Organized Exterminaton

I think it's difficult to write anything about the Holocaust because for us, as outsiders in terms of presence and time (being born long afterwards), it's simply difficult to wrap our minds around something that fundamentally evil. Since we just read Balakian, the idea of how the Holocaust compares against the Armenian genocide, or other instances of genocide (Slavey, Rwanda, Cambodia, etc.) enters the mind.

For me, the difference between the Holocaust and other instances of genocide has been its organized, mechanical nature. This is, of course, not to say that other instances of mass murder were less atrocious; all of them are atrocities and should be treated as such. But the sort of slick machinery of the Holocaust in terms of how it dehumanized its victims (as described in Levi's first couple chapters, especially At the Bottom and Initiation) sets it apart from the others for me, and makes it more horrifying. It wasn't enough to simply kill the Jews and other victims, they had to be systematically stripped of their identity and culture before their inevitable death. Even slavery, which reduced human beings to property, had the end goal of efficient labor. The dehumanization there was just as cruel, but the endgame wasn't immediate. You worked until you died; death itself was not the goal as it was in Auschwitz and other death camps. I'm not sure if this makes a new point or raises any important conversation, but it's always the thing that strikes me when reading the writing of Holocaust survivors, and something that I often cannot shake after reading their work.