![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This work offers an ecocritical reading of the Holocaust from the perspective of liberator accounts concerning the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It focuses on how Allied military personnel expressed their descriptions in two distinct ways. First, liberators offer a unique spatial orientation in their narratives, communicating values that are presented through geography and ecology. Second, the survivors were repeatedly viewed by liberators through the lens of animal metaphors, a type of zoomorphic language. This paper argues that the horrific suffering experienced by the survivors in Bergen-Belsen created a linguistic frontier or divide between themselves and Allied military personnel.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Katz, “The Holocaust as an Environmental Problem,” 429.
2 Biro, Listening to Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief, 15.
3 Auden, “In Time of War,” 73.
4 Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire. Translated: “The concentrationary universe.”
5 Małczyński et al., “The Environmental History of the Holocaust,” 188.
6 Ibid.
7 Cole, “Expanding (Environmental) Histories of the Holocaust,” 274.
8 Bartov, “What is the Environmental History of the Holocaust?,” 419.
9 Ibid., 424.
10 As quoted in Pollin-Galay, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony, 203.
11 Douglas Porteus, Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Sense and Metaphor, 25. For a larger discussion, see the author’s concept of ‘smellscape’ (Ibid., 21–45).
12 Ibid.
13 Celinscak, Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust.
14 Biro, 16.
15 Ibid., 33.
16 Greary, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metapenhor and How It Shapes the-Way We See the World, 224–225.
17 Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, 33.
18 Kłos, “The Green Matzevah,” 225.
19 Kemp, “The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in April 1945: The Testimony of Those Involved,” 30–31.
20 Weindling, “Belsenitis: Liberating Belsen, Its Hospitals, UNRRA, and Selection for Re-emigration, 1945–1948.” 403.
21 Zander, “To Rescue or Be Rescued: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen and the White Buses in British and Swedish Historical Cultures,” 345.
22 Shephard, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945, 201–202.
23 Hartigan, A Rising Courage: Canada’s Paratroopers in the Liberation of Normandy, 1.
24 Ted Aplin, Letter dated June 17, 1945. Clara Thomas Archives, York University: F0151, Aplin Family Fonds.
25 Ibid.
26 IWM, 13408, Private Papers of O.G. Prosser (05/2/1), 1.
27 Roth, “The World around Us: What Have We Learned from the Holocaust?”, 15.
28 Didier Pollefeyt, “In Response to John K. Roth,” 23.
29 Celinscak, Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 53–54.
30 Williams, A Page of History in Relief: London—Antwerp —Belsen—Brunswick. Quaker Relief: 1944–1946, 23.
31 Ibid.
32 Imperial War Museum 11561, Private Papers of TJ Stretch (01/30/1).
33 Ibid.
34 Gigliotti, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity and Witnessing in the Holocaust, 129.
35 Ibid., 131–132.
36 Engen, Odor Sensation and Memory, 81.
37 Ibid., 82.
38 USC Shoah Foundation Institute, 39023, interview with Mervin Mirsky (22 February 1998).
39 Synnott, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society, 183.
40 As quoted in Stevens, The Originals: The Secret History of the Birth of the SAS, 297.
41 As quoted in van Straubenzee, “The Stench of Death.” Spectator (9 April 2005).
42 University of British Columbia Archives, D805.G3 S66 1945a: Bergen-Belsen by Frank Snowswell (1 May 1945).
43 Paybody, “The Liberator.” Observer (9 January 2005).
44 Engen, Odor Sensation, 86.
45 Johnston, “The Relief of Belsen Concentration Camp. Recollections and Reflections of a British Army Doctor.” Rosenstaft Papers, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 5.
46 Alan Rose, “Transcript of Interview with the Holocaust Documentation Project,” SV257–SV259, 17 March 1982, Canadian Jewish Congress Records, CJCCC National Archives, 16.
47 Classen et al., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, 173.
48 Allan Ironside, letter dated May 4, 1945. Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, Toronto, Allan Ironside Collection.
49 Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity.
50 Ibid., xii.
51 Ibid., 153.
52 Ibid. 130.
53 As quoted in Celinscak, Kingdom of Night, 104.
54 Ibid., 105.
55 Netz, 153.
56 Library and Archives Canada: Samuel Cass Fonds, MG 30, D225, vol. 9, “A Record of a Chaplain’s Experience – World War II (1942–1946)” by Samuel Cass.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Didier Pollefeyt, “Preface,” 13.
60 Galles, “Skull,” 158.
61 Hannah Pollin-Galay, 223. Italics mine.
62 Ibid., 206.
63 Roth, 19.
64 Sington, Belsen Uncovered, 15–16.
65 Doniger, “Zoomorphism in Ancient India: Humans More Bestial Than the Beasts,” 17.
66 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 438–439.
67 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved , 98.
68 Neumann, “National Socialism, Holocaust, and Ecology,” 113.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., 114.
72 Biro, 11.
73 Ibid., 16.
74 Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 4.
75 Biro, 131–132.
76 Ibid., 131.
77 Sington, Belsen Uncovered, 16.
78 Ibid., 82.
79 Ibid., 23.
80 Ibid., 49–50.
81 Palmatier, Speaking of Animals: A Dictionary of Animal Metaphors , 7 and 257.
82 Doniger, “Epilogue: Making Animals Vanish,” 351.
83 McCreary, “The Conditions of Civilians in Western Europe at the Conclusion of the German Occupations.”
84 Department of National Defence, Directorate of History and Heritage, Ottawa: 87/241: “War Diary of Flight Lieutenant Carl Reinke, RCAF.”
85 George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For their discussion on the Great Chain of Being metaphor see ch. 4, 160–213.
86 IWM 11561, Private Papers of TJ Stretch (01/30/1).
87 LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence, 155.
88 Ibid., 156.
89 Heaps, 157.
90 LaCapra, 159.
91 Kemp, “The British Army and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, April 1945,” 138.
92 Shephard.
93 Hardman and Goodman, The Survivors: The Story of the Belsen Remnant , 16.
94 Wolschke-Bulmahn, “The Landscape Design of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Memorial,” 274.
95 As quote in Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design, 280.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mark Celinscak
Mark Celinscak is the Louis and Frances Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Department of History, and the Executive Director of the Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.