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In speaking of his painful childhood and its effects upon him, a young man said, “My Auschwitz happened in my sleep. I was so frustrated as a boy that I woke up castrated.” He quickly acknowledged that his experience was not one of barbed wire, guard dogs, beatings, starvation, and possible death. But after that apologetic digression, he returned to referring to his childhood as a holocaust. Of course, he had his own immense pain to contend with. To do so, he had appropriated a term signifying an event of immense horror and great historical significance to portray his own idiosyncratic experience of childhood in a Midwestern town in the 1980s. Perhaps because I was in the midst of writing this review, I found myself more uncomfortable than usual with his use of metaphor.
The word holocaust is now in such common parlance that its power to evoke a communal acknowledgment of the unique horror of Nazi brutality has significantly diminished. Its current usage can describe a variety of private and public experiences, many of which bear little resemblance to those of the authors whose books are under review. This casual use of the word aids in the suppression of what is too painful to want to remember. And the same might be said of the new Holocaust