A Hidden Holocaust in Trains

Kay Gundel, Anna Heilman, and Ruth Klüger — three women, three journeys, and indelible memories of captivity. There are countless stories about the horrors of deportation trains that were critical in the Final Solution, the Nazi euphemism for the mass murder of European Jewry during World War II. Irrespective of their origin of deportation, whether from Warsaw, Drancy, Salonica, or Westerbork, former deportees recall resoundingly similar experiences.

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Resettlement

Deportees as the Freight of the Final Solution

In his article, "German Railroads/Jewish Souls," Raul Hilberg asked: "How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?" He concluded that in the hands of bureaucrats and technocrats, the railroads metamorphosed, becoming a "live organism" that "acted in concert with Germany's military, industry, or SS to make German history." The deadly use of railways was history making for Germany, and marked "the end of the Jewish people in Europe."

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Ghetto Departures

The Emplotment of Experience

The unmaking of the modern railway experience began before victims were forced to board the trains. Roundups, unannounced inspections, ruthless extractions from apartments, and beatings were all features of the forced relocation from ghettos, towns, and villages. Observing the deportation of Jews from Salonica, Greece, Rosa Miller wrote: "And the Jews emerge, weighed down by their rucksacks, their bundles, their bags, loaded with baskets containing food for the journey ahead. Children press close to their parents, uncomprehending, fearfully following their every move. Older people have difficulty in walking, they stumble and fall sometimes, but everybody must carry their burden. Young people walk out defiantly, head up, completely silent." Using Miller's description as a departure point, I analyze victims' testimonies of departure from ghettos in different locations across Europe. I explore what they were discussing, responding to, and witnessing at each critical stage of transit, of which I identify three: identification and roundups, assembly and waiting, and boarding the trains.

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Immobilization in

The deportation trains were mobile chambers of death. It is not difficult to reach that conclusion. The conditions inside them produced violations of behavior and morality, as well as primal challenges to deportees' perceptions of themselves as locked in an epic battle between civilization and decline. The struggle to find space inside the train, the adjustment to the freight of other deportees, the psychological and physical fatigue from the train's wear and tear, the deprivation of food and water, the stench, and the loss of time and place during transit were, for many deportees, deeply disturbing experiences without comparison. For others, like Primo Levi, captivity in trains was a prologue for the rigors of the camp world. The intentional deprivation of basic provisions to deportees in train journeys was a "systematic negligence" and a "useless cruelty," "a deliberate creation of pain which was an end in itself."

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Sensory Witnessing and Railway Shock

Disorders of Vision and Experience

This chapter probes the tellability of the train journey's somatic traumas based on perspectives from cultural studies of witnessing, the body, and the senses. Through a close reading of testimonies from the David Boder archive, I examine how sensory witnessing emerged in the spoken-word traumas of displaced refugees before the Holocaust emerged as a universal motif of persecution. The model of sensory witnessing that I identify with train journeys is also applicable to other intense spatial experiences of forced closeness, such as in the trenches of World War I, bomb shelters, and living in underground sewers, among countless others.

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Camp Arrivals

The Failed Resettlement

The revelation of resettlement as death and the erasure of the victims' biography was the final scene of arrival for deportees who were transported to concentration camps. The perceptual destabilizations that occurred during the train journey, particularly the minimized opportunities for reliable visual truths, were partially restored on arrival. But arrival did not necessarily mean that what was visually seen could be comprehended or made tellable. The sensory assaults of deportation train journeys were not reversed upon release from the trains at the camps. Rather they were relocated and reconstituted according to specific locations and places of chaos, separation, and death: the platform, the sorting area, and the gas chamber.

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Memory Routes and Destinations

With the words and voices of survivors as a guide, I have attempted to explore what is a tellable truth when cattle car memory remains embodied and intimate, a captivity that is known only to the witnesses who were there. Deportees journeyed with the living and the dead, were witnesses to and victims of suicide, became violated and violators in cramped conditions, and were bathed in the sensory reminder of their pestilential degradation and deprivations. It is for these reasons that deportation train journeys were, for many survivors, more painfully inscribed as an intrusive and inexplicable memory than other experiences of suffering. More than trains to death, they were trains of death, a stand in for the unknown gas chamber experience.

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