Who Gets to Tell the Story of the Holocaust? (Essay)

On the eve of Yom HaShoah, and the anniversary of her grandmother's deportation to a ghetto ahead of Auschwitz, Leah Eichler has some thoughts.

By Leah Eichler,

I wrote a rather dismissive book review for a The Globe and Mail in Canada in 2002 on a novella called I was Hitler’s Cat by N. J. Dodic. The book appears to be out of print and my own copy disappeared many years ago, but I’ve often thought of that book, and my review over the ensuing 21 years, with the questions “did the book have more merit than I gave it? and “did my personal bias weigh in?”

The book follows Hitler’s fictional cat through the last days of the war, where it witnesses the horrors of the Holocaust presented as a circus side show. While I appreciate black humour, I also grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, surrounded by survivors for whom the events of World War II were anything but funny.

What perturbed me back then was the proverbial slippery slope. Each year, more survivors die out. The most recent survey from The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany showed under 100,000 remain worldwide and that was in 2016.

Each year, we get closer to the day when no one will have first person memories of the event. Who tells the story then? I’m not merely referring to historical accounts but the way the Holocaust is presented in literature. Will the post-survivor era of writing open new caverns exposing the depths of human cruelty and survival or will it reduce us to a caricature of suffering holy men meekly accepting our final reckoning with God? Sheep to the slaughter or a meditation on the banality of evil still present today?