Slaughterhouse Five Soap

I had a visceral reaction to anything Holocaust related when I was a preteen and teenager.  I don’t know why; I’m not Jewish (unless you count by injection *rimshot*).

Yeah, an anal sex joke probably isn’t the most tasteful lead-in to this, but still:

When the film came out, I saw it.   Once.  That was enough.  I know all the controversy behind the inaccuracies and bias in the film, but still, it was powerful- and I had been affected by the Holocaust long before that.  And amidst all the horror of the showers, the medical experiments, the work camps, the lampshades, what stuck with me as worst was three things: the teeth, the soap, and the candles.  I even had a hard time watching Fight Club, for those of you who remember the scene in that film where Tyler Durden explains how soap is made.

To the point, like I said, this is the first time in almost twenty years I’ve looked at Slaughterhouse, and I’m reading Chapter Five when Billy sits down at a table for the prisoners of war and

At each place was a safety razor, a washcloth, a package of razor blades, a chocolate bar, two cigars, a bar of soap, ten cigarettes, a book of matches, a pencil, and a candle.

Only the candles and the soap were of German origin.  They had a ghostly, opalescent similarity.  The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the state.

So it goes.

This scene brought me right back to my teenage years and my physical reaction to the Holocaust.  It had been years since I actually felt upset to my stomach when considering WWII.  Here, though, it came rushing back.  Reflecting, I think it might be two things- one, the term “fairies.”  Maybe I had a nascent understanding back then that even though I wasn’t Jewish, I would have been in the camps indeed.

But that doesn’t explain the soap, candles, and teeth, and why those things bother me the most.  Upon reflecting this afternoon, I think it has to do with cannibalism.  I understand cannibalism (at least the cultural reason for it)- it’s consumption of the flesh, but for a purpose, whether symbolic or survival.  The soap and candles of this scene, though, are sub-cannibalistic.  They do dishonor not only to the victims, but, as odd as this is, to the practice of cannibalism itself.  The bodies of the Jews are being used as utility, and there’s simply no need for it (is there ever a need for killing- maybe somebody ought to write a pacifist manifesto about senseless massacre and–oh wait– I’m kind of in the middle of re-reading it now).  It puts me in mind of horses being made into glue.  The soap and candles don’t just remove the life from the victim, but strips them, in my mind, more than anything, of their actual humanity because it’s a tangible destruction of their very being- and they get killed a second time,washed or burned away.

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