroms, starvation, disease and forced labor.
The death camps were, in part, a response to these ways of mass killing: they were inefficient, required too much ammunition, and the proximity was driving those tasked with doing the killing insane and, often, driving them to kill themselves. The death camps were the result of a logistical problem for the Nazis.
Perhaps the innovation is what captures the public memory and why, in the West especially, Auschwitz is remembered in a way that Babi Yar (where nearly 40,000 Jews were shot across two days outside of Kyiv) is not. However, there is a greater detail that often goes unnoticed and unmentioned in contemporary dialogue and remembrance practice. The majority of Jews killed in Auschwitz were deported from Western Europe. The majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust were Eastern European.
Part of the reason why the death camps existed in the East and not within Germany was specifically because Poland was understood as a colony and those within it colonial subjects. That is, the Holocaust was an event which took place within a broader context of German colonialism internal to Europe (in part because Germany had lost its African colonies as a result of the First World War).
Colonized subjects were not seen as human, and were not protected by laws in part because colonies existed on the pretense there had been no prior state in existence. Native societies in the global south were not seen as legitimate and this founding justification of colonialism was transposed onto Germany’s Eastern campaign of Lebensraum (living space). That’s why the first thing the Nazis did after invading Poland was destroy the state. They had to confirm their own mythology.
Deporting Western European Jews then to the Eastern colonial zones served the psychic and legal function of turning them into stateless sub-humans. They transformed legally and ideologically once they were sent by train over the border. As Timothy Snyder points out in his book Black Earth, the Dutch state had not been destroyed, only occupied. That is why Anne Frank was to be sent to Auschwitz (where she died of Tuberculosis) rather than killed in Amsterdam. She had to be legally and psychically outside the moral protection of European statehood.
The metonymic function of Auschwitz does not speak to the centrality of Auschwitz as the engine of the Holocaust, or even to the unique depravity of the means of death, rather it speaks to the extent to which a Western European victim is a more sympathetic and palatable victim retrospectively (within a Western hegemonic global order such as we are in). Not because Western European Jews were White during Holocaust but because they can be remembered as such, and are, after the fact whereas Eastern Europeans and Eastern European Jews specifically occupy a much more tenuous racial “category” in the Western imagination.
(Auschwitz, courtesy of the Museum of Jewish Heritage)
To assert that there is a categorical difference in the deaths of a Ukrainian Jew shot in the head and tossed into a mass grave, a Lithuanian Jew worked to death at Treblinka, or the gassing death of a Dutch Jew deported to Auschwitz is to assert a categorical difference between the victims and the value of their lives. It is an assertion which takes place within the racialized and hierarchical terms of Genocide and ignores the Holocaust as a colonial project within Europe instead of beyond it. The metonymic function of Auschwitz serves to reify rather than repel the racist organizing principles of modern genocide. Forgetting is catastrophic, but restrictive memory is equally so.
As Tova Friedman noted, Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust. They were 6 of the 12 million, whereas minority ethnic groups such the Romani, LGBTQ folks and political dissidents made up the other 6. What must also be noted is the broader colonial framework rooted in social Darwinism and European colonialism which produced the foundation for the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism was not enough on its own to create the Holocaust, if it were then it would have just as likely taken place in France or Russia half a century earlier. It was the result of a unique intersection of antisemitism with European racism, Social Darwinism, colonialism (Germany’s own exterminationist practices began in Namibia against the Herero and Nama) and modern methods of violence arising from colonialism, western expansion, the slaughterhouse, and the mechanized means of killing in the First World War (to say nothing of the political realities that war and the treaty of Versailles created).
If we are to honor the memory of the Holocaust, Auschwitz must be but one part of that memory. Not the whole memory. It cannot eclipse the other camps, and the camps cannot eclipse the death pits and firing squads, the pogroms, the sexual violence, the plundering, the exterminationist labor or the colonial frameworks and Social Darwinism that made all those actions possible.