Holocaust horror and its haunting lexicon

One of the darkest chapters of human history, the Holocaust has become a genre of literary and artistic expression in itself. A whole lot of words and expressions that have become associated with it still evoke chilling images of the effects of political aggrandizement, racist ideology and personal ambition. We look at some of them.

Written with a small ‘h’, holocaust comes from the Greek olokauston and means “an offering consumed by fire.” With a capital ‘H’ it refers to the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime, or the Third Reich, between 1933 and 1945. The specific application was introduced by historians during the 1950s, probably as an equivalent to Hebrew hurban (destruction) and shoah (catastrophe) used in the same sense. But it had been foreshadowed by contemporary references to the Nazi atrocities as a holocaust (in the sense of ‘great slaughter’, which dates from the early 19th century). A reference is found in 1943 Hansard Lords: “The Nazis go on killing… If this rule could be relaxed, some hundred, and possibly a few thousands, might be enabled to escape from this holocaust.” (Hansard is the official report of both Houses of British Parliament).

The Holocaust years are identified with the rule of the Third Reich, the German state under the Nazi party headed by Adolf Hitler. This a partially Anglicized form of German Dritte Reich (Third Empire), which is first recorded as the title of a 1923 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. The First Empire in this context was the Holy Roman Empire (up to 1806) and the Second Empire the Imperial German state from 1871 till the end of World War I in 1918.

Genocide, a term coined in 1940s to mean the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group was specifically in response to the Nazis’ slaughter of the Jews in concentration camps during World War II.

Final solution is a literal translation of German Endlosung, the name given to the Nazi policy, beginning 1941, of annihilating the entire Jewish population of Europe.

An extermination camp was a concentration camp for the mass murder of human beings, especially one of the camps set up by the Nazis during World War II. There were six major camps built for the sole purpose of killing Jews. These were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The first was the largest and the one that figures in Glazer’s movie. Chelmno was the first extermination camp to use gassing and the first place outside occupied Soviet territory in which Jews were systematically killed as part of the Final Solution.

Concentration camps, where Jews were imprisoned, were of three different types – transit, labour and extermination. Some like Auschwitz served both as extermination and forced labour camp.

A gas chamber refers to a sealed enclosure in which people are killed by means of poison gas, specifically one of those used by the Germans for their extermination programme. It was Holocaust that brought in this grisly new use for a term which had started life innocuously in the late 19th century, denoting an apparatus used in microscopy for studying the action of different gases on structures or organisms. A contemporary synonym was gas oven, but this gradually went out of use, perhaps because it was seen as robbing the victims of their dignity.

Coming back to ‘The Zone of Interest’, by some quirk of fate, a day before the film was premiered, Amis died at his Florida home at the age of 73. Author of such books as ‘Money’, ‘London Fields’, ‘Night Train’, ‘The Information’, ‘Time’s Arrow’, Amis was renowned for exploring the dark soul. The last too has Holocaust as its theme.