American Studies Journal (May 2015)
“Out of Germany”: Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, Jakub’s World (2005), and the Commemoration of the Holocaust in the United States
Abstract
This essay addresses survivor stories as formulations of Holocaust memory in the U.S. More specifically, it focuses on the former concentration camp at Flossenbürg in southern Germany. Compared to places like Dachau and Buchenwald in Germany or Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland, Flossenbürg is often absent from or—if present at all—marginalized in the public and scholarly discourse of Holocaust memory. The heavily autobiographical novel Jakub’s World (2005) tells the story of Jakub Szabmacher, a Jewish boy who is taken from his home in Poland by the Nazis and is eventually interned at Flossenbürg. He survives many months of deprivation and hardship in the concentration camp until U.S. forces liberate it in April 1945; orphaned and homeless, he eventually relocates to the U.S., yet returns to the site of his suffering many times. Reading the book against the backdrop of ongoing debates about Holocaust memory in the U.S., this essay explores structural and plot elements in the book that complicate both a Jewish identity derived from victimhood and the notion of liberation as the moment of ultimate redemption. Both Jakub’s World and the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial as sites of memory actively partake in the commemoration of the Holocaust, offering narratives that not only complicate the notion of World War II as the “Good War” but also reveal the transnational dimension of memories of the Holocaust. Neither the stories and memories of survivors of the Holocaust at Flossenbürg, nor the visitors to the present-day memorial site, nor the characters central to the memoir can be framed, addressed, or understood in the context of national boundaries.
