"The Evacuation still proceeds..." GR Part 1 Section 1

[jbor at bigpond.com]

>> Dora was not a death camp, it was a labour camp

On 27/10/2005, at 9:23 AM, Michael J. Hußmann wrote:

> Given that the ultimate aim of those labour camps was defined as (in
> Nazi terminology) "Vernichtung durch Arbeit", one could argue that both
> were one and the same.

One can also argue that they weren't. But whichever way you want to 
argue the semantics of it, the fact still remains that the ‘the Final 
Solution of the Jewish Question’ enacted by the SS in the Nazi death 
camps -- at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau and 
Majdanek, along with Jungfernhof (in Latvia) and Maly Trostinets (in 
Byelorussia) -- is nowhere described or referred to in the novel.

http://www.holocaust-education.dk/lejre/udryddelseslejre.asp

best

>> Dora was not a death camp, it was a labour camp, and of course the 
>> scenes there are prominent, and the use of slave labour in the German 
>> weapons program is a central theme (and is possibly even symbolised 
>> in the "screaming" that comes across the sky in Pirate's dream at the 
>> opening of the novel.) But what's striking is that there's only one 
>> very brief mention of Auschwitz ("Auschwitz or Buchenwald" on p. 666) 
>> in the entire novel, and throughout there are just these veiled hints 
>> and intimations that a program of systematic genocide against the 
>> Jewish people was being carried out in Nazi Germany -- no newspaper 
>> headlines (like the one about the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima), 
>> no radio reports, no references in conversation between characters or 
>> in the narration. The closest we get is the mention of the "three 
>> Jewish families sent east" as a result of Katje's undercover work for 
>> the Dutch Resistance (97, 105) or the little German girl Slothrop 
>> runs into after the liberation of Dora whose doll has human hair. 
>> Insinuations. It's happening, but it's happening offstage, and that's 
>> the effect Pynchon was aiming for. And I think it's pretty close to 
>> what the history books and those who are still here tell us about 
>> that time too. The way the opening dream sequence evokes the death 
>> camp transports is consistent, both with Pirate's special "talent" 
>> and with Pynchon's decision not to represent the Shoah directly in 
>> his novel.