The Role of Silence in Ida Fink’s Holocaust Short Stories

How can a short story shed light on what came under assault during the Holocaust and the Nazis’ systematic annihilation of the Jewish people? Like individual testimonies piecing together the horror and enormity of a crime, Holocaust short stories can convey a defining aspect of the Nazis’ assault on the soul, particularly as that assault manifests itself in an assault on language and meaning—and, by implication, on silence. Such connections are particularly significant for a literary work, since the literary text consists of this whole dynamic. Through a close analytical examination of the literary motif of silence found in select Holocaust short stories written by Ida Fink, this paper explores the ways in which Fink’s narratives illuminate this assault on word and meaning, on language and silence. Furthermore, I examine how this motif of silence, woven throughout Fink’s narratives, highlights the themes of the collapse of time and the collapse of relationships, which I consider key themes found throughout the Holocaust short story genre. For language is central to human relationship, and human relationship—at least among the Jews—was targeted for obliteration during the Holocaust. Lastly, by examining the role that silence plays in Holocaust short stories, I will shed light on how this literary genre uniquely reveals the assault on the soul, on language, and on human relationship that came about in Europe from 1933 to 1945.