Dora as Holocaust Locale?

[davemarc]

People, people, people....

Why not send email to a few *experts*, explain that you're having a
disagreement about an aspect of the novel Gravity's Rainbow, and ask them
whether they would consider deaths at Dora to be an aspect of the Nazi
Holocaust?  I thought you could contact Ken McVay of Nizkor, but a quick
visit to the site gave me the perception that his email address was removed.
(I hope he's okay.)  You could, however, check out the ADL site and maybe
the site for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  You could also open the question
to subscribers of a relevant newsgroup and/or mailing list, and get back to
us about it.  Maybe they will have questions about Thomas Pynchon that can
be answered in this forum.

In the meantime, I do note the presence of Dora references at the Nizkor
site--especially the presence of Dora on the list titled Holocaust:  The
Camps <http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/>.  Furthermore, noting the
following account by Benjamin Jacobs, a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz who was
eventually transferred to Dora (where he saw his former Hebrew teacher dead
on his bunk), I wouldn't dare suggest that his Dora experience was distinct
from his Auschwitz experience as far as the Holocaust is concerned.

Jacobs on Dora:  "It was rumored that in a few days we would be transferred
to a satellite camp of Buchenwald, called Dora-Mittelbau. It was a terrible
camp, the Buchenwald inmates said. We left Buchenwald and marched for four
hours. We passed a few German towns, including the city of Blankenburg, and
then we went east. Here, too, with the war near an end, the German people
seemed not to be affected by our condition as we marched past them.
Hauptscharführer Max Schmidt, Lagerältester Josef Hermann, and all
Fürstengrube guards and Kapos came with us. After ten more kilometers we
came to Dora-Mittelbau. It was like other camps, only this one stood among
trees without a fence around it."

Continued at
<http://mindit.netmind.com/searchit/track.shtml?URL=http://www.nizkor.org/fe
atures/dentist/chapter-16.html&SOURCE=5>.

d.