Facing Death: Confronting Mortality in the Holocaust and Ourselves

by Sarah K. Pinnock (Editor)

Overview

What do we learn about death from the Holocaust and how does it impact our responses to mortality today?

Facing Death: Confronting Mortality in the Holocaust and Ourselves brings together the work of eleven Holocaust and genocide scholars who address these difficult questions, convinced of the urgency of further reflection on the Holocaust as the last survivors pass away. The volume is distinctive in its dialogical and introspective approach, where the contributors position themselves to confront their own impending death while listening to the voices of victims and learning from their life experiences. Broken into three parts, this collection engages with these voices in a way that is not only scholarly, but deeply personal.

The first part of the book engages with Holocaust testimony by drawing on the writings of survivors and witnesses such as Elie Wiesel, Jean Améry, and Charlotte Delbo, including rare accounts from members of the Sonderkommando. Reflections of post-Holocaust generations—the children and grandchildren of survivors—are housed in the second part, addressing questions of remembrance and memorialization. The concluding essays offer intimate self-reflection about how engagement with the Holocaust impacts the contributors’ lives, faiths, and ethics.

In an age of continuing atrocities, this volume provides careful attention to the affective dimension of coping with death, in particular, how loss and grief are deferred or denied, narrated, and passed along.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295999272
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	12/05/2016
Series:	Stephen S. Weinstein Series in Post-Holocaust Studies
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sarah K. Pinnock is professor and chair of religion at Trinity University. She is the author of Beyond Theodicy: Jewish and Christian Continental Thinkers Respond to the Holocaust and editor of The Theology of Dorothee Soelle. The other contributors are Michael Dobkowski, Myrna Goldenberg, Leonard Grob, Rochelle L. Millen, David Patterson, Didier Pollefeyt, John K. Roth, H. Martin Rumscheidt, Amy H. Shapiro, and Lissa Skitolsky.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Death as Atrocity Sarah K. Pinnock ix

Part I Engagement with Holocaust Testimony

1 Holocaust Victims Speak; Do We Listen? Leonard Grob 5

2 Dying in the Death Camps as Acts of Defiance H. Martin Rumscheidt 17

3 At What Cost Survival? The Problem of the Prisoner-Functionary Lissa Skitolsky 31

4 Witnessing Unrelenting Grief Myrna Goldenberg 47

Part II Self-Consciousness of Mortality

5 Living For: Holocaust Survivors and Their Adult Children Encounter Death and Mortality Michael Dobkowski 61

6 Bearing Witness to a Grotesque Land Amy H. Shapiro 77

7 Melding Generations: A Meditation on Memory and Mortality Rochelle L. Millen 94

Part III Ethical and Religious Reflection

8 Experiences of Death: Our Mortality and the Holocaust Sarah K. Pinnock 113

9 A Jewish Reflection on the Nazis' Assault on Death David Patterson 128

10 Auschwitz and Hiroshima as Challenges to a Belief in the Afterlife: A Catholic Perspective Didier Pollefeyt 141

11 Facing Death: What Happens to the Holocaust If Death Is the Last Word? John K. Roth 156

Epilogue: Witnessing Mortality 174

Selected Bibliography 179

Editors and Contributors 183

Index 189

What People are Saying About This

Peter J. Haas

"Remarkably original because it deals not only with the victims and their testimonies, but also with the impact those testimonies have upon the scholars and thinkers who study them."