Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination
Otto Dov Kulka
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 0674072898
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Historian Otto Dov Kulka has dedicated his life to studying and writing about Nazism and the Holocaust. Until now he has always set to one side his personal experiences as a child inmate at Auschwitz. Breaking years of silence, Kulka brings together the personal and historical, in a devastating, at times poetic, account of the concentration camps and the private mythology one man constructed around his experiences.
Auschwitz is for the author a vast repository of images, memories, and reveries: “the Metropolis of Death” over which rules the immutable Law of Death. Between 1991 and 2001, Kulka made audio recordings of these memories as they welled up, and in Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death he sifts through these fragments, attempting to make sense of them. He describes the Family Camp’s children’s choir in which he and others performed “Ode to Joy” within yards of the crematoria, his final, indelible parting from his mother when the camp was liquidated, and the “black stains” along the roadside during the winter death march. Amidst so much death Kulka finds moments of haunting, almost unbearable beauty (for beauty, too, Kulka says, is an inescapable law).
As the author maps his interior world, readers gain a new sense of what it was to experience the Shoah from inside the camps—both at the time, and long afterward. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death is a unique and powerful experiment in how one man has tried to understand his past, and our shared history.
Great Death overtook my mother, too, there. It was on the twenty-fifth of January 1945, not long before the village was liberated – or conquered, as the local German population felt it then – by the Soviet army. 35. 8 Landscapes of a Private Mythology At the Sealed Gate of Mercy In this chapter I move to a very different time, to Jerusalem of the late 1960s. I do not remember if it was immediately after the war – the Six Day War – or some time later, after I returned from a year in
got a taxi, a faded antique, and asked the driver to take me to Auschwitz. It wasn’t his first trip to that place; he had already taken foreign tourists there. I spoke Polish, and not even such a broken Polish, made up in part from what I knew from then and in part what I had learned at the university, and my foundation in Czech helped, too. We drove along, the chatterbox of a driver chattering about his car having been stolen and returned to him, driving along the River Vistula (Wisła) while he
few people skitter by, indifferent, withdrawn, like shadows of the dead, hurrying about their business. The picture that arose in my mind then, based on the photographs and documents of that period in the history of Prague Jewry – during and after the mass deportations – was of those few who remained and were put to work cataloguing, recording and storing ‘the treasures of the glorious Jewish past’, a past which was frozen and thrust into deep-freeze then. Muted. And they, too, the few who were
horizon. But everything was there, and I, at least, was able to recognize it. 3. On the Ruins of the ‘Youth and Children’s Block’ and the ‘Hospital Block’ The first place I went to across that grass was the foundations of the youth and children’s block, the cultural centre of that unique camp, about which I will speak elsewhere. I picked up one mouldy brick – a fragment of a brick – and took it with me. I went according to the numbering there. I identified the place according to the rows of
wealth was restored, he was given sons and daughters – new ones, of course – and his grief for the first children was taken away. We might imagine that this retribution was the most terrible thing of all. We might imagine that the most terrible thing was Job’s ignorance: not understanding whom he had defeated, or even that he had won. But in fact, the most terrible thing of all is that Job never existed and was just a parable [my italics]’, ibid., p. 11. 13. Job 2: 7. APPENDIX 1. First