{"id":42,"date":"2020-11-05T09:24:23","date_gmt":"2020-11-05T14:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-bmalakoff\/?page_id=42"},"modified":"2020-12-17T18:17:39","modified_gmt":"2020-12-17T23:17:39","slug":"reflection","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-bmalakoff\/reflection\/","title":{"rendered":"Vapniarka: Slow or Spectacle?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I have discussed elsewhere, the Romanian Holocaust, in its horrific totality, was an example of slow violence. But were the events in Vapniarka? I\u2019m not sure. While Vapniarka clearly had elements of spectacle disaster, I believe there are also underlying conditions of slow violence, like the rapid yet long-term progression of the collective symptoms of neurolathyrism, and the dismissal of Jewish physicians\u2019 knowledge of the dangers of Lathyrus Sativus<\/em> by non-Jewish officials.<\/p>\n

My vehicle for this analysis is a series of translated excerpts from Dr. Arthur Kessler\u2019s unpublished memoir Ein Artz im Lager, <\/em>which translates to A Camp Doctor<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dr. Arthur Kessler in 1939. From (Shapiro 2013, 122).<\/p><\/div>\n

A\u00a0quick recollection: Dr. Kessler was the Vapniarka physician who made the connection between the consumption of Lathyrus Sativus <\/em>to the prisoners\u2019 symptoms (Garfinkle, Andermann, and Shevell 2011, 842). Unfortunately, I was unable to access the original version of Kessler\u2019s memoir, instead relying on a translation by Dirk Enneking of the University of Adelaide in Australia. I used this translation with hesitation, as Mr. Enneking often added his own historical context to Kessler\u2019s story, making it hard to discern Kessler\u2019s words from Enneking\u2019s. To account for this, whenever I use this source, in passages where the words are clearly a direct translation of Kessler, my in-text citations will include Kessler\u2019s name (for example: Kessler in Enneking 2015). Otherwise, my citations will simply cite Enneking as follows (Enneking 2015). In totality, Kessler\u2019s account was quite compelling, which is why I decided to use it, albeit with caution.<\/p>\n

In Kessler\u2019s memoir, the first key aspect of slow violence present in Vapniarka was the the blatant disinterest of the Romanian officials in mitigating the prisoners\u2019 neurolathyrism. He recalled how, in realizing the impending danger of mass death amongst the prisoners, \u201cA delegation [went] to the commanding officer on duty, Captain Buradescu\u2026I [described] the desperate situation\u2026There [were] already 120 completely lame and another 1000 on their way\u201d (Kessler in Enneking 2015, 6). Kessler and the delegation could not have been more explicit with Cpt. Buradescu: If he did not remove the cattle fodder (L. Sativus<\/em>) from the prisoners\u2019 diets, they would become disabled, or die. And yet, Buradescu was not particularly interested in the prisoners\u2019 plight, responding \u201cHow do you know that we are interested in keeping you alive?\u201d (Kessler in Enneking 2015, 6). Eventually, a formal investigation team was sent to Vapniarka in February 1943, yet they were as helpful as Buradescu. Kessler recalls \u201cThe conversation with the interned physicians was one-sided. We were the expelled, in the best case inferior humans\u2026.The immediate response is dismissive. It was better to remain silent than to debate.\u2026A report about the results was never received by us\u201d (Kessler in Enneking 2015, 7-8). Even though Kessler and the camp physicians were on the frontlines of treating Vapniarka\u2019s prisoners, the investigative team was uninterested in working with them. The outside inspectors saw themselves as superior to the camp\u2019s physicians, which I suspect was the result of them being non-Jewish. But most crucially, they neglected to inform the Jewish physicians about the results of their report.<\/p>\n

This most drastically reminded me of the slow violence inflicted upon the Zanskarpas in rural India in the weeks before a devastating flood: \u201cAbove all, the [Zanskarpas] monks\u2019 offer of help may be read as an attempt by the local population to exert greater agency on the impending disaster; its rejection further contributed to a prevailing sense of a lack of control over the situation\u201d (Gagn\u00e9 2019, 856). Like the monks from Zanskar, Kessler and the camp\u2019s physicians needed the investigative team to address the prisoners\u2019 situation with urgency. The monks, Kessler, and the peoples of Zanskar and prisoners of Vapniarka were mostly powerless to stop the impending catastrophes; the catastrophe that hadalready<\/em> begun in Vapniarka. This is why I began to associate Vapniarka with slow violence: the camp commanders had the ability to quickly stop the impending (and occurring) disaster. Yet, as the flood didn\u2019t wait for the Indian government to act, neurolathyrism in Vapniarka didn\u2019t wait either. However, while the Zanskarpas were unable to circumvent the Indian government\u2019s lack of urgency, the prisoners of Vapniarka were able to organize against the camp leaders and bring a halt to the forced consumption of L. Sativus<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Along these lines, Kessler also recalled horrific the progression of neurolathyrism, which I realized might also be interpreted as a metaphor for the Holocaust, overall. Kessler recalled that as his team of doctors began to study the prisoners\u2019 symptoms, they realized that \u201cmore than 70% of all inmates [showed] signs or prognostic symptoms of the disease\u201d (Kessler in Enneking 2015, 6). He goes into more detail describing the totality of the prisoners\u2019 symptoms: \u201cIt was hellish, not a picture to be shown, hundreds of sick, lame\u2026bent postures due to muscle cramps\u2026in addition, the sad, natural phenomenon of the passing of the old, tuberculosis affected and diabetics who weren\u2019t strong enough to cope\u201d (Kessler in Enneking 2015, 7). Kessler\u2019s graphic description of the prisoners\u2019 suffering struck me. I could picture the prisoners\u2019 fear, their screams, their pain, as their symptoms spread like wildfire throughout the camp.<\/p>\n

At first, I didn\u2019t associate this horrific passage with slow violence\u2014I thought it spectacle. But as I thought about the implication of this passage, I recalled Rob Nixon\u2019s portrayal of Animal, Indra Sinha\u2019s fictionalized personification of the victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster: \u201cWhen four-footed Animal (now nineteen) transports an ailing child on his back, his posture is precisely that of a beast of burden\u2026an implicit yet unforgettable image of a body politic literally bend double beneath the weight of the poisoned city\u2019s foreign load\u201d (Nixon 2011, 52). Akin to the metaphor of Animal, I envision Vapniarka as a metaphor for the Romanian Jewish people: subjugated not only by a poisonous diet, but by the \u201cpoisonous\u201d slow violence of ethnic nationalism and antisemitism.<\/p>\n

Exploring Vapniarka (and the Romanian Holocaust elsewhere) through the lens of slow violence explains not just how aspects of the neurolathyrism epidemic occurred, but why <\/em>they occurred. It isn\u2019t enough to know simply that the medical investigation team dismissed Kessler\u2019s knowledge, or that Vapniarka\u2019s prisoners suffered immensely from their bouts with neurolathyrism (Kessler in Enneking 2015, 6-8). To fully understand these aspects of the Vapniarka story, I needed to understand them in the context of Antonescu\u2019s desire to ethnically cleanse Judaism from Romania (Solonari 2017). It wasn\u2019t enough to know that many of the prisoners of Vapniarka were communist, or were suspected of having communist beliefs, nor was it enough to know that the Romanian commanders of Vapniarka were antisemitic (Benditer 1995; Solonari 2017). Understanding Vapniarka required my awareness that many Romanians blamed the Jewish population for the loss of territory to the Soviet Union, and may have been more inclined to target communist (or suspected communist) Jews as a result (Braham 1998, 12-13; Degeratu 2015, 38). Slow violence was the key to this analysis, as it was a framework for synthesizing the conditions that amplified the horrors of Vapniarka.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I have discussed elsewhere, the Romanian Holocaust, in its horrific totality, was an example of slow violence. But were the events in Vapniarka? I\u2019m not sure. While Vapniarka clearly had elements of spectacle disaster, I believe there are also underlying conditions of slow violence, like the rapid yet long-term progression of the collective symptoms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-42","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-bmalakoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-bmalakoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-bmalakoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-bmalakoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-bmalakoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-bmalakoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/42\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-bmalakoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}