Description:

"Representing the Operation Reinhard Killing Centers in Contemporary Holocaust Fiction"

Annual HEFNU/CCHS Lecture in Holocaust Studies featuring Erin McGlothlin (Washington University in St. Louis)

Please join us!
In-Person Only
Open to the Public
Reception to Follow

This presentation focuses on the mechanisms by which the canon of Holocaust literature has come to posit the Auschwitz killing center and labor camp as the paramount site of Jewish suffering in the genocide. The predominant place that Auschwitz holds in Holocaust literature not only constructs the experience of Auschwitz as normative, but it also leaves little space for the literary imagination of other important sites and experiences, including the Operation Reinhard killing centers Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełźec, at which collectively around nearly one-third of all victims of the Holocaust were murdered. However, in recent decades, a handful of fictional texts have begun to appear that attempt to articulate the particular character of the Operation Reinhard killing centers and thus to provide a slight aperture through which they might enter into the corpus of Holocaust literature. This presentation will examine two such representations: Ian MacMillan’s Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the Treblinka Uprising (1999) and Patrick Hicks’s The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard (2014). It will concentrate in particular on the narrative strategies each text employs to depict those distinct aspects of the Operation Reinhard killing centers not captured by the normative image of the Holocaust in the cultural imagination.