Why Are They Smiling?: Representations of the Shoah
Okay. It’s pretty much impossible to write anything about representations of the Holocaust (from here on our referred to as the Shoah) without talking about Adorno, so I’m going to get that out of the way immediately. German theorist and philosopher Theodor W. Adorno once wrote, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”[1] It’s amazing that this guy can just say something like that and now the rest of us are forced to bring it up anytime we want to say something about the Shoah. But the first thing that I will say about Adorno’s little claim here is that it’s wrong. I mean, who is he to determine how someone is to grieve? Who is he to determine how someone is to understand mass tragedy? Who is he?
Look, Adorno is a smart guy, I can’t attack his character like that. But to be fair, he’s calling every poet from the latter half of the 20th century—including those who were victims of the Shoah itself—barbarians, and that isn’t a kind term. In what sense can a poet be a barbarian? Isn’t poetry kind of “civilized”? And, as long as one is writing depressing and sad poetry, wouldn’t that be a proper way of trying one’s best to understand the Shoah? I mean, we can tickle ourselves with guilt over it, no?
Pretty much everyone agrees that how we represent the Shoah matters. But the answer to this problem isn’t easy, nor is it static or unchanging as we move further and further away from World War II temporally. And while this question hasn’t been collectively “answered,” there are certainly some unspoken rules regarding what is and what is not an appropriate representation of the Shoah. According Susan Gubar, “non-imaginative” representations are generally considered acceptable, such as documentary films or non-fiction accounts and journals, while more “creative” attempts (such as poetry or fiction-forms) in which one “imagines” a way of understanding and explaining the Shoah—are generally considered insufficient or even offensive. There is an expected tone of “objectivity” that is not—and cannot—exist in the work of imagination. This is because, according to Gubar, we claim to have no way of understanding the events of the Shoah, and therefore, we don’t bother with it.[2]
But really, the question is, what is the artist “using” the Shoah for? Why must they imagine the events in such a way to dramatize them? Is there a politic involved? Or, at the very least, who can use the Shoah and for what purpose, and how can we determine that? These questions are essentially impossible to answer. But one thing is certain, that the Shoah was horrific, sad, reprehensible (these words do not do it justice), and so our representations reflect those moods.
So, what might it mean to imagine joy in the Shoah? I’m not entirely sure it’s possible. Or, if one tries to imagine joy, it is only some strange form of joy, not joy itself, but a desperate, valiant maybe, yet vain, attempt. So, what is that form of joy? What can we do with it?
Let’s take a look at Randall Jarrell’s poem “In the Camp There Was One Alive.” The narrative is simple: a concentration is being liberated by Allied forces, and in the burning rubble, there is a young child still alive, yet dying. As Allied soldiers scan the debris, the child hears their footsteps, “They have come; and he calls to them / In gladness – it is the dead.” The child mistakes their footsteps for ghosts, perhaps family members or those who he spent time with in the camp, and he begins to talk to the voices of those ghosts. But he isn’t mistaking this, the ghosts are there, talking to him, crying for him, and saying his name, to which “He laughs out in joy.” It is hard for me to accept that there is any real “joy” in this scene, despite the use of the word. The simplest yet incredibly depressing explanation is that the boy is joyful for his death, his life having been so terrifying that he is excited at the prospect of its end. And I would not blame him for feeling that way, but I wonder if there is another way of thinking through this.
Let’s take a look at another example, this one being from the 2015 film Son of Saul, directed by László Nemes. The entire film follows the point of view of Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), mostly using shallow focus and framed closely on his face, as he spends a day in Auschwitz working as a Sonderkommando. Whatever is happening around him, Saul’s face remains almost perfectly stoic and emotionless throughout the film, with rare exceptions to show small degrees of anger. It is clear that for Saul to do what he must to survive, he has to suppress any significant emotions, and thus he takes on a cold and impassive posture. But at the very end of the film, after he almost unwillingly joined a revolt and has escaped the camp, a young boy stumbles upon the group of escapees, and looks at Saul. Saul, looking back at him, smiles and holds the smile until the boy runs away.
What about this boy makes Saul smile? Is this a type of joy? I guess, ultimately, what does a smile mean in a film about the Shoah? And it’s impossible not to ask this question; a smile disrupts all of our assumptions about the Shoah and what our representations of it look like. It is immediately out of place, questionable, and it signifies something important, yet what that is is unclear.
While I myself don’t know if I can correctly read the smiles in either “In the Camp There Was One Alive” or Son of Saul, I will say that, at the very least, they both challenge the way we can imagine the Shoah, an effort I find absolutely necessary. To show Saul smiling is to disrupt this proposed gaze of “objectivity” that is supposedly there in the documentary film, and it forces the viewer to question deeply the meaning of not only his smile, but of the Shoah as a whole. It says this: if one can imagine Saul smiling, perhaps one can imagine the Shoah, and begin to understand it, so as to protect ourselves from forgetting this tragedy, and to prevent ourselves from returning to it in the future.
[1] Theodor Adorno, Prisms
[2] Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew