Abstract This article draws attention to the pervasive role of female madness in literary representations of Holocaust deportation. The analysis focuses on three key texts: Elie Wiesel's Night (1956), Imre Kertész's Fatelessness (1975), and Ruth Klüger's Still Alive (1992), all of which depict an elderly woman's vocal and physical expression of hopelessness and despair en route to Auschwitz. By drawing on cultural frameworks of lamentation and madness, the article demonstrates her function as a narrative double, a character whose madness reflects and amplifies the psychological turmoil of the broader prisoner community. The article emphasizes that although the madwoman appears in each of these fictional representations, she is not treated as a monolith. Instead, each survivor writer and their narrators employ her differently to either foreshadow impending horrors, to create narrative distance, or to highlight the incapacity to engage with the suffering of others. The close reading analysis offers insights into the ways in which fiction can mediate and challenge our understanding of narratives of deportation experiences and thus contributes to the broader discourse on literary representation and Holocaust memory.
Mikael Olsson Berggren (Fri,) studied this question.