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Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1986 1(1):79-89; doi:10.1093/hgs/1.1.79
© 1986 by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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LITERATURE AS RESISTANCE: SURVIVAL IN THE CAMPS

ELLEN S. FINE

New York

If the world of literature appears to run counter to the concentration camp universe, under certain circumstances literature served as an instrument of spiritual resistance in the struggle for survival. The value of reading literature is explored, in general, followed by specific examples of the function of literature and the faculty of memory in the camps as described by witnesses. For some prisoners such as Jean Améry, the intellect was impotent, incapable of spiritually nourishing him with the humanist tradition of his past. For others, however, such as Primo Levi, and several women survivors, reconstructing poems and plays from memory played a significant role in keeping in contact with ‘the other world’, establishing a bond with their comrades, and in remaining in touch with themselves. In a dominion designed to annihilate all traces of the thinking mind, literature became a vehicle of human communion, a weapon of transcendance, and an act of defiance.


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