title: "Their numbers have been recorded": choiceless choice and the ethics of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk.
abstract: In this paper, I will examine several stories written by Holocaust survivor Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. Taken from her autobiographical collection, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (1967),"The Price of Life", "The Dance of the Rabbis," and "The Verdict" are three of forty short narratives the Polish Jewish writer compiled as literary testimony of her experience. During her time in Auschwitz, Nomberg-Przytyk held the comparatively fortunate position of infirmary worker, a position she earned by her pre-War leadership in the underground Polish Communist party. In these stories and others in the collection, she examines the daily ethical dilemmas faced by those working on the front lines of the Auchswitz death-and duplicity machine. As witnesses, they saw death in all forms, including mass piles of corpses, and in places that were devised to be duplicitous, such as the infamous "showers" that were actually gas chambers. They felt death in the human ashes that rose up from the crematoria and floated over their bodies as they navigated through their days and nights in the camp. As a witness to this landscape of death, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk offers us an opportunity to examine the nearly impossible notion of choice and human dignity within the concentrationary universe of Auschwitz. Through these stories, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk teaches us about Jewish ethics in the face of Auschwitz.
authors: Jewish Studies Department, Los Angeles, CA 90035, USA.
authors: Holli
authors: H
authors: Levitsky
mesh_terms: D049673:History, 20th Century; D017767:Holocaust; D006801:Humans; D007585:Jews; D033262:Narration / Q000266:history*; D017741:Survivors