Abstract
This could be an essay that encircles the whole globe from the Jewish refugees on the SS St Louis off Cuba, the Polish Underground emissary Jan Karski in Washington, the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg, the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth to the leafy street in Berlin where the Wannsee Conference was held. I have chosen to deal with the topographies of the epicentre of the genocide: the ghettos and deportation points on the European mainland, the camps that received the prisoners and the killing sites. This essay is not, however, an inventory of the landscape and topography of every site of genocide on soil under German occupation 1933–45.1
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’ (1942)
When people are silent, then the stones speak.
Heinrich Himmler
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Notes
Such an inventory is provided in M. Gilbert, Macmillan Atlas of the Holocaust, 5th edition (London: Macmillan, 2002). The topographies and landscapes of Holocaust sites are ignored.
C. Lanzmann, Shoah (London: Academy Video 1986).
P. Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Abacus, 1991), p. 16. Characteristically, Hugo Gryn has one of the best descriptions of the first view of Birkenau, but being on one of the Hungarian transports in 1944 his train arrived along the new train spur and on to the new ramp. Those prisoners were able later to orient themselves as the point of arrival was within the camp and observed on later occasions. H. Glyn, Chasing Shadows (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 174.
A. Charlesworth and M. Addis, ‘Memorialisation and the Ecological Landscapes of Holocaust Sites: the Cases of Auschwitz and Plaszow’, Landscape Research, 27 (2002), 229–51.
For understanding the discipline of such cartographic representations, see P. Gould, ‘A Note on Research into the Diffusion of Development’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 2 (1964), 122–7.
A. Charlesworth, ‘Spielberg’s List: Schindler, Authentic History and the Lie of the Landscape’, in Studying the Landscape, ed. I. Robertson and P. Richards (London: Edward Arnold, 2003), pp. 93–107.
T. Keneally, Schindler’s Ark (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983), p. 178.
A. Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary (London: Pimlico, 1991), p. 508.
M. Greenbaum, The Jews of Lithuania (Jerusalem: Gefen, 1995), pp. 308–9.
R. Reder, Belzec (Krakow: Fundacja Judaica/Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1999), p. 142; M. Treganza (personal communication).
D. Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diaty (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), p. 78.
R. Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (Oxford: Perseus Press, 2002), chapter 11.
T. Richmond, Konin (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 450–5.
E. Klee, W. Dressen and V. Riess, ‘Those Were The Days’: The Holocaust as Seen by the Perpetrators and Bystanders (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), p. 227.
K. Hart, Return to Auschwitz (London: Grafton, 1983), pp. 154–5.
K. Smolen etal., eds., KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS (Warsaw: Interpress, 1991), p. 117.
B. Zajac, ‘Zielony czy stary: jaki byl obraz obozu’, Pro Memoria, 3 (1995), 41–2. Interview with Mrs. Zaj4c, July 1994.
A. Strzelecki, The Evacuation, Dismantling and Liberation of KL Auschwitz (Oswigcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2001), pp. 52–3.
S.C. Feinstein, ed., AbsencePresence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
A. Krell, The Devil’s Rope: A Cultural Histoty of Barbed Wire (London: Reaktion Books, 2002).
Ibid., p. 51.
P.B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labour and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), chapter 5.
D. Dwork and R.J. van Pelt, Auschwitz 1270 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), pp. 225, 361.
F. Driver, Power and Pauperism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodemity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 33.
For an interesting discussion on lighting, see N.J. Thrift, ‘Inhuman Geographies’, in Writing the Rural, ed. P. Cloke et al. (London: Paul Chapman, 1994), pp. 191–248.
Quoted in M. Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: William Collins, 1986), p. 167.
Marszalek explains it simply in terms of the short distance between the railway and the camp. I think it is more complex than that and has to do with the type of camp Majdanek was and its relation to the Flugplatz complex and the latter’s role within ‘Operation Reinhard’. It is surprising that for so important a camp as Majdanek we have no definitive history of the camp written in the post-socialist era. J. Marszalek, Majdanek (Warsaw: Interpress, 1986), p. 23.
Wydawnictwa ‘ALFA’, Warsaw As It Was (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa ‘ALFA’, 1985).
S. Drix, Witness (London: Fount, 1995), pp. 136, 167–8.
Ibid., pp. 37ff.
N. Davies, God’s Playground. Volume II: 1795 to the I’resent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 447–51.
Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 31.
Greenbaum, The Jews of Lithuania, p. 307; Klee, Dressen and Riess, ‘Those Were the Days’, pp. 31, 45.
A. Kantor, The Book of Alfred Kantor (London: Judy Piatkus, 1971), p. 79.
C.R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), pp. 138–9. M. Treganza (personal communication).
See J. Gulczynski, Oboz Smierci w Chelmnie nad Nerem (Konin: Muzeum Okregowe, 1991), photograph in Annex, p. 15.
Interview with George Steiner, Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4(July 1993).
R. Hoess, Commandant ofAuschwitz (London: Pan, 1961), pp. 101–2.
E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (London: Abacus, 1977), pp. 280–1.
E.M. Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 192.
U. Keller, ed., The Warsaw Ghetto in Photographs (New York: Dover, 1984), p. x.
For example, the collection of photographs in Judisches Museum Frankfurt am Main, ‘Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit’ (Vienna: Locker Verlag, 1990).
P. Collison, The Cutteslowe Walls: A Study in Social Class (London: Faber and Faber, 1963).
M. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Talk on the T4 programme given at Yad Vashem in July 1991 by William Seidelmann.
A. Ehmann etal., Die Grunewald-Rampe (Berlin: Gedenkstätte Haus der WannseeKonferenz, 1993). A. Ehmann (personal communication).
R. Glazar, Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995).
D. Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 142.
O. Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), chapter 4.
T. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 60.
J.E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 128.
Ibid., pp. 127–8.
Quoted in S.R. Horowitz, ‘But is it Good for the Jews?’, in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Y. Loshitzky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 137. For a fuller discussion about moral landscapes and the Holocaust, see Charlesworth, ‘A Corner’.
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Charlesworth, A. (2004). The Topography of Genocide. In: Stone, D. (eds) The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524507_11
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