{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03333333333333333, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004830917874396135, 'mean_word_length': 5.256797583081571, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Flannery O'Connor, The Holocaust, and the Evolution of Catholicism

Holocaust imagery haunts many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and both of her novels. In climactic moments when characters imagine their death scenes, as Marshall Bruce Gentry has shown, they conjure images of boxcars, dead bodies, and incinerators. Since Gentry’s observations, however, critics have yet to explore fully O’Connor’s preoccupation with the Holocaust, an event that profoundly influenced the way the Catholic Church would come to understand its relation to Judaism. O’Connor contemplates the Holocaust most extensively, though indirectly, in a story written less than a decade after it took place. ‘‘The Displaced Person,’’ which imagines what happens when a family of European refugees from converted concentration camps is hired to work on a farm in the South, began as a sketch of O’Connor’s personal experience. In 1953, her mother Regina hired the Matysiaks, a family of Polish refugees, to work on Andalusia. Mr. Matysiak had been a prisoner in a German labor camp during the war and had lived with his family in Displaced Persons (DPs) camps for six years before moving to America. Though O’Connor rarely interacted with the Matysiaks, she used her experience with them to create the Guizacs, the fictional displaced family of ‘‘The Displaced Person’’ that comes to live on the McIntyre farm. Recent biographer Brad Gooch declares that ‘‘she started her story, with bold simplicity, almost as an eyewitness account of daily life on Andalusia’’ (242–3). Though the story might have begun simply, it would lead O’Connor to consider much more complex issues. The final version of the story, a 42-page narrative in three parts, contrasts worldly and transcendent perspectives, examines anxieties about racial miscegenation, and explores the dangers of repressing social progress in a the rapidly evolving American society of the mid-twentieth century. Overall, the story critiques several American cultural issues, from attitudes about foreigners in general and displaced persons