There's a great deal of discussion on Holla Forums revolving around the Holocaust "Narrative" that exists today - that is, the way in which the schools, politicians, movies, and books portray the Holocaust. But I think this board suffers from a complete and utter ignorance in regards to actual Holocaust narratives (that is, first-hand accounts dealing with the event). In fact, there are a particular group of narratives that I find it worth bringing to your attention.
Immediately after the end of the war and their liberation from various German camps, the interned began sharing their experiences. Before the Holocaust "Narrative" that exists today was cemented, writers from many different nationalities and in many different languages published raw, first-hand accounts of events still fresh in their memory. For brevity's sake, we'll focus on three of these memiors: Janusz Nel Siedlecki/Krystyn Olszewski/Tadeusz Borowski's "We Were in Auschwitz", Primo Levi's "If This is a Man", and Margarete Buber-Neumann's "Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler". These works have a few curious aspects that are worth reflecting on:
1) Despite being written by three different groups (a trio of Christian Poles, an Italian Jew, and a German ex-Communist respectively) these books all describe very similar experiences, events, and camp dynamics. All are set in Auschwitz (or one of its constituent camps), and all paint Auschwitz in a remarkably comparable light - for instance, their portrayals of the arrivals of new prisoners and their categorization. Prior to the existence of a Holocaust "Narrative", before the fog of time and the pressures of the coming changes in society, a group of disparate prisoners wrote works that shared a lot in common.
2) These works are uncompromising and harsh towards all involved. Unlike movies or books about the Holocaust today, they do not paint a black and white narrative of victim/perpetrator. Borowski notes with almost perverse pride how his cunning allowed him to gain one ups on his fellow prisoners to survive. Nor do they have a narrow focus on the Jewish experience. Even Levi, a Jew, makes careful note of the various interned groups, their circumstances, their plights, and their internal dynamics. A common theme in all three is the way in which human's become monsters when striped of civilization, and their greatest critique of the camp is that its inhumanity turned humans into beasts. Rather than sending beasts to the camps, the camps made people into beasts.
3) The three not only corroborate each other, but are corroborated by the similarity of their accounts towards accounts of the Soviet Gulags - a source of inspiration for later German camps. They describe similar hierarchies (Guards, then Criminals - Urkas in Russian and Kapos in German, then privileged/clever prisoners, then the 'goners'). They describe work and food (food is almost the singular concern for prisoners in both cases) and camp life in eerily familiar terms. In fact, Neumann herself went through both camp systems consecutively, and thus her memoir provides a fascinating insight into the comparisons between the two.
