The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust

by Simone Gigliotti

Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis’ genocidal vision of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the “Final Solution,” Raul Hilberg pondered the role of “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?” This book explores the question by analyzing the victims’ experiences at each stage of forced the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.

Genres: Holocaust, Historical Fiction

405 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Michael Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Why the Twentieth-Century remains a complete failure"

No better way to get our minds around the sea of misery that surrounds us after the end of the twentieth-century. Let's strike three notes: departure, the train journey, and arrival at the camps. This progression parallels a more common experience: birth, coming of age, and the coffin. We are all subconsciously aware of the humiliation of child birth. Today life is often spoken of as a journey. But what, after all is the destination? Humiliation. The actual decay of flesh. Or the coffins of the transports.

We don't need another factual account of the Holocaust. What we require is an in-depth appreciation of the existential truths reveal in testimony and memoirs. "I cannot state numbers. I can only say it was actually impossible to stand up in the freight car...the congestion was so great." Gutman's testimony.

[Geicodave · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an informative book but not one intended for the general reader. The author breaks the Holocaust into various parts or stages: ostracism, isolation, ghettoization, railway transport from towns/cities to the death camps and, ultimately, murder. The focus of this book is on the transport stage (including arrival at the camps), which had its own unique characteristics and brutalities. The book contains many first-person accounts of the journey to the camps.

The book is too theoretical in parts and is written in an academic-style language which is often incomprehensible to the general reader. I, for example, noticed this when the author first used the term "thick description."

The book is worth reading though, if one keeps the overall theme in mind, relates the victims' accounts to that theme, and leaves the "academese" to the academics.

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

My father was one of the GI’s that liberated the death camps…what he saw broke something inside of him…he held prisoners as they died…when he was discharged he didn’t come right home, relatives had to go in search of him and bring him home…he refused to speak of it…one day in his last year of life it was the anniversary of D day….he was in the basement drinking beers and getting drunk, I was the daughter closest to him and he called me down…

He told me his story and I knew and understood his demons finally…he died that year 1987….may he rest in peace…