This article examines the life and work of Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), a Francophone writer of Romanian origin, Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor, American citizen, Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1986. It ...specifically explores Wiesel’s complex engagement with the divine and the faith, which remained a central concern throughout his life, following his return from the Nazi extermination camps. This is most evident in his seminal book, Night, where he recounts the experience of God’s death in the death camps. Despite such profound crisis of faith, Wiesel remained a deeply religious Jew till the end. On the 16 July 2006, Oprah Winfrey dedicated her Book Club to The Night and called it “one of the greatest books of the century”. More than 3 million copies were sold in a few weeks in the United States. This study proposes that Wiesel’s confrontation with the divine can be best understood through his response to mysticism, expressed as a spiritual song of a fervent yet torn soul. It further suggests that his rejection of Nietzsche’s proclamation of “God’s death” and his alignment with Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav’s idea of a “broken faith” underscores his profound spiritual resilience.
This paper, largely inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of the camp, reflects on the relationship between the ‘topographical’ and the ‘topological’ in reference to Auschwitz–Birkenau and ...its spatialities. After having discussed the concept of
soglia (threshold), we briefly introduce the ways in which the historiographical literature on the Holocaust treats the relationship between modernity, rationality, and Nazism. The second part of the paper is dedicated to an attempt to read ‘geographically’ the entanglements between the camp, Nazi spatial planning, bureaucratic rationalities, and the Holocaust. The notion of the camp-as-a-
spazio-soglia is central to this interpretation. Auschwitz, conceived as a metaphorical and real space of exception, is contextualized within the broader regional geography planned by the Nazis for that part of Poland; while ‘Mexico’, a specific compound within the camp, is described as a key threshold in the reproduction of those very geographies. The aim is to show how the topological spatialities of the camp were a constitutive element of the overall biopolitical Nazi project of ‘protective custody’ and extermination and that, for this reason, they deserve further investigation and need to be discussed in the relation to the crude calculative and topographical aspirations of that same project.
► Topographies and topologies of Auschwitz. ► Nazi geographies. ► Giorgio Agamben and geography. ► New ideas on biopolitics and geopolitics.
The role of Jewish functionaries during the Holocaust has fueled heated debates internationally, as well as in Israel since the 1940s. For decades, however, the topic was marginalized in Israeli ...cinema. The documentary,
(Tor Ben-Mayor and Dan Setton 1999) was the first to include filmed testimonies of former Jewish female functionaries in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The documentary,
(Itai Lev and Gideon Greif 2021) is the first to include testimonies by members of the
(“the special squad”) i.e., prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, primarily Jews, who were forced to work in the killing installations. This article analyzes the ways these documentaries deliberately suspend judgment to provide a more complex perspective on these individuals.
and
are examined in the context of how Holocaust memory has changed in Israeli society and cinema. The discussion centers on the ways these films generate a non-judgmental narrative, and the similarities and differences between them in approaching this sensitive topic. It shows that
endeavors to maintain cinematic ambivalence, whereas
deliberately highlights the protagonists’ lack of agency and avoids rendering judgment.
Selfies at Auschwitz have become increasingly popular, and have generated agitated public debate. While some see them as an engaged form of witnessing, others denounce them as a narcissistic ...desecration of the dead. We analyze the taking, composition, and circulation of several of the most popular selfies of Auschwitz and the online reactions to them. The practice of selfies marks a shift from witness to witnessee and from onsite to online presence. Yet it also builds on previous practices: photography, postcards and souvenirs, the affordances of the architecture of the memorial site, the bodily presence of the survivor-witness as mediator of the Holocaust, and the redemptive value assigned to the physical presence of the visitor as “witness of the witness.” We suggest that the combination of continuities with the past alongside the radical break with previous witnessing practices empowers selfie-takers, while arousing the indignation of gatekeepers of Holocaust memory.
ResumenEl concurso para el Memorial de Auschwitz-Birkeanu, iniciado en 1957, representa un hito en la reflexión sobre el sentido de un paisaje arquitectónico de la memoria en la segunda mitad del ...siglo XX. Los proyectos que se presentaron en las diferentes fases del concurso, que se alargó diez años hasta 1967, contienen no solo una fuerte carga formal sino una importante búsqueda conceptual por reflejar y sintetizar de manera simbólica, mediante elementos arquitectónicos y de paisaje, la huella de todo el horror que se había vivido en el campo de exterminio polaco. De entre todos ellos destaca el proyecto “The Road”, del equipo dirigido por el arquitecto Oskar Hansen, una propuesta que, de haberse realizado, hubiese marcado un sentido nuevo en el proyecto de paisajes arquitectónicos en su relación con los movimientos plásticos de vanguardia. Sin embargo, el resultado final del concurso fue la construcción de un mero monumento conmemorativo de escaso carácter, perdiendo así una gran oportunidad en la investigación y el desarrollo de los paisajes arquitectónicos contemporáneos.AbstractThe competition for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, started in 1957, represents a milestone in the reflection on the meaning of an architectural landscape of memory in the second half of the 20th century. The projects that were presented in the different phases of the contest, which lasted ten years until 1967, contain not only a strong formal charge but also an important conceptual search to symbolically reflect and synthesize, through architectural and landscape elements, the footprint of all the horror that had been lived in the Polish Death Camp. Among all of them stands out the project “The Road”, developed by the team led by the architect Oskar Hansen, a proposal that, if it had been carried out, would have marked a new meaning in the architectural landscape project in its relationship with avant-garde plastic movements. However, the end result of the competition was the construction of a mere commemorative monument of little character, thus missing a great opportunity in the research and development of contemporary architectural landscapes.
The research aim was to optimize the operating parameters of a diode laser irradiation for the effective disinfection of degraded collagenous materials. Historical leather shoes stored at the ...Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim (Poland) were the main study objects. Surfaces of contaminated small spots occurring on the degraded materials were sampled with moistened swabs and microbiologically examined using the molecular techniques MALDI-TOF MS, 16S rRNA, and NGS sequencing. The surfaces were colonized by bacteria with 10
CFU/100 cm
and 10
CFU/100 cm
by fungi, on average. Microorganisms of the genera
and
were predominant. The effectiveness of the laser treatment was assessed for the new and degraded collagenous materials against isolated environmental strains using four variants of exposure time and number of repetitions. 0.3 W/CW 2 × 2 min variant was the most effective and also did not noticeably change the color of the treated samples. The variant caused a reduction in the numbers of microorganisms by 96-100%. After 1 month, four types of leather were subjected to comprehensive physico-chemical analyses. SEM and FTIR techniques confirmed that laser irradiation in the selected optimal variant did not affect the surface morphology and collagen structure, while XPS technique enabled detection of subtle changes in non-historical protective coatings on the surfaces of tested degraded historical materials.
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