The concentration camp prose: from a document to a novel

The essay considers some works - «The Ghetto Fights» by M. Edelman (1945), «I survived Auschwitz» by K. Zywulskaya (1946), «The Death of a City» (1946) or «The Pianist. Warsaw Diaries 1939-1945» by W. Szpilman (1998, version edited by E. Valdorff), «A Daughter’s Gift of Love: A Holocaust Memoir» by T. Birger (1992, in co-authorship with Jeffrey M. Green) and «The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie» by M. A. Shaffer and A. Barrows (2088) - as those representing transition from a document to a literary work, from non-fiction to fiction. This type of writing can be regarded as a new genre modification and can be called the concentration camp novel. As well as the subject, works of this type have common formal features: a true story as a basis; a constant plot (ghetto - camp - death), a metaphoric idea of «reverse initiation»; identity of the topos and the type of the narrator. The process of evolution does not finish with the transition from the documentary chronicles (Edelman) to the autobiography with elements of fiction (Zywulska) and then to the novel proper (Szpilman). An increasing number of literary works of this type, increasing temporal distance between the time of the event and the time of story-telling and a decreasing number of witnesses lead, on the one hand, to appearance of melodramatic notes and lines typical of the popular literature (e.g., an image of a “princess” who turned into “Cindirella” cleaning soldiers’ toilets - Birger). On the other hand, all these lead to disappearance of borderlines between the new genre modification and the novel proper since the concentration camp novel becomes one of the components of the synthetic novel integrity. «The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie» represents a new stage in the concentration camp novel modification. It does not contain autobiographical component or references to any documents but it reproduces the topos of a concentration camp and describes all the stages on the way there known from non-fiction works.