BtZ42 this section

[rich]

Part of the reason for that, as Timothy Snyder mentions in Bloodlands and
Black Earth was that much of that perception was made by the West. Those in
Ukraine and Belorussia saw a different holocaust but that was mostly
forgotten (until now), partly due to Stalin and past-war communist
suppression of jewish deaths by Nazi Germany.

Has anyone mentioned Wiesel's support for Netanyahu?

rich

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 10:19 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I think Elie Wiesel’s writing gives a powerful sense of why the ovens
> became the dominant language. Jews were killed in several ways: frequently
> shot, machine gunned into mass graves, bayoneted,  starved, worked to
> death, cold exposure, ‘scientific’ experiments , and after the mass killing
> was already underway Jewish people were murdered via the inexpensive
> unbloody efficiency of gas chambers. But the numbers killed required mass
> disposal of bodies and cremation was the industrial solution. The fires are
> what survivors remember most vividly.  It stank; It turned people into ash,
> made them disappear without trace, or place.  It was the final step in a
> methodical attempt at global genocide, the erasure of a people.
> Another similarity in this chapter in GR to the events of the Holocaust is
> the difference between Gottfried and Katje. Many Jewish people saw or were
> warned about what was coming, many fled but many were in denial, refusing
> to see what was happening and even cooperating with the deportation of
> other Jews.
>
> At any rate, and by whatever mechanism or reason, the language of ovens is
> so common that some who have not looked at the details of the  holocaust
> think most  victims were burned alive. This did happen occasionally but was
> uncommon.
>
> For Pynchon it also carries forward into the threat of  Nuclear fire
> enabled by burning rocket fuel ( or bomber fuel), which is where the arc of
> the story is going.
>
>
>
>
> > On Jun 19, 2016, at 1:16 PM, Richard Romeo <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Why ovens became a metaphor for the Holocaust perplexes me since most
> were already dead before they were placed in them (at least in the death
> camps)
> > Misappropriation of the word that became conventional wisdom over time
> most likely
> >
> > rich
> >
> >
> >> On Jun 19, 2016, at 7:07 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> The Oven chapter. And GR is NOT about the Holocaust AT ALL? Don't think
> that holds up.
> >> How does the Hansel & Gretel Story work as depth metaphor and there are
> other (is another)
> >> Great Northern Myth at work.
> >>
> >> Why a threesome?
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160620/709474f0/attachment.html>