Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era

The essay diachronically compares some declarations of man’s rights such as Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, the French Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (1789) and, much later and after World War II, the Charter of the United Nations (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) in order to understand how the concept of “human rights” has evolved across time. The triumph of human rights is rooted in paradox and in their principles’ patent violations during the age of the Holocaust. One of the most horrible consequences of the violation of human rights in that period consisted in the survivors’ being doomed to silence for more than twenty years. The survivors’ words had to confront the resistance of language to represent what sounded as unrepresentable and the people’s refusal to listen: they were deprived even of the right to speak. The problem of authenticity and inauthenticity is called into question, recalling Geoffrey Hartman’s Scars of the Spirit. From this perspective, the paper examines John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments (1996) and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1982), thus centring its focus on children’s rights