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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
One of the ways in which Jews and others have sought somehow to assimilate the knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust has been through the theatrical expression of the appalling dilemmas it posed. Implicitly or explicitly, however, the process of ‘shaping’ that this involves forces an attitude to be taken by the dramatist towards the meaning of ‘choice’ in such circumstances, and the ‘acceptable’ price of possible survival. In his anthology The Theatre of the Holocaust (1982), Robert Skloot assembled four plays which exemplified the possible ‘attitudes to survival’, and here he relates them to the ideas of Bruno Bettelheim, Terrence Des Pres, and other writers on the subject, in an attempt to assess how fully and honestly theatre is able to reflect the issues involved. Robert Skloot is Professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was Fulbright Lecturer in Israel in 1980–81. He has also edited a collection of essays, ‘The Darkness We Carry’: the Drama of the Holocaust, due for publication in the spring of 1988.
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2. Bettelheim, ‘The Holocaust – One Generation Later’, in Surviving, p. 97.
3. Bettelheim, ‘The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank’, in Surviving, p. 250.
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6. Pres, Des, ‘The Bettelheim Problem’, Social Research, XLVI, 4 (Winter 1979), p. 624. Also see ‘Us and Them’, in The Survivor, p. 149–78Google Scholar.
7. Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 129.
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15. Langer, Versions, p. 64–5.
16. Langer, Versions, p. 72. In writing of the ‘death guilt’ of survivors, Robert Lifton comments that no survivor of the concentration camps ‘could be totally unaffected by a pervasive “either-you-or-me” atmosphere’. See Lifton, Robert J., Death in Life (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 490Google Scholar.
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18. Hampton, Christopher, George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (London: Faber, 1981). Elie Wiesel was also among the first to identify this ghastly phenomenon in his autobiographical memoir Night (1958), and later in an essay called ‘The Guilt We Share’, in Legends of Our Time (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968). He describes the devastating psychological condition which is produced in the surviving victim of ‘choiceless choice’: ‘Only the number, only the quota counts. Thus, the one who had been spared, above all during the selections, could not repress his first spontaneous reflex of joy. A moment, a week, or an eternity later, this joy weighted with fear and anxiety will turn into guilt. I am happy to have escaped death becomes equivalent to admitting: I am glad that someone else went in my place’ (p. 172)Google Scholar.
19. The Theatre of the Holocaust, ed. Skloot, Robert (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 14Google Scholar.
20. Schiff, Ellen, From Stereotype to Metaphor: the Jew in Contemporary Drama (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 210Google Scholar.
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23. See Langer, Lawrence L., ‘The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen’, in From Hester Street to Hollywood, ed. Cohen, Sarah Blacher (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 213–30Google Scholar.
24. Ezrahi, By Words Alone, p. 4.
25. Rumkowski has been the subject of much investigation in recent years, by artists as well as historians. He appears as the protagonist of Epstein's, Leslie novel King of the Jews (1979)Google Scholar, and as the central figure in a documentary film The Story of Chiam Rumkowski and the Jews of Lodz (1984). Also see Dobroszycki, Lucjan, The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, and Bellow's, Saul novel, Mr. Sammler's Planet (New York: Viking, 1964)Google Scholar.
26. Langer, Versions, p. 60.
27. Roskies, David, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 9Google Scholar.