Prompt: Quinn makes a comparison between the slave trade and the Holocaust and the famine emigration early in the essay only to reject it later. Why?
“In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone has his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.” — Elie Wiesel
In his short story “In Search of the Banished Children,” Peter Quinn shares his findings about his personal Irish ancestry and connects the experiences of his ancestors to the experiences of other Irish immigrants in New York during the 1840s. Quinn goes into detail about the struggles faced by Irish immigrants — a struggle that was so terrible, many immigrants refused to talk about it. Quinn saw the experience as so physically and mentally debilitating that he describes the famine emigration in the words of historian Robert James Scaly, who stated that the event has “more resemblance to the slave trade or the boxcars of the Holocaust…” (48).
However, later in the text, Quinn writes, “The Irish Famine of the 1840s and the Jewish Holocaust of the 1940s are very different events and should not be confused or equated” (53). Quinn retracts his previous statement because of the differences in severity of suffering and social awareness between the famine emigration and the Holocaust. Quinn says, “As terrible and traumatic as the Famine was, as formative of all that followed in Irish and Irish-American history, it was not [the Holocaust]” (53).
This realization is supported by Quinn. He brings up that the famine was merely a natural catastrophe and implies that the Holocaust was worse because it was a human-made disaster which created a large magnitude of suffering and plight. The organizational power during the Holocaust sought to eradicate all Jews — unapologetically and by any means. Quinn says, the “Holocaust was a death sentence leveled against every Jewish man, woman and child under German rule” (53). To make matters worse, unlike the Irish famine emigration, the Holocaust was bluntly denied by Nazi apologists (54).
The genocide that poisoned the bodies of Jews and the minds of Nazis, took the lives of millions (born and unborn) and left behind pits of bones and walking skeletons was being outright denied. Imagine having survivors so shaken, like Elie Wiesel, they choose silence while the inflictors of the pain shout denial — not regret or apologies … denial. Quinn says, “Such a challenge was never made against the Famine” (54).
Quinn has a personal connection to the stories of the Irish immigrants who came to the United States after the Great Famine. Despite this connection, Quinn is aware of the differences between the Great Famine and the Holocaust. Quinn tells the reader that the sufferings of the Jews during and after the Holocaust were so much greater than that of the Irish during the famine. “No exceptions. None” (53).
