![]() ![]() ![]() First of all there is the traditional association of the death camps, where half of the Jews were killed, with hell. Indeed, while 99.99 per cent of the bodies that were burned were the corpses of people killed by other means (mostly by gas), most authors who refer to the Holocaust choose to emphasize the importance of the act of burning within that genocide. One of the first memoirs of Auschwitz, written by Sonia Landau and published under the Polish-Christian name she had adopted after her escape from the Warsaw ghetto, Krystyna Zywulska, systematically conflated the killing and burning. 4 Often people refer loosely to the ‘gas ovens’ of Auschwitz, collapsing the gas chambers and crematoria ovens into one spurious umbrella concept that equates killing and burning. Yet burning has become the central icon of the event that, signifi cantly, has become known first in English and later in many other languages as the Holocaust, derived from a Greek word that means ‘something wholly burnt’. ![]()
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