Nizkor Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1457

[Doug Millison]

My statement about The Nizkor Project describing Dora as a Holocaust 
camp remains accurate. Go to http://www.nizkor.org/. The home page 
includes a heading, "The Holocaust Camps" about half-way down the 
page.  This links to a page, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/, 
entitled "Holocaust: The Camps" -- scroll down to Mittelbau Dora, 
click the link, and you will go to a page with a link to the Reuters 
story I posted yesterday.

Your point about Weissmann ("I think that's what's "different" is 
that the "power" at Auschwitz and Buchenwald was the power over life 
and death. Weissmann's "power" at Nordhausen is a power over history 
itself.") is unclear, and does not appear to address any functional 
difference between Auschwitz and Buchenwald on the one hand and Dora 
(a satellite camp of Buchenwald) on the other.

Obviously we disagree on what it would mean to say that the Jewish 
genocide (or the larger Holocaust) is represented in GR.  Dora was a 
satellite camp of Buchenwald,  Jewish prisoners (and other Holocaust 
victims) were at Dora, Pynchon depicts Dora and its slave laborers 
and a horrific scene of dead and dying Dora prisoners  in GR --  I 
say that we can see the Jewish genocide in GR. I've offered 
definitions and discussions from many different sources that broaden 
the definition of the Holocaust to include not only Jews, but also 
other minorites, and other categories of victims (including slave 
laborers, such as those who suffered and died while working on the 
V-2 rockets at Dora).

You interpret things differently, and choose narrower definitions of 
the Holocaust. Yes, the Nizkor Project appears to use the narrower 
definition of Jews only, in contrast to historians and other sources, 
such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial, which use the broader definition.


>
>Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2000 13:27:45 +1100
>From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
>Subject: Re: defining the Holocaust?
>
>Thanks for your posts. The Nizkor site is very interesting. At this site the
>Dora camp is referred to as a "Nazi slave camp"; nowhere could I find it
>listed under the heading "The Holocaust Camps". Here is the Nizkor site
>definition of the Holocaust:
>
>"when one uses the term "Holocaust," the understood meaning is that of the
>systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazi state"
>
>http://www.nizkor.org/features/revision-or-denial/rebuttals-02.html
>
>Nowhere in GR does Pynchon depict this, nor even mention it in passing. I
>stick by my assertion that the Jewish genocide is *not* represented in GR.
>
>Of Weissmann at the Mittelwerke Pynchon writes that it was
>
>      a time which was granting him a power different from Auschwitz or
>      Buchenwald, a power they couldn't have borne themselves. . . .
>                                                            (666)
>
>I think that's what's "different" is that the "power" at Auschwitz and
>Buchenwald was the power over life and death. Weissmann's "power" at
>Nordhausen is a power over history itself.
>
>best
>
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