The Complete Lives of Camp People

In <i>The Complete Lives of Camp People</i> Rudolf Mrázek presents a sweeping study of the material and cultural lives of twentieth-century concentration camp internees and the multiple ways in which their experiences speak to the fundamental logics of modernity. Mrázek focuses on the minutiae of daily life in two camps: Theresienstadt a Nazi ghetto for Jews near Prague and the Dutch isolation camp Boven Digoel-which was located in a remote part of New Guinea between 1927 and 1943 and held Indonesian rebels who attempted to overthrow the colonial government. Drawing on a mix of interviews with survivors and their descendants archival accounts ephemera and media representations Mrázek shows how modern life's most mundane tasks-buying clothes getting haircuts playing sports-continued on in the camps which were themselves designed built and managed in accordance with modernity's tenets. In this way Mrázek demonstrates that concentration camps are not exceptional spaces; they are the locus of modernity in its most distilled form.