Language:
English
Year of publication:
2001
Titel der Quelle:
Auto/Biography Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
16,1 (2001) 24-38
Keywords:
Holocaust survivors Psychology
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives
Abstract:
Reflects on the motif of spiritual death and subsequent "death-in-life" in autobiographies written by Holocaust survivors, e.g. Alexander Donat, Elie Wiesel, and Livia Jackson. These writers imply a complete cessation of emotional, spiritual, and psychological life, which might have occurred at various stages during the Holocaust: ghettoization, deportation, as a member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, etc. Camp inmates who experienced spiritual death could not be glad, even about their liberation; it came too late for them. The "death-in-life" described by Holocaust survivors is different from the "death of the self" described by some Christian writers, because in the latter a death-and-transfiguration motif is present. This is lacking in most Holocaust "automortagraphies", which have place only for the author's "I" and do not lend themselves to optimism.
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