The Shoah literatura in Brazil: the fragile human body in Joseph Nichthauser

Abstract

In the XXth century, with the First and the Second World Wars, there was the emergence of a new man. A man no longer endowed with heroic forces capable of resisting the violence of the new times, but a weakened and vulnerable man. This feeling of disability has taken hold mainly of those who were victim of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. In the international context, particularly after The Second World War, many Jews, due to decimation and violence suffered, left Europe in search of a less unworthy life in other countries of the world. The Brazilian Jew Joseph Nichthauser is an example of a survivor of the Nazi Shoah. Victim of hunger, irreparable loss, disease, and forced labor, he saw in writing a means to find and assign meaning to his life. In 1972, he published Quero Viver... Memórias de um Ex-Morto, and, in 2003, A Morte de um Carrasco. This paper aims at analyzing violence and oppression exerted on the Jews’ bodies in concentration camps, the animalization to which they were subjected, the disallowance of their religious beliefs, and the immigration process they went through, based on the second book published by the author. A reflection on these items is important because they allow the construction of a new ethics, a new point of view to think about humanity, human relations, and minorities. Elaine Scarry and Walter Benjamin are the main authors who underscore the present approach.