Something Finished?

I suppose I feel a sense of relief at completing Nikolaus Wachsmann's KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps today. I haven't enjoyed reading it, but it has made for utterly compelling reading. I thought I knew a reasonable amount about the horrors of the camps, and the Holocaust generally. I didn't. Almost every page of Wachsmann's work has been revelatory in some degree.

Initially I'd hesitated over buying the book, and embarking on my reading, wondering whether my interest in its grim subject matter involved some kind of prurience. But finally I'd felt morally obliged to read it, and I think that's an appropriate perspective to adopt. Collectively we need to remember what took place: the work of Wachsmann and that of the researchers he draws upon, and the first hand accounts are precious indeed in enabling us to do so; but all this needs to be read and understood and communicated somehow.

There's a particularly resonant sentence towards the end of the book: In the same way our search for deeper meaning in the KL will go on, even though efforts to extract a single essence are destined to come up short. The our here refers to the work of the historians involved in grappling with the phenomenon of the camps, but I think the suffering of all the victims - so many! - means the word must have a wider application. The business of the camps should not be seen as finished.