The Historiography of the Holocaust

Figure 27
The Topography of Genocide 247
The streets would be quiet so that the presence of hundreds of Jews would
attract attention. Did they, as they passed the house where Isadora Duncan and
Engelbert Humperdinck had lived at different times, do a dance in their head
or sing a melody from ‘Hansel and Gretel’? Or did this last glimpse of their Berlin
in all its solid bourgeois affluence make the shock of having been alienated
from that world by Nazi law all the keener? There is a memorial at Grunewald
today, but no indication of how the Jews arrived at the station, so someone
could walk up Trabener Strasse without a thought about the Germans who
leant out their windows to see that Sunday morning spectacle go by.
Go East
The impression we might have conveyed of the camps could be one that is too
orderly and rational. Treblinka suffered chaotic breakdown before Franz Stangl
was put in charge, with the landscape of the camp littered with hillocks of
dead bodies. But what we need to remember about the camps is that they
served a dual purpose – to kill and to expropriate the victims – and hence they
were places of vast wealth given the number of captives brought to them in
a relatively short space of time. Richard Glazar, one of the most perceptive
captives, gets it exactly right when he describes Treblinka as like a settlement
in the Wild West, 66 or a gold-mining town in the Yukon. Everyone employed
in the death camp knew that it had a temporary existence, so there was no
need to build anything permanent, just temporary structures or conversions of