Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading

By Leona Toker

A literary scholar examines survival narratives from Russian and German concentration camps, shedding new light on testimony in the face of evil.
 
In this illuminating study, Leona Toker demonstrates how Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, especially how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker’s analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as how each text documents the writer’s experience in a form where fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony. Toker also views these texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression.
 
Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprún, illuminate the discussion. Toker also provides context for references to potentially obscure historical events and shows how they form new meaning in the text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253043559

Book preview

GULAG LITERATURE AND THE

LITERATURE OF NAZI CAMPS

JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor

GULAG LITERATURE

AND THE LITERATURE

OF NAZI CAMPS

An Intercontextual Reading

Leona Toker

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2019 by Leona Toker

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-04351-1 (hdbk.)

ISBN 978-0-253-04353-5 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-253-04354-2 (web PDF)

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To Iris, Nitzan, and Ariel

"I imagine there will be a flood of accounts. . . . Their value will depend on the worth of the witness, his insight, his judgment.

. . . And then there will be documents. . . . Later, historians will collect, classify, analyze this materials, drawing on it for scholarly words. . . . Everything will be said, put on record. . . . Everything in these books will be true . . . except that they won’t contain the essential truth, which no historical reconstruction will ever be able to grasp, no matter how thorough and all inclusive it may be."

The others look at him, nodding, apparently reassured to see that one of us can formulate the problem so clearly.

The other kind of understanding, the essential truth of the experience, cannot be imparted. . . . Or should I say, it can be imparted only through literary writing.

He turns toward me, smiling. Through the artifice of a work of art, of course!

—Jorge Semprún, Literature or Life

Contents

Acknowledgments

Intercontextuality: Introduction

1   The Gulag and Nazi Camps: From Improvisation to Stability

2   Two Strands of Concentration-Camp Literature: A Brief History of an Entanglement

3   The Muselmann and the Dokhodiaga

4   Forced Labor

5   The Drowned and the Reprieved

6   On the Way to Resistance

7   Faith

8   End Games

9   Survivor Guilt

Concluding Reflections

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

MY WORK ON this book continued the attempts made in Return from the Archipelago (Indiana University Press, 2000) to approximate an understanding of a specifically twentieth-century kind of suffering, that of the inmates of concentration camps. It is a tribute to the survivors of the Nazi and Soviet camps who have testified to their experience, often creating accounts to which one turns for the facts but on which one lingers owing to their art of representation.

I am grateful to the colleagues who have encouraged this project and given me the benefit of their insights. I mourn the passing of the earliest advisors of this work—H. M. Daleski (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Geoffrey Hartman (Yale), and Emily Budick (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). Alvin Rosenfeld of the University of Indiana, whose book on Holocaust literature was one of the first I read, as is true for thousands of others, has lent support to this project, read its results with constructive criticism, and gave me much valuable advice. The criticism of David Roskies (Jewish Theological Seminary and the Hebrew University) has led to an important change in the structure of the work; the expertise of Jeff Wallen (Hampshire College) has led both to tightening the material and to filling in gaps. At different stages of the work I have been stimulated by discussions with Pekka Tammi (Tampere University), Anja Tippner (Hamburg University), Elena Mikhailik (University of New South Wales), the writer and Shalamov scholar Valery Esipov (Vologda Exile Museum), Omri Ronen (University of Michigan–Ann Arbor), Beth Holmgren (Duke University), Markku Lehtimäki (University of Eastern Finland), Nora Buhks and Luba Jurgenson (the Sorbonne), Natalia Pervukhina (University of Tennessee–Knoxville), Jakob Lothe (University of Oslo), Gennady Barabtarlo (University of Missouri–Columbia), and Meir Sternberg, Tamar Yacobi, and Dan Laor (Tel Aviv University), as well as with my Hebrew University colleagues Yehiel Szeintuch, Dimitri Segal, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Sidra Ezrachi, Amos Goldberg, Manuela Consonni, Esther Cohen, Edward Waysband, and David Stromberg.

Earlier versions of different portions of the material have appeared in the following publications: On the legitimacy of comparisons: the Gulag ‘goner’ and the Auschwitz Muselmann, in Jews and Slavs, vol. 14, Festschrift for Professor Ilya Serman, 325–30 (Jerusalem: Gesharim; Moscow: Mosty kultury, 2004; in Russian); Testimony and Doubt: Varlam Shalamov’s ‘How It Began’ and ‘Handwriting,’ in Real Stories: Imagined Realities: Fictionality and Non-fictionality in Literary Constructs and Historical Contexts, ed. Markku Lehtimäki, Simo Leisti, and Marja Rytkönen, 51–67 (Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2007); Varlam Shalamov’s signs and symbols, in Paths in Art: Symbolism and European Culture in the 20th Century, ed. D. M. Segal and N. M. Segal Rudnik, 380–90 (Moscow: Vodolei, 2008; in Russian); Textes littéraires et documents d’archives: entre élision et allusion, in Le Goulag en heritage: Pour une anthropologie de la trace, ed. Elisabeth Anstett and Luba Jurgenson, 89–99 (Paris: Pétra, 2009)—revised English and Russian versions published as Literary Texts and Archival Documents: Between Elision and Allusion, Gulag Studies 2–3 (2009–10): 55–67, and Literatura i dokument: Opyt vzaimoprochtenia in Varlam Shalamov v kontekste mirovoi literatury i Sovetskoi istorii, ed. S. M. Soloviev, 103–10 (Moscow: Litera, 2013); Folk Theodicy in Concentration Camps: Literary Representations, in Knowledge and Pain, ed. Esther Cohen, Leona Toker, Manuela Consonni, and Otniel E. Dror, 211–29 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012); Rereading Varlam Shalamov’s ‘June’ and ‘May’: Four Kinds of Knowledge, in (Hi-)stories of the Gulag: Fiction and Reality, ed. Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal and Karoline Thaidigsmann, 193–203 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016); Representation of Forced Labor in Shalamov’s ‘Wheelbarrow I’ and ‘Wheelbarrow II,’ Mémoires en jeu / Memories at Stake 1 (September 2016): 77–85; A reconsideration of the concept of heroism in Shalamov’s stories, in Zakon soprotivleniya raspadu: Osobennosti prozy i poezii Varlama Shalamova i ikh vospriyatie v nachale XXI veka, ed. Lukasz Babka, Sergey Soloviev, Valery Esipov, and Ian Makhonin, 69–78 (Prague: Národní knihovna České republiky, 2017; in Russian); and Towards a Literary History of Concentration Camps: Comparative of ‘Entangled,’ in Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement, and Survival, ed. Anna Artwińska and Anja Tippner, 13–29 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019). I thank the editors of these collections, as well as Professor Olga Cooke, editor of Gulag Studies, for their feedback.

The structure and texture of this book implements the lessons learned from Michael Scammell’s comments on Return from the Archipelago and from the editorial supervision of that 2000 publication by Janet Rabinovich and Dee Mortensen.

I am grateful to my mother, Professor Nedda Strazhas, my first reader, critical and encouraging. My husband, Gregory Toker, has likewise been consistently supportive and made important comments on the logic of the analysis.

In 2004–2007 the project received the generous support of the Israel Science Foundation, grant 435/04. The help of my research assistant, Irina Lyan (now Dr. Lyan), in the framework of this grant, has been invaluable.

GULAG LITERATURE AND THE

LITERATURE OF NAZI CAMPS

Intercontextuality: Introduction

THIS BOOK IS devoted to narratives of the survivors of some of the worst sites of human suffering in the twentieth century—the Soviet Gulag and the Nazi concentration camps. The works chosen for analysis are those literary representations of the Gulag that can shed light on narratives of the KZ (the Konzentrantsionslager) and, conversely, those narratives of Nazi camp survivors that provide indirect comments on the Gulag and its literature.¹

Having started as a means of repression and terrorization of antifascists, the KZ eventually became one of the main loci of the Holocaust. The term Holocaust for the Nazi genocidal drive against Jews came into frequent use in the late 1950s (see Bauer 1978, 31); it covers the processes that began with persecution and ghettoization and ended with mass murder. In its concentration-camp constituent and in the history of resistance, the Holocaust overlaps with the experience of non-Jewish victims of Nazism. Holocaust literature has been usefully defined by David Roskies and Naomi Diamant as all forms of writing, both documentary and discursive . . . that have shaped the public memory of the Holocaust and been shaped by it (2012, 2); mutatis mutandis, Gulag literature, whose corpus I have attempted to organize in Return from the Archipelago (2000), can be defined in a similar way.² Holocaust literature, however, comprises texts that in Gulag literature would be considered background materials—not only accounts of the ghettos as holding camps for Jews en route to death (Clendinnen 1999, 1), killing ravines such as Babi Yar, and Nazi concentration and extermination camps but also narratives about different aspects and areas of Jewish life in Europe overrun by the Nazis. The narratives of, for instance, Aharon Appelfeld and Ida Fink evoke life in the shadow of the ideology that called for an extirpation—physical, genetic, and cultural—of Jews and Gypsies (and, according to Hitler’s master plan, eventually other peoples as well)—they are an intrinsic part of Holocaust literature.³ By contrast, Soviet narratives of life outside prisons and camps, though in their shadow (in particular, the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam), form contexts for Gulag literature rather than a part of that corpus. My focus is on literary works, memoiristic or fictionalized, in which firsthand witnesses represent the common feature of the Soviet and Nazi systems of oppression—the network of concentration camps. Each camp system provides a context for the other, and this relationship also extends to the narratives of survivors.

This study combines close readings of individual works with historical contextualization. The analysis is intercontextual: each of the two literary strands is seen as a context for the other.

A Lesser Evil?

The term concentration camps stems from the Spanish-Cuban notion of reconcentration, that is, relocating the nodes of the rural population to prevent civilians from extending support to guerilla fighters. In a recognizable form, concentration camps were first introduced by the Spanish troops in Cuba in 1896 and even in earlier colonial antiguerrilla warfare (see Scheipers 2015; Smith and Stucki 2011; and Stucki 2018); then they were resorted to in 1900 by the British in the Boer War.⁴ They mainly functioned as an administrative measure against potential, rather than actual, opponents; the population of entire villages was interned. The aim was to cut the militants off from their resource platforms, but the supplies made available to the interned population were insufficient and did not compensate for disrupting the traditions of material culture that had maintained the members of the communities in a reasonable state of health. The result was a very high mortality rate, especially among children.

This etiology of the word (re)concentration was soon forgotten, and concentration came to be perceived as nearly synonymous with condensation, or gathering together. Both in Cuba and in South Africa, gathering people together in crowded facilities involved lethal neglect and privation, deliberate or caused by the hastiness of the moves. This pattern, a side effect of relocation—or perhaps, for the perpetrators, its bonus—would recur throughout the history of concentration camps.⁵

Though concentration camps were both symptomatic and productive of large-scale misery, in their infancy they were sometimes perceived as signs of progress in moral practice,⁶ or at least a lesser evil in comparison with the take-no-prisoners civil war principles, or what is now called ethnic cleansing. In the first years of Soviet rule, the term concentration camps was still free from the odium that it would acquire later. In an order of June 4, 1918, Trotsky demanded that the mutinous Czechoslovak prisoners of World War I be detained in concentration camps (see Heller and Nekrich [1982] 1986, 66). It is not clear what kind of bivouacs Trotsky imagined. In his 1930 autobiography, My Life, for example, the chapter dealing with his quite comfortable detention in Canada in 1917 is called In the Concentration Camp. Despite his belief in the need for revolutionary violence, for Trotsky the idea of concentration camps engendered no cognitive dissonance with the progressive agenda.

Two months later, in August 1918, Lenin too recommended, along with the merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards, a seemingly milder measure—locking up of suspects in concentration camps outside the city (1970, 143–44).⁷ This was a blueprint for the prophylactic use of concentration camps to incapacitate potential opponents of the regime—whereas the active opponents and members of such a priori marked groups as kulaks, priests and White Guards were to be subjected to the merciless terror of summary executions.

In Germany, on March 13, 1921, the Völkischer Beobachter, the propaganda organ of the Nazi party, printed Hitler’s call: Let us stop the Jews from undermining our nation, if necessary by keeping their germs safely in concentration camps (Goeschel and Wachsmann 2012, 9). This did not switch on warning lights among his admirers, possibly because the camps were already a part of the German political lexicon, what with the memories of the collection camps (Sammellager) into which communists had been herded, to preempt insurrection, during the postwar crisis of 1919. Those camps were quickly shut down once the political crisis had ebbed (Overy 2005, 600), which helped to maintain the idea of the camp as a temporary, makeshift, nonlethal form of imprisonment. In his Holocaust novel Fateless, Imre Kertész notes that, for young Hungarian prisoners, even on arrival in Auschwitz in 1944, the word camp was surprising but did not mean anything particularly frightening: "The expression camp . . . was new to me but was quite understandable from the German word Lager" (68). The word camp, in English and its equivalents in Russian and in German connote both roughing it and a relief from the hardship of travel, hunt, or march.⁸ A camp is a makeshift way station for those who have left their usual habitat or else a temporary locus outside common social life. In its original sense, the word evokes both motion and stasis, travel and halting, exertion and rest. The uses of this word in the twentieth century have drastically changed its semantics so that an adjective (e.g., youth camp, summer camp) has become necessary to allow it to keep its untainted early meanings. This shift is a path by which the poet Anthony Hecht moves toward the memorialization of the Holocaust victims in The Book of Yolek (see Pozorski 2016). And in part 4 of his 1970 poem A v eto vremia (In the meantime), the Soviet dissident writer Yuli Daniel wonders about the meaning of konts in kontslager’ (in Russian, the term for concentration camp is an abbreviation) and links it to the word konets (end). Thus, contscamps are the end—they put a stop to humanism, to emotional and spiritual life, to life itself. For many German civilians the notion of Konzentrationslager had acquired an ominous significance already in the second half of the 1930s, though its acronym KZ was sometimes ironically deciphered as Konzertlager (concert camps), a veiled reference to the shouts and the sounds of blows (Kempowski 1979, 23, 29).

The setting up of the camps meant that the regime had encountered a wider resistance than could have been contained by traditional prisons. In the tsarist Russian Empire, penal institutions could house about 200,000 inmates—fewer than one-tenth of Gulag prisoners in 1945. For ideological reasons, postrevolutionary Russia could not build new prisons. Under socialism the crime rate was supposed to fall since its social causes were expected to be eliminated, and the limited means available for construction were to be used on housing and industry. It was more politically correct to transfer the surplus prison inmates to would-be temporary facilities, such as vacated monasteries or manor houses, or hastily constructed barracks.⁹ Actually, the relative cheapness of setting up such camps encouraged their proliferation. In Germany, fifteen years later, when habeas corpus was suspended through the Enabling Act after a pretext provided by the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933 (see Dawidowicz [1975] 1976, 65–68), concentration camps, first referred to as protective custody, moved out of the Hitler’s fantasies into reality. There too some of the early camps were set up hastily in derelict buildings, former pubs, sports grounds, hotels, and even on ships (Goeschel and Wachsmann 2012, 4). Soon enough, more stable barrack camps were custom made.

The history of the Gulag involved the consolidation of the temporary facilities in fortified complexes (in particular, on the Solovetsky Islands in the late 1920s), followed by their spread (aptly compared in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago to that of metastases) and the gradual codification of rules and practices. The condition of prisoners depended on the specificities of the political situation, on the climate, on the luck of being sent to a veteran camp rather than to a new improvisational one, on the camp’s location (in the center or periphery of camp complexes), on the kind of forced labor (canal building, mining, lumbering, construction, or, if one was fortunate, agricultural, medical, or office work), on the fluctuating ratio of the supply and demand of labor, on a strong or diluted presence of criminal convicts, and on the character or vested interests of local chiefs. The fluidity of the conditions, within a smaller and darker range, was even greater in Nazi concentration camps, whose history unfolded over a shorter period and whose victims had a much shorter average life span.

In both cases, however, the initial sense of the makeshift nature of camps and their partly or wholly extrajudicial standing promoted arbitrary rule and random atrocities, along with systematic ones. The fate of ordinary prisoners, en masse, was frequently decided by the weighing of expediences in some higher echelons, impenetrable to individual victims. This is the theme that runs through the passages from the Holocaust and Gulag literature discussed in the following section. To illustrate how the reading of Gulag literature can affect our reading of Holocaust texts and vice versa, I shall now turn to one of their shared topoi—the motif of arbitrarily changing orders.

Example: The Topos of Changing Orders

In the third chapter of Fateless, the Hungarian writer and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész (1929–2016) tells of something strange ([1975] 1992, 31). The protagonist-narrator, a Budapest teenager on his way to work in the oil refinery on Csepel Island, is taken off a bus along with the other Jewish passengers. He does not realize that they are being arrested and that their destination is either an execution site or prison. There is just one policeman in charge at this particular city border post, and he has turned it into a game: those taken off the earlier buses have been told to hide and enjoy the bewilderment of the new arrivals. The victims’ understanding of the serial character of the operation is thus delayed. The nice policeman does not seem to really know what to do with the growing mass of people—he has not received further orders. As if to protect the assembled Jews from the elements, he suggests that they go to the nearby customhouse. This is their first captivity, but they are slow to understand it, especially when the policeman appeals to their intelligence and discipline (33).¹⁰ No one tries to escape yet. The wait is irksome, though they have been told that the impending document check is just a formality. By the end of the workday the policeman gets new orders by telephone: We overheard his hurried voice coming from his room, referring to some change of plans (40). Eventually, the whole group is marched to the city in a column, which blends with similar columns coming from other border posts. During this beautiful clear summer afternoon, a dissonance is produced by the reactions of the passersby—a kind of hurried, hesitant, almost furtive curiosity (41). Then a streetcar wedges in, and a few adults from the column use the confusion to escape. The protagonist does not understand why they should do so—for fun? He does not follow suit: I had enough time for it, but still my sense of honor proved to be the stronger of the two urges (42). In other words, the protagonist-narrator’s upbringing makes him regard fleeing from the column as indecorous, dishonorable, and perhaps indecent.¹¹

The columns are taken to a makeshift prison—in hindsight, a threshold of hell.¹² What had the change of orders been? Logistics of the march or the decision to send the workforce to concentration camps rather than straight into the Danube?¹³ These alternatives are not present in the mind of the protagonist. Rather, the implications of the change-of-orders topos would be recognized by the informed reader.

A change in orders is also implied in the following recollection of the Gulag prisoner A. P. Butskovsky.¹⁴ In December 1953 he was transferred to Camp Nevelskoy, to work on the construction of a dock on the shore of the Strait of Tartary. A tunnel to Sakhalin was to be built under the strait; the project was eventually discontinued. There was no stopping the rumor that this was the end of the line for us, that we were to die here building this dock. We got no letters, and all links with the outside world were cut off (Solzhenitsyn 2010, 199). Evidently, the construction was meant to be secret. Then something strange happened:

One day we were taken into a small ravine with cliffs on either side; they set up machine guns on the heights and aimed them at us. I don’t know what they had in mind for us, but in any case they kept us here a very long time. Our guards fell back much farther than they normally did. We didn’t do any work that day. They might even have been checking how they could bury us after an execution. In any case, something was being planned against the politicals.

Two days after that incident we learned about the arrest of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Beria. The camp administration was in some confusion, but it was ready to carry out an order to eliminate political prisoners. (199)

Someone in command must have sensed a change in the wind and did not sanction the massacre.¹⁵ The prisoners could not have been aware that the massacres of remaining captives of Nazi camps before the Allies could liberate them were planned and partly implemented in 1945, as were the massacres of NKVD prisoners in territories about to be occupied by the Nazis in 1941.¹⁶ At the time of composition, however, the memoirist was likely to have known at least about the massacres perpetrated by the Nazis. Tellingly, Butskovsky records no feeling of relief when the prisoners are led away from the ravine. Rather, his memory seems to be petrified, replicating, as it were, the fatigue of his body and the frozen state of his soul when he received a reprieve from speedy death, whether or not he understood it. His memoir suggests by omission what other survivors deal with explicitly: the muted response to being reprieved as part of the complex problem of a goner’s surface indifference to life and death. I shall return to this in chapter 5.

The two change-of-orders episodes, initiating a descent into inferno in Kertész’s book and, conversely, foretelling the regime’s end game in Butskovsky’s memoir, share a number of semiological features. One of them is the helplessness of the victims—physical, psychological, and cognitive. Their fate is being decided in distant quarters, by the local adherents of the Führerprinzip, who intuit and align themselves with the leaders’ unstated policies and translate them into commands. Indeed, the murders were a matter of decisions under circumstances that would have allowed for other responses as well.¹⁷ Another feature, a literary topos in its own right, is the victims’ semiotic perplexity, implicitly contrasting with the memoirists’ hindsight: the narration involves submerged catalogs of signs and symptoms that call for deciphering. In Kertész’s book, the horrible is beginning to happen, and the protagonist is in denial about its signs. But could he, in his teens, have known or imagined such developments so far outside his cultural horizons? His very strengths, the features that he is proud of, defeat him—his sense of honor, his habits of propriety, and his culture overlapping with that of the authorities prevent him from trying to flee. Bewilderment turns him into a sheep led to slaughter.¹⁸ The story of his arrest might, moreover, double as an indirect comment on the nonresistance of Soviet citizens during their arrests: decorous conduct (deplored by Solzhenitsyn in the first chapter of The Gulag Archipelago), the sense-of-honor self-delusion, valorization of the kul’turnost’ of body language (see Dunham 1976, 19–23), and a reluctance to recognize the finality of the change. Conversely, the elision of the expected sense of relief in the stories of the reprieved Gulag prisoners may be a comment on the troubled representation of the release from concentration camps in the memoirs of Holocaust survivors.

The narratives do not merely shed light on one another but also comment, albeit indirectly, on broader issues. The hide-and-surprise game in Kertész’s text is symbolic: the victims are manipulated to participate in deceiving and betraying themselves and their fellow victims, knowingly or unwittingly collaborating with the perpetrators—an insistently recurrent concern in Holocaust narratives. The reader of Kertész’s well-crafted novel has to decipher the semiotics of the episodes but is likely to register their symbolic load directly. The reader of Butskovsky’s straightforward memoir, however, can appreciate the congruence of the narrative stance with the weight of the recorded human experience. The sense of difficulty overcome—one of the sources of our spontaneous appreciation of the artistic merit of a work—is here associated not merely with the axiological appropriatedness of the form of expression but also with the caliber of the experience rendered: the feat of survival and the courageous summoning of one’s vital forces to relive the past and bear witness. The intentness commanded by such texts makes it hard for us to separate our moral outrage at the events narrated from our appreciation of the quality of the telling.

Literature and Historiography

The main primary sources discussed in this book are literary narratives by former prisoners of concentration camps.¹⁹ When such narratives first appeared, they were read primarily for the facts. These days, when sources for factual information are ample, literary scholars feel justified in focusing not only on the content of literary testimony but also on the narrative features that allow it to bring home to us those aspects of human experience that elude historiographical discourse. Literary testimony is multifunctional: its aesthetic appeal combines with pragmatic functions, such as attesting, consciousness raising, and context emendation (see Toker 2000, 7–8). The relative dominance of the different functions changes in the process of individual or collective reception, but in the most effective of literary testimony, the relationship between them remains that of mutual support.

The value of survivor narratives as historical testimony has not always been self-evident. Laying the groundwork for Holocaust historiography in The Destruction of European Jews (1961), Raul Hilberg abstained from including even strictly factographic survivor memoirs among his sources, considering them subjective and unreliable. Since the mid-1960s—that is, since the turn to survivor testimony registered extempore by Elie Wiesel (1970, 7) and comprehensively discussed by Annette Wieviorka in The Era of the Witness ([2002] 2006)—the imbalance between archival and narrative sources has been redressed. For example, Saul Friedländer’s two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997, 2007) makes use of both. Conversely, early studies of the Gulag were massively indebted to survivor narratives because of the paucity, inaccessibility, and unreliability of archival materials before the 1990s (and in the recent decade). Moreover, in the history of the collective memorialization of the Gulag, it was fiction rather than memoir literature that played the central role. The first texts on Gulag experience to be published in the Soviet Union (rather than abroad) after the public condemnation of Stalinist crimes at the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party in 1961 were fictional—Solzhenitsyn’s 1962 novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Georgy Shelest’s short story The Nugget (Samorodok).²⁰ Though these works were followed by a trickle of memoir literature in the Soviet press, the next major event in the history of Gulag literature was the samizdat circulation of Varlam Shalamov’s short stories.

The virtual master narrative of the camps needs both historiography and survivor narratives. For example, when discussing the strikes and rebellions in the Gulag in 1953–55, former prisoners tend to attribute these events to the changed demography in the camps (GA 5, chap. 2) or to the fact that the improved rations allowed the prisoners food for thought (Scholmer 1954, 232–33).²¹ Historical research supplements this by foregrounding acute personnel shortages in remote camps—more than ever before, such camps served as the last refuge for officers and managers of the Gulag who had become hopeless alcoholics and moral degenerates (Ivanova [1997] 2000, 175) and whose corruption and abuses of authority were often the last straw (175–80). The present study takes historical research into account, but its methods and materials are literary, and the pieces of the mosaic that it puts together come mainly from survivor narratives.²²

Studies of life writing (e. g., Olney 1980; Eakin 1985, 1999) show how the pragmatic goals of each work of documentary prose and the self-protective workings of the writers’ memory may influence the content of the testimony. However, in the process of reading documentary prose or narratives of testimony, one tends to accept their content as accurate—so long as it is not proved otherwise by other sources or subjected to doubt by their internal features.

Comparison and Traces of Entanglement

A number of historical studies have compared the types of political persecution and genocidal waves for which Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes were responsible.²³ Many literary-critical studies have been devoted to the testimony of the victims of both these regimes.²⁴ The present analysis focuses on those cases where the two bodies of literature about concentration camps provide helpful contexts for each other—where what is clear in one literary corpus sheds light on what is obscure in the other. Insofar as literary works double as historical testimony, this comparative method may add to our understanding of the particulars of the prisoners’ experience, as well as of the potentialities of narrative representation.

This intercontextual method leaves space for alertness to the effects that the two strands of history, as well as the two literary corpora associated with them, exerted on each other. In the survey of the rise of the Soviet and Nazi camps in chapter 1, I note the possibility of entanglements between the developments of the two camp systems.²⁵ Chapter 2 traces entanglements between the two strands of literature, the narratives of the Gulag and the narratives of Nazi camps, in the process of mutual, one-sided, or deferred observation—entanglements as persistent and deep-seated reactions to the other side (Fox 2012, 4). The chapters that follow involve close analyses of texts from the Gulag corpus in the context of materials about Nazi camps, or vice versa—texts from the Holocaust corpus in the context of information about the Gulag. Some of the chapters juxtapose accounts of homologous experience in the two camp systems. With the passage of time and changes in the generations of readers, these narratives become less self-explanatory; one of the aims of my analysis is to provide a partial compensation for the growing obscurity of their references.

"Every declarative sentence that one speaks or writes leaves out more than it grasps. Nevertheless, the Holocaust negates the equation between understanding and simplification; it resists the belief that any this can be fully understood without attending to virtually every that" (Petropoulos and Roth 2005, xix). This statement is no less true of the Gulag: what it was like in the camps cannot be fully reconstructed through imagination or grasped by analytic reason. The inevitable complexities of judgment and of suspending judgment demand humility in writing about camp experience.²⁶ On the other hand, any rediscovered factual detail and any responsible mental operation in the processing of the material may complicate, refine, or modify our model approximations of concentration-camp experience and its contexts, or at least improve the ethical sensitivity of our discourse on this subject.

Drawing analogies is among the most perilous of analytic procedures: if all cats are gray, it is because the perceiver is benighted. Yet it can be justified if, as noted earlier, the prominent features of one of the terms provide a comment on the veiled features of the other. That which is explicit in the semiotics of the narratives of Nazi camps can elucidate what remains inchoate in the literary processing of the Gulag—and conversely, that which is systematically explored in the literature of the so-called red camps may remain understated or overlooked in the literature about the so-called brown ones. The nature of some of their shared features was clearer to prisoners of the Nazis because of the greater intensity of the phenomena in question. Others were more prominent in the Gulag because of the greater length of time in which they were unfolding.

Jürgen Kocka describes comparison as discussing two or more historical phenomena systematically with respect to their similarities and differences in order to reach certain intellectual aims (2003, 39). Much depends on what those intellectual aims may be. The legitimate ones—heuristic, descriptive, analytical, and paradigmatic (39) are to be distinguished from the agenda of competitive suffering and similar struggles over social capital. The purpose of my comparison is predominantly heuristic: to identify questions and problems that one might miss, neglect, or just not invent otherwise (40).²⁷

Whether or not the Nazi and Soviet authorities learned from each other’s tutelary or monitory examples, the place and function of the camps in each regime was in some measure affected by reciprocal observation and transfer (cf. Patel [2003] 2005, 18). Things that were unthinkable in one of the systems may have become thinkable because practiced in the other. In particular, at overlapping periods and eventually in overlapping spaces (see Snyder 2010, 377), the totalitarian regimes responsible for the Gulag and the KZ created a moral climate for each other, despite the differences in their discourse and their proclaimed ultimate goals. The fact that some features of the institutions and of the existential positions of their inmates are clearly evident in one of the systems and camouflaged in the other usually also carries a semiotic load: distinctions compete with analogies for moral attention.

The issue of the legitimacy of comparisons is complicated by the Holocaust-uniqueness debates that have consumed much intellectual energy in recent decades.²⁸ I disagree with Tzvetan Todorov’s view of decorum, according to which a Gentile must emphasize the uniqueness of the Holocaust whereas a Jew should focus on its similarity to various genocides. All the terms in this chiasmus—Jew, Gentile, uniqueness, similarity—are sweeping generalizations. The label unique, as in the Holocaust is a unique event, is language-bound, overused, and nearly meaningless unless philosophically defined. As Yehuda Bauer has pointed out, insistent arguments on both sides of the issue are paths to different kinds of mystification (1978, 23–24). There are prominent features that single the Holocaust out from other atrocities, such as the Armenian genocide of 1915 or the Rwanda genocide of 1994. In addition, there are certain features of the Stalinist Great Terror that find themselves repeated in Yugoslavian camps and in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, as well as in Chinese, Vietnamese, and North Korean labor camps,²⁹ but these features do not recur as a full syndrome. Those other catastrophes developed singular (uniquely atrocious) syndromes of their own: "Every country and every region has its own Sonderweg" (Kocka 1999, 48). Sustained attention to the history and the significance of each is a moral imperative for both research and memorialization.

Frequently concomitant with the debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust is a tendency to obfuscate the specifically Jewish experience of World War II. Attempts to downplay the fact that the Jewish people were the first and immediate targets of the Nazis were systematic in the Western media of the 1950s and, for a different though overlapping set of reasons, in the Soviet media until the mid-1980s (see Epelboin and Kovriguina 2012; Toker 2013a and 2013b). This tendency is now fashionable in the so-called progressive discourse and even in some of the official statements of politicians (e.g., Catherine Ashton’s remarks on the International Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2014). Their subtext is often antisemitic.³⁰ However, the very fact of the uniqueness debate and the widespread tendency to use the Holocaust as a basis for comparisons point to the ways in which it haunts collective memory despite sundry defenses. One of the defenses against that specter was the Historikerstreit, the debate among German historians that erupted in the 1980s, sparked by a reluctance to see Germany as responsible for an incomparable crime and hence by the preference for seeing this crime as one in a historical series of war crimes and crimes against humanity, prominently including those of Stalin’s regime.³¹

In the Jewish discourse the problem of the uniqueness of the Holocaust is sometimes reformulated in terms of the history of the specifically Jewish suffering: Was the Shoah merely a part of the history of Jewish catastrophes, including the destruction of the first and the second temples? Did it merely continue the line of massacres that wound through York, Mainz, Nemerov, and Kishinev? Or was it a qualitatively different event (see Edrei 2007, 39–54)? Ultraorthodox communities in Israel sometimes mark the Holocaust on the tenth of the month of Tevet, when it is customary to say the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. However, the mainstream and officially legislated Memorial of the Catastrophe and Heroism (Shoah ve-gevurah) is on the twenty-seventh of the month of Nissan, associated with the Warsaw ghetto uprising.³² A gap between the past and the future hovers between these two dates, standing, respectively, for an attempt to create a memorial for the Holocaust that views it as part of the continuity of Jewish history and an attempt to create a memorial that views it as a cataclysmic event representing the beginning of a radically new era in Jewish history (Edrei 2007, 44), an era marked by the massiveness of the destruction but also by the Jewish secular self-determination and the establishment of the state of Israel.

The most prominent among the features of the final solution is the fact that the goal was total extermination. Not a single Jewish man, woman or child was to survive, or—except for a few who were well-hidden or overlooked—would have survived had Hitler won the war because Jewish birth was sufficient cause to merit torture and death; this goal may have been an end in itself rather than a pragmatic project serving such ends as political power or economic greed (Fackenheim 1982, 12). Still, when Fackenheim notes that to link Auschwitz with Hiroshima is not to deepen or widen one’s concern with humanity and its future but to evade the import of Auschwitz and Hiroshima alike (1982, 12–13), one is left asking in what sense—causal, rhetorical, or other—the word link is used. I propose to reverse the issue. Instead of linking the Gulag and the Holocaust for the sake of broadening our concern with humanity,³³ and taking care not to trivialize the Gulag or normalize the Holocaust, I examine the ways in which our understanding of each specific phenomenon can be improved by insights suggested by its identifiable counterpart.

The political import of the uniqueness debate has changed under the influence of postcolonial studies, as well as studies of slavery. In his 2009 Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg rejects the zero-sum game in which scholarly attention to one of the issues is believed to come at the expense of the other (see also Craps and Rothberg 2011), while also showing the entanglement between the historical strands in question. Collective memory of the Holocaust need not be crowding the memory of African American history out of the public space of American collective consciousness (Rothberg 2009, 2).³⁴ One might add that public consciousness in Europe and beyond would be demeaned by any denial of its ability to hold the memory of the Holocaust without prejudice to the memory of the Armenian genocide, the Gulag, or the Ukrainian Terror Famine (the Holodomor). Comparing the incomparable, to borrow the title of Marcel Detienne’s 2000 book,³⁵ need not be detrimental to the terms in the juxtaposition. Nor need there be a straight line running from memory to identity (Rothberg 2009, 4). Cultural identity is a shortcut to the semiology of each of these subjects as it facilitates the reading of signs, while awareness of one’s own cultural identity and that of the other helps to deautomatize one’s response to their coding.

Factography and Narrative Technique

So long as survivor narratives are treated not as transparent channels toward historical truth but as facts in their own right (C. Ginzburg 1992), and so long as they are not our only sources for the knowledge of historical facts, they are a major aid in our attempts to understand the human experience behind statistical and historiographical statements. They assist our