Author’s Note: THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST: A Journalist’s Guide to History
Podcast playlist on YouTube: “Things You Didn’t Know About the Holocaust”
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Shoah or Hashoah is the Hebrew word for what has now become known in English as the Holocaust. The word Holocaust is what we will be using in this book.
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Anecdote about place names in Europe:
During the time my husband Mitch and I were stationed with the U.S. Army in Munich, Germany from September 1970 to May 1972 we overheard two young Americans talking on a train. They had unsuccessfully been trying to find Florence on a local map. Having learned ourselves that place names were in the language of the map, Mitch and I knew that Florence on the map was actually Firenze.
Why am I sharing this anecdote now? Because place names in Europe change depending on which government is in charge, what language the name is being expressed in, etc. What’s equally confusing is country names.
On a chest in my living room I have a children’s puzzle (ages 4 and above) of the current countries of Europe. This helps me with some of the lesser-known countries. It doesn’t help with the countries of Europe just before WWI or after WWI or as the Nazis began annexing and conquering other European regions or countries in the 1930s. Or the changes from after WWII to now.
And then there are variant spellings in the same language ….
Shakespeare himself didn’t always sign his last name with the same spelling. In early 20th Century Europe where countries changed hands and languages at an often dizzying speed, we certainly cannot expect the spelling of names even in the same language to be consistent.
To hear an explanation of a place name in Poland whose pronunciation sounds very different depending on the language spoken, listen to the first few minutes of the interview below:
One other European place name anecdote:
Years ago my husband had a law firm client who was a Holocaust survivor born in Ruthenia, a place you won’t find today on any current European maps. When the client went to renew his passport, the clerk said that the client had written his country of birth — Hungary — incorrectly. The client insisted he knew where he had been born. The clerk said that part of Europe was now Ukraine and the client’s passport had to state Ukraine as the country of birth.
Quick word about historical dates:
As with any historical record, there are discrepancies. For example, the date the Jews of Warsaw were told they had to enter the Warsaw Ghetto area (October 1940) was earlier than the date that the Warsaw Ghetto was sealed off from the rest of Warsaw (November 1940). People talking about the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto might use the date of either month without necessarily being inaccurate.
Regardless of the place or country name, the Holocaust was not uniform across all places and all times except for the eventual goal (developed as WWII brought more places under Nazi control) of the elimination (read “murder”) of all Jews.
In the chapters of this in-progress book THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST, I hope to make this confusing European place/country name information as well as the differing and confusing aspects of the Holocaust as coherent as possible. (On the topic of place names, you might want to get children’s puzzles of your own for the different time periods.)
One of the goals of this book is to demonstrate that the Holocaust was not a monolithic event. Even the things you think you know about, say, Auschwitz, might only be correct for a specific date and for a specific transport on that date.
To keep things somewhat less confusing — “World War I” will be used instead of the “Great War” for the war between 1914 and 1918. This will be used even when the book discusses events before World War II although that name for the Great War didn’t exist until World War II.
Finally, while this book is meant to give an overview of the lead-up to WWII, WWII, and the Holocaust, it can, of course, not be comprehensive. Thus, besides the major historical information, the additional included information is what I personally find of interest and relevance.
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Presumably you know the difference between fiction and nonfiction except that there are many shades of grey between these two designations — especially in books about WWII and the Holocaust.
For example, a nonfiction book that uses only direct material quoted from people’s diaries, etc. with no invented dialogue is farther toward the nonfiction scale than a nonfiction book that imagines scenes that cannot be verified. My favorite example of this is David Benioff’s book “City of Thieves,” which carries on its cover page the additional words “A Novel.” Yet, as the author himself describes, he interviewed his grandfather extensively:
“[M]ostly he talked about one week in 1942 [during the Nazi Germany siege of Leningrad]…”
As Benioff pressed his grandfather for exact details, his grandfather said, “‘It was a long time ago. I don’t remember what I was wearing. I don’t remember if the sun came out.'”
Benioff goes on to say that he wants to get everything right and not mess up his grandfather’s story.
“‘David,’ he said. ‘You’re a writer. Make it up.'”
And that’s why Benioff classified his nonfiction book as a novel.
On the other hand, Don Gabor’s self-published novel “Vienna on Fire: A WWII Story of Survival” weaves elements of his mother’s survival account into the fictional story. (Spoiler alert: One such fantastical sequence takes place at Goring’s country residence Carinhall.) Yet neither the title (“story” can mean either nonfiction or fiction) nor the cover of the book indicates this is very much a novel.
The moral of this digression is BUYER BEWARE when you are reading books about WWII and the Holocaust including when it comes to dates that can often be incorrect.
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Note: For an excellent nonfiction book about the leadup to WWII see my review of Erik Larson’s IN THE GARDEN OF THE BEASTS.
NEXT CHAPTER: Prologue: The Evil of Our World