85 books with Auschwitz in the title: the publishing industry takes advantage of the Holocaust as a commercial hook

In recent years, the following books have reached Spanish and half-world bookstores: The Librarian of Auschwitz (by the Spanish Antonio Iturbe, written with respect and information and, above all, published in 2012, before it became a commercial fashion); The photographer of Auschwitz, that just came out in Spain; The doctor of Auschwitz; The Master of Auschwitz; The dressmakers of Auschwitz; The Auschwitz Song Lullaby of Auschwitz; The Pharmacist of Auschwitz; The Auschwitz Twins; The Wizard of Auschwitz (there are two with the same title, by different authors); The tattoo artist of Auschwitz (a great international success); The violin of Auschwitz; The daughter of Auschwitz; There was no Prozac in Auschwitz (yes, there is a book titled like that); The boy who followed his father to Auschwitz; The survivor of Auschwitz; KO Auschwitz; The girl who played chess in Auschwitz; Me, Dita Kraus. The Librarian of Auschwitz The Auschwitz Volunteer; The girl who escaped from Auschwitz y The dancer of Auschwitz. Between 2010 and 2024, there are 85 titles available in the ISBN with Auschwitz in the title: this list is a selection that does not include rigorous scientific essays, such as those by Laurence Rees or Sybille Steinbacher, or classics by camp survivors, such as The Auschwitz Trilogy by Primo Levi.

The vast majority are inspired by real stories that occurred in the German concentration and extermination camp, in which the Nazis murdered more than a million people, mainly Jews, fictionalized with, let’s say, a certain freedom with respect to the facts. This is not a parody. All titles exist. Then there are the novels, like The boy in striped pajamas, in which the name of the course does not appear in the title, although they take place in that setting and have become international hits.

How the Shoah and Nazi horror can be represented—and whether fiction is a legitimate way to do so—has been problematic since the end of World War II; But this avalanche occurs at an important and definitive moment: unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer survivors who can tell what happened and, with them, the living memory of a unique tragedy disappears. On the other hand, there are practically no perpetrators left alive. First-person narratives of horror will soon give way to a time without witnesses, in which those who did not experience it will have full responsibility for the story—who will also not be able to speak with those who went through the fields and ghettos. What is happening in bookstores does not seem very promising.

Wanda Witek-Malicka, from the Auschwitz Museum Research Center, is adamant: “Without a doubt, and unfortunately, Auschwitz and the Holocaust as symbols have become commodities for sale.” “Books with barbed wire and striped prisoner suits on the cover are sold in discount stores, gas stations and supermarkets, and are portrayed in pastel-colored photographs on social media as perfect holiday reads. Popular novels about Auschwitz, essentially fictions about the Holocaust, teach nothing new; they simply recycle the same set of stereotypes and symbols. The commercialization of Auschwitz and the popularization of a trivialized, extremely simplified and romanticized narrative of the Holocaust (intended for sale, an easily digestible version of history), create an entirely new educational reality that professionals working in the places of memory,” says this expert who investigates the Auschwitz Museum, currently located in Poland — it was in territory occupied by the Nazis when the camp was built as the largest mass murder center of the Third Reich — and a world heritage site. of UNESCO.

In the past, the Auschwitz Memorial had already spoken out about the historical errors of some of those novels, converted into best-seller international and that, therefore, could replace authentic facts in collective memory. Their goal was to make it very clear that anyone reading these books was not receiving reliable information about the Holocaust. About The tattoo artist of Auschwitz, the Memorial spread the following message on the social network Twitter in 2018 (in which he currently has a million and a half followers): “Due to the number of factual errors, The tattoo artist of Auschwitz cannot be recommended as a work of value to those who wish to understand the history of the field. The book is an impression about Auschwitz inspired by authentic facts, with almost no documentary value.”

The controversy that has erupted in recent weeks over the novel The women’s barracks (Espasa), by Fermina Cañaveras, which has provoked protests from relatives of survivors of the Ravensbrück camp who accuse the author of manipulating reality to build a publishing success through morbidity, reflects a problem that has never been resolved: how to tell the Holocaust and what licenses a narrator can take with reality when confronting Nazism. Cañaveras’ book had a previous edition two years ago in a smaller publisher, Molinos y Gigantes, with a very explicit title, country whores.

Her work deals with the sexual slavery to which hundreds of inmates were subjected in the only Nazi concentration camp for women, who were transferred to other camps to become prostitutes. It could be argued that the success achieved by this book helps spread a little-known aspect of terror under the Nazi yoke; but also – as the families of the survivors maintain – that it is pure morbidity and that suffering is used to sell books by inventing stories far from reality. When the series premiered Holocaust In 1978, a not very different controversy occurred: she was accused of trivializing and turning the Shoah into a soap opera.

“False, offensive and cheap. It is an insult to those who survived. “What appears on the screen has nothing to do with what happened,” she wrote when Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Auschwitz survivor and author of seminal works on extermination such as The night. The French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who was then working on Shoah, the 10-hour documentary considered the most important film on the Holocaust, was even more emphatic: “This is fiction. That is to say a fundamental lie, a moral crime, a murder of memory.” However, the impact of the series was enormous and was fundamental for the spread of the Jewish genocide in Germany. It helped bring from oblivion a crime that had been relatively buried. Magazine Variety then collected a survey that claimed that 70% of young Germans aged 14 to 19 said they had learned more about the Holocaust in the series than at school.

Nearly 30 years ago, in November 1993, it premiered Schindler’s List Steven Spielberg’s film that adapts the book by Australian Thomas Kennelly, perhaps the film about extermination that has achieved the greatest global impact. The debate, again, resurfaced. Some critics objected to the suspense scene in the showers (for a few minutes the spectators do not know if gas or water is going to come out) or criticized the choice to tell the story of a good German in the midst of an atrocity that included the collaboration of all levels of German society. But the visual force prevailed in a resounding way.

Even so, numerous voices, including Lanzmann’s again, rose against the film. “When you see Schindler’s List I felt the same again as with Holocaust. “Transgressing or trivializing is the same: a soap opera or a Hollywood movie transgresses because they trivialize, abolishing the unique character of the Holocaust,” the filmmaker wrote in The world in an article in which he recognized, however, the artistic merits of the film and its director. However, years later, Lanzmann spoke out in favor of Saul’s son, from the Hungarian László Nemes, who saw in Cannes in 2015: “He invented something and he was clever enough not to try to represent the Holocaust, because he knew that he neither could nor should.” Life is Beautiful, by Roberto Begnini, provoked in 1997 both intense praise and great criticism for turning the Holocaust into a kind of fable; although it was a public success and won the Oscar.

But the phenomenon that many authors and publishers have embarked on in recent years, with Auschwitz becoming a trademark, is unparalleled. As documentary filmmaker Ismael Alonso recently noted on Twitterafter putting together a part of the covers in the same image, “seriously, authors and publishers, you have to stop this…”.

But not all fictions about Auschwitz are the same nor do they all respond to the commercial impulse. Other recent examples are The area of ​​interest, Jonathan Glazer’s film in which only the sound of the countryside can be heard, which makes this story about the banality of evil, which won the Oscar for best foreign language film, more terrifying, or The passenger, the opera by Mieczyslaw Weinberg – a survivor of Nazism and Stalinism – of which the Teatro Real in Madrid has recently offered a subtle and brutal staging at the same time. They are fictional stories that subject the viewer to enormous tension, forcing them to reflect on the abysses of evil and look at themselves in a repulsive mirror; they place them in a place where the borders of humanity are diluted.

The profound discomfort caused by Cañaveras’ work and the entire binge of fictions that have Auschwitz in the title—of different artistic and documentary value—is not only related to its remoteness from reality; but with what Lanzmann pointed out: the danger of a unique tragedy becoming trivialized. Elie Wiesel spent his life fighting so that the Holocaust would not be forgotten — “Forgetting would be an absolute injustice just as Auschwitz was the absolute crime,” he declared at the trial against Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon — not only for the victims, but for its lessons for the present: trying to understand Nazism also means understanding the mechanisms of evil in a society.

In an interview with this newspaper in 1992, Wiesel was very concerned about the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which the Serbs committed genocide against the Bosnians. He had just visited Sarejevo during its siege. “We have no right to compare; but we also do not have the right to remain silent,” he noted. The path between diffusion and trivialization is very narrow; But right now the problem is not whether Auschwitz has been forgotten – as happened in Germany until the sixties – but whether Nazi horror can become a vulgar commodity, with no value for the present beyond commercial value.