Holocaust and Trauma

The effects of the holocaust are still felt many years later. The horrible reality of the
holocaust, war, destruction, and killings have been captured in various works of literature. Some
authors have captured the effects of the holocaust in memoirs because they experienced the
tragedy first-hand. In other instances, authors have written the stories of the holocaust in a more
fictitious manner and from a third-person point of view. The reality is that the holocaust was
traumatic to those who had first-had encounters as well as to those who heard about it and saw its
aftermath. Holocaust even has its own genre, which is known as holocaust literature. Night and
Arrivals, Departures are memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Charlotte Delbo, respectively, detailing the
first-hand encounters that the authors had with the holocaust. Ida Fink writes The Key Game, a
story set during the holocaust. Fink employs a strong sense of pathos in analyzing the wrongs
and rights committed during the holocaust. The gruesome and horrid events of the holocaust left
trauma and unseen effects on the survivors and those who lived to witness the awful wrath of the
Nazis.
The paradox of writing Holocaust literature is in the ability to fictionalize the horrid
events of the holocaust without being inaccurate, insensitive, and ineffective in capturing the
plight of the six million people who were killed and millions of others left without a voice.
Survivors of the holocaust, such as Ida Fink, have struggled to capture the details and trauma of
the Holocaust. According to Victoria Aarons (2012), it is a difficult task to translate the events of
the holocaust into ordinary language when even those who came out of it alive such as Fink find
their memories broken into wrecks as opposed to complete stories that can be packaged into
clear-cut narrations. Aarons does not discount fiction. On the contrary, she identifies the paradox
and difficulty of putting the unspeakable into words. She urges readers to be attentive to the

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wordlessness and to the utterances that are never spoken when interacting with holocaust
literature.
In the Key Game, Ida Fink fictionalizes her holocaust memories and tells the unspeakable
through fragments of details that border between the unreal and the real. She chooses to recount
emotional turmoil and the trauma of the holocaust as opposed to giving the historical facts. In the
story, the trauma and horrors of the holocaust are not directly said. Instead, they are depicted
through the decisions made by victimized and wounded characters. The family in the story
continuously rehearses the game. They never express to each other what it would mean to not
win. The characters instead use some phrases that do not communicate much such as “be well.”
She reveals the horrible stories of the holocaust, where children were prematurely called upon to
protect their parents.
The family in The Key Game has to rely on their child to answer the door. They do so
when they anticipate the Nazis are coming. They hope that the child can answer the door as that
has taught him. The child’s physical features, such as “blue eyes” and “chubby cheeks,” make
him look least Jewish (Fink, 1995). They hope that he can save them from the Nazis. There is a
lot of emotional turmoil that goes unsaid in the story. The reader is left sympathizing with the
family and the boy as well. It seems to have been a norm during the holocaust that children had
to step up and save their families. In Night, Wiesel explains how he had to take care of and
protect his father even when he felt weak and defeated. He survived the ordeal, but
unfortunately, his father never lived to witness their release from the concentration camp. These
stories capture a lot of emotions that the authors do not put into words. The children lived with
the trauma of the holocaust as well as the sad memories of losing family in such helpless and
unfortunate circumstances.

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The victims of the holocaust faced dark moments. Over the years, the memory and
trauma of the holocaust have been explored by some of the victims themselves. In Night, Elie
Wiesel documents the story of a Jewish teenager living in Hungary in the 1940s (Wiesel, 2017).
the teenager is then sent to a concentration camp in Auschwitz. He struggles to maintain his faith
as he helplessly watches prisoners losing not only their faith but their humanity as well. Different
scholars have debated whether Eliezer Wiesel, the protagonist in the story, is Elie Wiesel, the
author. According to Sternlicht (2003), Night depicts the aspect of the holocaust as seen and
experienced by youth. Sternlicht also states that theodicy is evident in Night, and it shows the
struggle to believe in the justice and goodness of God while having to live in an immoral and
unjust world.
Further, the trauma of the holocaust is captured artistically through the use of imagery in
the holocaust literature. One such artist is Charlotte Delbo, who depicts the horror of the arrival
witnessed by those who had a first-hand encounter with the holocaust. In the poem, Arrivals,
Departures, Delbo captures a unique perspective of the experiences of prisoners in the
concentration camp in Auschwitz. A personal narrative would have provided Delbo with a better
opportunity to capture the prisoners’ trauma and emotional turmoil. However, she chose to use a
poem and employ the metaphor of a train to show the journey of those killed in the gas chamber
in the camp and then cremated by the Nazis. The poem is Delbo’s way of saying the unthinkable
as it happened within the concentration camp. Even those in the camps, as depicted by Delbo, do
not have a vocabulary to describe the experience. The wait and “expect the worst-not the
unthinkable.” Delbo successfully captures the emotions of the victims. They knew the worst was
coming, and the trauma of imagining what would be done to them kept them in fear.

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The tension between the explainable historical phenomenon and the inconceivable
traumatic experiences of the war is evident in holocaust literature. Delbo captures the events in a
traumatic realistic manner and represents the universe as a borderland, a zone between the
traumas of living with war memories and the everyday experiences (Mandel, 2002). When Delbo
writes about the thoughts of the mothers with their children waiting for their turn in the long
queues, the reader cannot help but notice the emotional turmoil the women went through. The
people never knew that it was possible to take a train to hell. She writes, “they got their courage
up and got ready to face what was coming together with their children, their wives and their old
parents with their family memories, and family papers” (Delbo, 1993). These lines show
devastation and hopelessness. Those who survived were left with the memories and the family
papers they traveled with. The events of the holocaust are compared o hell. The difficulty of
holding one’s child for one last time, not knowing what the future held, must have been too
much for them. Delbo shows that even those who survived struggled because the encounter was
horrifying and traumatic in equal measure.
Overall, holocaust literature captures the traumatic reality of when the world collapsed. It
shows the collapse of family, humanity, and relationships. The different people who have written
about the holocaust, such as Elie Wiesel, Charlotte Delbo, and Ida Fink, do so in unique ways as
each artist tries to put into words the unthinkable effects of the holocaust. Delbo puts her
experiences in a poem that indirectly and directly captures the horrifying and traumatic reality of
victims of the holocaust. Wiesel tells his story through a narrator whose experiences mirror those
of the victims of the concentration camp. The author manages to ‘hide’ his identity in the
narrator in an attempt to tell the story from a neutral and realistic point of view. However, it is
evident that the way in which the events are narrated mirrors the experiences of a person who

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was in the camp. Ida Fink also chooses to tell the story through a game but still shows the reality
of life for the children who were in the camp with their parents. Overall, the authors represent
many others in holocaust literature who attempt to put the trauma of the holocaust in ordinary
language while doing justice to the victims.

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References

Aarons, V. (2012). The certainties of history and the uncertainties of representation in post-
holocaust writing. Studies in American Jewish Literature, 31(2), 134-148.
Delbo, C. (1993). Arrivals, departures. na.
Fink, I. (1995). The Key Game. na.
Mandel, N. (2002). Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Cultural
Critique, 51(1), 241-245.
Sternlicht, S. (2003). Student Companion to Elie Wiesel. Greenwood Publishing Group.
Wiesel, E. (2017). Night: Memorial Edition. Hill and Wang.