Abstract
As they advanced through Germany in the spring of 1945, the allies discovered, with amazement and horror, the death camps. Information about the Nazi system had filtered out long before; on the eve of the war it was known that some 300,000 people, political opponents, suspects and the ‘socially maladjusted’ were already gathered in seven camps directly ruled by the SS, beyond any control of judicial power. Later news arriving from resistance organisations made it clear that thousands of partisans, Jews and Gypsies were packed in trains and sent to Germany, where many died of hunger and illness. But the decision to carry out a final solution, which would ‘free’ Europe from theJews, and the opening of extermination camps went almost unnoticed;1 few realised that the Nazis were carrying out a policy of systematic humiliation, degradation, and annihilation.
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Notes and References
See Charles Glass, ‘The Universal Instant’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 March 1995: p. 7.
Another important initiative was the creation by Steven Spielberg of the ‘Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies’ at Yale, where the testimonies of survivors are systematically collected. See Geoffrey Hartmann, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)
Lawrence L. Langier, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Yale University Press: Cambridge MS, 1991).
Barbie Zeiler, ed., Visual Culture and the Holocaust (Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001);
Anton Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 2004);
TobyHaggith and JoannaNewman, eds, Holocaustand the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933 (London: Wallflower Press, 2005).
Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the Word: A Political History of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
In the battalion of Jew hunters described by Christopher Browning, only one-third of the men were Nazis, see Note 8 above. See also Caty Caruth, Trauma: Exploration in Memory (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995);
Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1994)
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
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© 2007 Pierre Sorlin
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Sorlin, P. (2007). Laughing Against Horror: Life is Beautiful and Train of Life. In: Paris, M. (eds) Repicturing the Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592582_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592582_11
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