The Historiography of the Holocaust

The Topography of Genocide 241
In E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Mr Wilcox describes it exactly like that, as ‘the
battle of life’. 56 Once inside, the home shut out the din of battle. Once inside,
regroup, refresh, back to face the sound and fury, to do the necessary work to
save and prosper one’s business and in so doing protect one’s family – the
family firm and the bourgeois home had identical aspirations: to survive at the
expense of others.
The Germans were fond of using metaphors of cleansing, of disease, of
vermin, of bacilli. These we tend to associate with medical discourses. The
motto ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ is a bourgeois one. And to many a German
Hausfrau it would not have been odd to hear that Zyklon B, used as rat poison
in the kitchen of the bourgeois home and in factories to keep disease at bay,
was being employed in gas chambers to eradicate the Other, the Jew. The world
beyond the front door of the bourgeois home had to be cleansed if the family
home was to be made safe.
I have often walked down this street before
In accounts of the formation of the ghettos much has been made of the fact
that the Germans usually – and always in the cities – chose the areas with poorest
housing for the location of the ghetto. This was because the Germans wanted
to expropriate as much as possible from the Jews in the first act of resettlement.
On the other hand, one must not fall into the trap of SS film and photographic
propaganda that wanted the world to see the Jews right from the commencement
of ghettoization as degraded sub-humans. The ghettos were not death
camps, nor were they on another planet or another part of this planet. It was
the SS who proclaimed that ‘Asia had come to Europe’ as the headline in
a propaganda piece on the Warsaw Ghetto had it, just as it was the Germans who
gave an Oriental flourish to the walls and gateways of the Cracow Ghetto. 57
Our problem is that we have not looked closely enough at the photographs,
especially those colour photographs from the Lód4 Ghetto. 58 Here, if you view
such scenes from the context of the depression of the 1930s and not from the
ramp at Birkenau, you begin to see people on streets, hanging around street
corners, whose clothes and way of dressing are not dissimilar to Europe’s urban
unemployed. If you then look into the background, the landscape is not one
from a Doré lithograph of Seven Dials in London or Scorsese’s Five Points in
New York in the nineteenth century. What we have are streets and houses that
are recognizable to anyone familiar with east European cities in the 1930s. The
landscape of the ghetto looks normal, where daily life appears on the surface
ordinary. Pictures of bombed-out families in London or in Berlin can appear
more foreign and even distressing to us, a comparison that in the case of the
Germans was often made as justification for the conditions in the ghetto and
later for the even more brutal treatment meted out. 59