Rosh Hashana

Rosh Hashana is presented as a sacred Jewish day that the camp’s system of persecution turns into a point of heightened danger. Its significance lies not only in its place in the religious calendar, but in the calculated inversion of that calendar: observance is met with violence, and a day of awe becomes a date to fear.

The Holiday in the Calendar of Persecution

In a passage narrated by Szmul, the Jewish holy days are described as repeatedly marked by an Aktion. The account singles out Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, as occasions reserved for the sharpest measures. The calendar therefore records more than the passage of religious time: it exposes a recurring pattern in which Nazi violence intrudes upon days of particular spiritual importance.

Profanation and the Material World

The reference to Rosh Hashana occurs amid a catalogue of deliberate profanations. A Star of David is fixed to the ceiling of an airtight chamber; the prisoners’ foot rags are scraps of prayer shawls; and Transit Route IV, a slave-built highway from Przemsyl to Tarnopol, is laid over the rubble of synagogues and Jewish gravestones. These details are not all tied specifically to Rosh Hashana, but together they establish the conditions in which the holy days are targeted: Jewish religious objects, spaces, and observances are repeatedly converted into instruments or settings of humiliation and death.

Recurrence as a Form of Terror

The phrase Goebbels Calendar names the system’s pattern of aligning actions with holy days. The passage gives no particular Rosh Hashana date or single operation to identify; instead, its emphasis is on recurrence. By saying that no holy day passes without an Aktion and that the sharpest measures are reserved for the Days of Awe, the narrative presents persecution as something imposed upon sacred time with methodical regularity. Rosh Hashana thus signifies both a religious observance and the danger attached to its observance under camp rule.

Sacred Time and Nazi Commemoration

Elsewhere, the novel contrasts the persecution of Jewish holy days with the regime’s own political calendar. A celebration marks both the electoral breakthrough of September 14, 1930, and the passage of the Nuremberg Race Laws on September 15, 1935, joining political success to racial legislation as a double cause for celebration. At a separate November 9 memorial, Paul Doll invokes the Nazi movement’s commemorative history and displays the Blood Flag, which he says is symbolically stained with red wine. These scenes do not identify Rosh Hashana as part of Nazi ceremony; their contrast clarifies the novel’s broader treatment of time. The regime stages its own dates as occasions for political reverence while the Jewish calendar is subjected to calculated desecration.