Geraldine;
>"But why always Auschwitz?..."<
I think you answered your own question Geraldine. Its closeness to us. The fact that this happened just over the water and could have happened here - it is a haunting idea. It was not just the scale either, it was the bureaucratic coldness. I also think that because anti-semitism was not a Nazi invention there is a huge residue of guilt re the holocaust that does not necessarily apply to other genocides etc.
And people, poets, writers, are going to use images and references that can represent horror and inhumanity etc, and the image and notion of the concentration camp is there, available, ready to be used. I suppose there is a difference between it being used like that, as an ultimate symbol, and its use by survivors or the relations of survivors where an extreme emotional identification persists, but as time goes on there is an increasing grey area between those two. I think a lot of people would argue with you about Plath with regard to this as well. She used to convince me, but I haven't read those poems for a long time.
On the broader question, why other atrocities don't get our same attention, I would agree with you. I don't want to reopen old wounds here but it remains a fact that the West's emotional response to 9/11 was far far more pronounced than its response to any other horror. As i've said before, I knew people who before that happened never gave a rat's arse about the awful things that were happening around the world and more often than not blamed the actual victims - if you're starving its your own fault etc - remember how awful and how widespread such right-wing thinking was in the 90's - then when 9/11 happened it was a different story, life suddenly wasn't quite so cheap.
Cheers
Tim A.
