The Historiography of the Holocaust

218 Andrew Charlesworth
So we are left with a lacuna which we need to fill, as Lanzmann does by
walking the terrain trying to recover certain features that give us another
insight into the genocidal act. Yet our knowledge of the history of the Germans’
policy of racial and social engineering effected through mass murder already
colours our expectation of the landscapes and topography we will find. Just as
we both expect and want the perpetrators to look evil, similarly we wish to
invest the landscapes of the Holocaust with evil and tragedy. People prefer to
take photographs of Auschwitz when it is snowy or raining or has leaden
skies. 6 If it does not match our expectations, then we may regard the site as out
of place. But the reality both then and now is different.
Topography
We tend to think of the death and concentration camps as built on isotropic
surfaces with all traces of topography and geology erased on construction.
Perhaps this is best exemplified in those aerial shots of Birkenau taken by the
Soviet Air Force at the liberation and still shown to visitors in the cinema at the
Auschwitz State Museum. Here we see a grid pattern of rows of black huts, grids
of streets and fences, with regularly spaced watchtowers in the snow. The way
sites have been presented to us cartographically has confirmed this view. Black
dots or lines on white paper characterize such cartographic representations of
the Holocaust sites. 7 Certain topographic features, such as forests, marshes,
rivers and seas, are shown, but relief, the contoured landscape, is not. This robs
accounts of life and death at these places of an important dimension.
The Plaszow concentration camp – not Steven Spielberg’s set which was built
on a flat surface – was constructed on undulating topography with steep slopes
(figure 1). 8 It must have cost the Germans a lot of time and resources to build
barracks on such terrain. Thomas Keneally describes some of the conditions
under which construction took place in one of his first substantive passages on
Plaszow: ‘Goeth estimated the distance the women had to carry the frames to
be some three-quarters of a kilometre. “All uphill,” said Kunde, putting his
head on one shoulder then on the other, as if to say, so it’s a satisfactory form
of discipline, but it slows up construction.’ 9 The question is why they chose to
do so. In answering that question we are made to think who those men were
who made that choice. They were certainly not desiccated, calculating robots
or they would have rejected the site as too costly. They were more like Kunde,
men with a chosen mission who did not count the cost as long as the end was
achieved. 10
On the other hand, in Schindler’s List Spielberg’s intention in inverting the
topography of the camp appears to have been to stress the demonic side of
Amon Goeth, the camp commandant. By placing his villa on a hillside above