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OMER BARTOV
 PROFESSOR OF HISTORY
Brown Univeristy
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From: Bartov, Omer. Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation.
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33—One of the most striking aspects of battlefield descriptions in Great War literature is the extent to which they resemble accounts of the Holocaust. The similarity is rooted in the sense of existing in an unimaginable environment, one that no human mind, not even the most perverse, could have conjured in fiction. The lands of WW I and the Holocaust are the domain of the innocent.
34—That other link between the Holocaust and 1914-18: In both cases the millions devoured by the event stubbornly perceived it for a long time as something quite different from what it actually was, which goes some way to explain not only their willingness to enter that universe from which so many did not return, but also our own difficulty in understanding their psychology, indeed our reluctance to “empathize” with them, since they had been deceived while we already “know” the “truth” about their fate.
Hence, even if few of us would put it so bluntly, we perceive the victims as being complicit in their own destruction, the soldiers of the Great War by having marched so willingly into battle and conducted it for so long and with such untiring determination, the victims of the Holocaust by having put up so little resistance.
49—For the Holocaust was the almost perfect reenactment of the Great War, with the important correction that all the perpetrators were on one side and all the victims on the other. Everything else was there: the barbed wire, the machine guns, the charred bodies, the gas, the uniforms, the military discipline, the barracks. But this reenactment had the great advantage that it was totally safe for the guards.
49—Arriving at the camp, inmates were beset by a sense of unreality, disbelief, shock. Their descriptions often resemble those of soldiers arriving at the front, who were similarly struck by its “hellish,” nightmarish appearance: “All around us were screams, death, smoking chimneys making the air black and heavy with soot and the smell of burning bodies. It was just like a nightmare and it took weeks and weeks before I could believe it was really happening.”
“Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something…little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it…Was I awake? I could not believe it. No, none of this could be true. It was a nightmare!” “Many times I felt I must be dreaming, and I would call to myself: ‘Wake up! Wake up! You are having a nightmare!’ I would look around me, trying to wake up, but alas, my eyes kept on seeing the same dismal picture.”
It has been rightly noted that “the drift of modern history domesticates the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable. And the catastrophe that begins it is the Great War.”
50—Yet there is much reluctance to associate the imagery of the Great War with the Holocaust. This has to do both with the discomfort of perceiving national wars as instances of industrial killing and with the general tendency to insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, or at least on the differences between genocide and war.
57—The Event: In much of the English-speaking world it is called the Holocaust. This is a highly evocative term, of course, since it carries with it the connotation of sacrifice, without specifying who sacrificed whom for what. If the Jews were the victims, the Nazis the slaughterers, what then was the purpose of the sacrifice?
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