The most celebrated Shoah fictions focus on the rare rescuers, fictional non-Jewish victims or sympathetic perpetrators. But you cannot love Jews if you refuse to understand what happened to them, and why
August 18, 2025 14:52
Marvel’s X-Men (2000) begins in Auschwitz; X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) ends there. Bridget Jones’s mother begs her not to walk around 1990s London, “looking like someone from Auschwitz, darling”. If, before October 7, the glut of Shoah culture and allusion never bothered me – dream of Nazi criminals in Schindler’s List (1993), gas the Nazi child in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) – I now see a connection between these works, and the endurance of the hatred that inspired the Shoah. Because they amount to, by instalments, the erasure of the Jew from his own calamity, and history.
The three most famous novels about the Shoah are by non-Jews. The first is Schindler’s Ark (1982); the second is Sophie’s Choice (1979); the last is John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Here, Jews are stripped of Jewish character and hinterland, so the reason for their murder is obscured; the perpetrator is an object of fascination, often glamour; the Jew is replaced by the non-Jew to create a non-Jewish tragedy to rebuke the Jew himself; sometimes the Jew is the perpetrator. Inside these cumulative fictions the Jew becomes, as he has always been, a mythical being who cannot be loved or mourned; you cannot love, or harm, an idea. And of the overwhelmingly Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation that is gone there is almost nothing.
Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, filmed as Schindler’s List (1993), is the story of a Nazi rescuer and his Nazi nemesis, not a Jew, or even many Jews. People love tales of rescue but, as Dara Horn writes, there are so few – 30,000 rescuers from a pre-war population of 300 million – they could be a rounding error. A Shoah story, if it is honest, must be about Jews and death. What else can it be about?
The problem is not in its telling but in how, with its fame, Schindler’s Ark obscures other, more representative stories, sometimes deliberately. Schindler, for instance, was given a ring by the people he saved, inscribed: “He who saves a single life saves the world entire.” It’s a beautiful line, and a consoling lie: nine tenths of Polish Jewry died in the Shoah. The key line in the novel is: “The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf”. It does not touch the gulf.
Watching the film, I cannot forget, because Spielberg will not let me forget, that Schindler enjoyed the war. All his exultation is on the screen: when he pulls Itzhak Stern off the train to Auschwitz, you rejoice with him. One more life! German Hotties Save the World (Entire)!
Scenes from the novel where Jews had agency – the violinist Henry Rosner fiddling an SS officer to death; the gangster Max Redlicht refusing to spit on the Torah – were cut from the film. Instead, we have the cringing mass – the almost dead, the pre-dead, the fated dead – that dominates Shoah culture.
There is a fabrication close to the end: the one-more-life scene. Schindler collapses and weeps: he pulls out the things he could have sold for Jews. “I threw away so much money. I didn’t do enough.” This is the final battle of a sinner with his conscience, among the Jews who are the instrument of his redemption: Christian imagery imposed on Jewish death. (Joshua of Nazareth would understand: a very similar thing happened to him). Stern tells Schindler, “You did so much.” And this is absolution. He did enough, and, in the watching of the film – this is the insinuation – so have we.
In the last scene Liam Neeson lays a red rose on Schindler’s grave, magician to magician. Why him? To say thank you, Oskar – for the part? But – two Oskar Schindlers! How many lives is that? And seven Oscars! How many lives is that?
If Thomas Keneally writes the non-Jewish rescuer, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice presents the non-Jewish victim, Sophie, who is also an antisemite. She confides in the book’s narrator, Stingo, because her Jewish lover Nathan, who destroys Sophie (it took a Jew to do it, even after Auschwitz) is insane. In Auschwitz, Styron writes, “Although she was not Jewish, she [Sophie] had suffered as much as any Jew who had survived the same afflictions, and – as I think will be made plain – had in certain profound ways suffered more than most.” Profound and fictional ways.
The book’s climax is the titular choice: Sophie must choose which of her children will live. There is not atrocity enough for Styron in Auschwitz, so he invents Dr Jemand von Niemand of the SS, a “steadfast churchgoer … [who] had always planned to enter the ministry. A mercenary father forced him into medicine.”
In Auschwitz, von Niemand sought “to restore his belief in God, and at the same time to affirm his human capacity for evil, by committing the most intolerable sin that he was able to conceive?...One whose glory lay in its subtle magnanimity – a choice”. Styron’s “Shoah” novel has a Christian imperative at its heart and of all the anguished, vanished Jewish mothers of Europe, Styron couldn’t find one worthy of him. That was his choice. “Morning”, his novel ends, “excellent and fair”.
Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas combines Keneally’s and Styron’s elisions – non-Jewish rescuer, non-Jewish victim – to invent a non-Jewish rescuer and victim in the form of one child: Bruno, the son of the commandant of Auschwitz. It is a novel of stunning omission.
Boyne writes about two nine-year-old boys, German Bruno and Jewish Shmuel. At Auschwitz, Bruno meets Shmuel, the most un-Jewish Jewish child in fiction, and a prisoner. They realise they have the same birthday: “We’re like twins,” says Bruno. Shmuel agrees: “A little bit.” Boyne’s conceit is this: their fates might have been reversed. The German child could have been the victim; perhaps the Jew could have been the perpetrator. (When I am cynical, I wonder if this is a cautionary tale about being friends with a Jew. When I am yet more cynical, I wonder if Shmuel planned the whole thing.) In any case, they are the same boy. Bruno climbs under the fence to help Shmuel find his (presumably dead) father, puts on a pair of striped pyjamas, and is gassed to death with Shmuel.
The reader accepts Shmuel’s fate: he is already dead. (Another Jewish inmate mirrors this: when Bruno asks how long he has lived in Auschwitz, he says, “I think I’ve always been here.” He is one of Spielberg’s fated dead.) But we cannot accept Bruno’s death, because Boyne has used his skill to make us love him. You feel grief for him, because his fate is awry: he is not meant to be dead.
Shmuel is alive to nothing. He feels no anger, just placidity, and the reader feels no sadness, or guilt. Speech itself has been removed from Shmuel: his description of living in Auschwitz is: “It’s not very nice.” When Bruno causes him to be beaten, he says, “It’s alright, I don’t feel it anymore, I don’t feel anything anymore.” Bruno thinks the name Shmuel “sounds like the wind blowing”. I gagged at this: dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.
The novel – and the story of popular Shoah culture - can be told in one scene. “I came home one day,” Shmuel says, “and Mama said we couldn’t live in our house anymore.” “That happened to me too!” shouts Bruno.
The more contemporary novels treat Auschwitz as a painted curtain, or Oz. Little Dorothy could always go home, she just didn’t know it. They are mindless.
John Donoghue’s The Death’s Head Chess Club (2015) has a Jewish chess player in Auschwitz play for his life. At the end, he says Kaddish for the SS because – well, they suffered too. Sophie’s Choice, the film The Zone of Interest (2023), and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas all discuss the anguish of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. It wasn’t easy being in Auschwitz in 1942 – for anyone! Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) should have been a musical comedy. “I’m just a number,” the tattooist’s lover tells him. “You should know that. You gave it to me.” It is also, entirely accidentally, funny. At one point someone says: “Where is everybody?” Well, quite. Morris wonders why a Sonderkommando elects to live: “He too has chosen to stay alive for as long as he can, by performing an act of defilement on people of his own faith.” As in – one less life?
Ellie Midwood’s The Girl in the Striped Dress (2021) is “mostly based on a true story”: how the Slovakian Jew Helena Citrónová was beloved by the Waffen-SS soldier, Franz Wunsch, who protected her. In the novel the leading villain is a Jewish Sonderkommando, and Midwood has Helena marry Franz. In reality, Helena refused to speak to him after the war, moved to Israel, and married an IDF soldier.
This is only a small part of it, of course: it is an overwhelming glut, and it mirrors Primo Levi’s dream in Auschwitz, “varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they [survivors] had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to”.
The dreams were true. The glut exists because it is easy: in the end I think people are just too afraid to hear the truth. But you cannot love Jews if you refuse to understand what happened to them, and why; if you write myths around them and call it art. Still, it is what happened. We are everywhere and nowhere; we are fictional and real.
This is an extract from Shameless: Exploiting the Holocaust, Tanya Gold’s essay for the Jewish Quarterly, out August 22.
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