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MIRSKY / ABUSE OF THE HOLOCAUST
43
ous conditions un d e r which hum an beings were forced to live, the
to r tu res to which they were put, the sadism o f concentration
camp commanders and guards, the brutality o f Kapos, the starva
tion, the beatings, are there , bu t they form a backdrop fo r the
romanticized exploits o f Spangler. “T h e o th e r k ingdom ” is
tu rn ed into Graustark by this Black Pimpernel o f Auschwitz-
Birkenau, the location o f his climactic heroic foray. T he effect,
even if no t intentional, is to romanticize the m ind-numb ing
reality and transform the unspeakable ho rro rs o f exterm ination
camps into a deliciously exciting background against which the
h ero ’s exploits shine more glowingly.
T h a t it is possible to write a thriller based on the Holocaust
experience, or be tter said, the after-experience o f the Holocaust,
is dem onstra ted by Frank de
YeXitte'sOktoberfest
(1973) which uses
the form to probe the con tinu ing agony and the ultimate devasta
tion which the Holocaust visited on the world. But such works are
few. T he majority o f them are properly described by Jan e Larkin
Crain: “O ugh t the atrocities o f the Nazi dea th camps be tro tted
ou t in lurid and titillating detail to aggrandize a rou tine novel o f
suspense?”, she asks. “I t is . . . altogether cheap and noisesome.”2
But the pornografication to which I wish to draw attention goes
far beyond such comparatively innocent tawdriness. T he rela
tionship between Nazism and po rnography and the exploitation
o f this relationship by those whose aim is titillation and sensation,
has been noted. Ernest Pawel has pointed ou t tha t “among o ther
things, the concentration camp also represen ts the archetype o f
the po rnograph ic fantasy come true: it affords total power over
defenseless hum an beings”.3 Many, among o thers William Pech-
ter and B runo Bettelheim,4have discussed the degradation o f the
Holocaust in film, and Lucy Dawidowicz has rem arked that “p o r
nography and Nazism have mutually reinforced each o the r over
the decades. Today a sizable population views the T h ird Reich’s
te rro rs and m u rders only th rough a prism o f po rnog raphy”
(The
Jewish Presence,
p. 224).
USE OF SMUT
One o f the first novels to exploit this relationship between the
concentration camps and pornograph ic fantasy was Edwin Sil-
2
N.Y. Times Book Review,
December 10, 1978.
3 “Fiction o f the Holocaust,”
Midstream,
June/July 1970, p. 26.
4
Commentary,
May 1976, pp. 72-76;
New Yorker,
Aug. 2, 1976, pp. 31-52.