Advancing Holocaust Studies 2020011142, 2020011143, 9780367472313, 9780367497118, 9781003034278

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ADVANCING HOLOCAUST STUDIES

The growing field of Holocaust studies confronts a world wracked by antisemitism, immigration and refugee crises, human rights abuses, mass atrocity crimes, threats of nuclear war, the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, and environmental degradation. What does it mean to advance Holocaust studies— what are learning and teaching about the Holocaust for—in such dire straits? Vast resources support study and memorialization of the Holocaust. What assumptions govern that investment? What are its major successes and failures, challenges and prospects? Across thirteen chapters, Advancing Holocaust Studies shows how leading scholars grapple with those tough questions. Carol Rittner is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Dr. Marsha Raticoff Grossman Professor Emerita of Holocaust Studies, Stockton University. Her books include The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future and Women, the Holocaust, and Genocide. John K. Roth is Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Founding Director, Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights), Claremont McKenna College. His books include The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities and Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide.

Routledge Studies in Second World War History

The Second World War remains today the most seismic political event of the past hundred years, an unimaginable upheaval that impacted upon every country on earth and is fully ingrained in the consciousness of the world's citizens. Traditional narratives of the conf lict are entrenched to such a degree that new research takes on an ever important role in helping us make sense of World War II. Aiming to bring to light the results of new archival research and exploring notions of memory, propaganda, genocide, empire and culture, Routledge Studies in Second World War History sheds new light on the events and legacy of global war.

Recent titles in this series British Exploitation of German Science and Technology, 1943–1949 Charlie Hall Unknown Conflicts of the Second World War Forgotten Fronts Chris Murray A New Nationalist Europe Under Hitler Concepts of Europe and Transnational Networks in the National Socialist Sphere of Inf luence, 1933–1945 Edited by Johannes Dafinger and Dieter Pohl The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust Pontus Rudberg For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com /Routledge-Studies-in-Second-World-War-History/book-series/WWII

ADVANCING HOLOCAUST STUDIES

Edited and introduced by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Carol Rittner and John K. Roth; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Carol Rittner and John K. Roth to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rittner, Carol, 1943- editor. | Roth, John K., editor. Title: Advancing Holocaust studies/edited and introduced by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth. Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge studies in Second World War history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020011142 (print) | LCCN 2020011143 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367472313 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367497118 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003034278 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)–Study and teaching. Classification: LCC D804.33 .A38 2020 (print) | LCC D804.33 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/18071–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011142 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011143 ISBN: 978-0-367-47231-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-49711-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03427-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Sr. Mary Roch Rockledge, R.S.M. The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I

The scholar bends on hands and knees over the deep hole of history. —Jim Quay

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgments Prologue: What’s it for? Carol Rittner and John K. Roth Chronology: Events advancing Holocaust studies, 1945–2020 Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

xi xiii 1 11

PART I

Journeys

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1 Places I have been John K. Roth

27

2 Peripheral vision Sara R. Horowitz

39

3 Living alongside the Holocaust: A personal and professional journey Edward T. Linenthal 4 The memorialist James E. Young

49 61

x

Contents

PART II

Challenges 5 Holocaust studies: A compass Debórah Dwork 6 Thinking back and looking forward: Holocaust education in a troubled world Alex Alvarez 7 Culture matters: Warnings and implications from the Holocaust Jonathan Petropoulos

73 75

88

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8 Catholics, the Holocaust, and the burden of history Robert A. Ventresca

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9 Intersections: Holocaust studies, personal lives Wendy Lower

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PART III

Prospects 10 Holocaust studies: Why, how, and wherefore Robert P. Ericksen 11 My unorthodox path: Toward integrative, interdisciplinary, and comparative Holocaust studies Wolf Gruner

141 143

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12 A stone under the wheel of history Lisa Moses Leff

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13 Words matter Carol Rittner

177

Epilogue: Why? Carol Rittner and John K. Roth Index

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CONTRIBUTORS

Alex Alvarez is Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Founding Director, Martin-Springer Institute for Teaching the Holocaust, Tolerance, and Humanitarian Values, Northern Arizona University. His books include Native America and the Question of Genocide and Unstable Ground: Climate Change, Conflict, and Genocide. Debórah Dwork is Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and

Genocide Studies at Clark University and serves as Distinguished Research Scholar, Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Holocaust: A History and Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946. Robert P. Ericksen is Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies Emeritus at Pacific Lutheran University. His books include Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch and Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany. Wolf Gruner is Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, Professor of History,

and Founding Director, USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, University of Southern California. His books include Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 and Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses. Sara R. Horowitz is Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Humanities and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, and Graduate Director, Israel and Golda Kochitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, York University, Ontario, Canada. Her books include Voicing the Void: Muteness and

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Memory in Holocaust Fiction and Lessons and Legacies X: Back to the Sources; Reexamining Perpetrators,Victims, and Bystanders. Lisa Moses Leff is Professor of History, American University, and Director, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her books include The Archive Thief:The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust and Jewish Migration and the Archive. Edward T. Linenthal is Professor, Department of History, Indiana University

Bloomington, and former editor, Journal of American History. His books include Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields and Preserving Memory:The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. Wendy Lower is John K. Roth Professor of History, George R. Robert Fellow, and Director, Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, Claremont McKenna College. Her books include Nazi Empire-building and the Holocaust in Ukraine and Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Jonathan Petropoulos is John V. Croul Professor of European History, Claremont

McKenna College. His books include The Faustian Bargain:The Art World in Nazi Germany and Artists under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany. Carol Rittner is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Holocaust and Genocide

Studies and Dr. Marsha Raticoff Grossman Professor Emerita of Holocaust Studies, Stockton University. Her books include The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future and Women, the Holocaust, and Genocide. John K. Roth is Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Founding

Director, Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights), Claremont McKenna College. His books include The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities and Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide. Robert A. Ventresca is Professor of History, King’s University College at Western

University, Ontario, Canada. His books include From Fascism to Democracy: Culture and Politics in the Italian Election of 1948 and Soldier of Christ:The Life of Pope Pius XII. James E. Young is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus and Founding

Director, Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst. His books include At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture and The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Publishing this book required encouragement, cooperation, and support from many people. We are deeply grateful to the Holocaust scholars who contributed to Advancing Holocaust Studies. More than scholarly effort, however, was needed to produce it. Absent funding and hospitality that enabled the contributors to share early versions of their chapters in a seminar held in late March 2019 at the Mercy Conference Center in St. Louis, Missouri, the book would not exist. Advancing Holocaust Studies is dedicated to Sister Mary Roch Rockledge, R.S.M. The Health Ministry Liaison at Mercy, St. Louis, she obtained a generous grant to support the seminar. More than that, her enthusiastic interest and constant encouragement for the book project have been inspiring. Sister Mary Roch’s colleagues at Mercy, St. Louis, Shannon Sock and JoAnne Levy, also championed the seminar. Rabbi Amy Feder, Congregation Temple Israel, St. Louis, as well as The Holocaust Museum & Learning Center, a program of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis, also gave assistance. Thomas Botzman, president of Misericordia University at the time of the St. Louis seminar, kindly granted permission to use funds from the Sister Carol Rittner R.S.M. Holocaust Fund to support the project. Over the years, Michigan friends Maurice Chandler and Jerry Minkin have underwritten several Rittner-Roth books. They did so again for this one. We are immensely grateful to these good people. Their generosity advances Holocaust studies. We also thank Robert (Rob) Langham, Senior Publisher for History, Routledge Publishing, who early on expressed encouraging interest in the book project, and Tanushree Baijal, his Editorial Assistant at Routledge, who patiently handled our many questions and requests. Their expertise, sound advice, attention to detail, and efficiency—along with that of Anna Dolan and Rennie Alphonsa, key members of the Routledge team—benefitted Advancing Holocaust Studies in countless ways. They all are consummate professionals and good friends too.

PROLOGUE What’s it for? Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

What’s it for? That’s a question one might ask when encountering something strange for the first time. What’s wanted is a response that explains how something works—for example, a material object (perhaps a tool) but also a practice (perhaps teaching) or a discipline (perhaps political science). A related but different way of understanding “What’s it for?” emphasizes what something—for example, a material object (perhaps a book) but also a practice (perhaps researching documents) or a discipline (perhaps history)—supports and encourages, advocates and defends. Holocaust studies invites inquiry about both senses of “What’s it for?” How does that field of inquiry work? What happens within it? Who are its investigators and practitioners? In addition, why do people become Holocaust scholars and educators? What goals do they pursue; what do they want to accomplish? What do they support and defend? How well do their aims, including their explanations about them, withstand critical scrutiny? Surrounding and driving the urgency of those questions is a conviction that the Holocaust demands attention because what happened at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the killing fields of Eastern Europe was immensely wrong, unjust, and evil—period, full stop. We study the Holocaust because it happened, but ethical reasons govern that work. If they don’t, what’s the point of Holocaust studies and education and the huge investment that supports them? The Holocaust was wrong or nothing could be—that bedrock grounds Holocaust studies. Absent such conviction, the field would lack the passion, intensity, and commitment that make it fertile. At least seventy-five years old as the third decade of the twentieth century unfolds, the growing discipline of Holocaust studies inhabits a world wracked by antisemitism, immigration and refugee crises, human rights abuses, mass atrocity crimes, threats of nuclear war, the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019)

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pandemic, and environmental degradation. Some assumptions held that learning and teaching about the Holocaust would curb, if not prevent or eliminate, at least some of those upheavals. But it’s not easy to be optimistic about post-Holocaust humanity, which means that confidence about the outcomes of Holocaust studies and education bears watching. What does it mean to advance Holocaust studies—what are learning and teaching about the Holocaust for—in currently dire straits? How can Holocaust studies and education help us to navigate them? Vast resources support research, memorialization, and teaching about the Holocaust. How large, how good, is the return on that investment? What are the major successes and shortcomings of Holocaust studies? How shall that discipline gauge and engage its problems and prospects? This book shows how leading scholars deal with those tough questions.

Defning Holocaust studies Studies about the Holocaust—the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and murder of Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945—began while that catastrophe took place and before the Holocaust got that name. German perpetrators documented their genocidal actions. Euphemism often masked that work, which was also cloaked in silence. Not every wartime German document dealt with the destruction of the European Jews; many that did were destroyed or went missing. But the pioneering scholar Raul Hilberg, a seminal founder of Holocaust studies, underscored the Third Reich’s fixation on documentation when he observed that in just one place, the postwar War Documentation Project in Washington, DC, “28,000 linear feet of shelves of captured German documents” could be found.1 Evidence of the Holocaust includes much more. Deported to ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers, Jewish women, men, and even children wrote about their plight and the hope that persisted in spite of it. Murdered Jews do not speak, and yet the dead left behind words that do. Clandestine artworks preserved what Jews saw. In courts as well as in oral histories and written accounts, Jewish survivor testimony documented in irreplaceable ways what happened during the Holocaust. Recovery of plundered property and stolen possessions added insight about the theft that so greedily robbed the European Jews. Meanwhile, archives showed that governments and churches knew about the “Final Solution.” Journalists who covered Europe during World War II included reports about the devastation of Jewish life under the swastika. Photographs and movies made by Germans and by the Allies depicted what genocidal antisemitism entailed. Preparation for postwar trials gave prosecutors and judges abundant records about Nazi antisemitic atrocities. The destruction of the European Jews was no secret. It produced studies that were part of the Holocaust itself. Those inquiries and documents, including eyewitness investigations and testimonies, were not an academic discipline called Holocaust studies. That development, including Holocaust education, came

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later—postwar and post-Holocaust. But more than prefiguring the academic field called Holocaust studies, and Holocaust education as well, the studies concurrent with the destruction process, or produced in its immediate aftermath, activated and even necessitated those developments. The early documents, reports, testimonies, films, and artworks provided horrendous glimpses of the immense and unrelenting destruction that Nazi Germany wreaked against Europe’s Jews. The glimpses raised questions—fundamental, intense, arguably unending—such as: Why and how did the disaster happen? Who planned and executed it? Who was responsible? When and where were key decisions made? How did Jews cope at the time and in the aftermath? What are the primary implications and reverberations of the genocide? What meanings, if any, are embedded in Holocaust history? Such challenging questions require inquiry. They oblige expanded vision and demand penetrating insight to detail and contextualize what happened, to struggle with the disaster’s implications, and to assess what steps, if any, might ensure that such lethal events do not take place again. Compounding the difficulty of those issues, the vast scope of the Holocaust complicates, even frustrates, every effort to explain it completely and to comprehend it fully. The destruction of the European Jews was continental and international. Hilberg alluded to one aspect of that fact’s complexity when he said, “I once counted the number of languages that can be legitimately called ‘languages of Holocaust research.’ And, there were twenty! In fact,” he added, “there are more.”2 No scholar is likely to know them all. Nor can any individual research every archive’s contents, study all testimonies, read every Holocaust-related book or article, or explore all of the Holocaust’s reverberations and implications. Generations of scholars are needed to advance Holocaust studies. What’s more, doing so takes cooperation from people with expertise in many fields— history, literature, psychology, gender studies, philosophy, economics, and religious studies to name a few. Those facts are reminders that Holocaust studies is a singular term in two senses. First, it refers to study of a distinctive, particular event—sometimes called a watershed in history or described as novel, unprecedented, or unique. Controversy has swirled around which descriptive words are best to distinguish the Holocaust from other mass atrocity crimes, but, however those debates play out, the fundamental importance of the Holocaust remains. At a minimum, the destruction of the European Jews, a process that involved every organized element of German society, was, in Hilberg’s words, “one of the most drastic acts in history.”3 One reason why was captured well when Hilberg also observed that “no obstruction stopped the German machine of destruction. No moral problem proved insurmountable. … The old moral order did not break through anywhere along the line. This is a phenomenon of the greatest magnitude.”4 Second, the term Holocaust studies identifies a field of study, an academic discipline; used in that way, the subject takes singular verbs—Holocaust studies is … Holocaust studies does … Those historical and grammatical facts do not contradict others. Holocaust studies is also a plural term in two senses. First, studies of the Holocaust are

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multiple; they involve diverse methods, approaches, disciplines. Much Holocaust scholarship depends on the best practices of traditional branches of learning such as history. But new developments in digital humanities, the use of technology and “big data,” and comparative genocide studies are among recent developments that change and expand the field. Second, scholarship on the Holocaust entails multiple interpretations of the event. The notion that there is one correct answer to the question “What is the Holocaust?” or to the question “How did the Holocaust happen?” gives way to the realization that different disciplines will respond to such questions differently. Corroboration of basic facts and considerable but imperfect agreement about sound answers mixes and mingles with changing perspectives, evolving disciplines, and new findings that keep the key questions open for further inquiry. Incompleteness prevents closure. Human finitude and fallibility eclipse finality and necessitate revised and corrected understanding. The Holocaust and its legacy are so vast that, at best, there can only be selective narratives and analyses about them. Done well, those accounts more or less weave together reliable glimpses, documented perspectives, focused but not allembracing slices from a destruction process that swept through a continent from 1933 to 1945. Scholars, teachers, and students should have the modesty to realize that inquiry about the Holocaust has an open-ended and, therefore, somewhat inconclusive quality about it. Especially when studies about the Holocaust are successful, Hilberg warned, a mistaken belief should be exposed and corrected: namely, the assumption that in such research one “will find the true ultimate Holocaust as it really happened.”5 His comment echoes the gentile Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo, who could have been cautioning Holocaust scholars, educators, and students when she said, “Today people know / have known for several years / that this dot on the map / is Auschwitz / This much they know /as for the rest/ they think they know.”6 Delbo’s caution does not mean that Holocaust studies and education should cease and desist. Her commitment to advancing insight about the Holocaust was not less than Hilberg’s. Both of them sought to fathom that catastrophe, but they understood, and in their distinctive ways communicated, that assumptions and claims about what study and education about the Holocaust can accomplish should not try to support more weight than they can bear. The Holocaust, it is claimed, has what Sara J. Bloomfield, Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, calls “timeless importance and relevance.” If that claim is valid, the proof depends on the degree to which Holocaust studies and education advance, in Bloomfield’s words, “critical thinking about how and why the Holocaust happened, and what made it possible.” 7 The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, whose mission includes uniting “governments and experts to strengthen, advance and promote Holocaust education, research and remembrance,” augments Bloomfield’s hopes by affirming that “teaching and learning about the Holocaust provide an essential opportunity to inspire critical thinking, societal awareness, and personal growth.”8

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Even modest progress toward those goals would be a significant accomplishment because it could confirm that Holocaust studies and education can open minds, deepen sympathies, and fortify wills in ways that help people to live more justly and compassionately in the present and to meet an unpredictable future with courage. But what if the lofty quality of even unassuming hopes for Holocaust studies and education makes them less than completely convincing? That question could lead to another: Why try to advance Holocaust studies?

Why do it? Why am I doing this? Anyone who studies the Holocaust, and especially those who want to advance Holocaust studies, is likely to ask that question at some point in grappling with the Holocaust’s complex, fraught, and painful enormity. Two responses, one general and the other more specific, clarify what Advancing Holocaust Studies is about. The first begins by saying: the Holocaust is interesting. Interesting? But in what ways and at what price? No doubt it is interesting that countless Jews and many other persons suffered and died, but isn’t the Holocaust different from the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, or fine cooking, which are also interesting? Isn’t the Holocaust a catastrophe, an event so fundamentally wrong that if kept only in the category of “interesting” it is mocked or in turn mocks us? But not just “interesting” goes a further rationale. People can learn from such study how to make the future better. The real motivation is to be warned by the past, to make sure that such things never happen again. This approach seems more satisfactory. At least it moves from an aesthetic category to something like an ethical outlook. But pause. Does history testify that the study of it improves things? Or is the truth closer to Hegel’s view? History—including the study of history—is a “slaughter-bench, upon which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals” have been sacrificed.9 Learning can instill pessimism and despair as well as optimism and hope. When the slaughter of millions is focused, what result should one expect? Heretical though it may seem even to ask the question, could study of the Holocaust teach what would be necessary to encourage and efficiently enact mass atrocity crimes in the twentyfirst century? Still another option runs like this: “I am Jewish, and I need to know what happened,” or “I am not Jewish, but I need to know what happened.” Again, the ever-present “why?” Well, one might say, even if we can’t guarantee that study will improve history, it still seems important to understand the persons and forces that produced Holocaust events and to face those who struggled to survive them. At least to understand how or why something occurred contains some justification of its own, and that understanding might help us too. Yes, it is possible to see patterns of action in Holocaust events, to detect reasons why things went one way rather than another. Historical, political, sociological, psychological, and even philosophical, literary, and religious analyses

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can be made, and they do shed light for understanding. But that fact is complicated by another of Charlotte Delbo’s warnings. She stressed that the Holocaust was full of what she called “useless knowledge,” the term she used to title the second part of her Auschwitz and After trilogy. Normally, we think that knowledge is useful, and it certainly can be, but Delbo showed how the Holocaust produced knowledge about hunger and thirst, disease and brutality, sexualized violence, suffering, degradation, and death that did nothing to edify or dignify life. Hearing “the sound of fifty blows on a man’s back … an endless number,” seeing the corpse of a woman who was worked to death, its “left eye devoured by a rat”—these are only two examples of what Delbo called useless knowledge.10 Its incalculable accumulation drove home her point: for the most part, what happened in the Holocaust divided, besieged, and diminished life forever. What good does it do, how useful is it, to know that? What if the net result of needing to know doesn’t yield a fully satisfactory answer to “why?” What if we are left with the impression that human circumstances fundamentally elude reason, that they are not only existentially absurd but all too destructively so? Then would “needing to know” be worthwhile, or would it drive us into a dark night of the soul where loss is just as likely as gain? Other scenarios could be played. They could include the fact that academic careers and reputations can be made by studying the Holocaust, that books and articles one publishes in this field add to personal prestige, that profitable awards, alliances with literary agents, book tours, royalties, fees, and fellowships may be gained by becoming expert in Holocaust studies. Where study of the Holocaust is concerned, such incentives are problematic, unlikely to withstand ethical scrutiny, if they primarily inform responses to the question “Why am I doing this?” But better conclusions can be found. The Holocaust reveals that the interesting can be horrible, that the ethical drive can point toward its own demise, that study of the Holocaust for professional or financial gain is corrupt, and that the search for understanding can turn on itself by uncovering events beyond final, let alone gratifying, comprehension. It does not follow, however, that it is better to ignore that portion of the past. In spite of, indeed because of, the fact that we live in a world engulfed in corruption and shadowed by pandemic, climate change, and other threats of mass destruction, it becomes imperative to take the gamble inherent in Holocaust studies. Reason? By witnessing in retrospect the worst that has befallen humanity, by facing the disillusionment and despair that such an encounter must produce—perhaps only by doing those things—we may rediscover or locate for the first time resources of heart, mind, and will, without which there will be too little checking of destruction in the future. A risky gamble? Of course. Too risky? Not when the alternatives are considered. Ignorance is not bliss. What is not known can and does hurt us. Thinking that there are “unthinkable” possibilities—and therefore that we are somehow protected from the worst that men and women are capable of doing—probably people are never immune from that illusion. But efforts to forestall it are crucial for human well-being, and they will not be rooted strongly enough unless

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we face honestly the reality and aftermath of a Holocaust that leaves our own times charged with extraordinary potential for destruction. In fact, if we do not advance these efforts, double down and spend more to support them, antisemitism, racism, and other threats to human f lourishing are likely to go from bad to worse. Unfortunately, even that analysis may be less than convincing. Try as one may to answer the question “Why am I doing this?” that question leads to another: “Why not quit?” Few are the Holocaust scholars and teachers who have not confronted it.

Why not? On May 8, 2018, more than thirty leading Holocaust scholars met at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) to participate in a symposium called “Critical Junctures: Ethical Challenges of Holocaust Studies,” which was part of the museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary observance. Its title acknowledging that the maturing field of Holocaust studies exists in profoundly unsettled and unsettling times, the symposium focused on ethical challenges that confront Holocaust scholars and scholarship: What does the Holocaust tell us about historical forces, human nature, and the fragility of our ethical frameworks? What ethical questions should be central and what presuppositions most need to be questioned as Holocaust scholarship moves further into the twenty-first century? To what extent does study of the Holocaust make the world better? The editors of this book, Carol Rittner and John Roth, helped to plan the “Critical Junctures” symposium. The hope was that a significant publication would emerge from it, but the symposium was too short and the number of participants too large to achieve that goal without a focused follow-up. So, building on the work begun at the USHMM, Rittner and Roth invited eleven eminent scholars to join us at St. Louis, Missouri, in late March 2019. The interdisciplinary invitation list included: Alex Alvarez, Debórah Dwork, Robert Ericksen, Wolf Gruner, Sara Horowitz, Lisa Leff, Edward Linenthal, Wendy Lower, Jonathan Petropoulos, Rob Ventresca, and James Young. Accepting the invitation, the participants understood that the St. Louis seminar would be a stage in the development of Advancing Holocaust Studies. Moving toward that goal, each participant prepared a short paper. Distributed, read in advance, and discussed in detail, the St. Louis seminar papers explored in diverse ways of the writers’ choosing two question clusters. The first situated Holocaust studies in the vicissitudes of contemporary life. What does the advancement of Holocaust studies signify and mean in that context? The second question set contextualized Holocaust studies in the participants’ personal lives. What led you to study the Holocaust? How do you study it? Why have you persisted in this work, what has changed for you along the way, why do you keep going? What do you hope to accomplish through your research, teaching, and writing about the Holocaust? What do you take the importance, the meaning— especially the ethical significance—of your work to be? Why should college and

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university students study the Holocaust? If none decided to do so, what difference would that make? What is study of the Holocaust for? In the final session of the St. Louis seminar, the participants saw that their brief papers, which represented diverse approaches, disciplines, and perspectives, could be early drafts for chapters that would advance Holocaust studies by providing a novel and significant introduction to the field for twenty-first-century students and their teachers. In this regard, the contributors have not produced a “handbook” or a “companion” to Holocaust studies, let alone a conventional textbook. Instead, they have approached their writing with awareness that the readers of Advancing Holocaust Studies are going to meet authors who are like characters in a story. Learning and teaching about the Holocaust are the story; each of the book’s contributors has a part in it. How do we—each and all—add to the story, complicate it, and take it in unexpected and decisive directions? How do we make the story compelling, something not to be missed, let alone forgotten? Combining theory and practice, the contributors to this book provide glimpses into the inf luences that have affected their approaches to Holocaust studies and their insights about the Holocaust itself. In ways that make this book more than the sum of its parts, the chapters that follow show not only why their authors do not quit but also why they persist in the conviction that efforts to advance Holocaust studies, done responsibly and well, can help people to justify—honestly, compassionately, ethically—human existence in a threatened post-Holocaust world. Why not make their stories, explorations, and questions yours and see where that inquiry leads?

Notes 1 Raul Hilberg, The Anatomy of the Holocaust: Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship, ed. Walter H. Pehle and René Schlott (New York: Berghahn, 2020), 198. The quotation is from Hilberg’s article, “Working on the Holocaust,” which was published originally in 1986. 2 Hilberg, Anatomy of the Holocaust, 230. The quotation is from Hilberg’s article, “The Development of Holocaust Research: A Personal Overview,” which was published originally in 2008. 3 Hilberg, Anatomy of the Holocaust, 23. The quotation is from Hilberg’s article, “German Motivations for the Destruction of the Jews,” which was published originally in 1965. 4 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 3:1085. 5 Hilberg, Anatomy of the Holocaust, 155. The quotation is from Hilberg’s article, “I Was Not There,” which was published originally in 1988. 6 Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 138. 7 Sara J. Bloomfield, “First Word: A Vision from the 20th Century Challenges Us Today,” Memory & Action 7, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 3. 8 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust (Berlin: IHRA, 2019), v, 11. 9 G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 24. 10 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, 58–9, 84.

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Bibliography Bloomfield, Sara J. “First Word: A Vision from the 20th Century Challenges Us Today.” Memory & Action 7, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 2–3. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. Translated by Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Hegel, G.W.F. Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Translated by Leo Rauch. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988. Hilberg, Raul. The Anatomy of the Holocaust: Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship. Edited by Walter H. Pehle and René Schlott. New York: Berghahn, 2020. ———. The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust. Berlin: IHRA, 2019.

CHRONOLOGY Events advancing Holocaust studies, 1945–2020 Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

While no chronology can be complete, this one identifies major moments in the post-World War II development of Holocaust studies. It provides a timeline and context to help orient readers for the chapters that follow.

1945 May 7–8

Nazi Germany surrenders; V-E Day, the war in Europe ends.

October

In Nuremberg, Germany, between October 18, 1945, and October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal (IMT) tries twenty-two Nazi war criminals on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit such crimes. The evidence from these trials, which takes place before judges representing the Allied powers, provides early insights about the destruction of the European Jews.

September 18

Ten metal boxes containing part of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archive are recovered from the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. On December 1, 1950, a second portion of the archive is discovered. The Oyneg Shabes archive contains documents detailing Nazi crimes.

December

Between December 1946 and April 1949, 177 persons are tried in Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings.

1946

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1947 June 25

In the Netherlands, Otto Frank publishes one thousand five hundred copies of Het achterhuis [The secret annex], the diary of his daughter, Anne Frank.

July

The First Conference on Holocaust Research is held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

October

Primo Levi’s memoir, Se questo è un uomo [If this is a man] is published in Italy.

May 14

David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, declares “the establishment of a Jewish state in EretzIsrael, to be known as the State of Israel.”

May 15

Palestinian displacement from the newly established State of Israel becomes known as the Nakba (literally, “disaster,” “catastrophe,” or “cataclysm”) and is observed annually on this day.

December 9

The United Nations General Assembly passes the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

December 28

The first Holocaust Remembrance Day takes place in the new State of Israel.

1948

1949

1951

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, or Claims Conference, begins its work representing the world’s Jews in negotiating for compensation and restitution for victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs.

1952

Anne Frank’s Het achterhuis [The secret annex] is translated into English and published as The Diary of a Young Girl.

1953 August 19

The Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, unanimously passes the Yad Vashem Law, establishing the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. Its aims are education, research and documentation, and commemoration of the Holocaust (Shoah).

1957

Yad Vashem Studies, a peer-reviewed, semi-annual scholarly journal on the Holocaust, begins publication.

1958

Elie Wiesel’s 1956 Holocaust memoir, published in Yiddish as Un di velt hot geshvign [And the world

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remained silent], is translated into a shortened French edition and published by Les Éditions de Minuit as La Nuit. In 1960, it is translated into English and published in the United States as Night.

1959

Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo [If this is a man] is translated into English and published in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. April 8

Yom Hazikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah (Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah, is established in Israel by the Knesset. Yom HaShoah is to be commemorated each year on the twenty-seventh of Nisan (April/May).

May 20

Adolf Eichmann, one of the pivotal actors in the implementation of the “Final Solution,” is captured by Israeli Mossad agents outside his home in Buenos Aires, spirited out of Argentina, and taken to Israel to stand trial.

June 13

The French Jewish scholar and Holocaust survivor Jules Isaac meets at the Vatican with Pope John XXIII, urging him to include Jewish-Christian relations as a topic for the Second Vatican Council, which the pope had announced six months earlier.

1960

1961

Raul Hilberg publishes the first edition of his groundbreaking Holocaust studies work The Destruction of the European Jews, a seminal text in the field. April 11–December 15 A special tribunal of the Jerusalem District Court tries and convicts Adolf Eichmann for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. Widely reported, the trial creates widespread interest in the Holocaust.

1963

Eli Zborowski organizes the first United States Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration in New York City. Bar Ilan University, Israel, establishes the first academic chair in Holocaust studies. Hannah Arendt publishes her controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

1964

Rolf Hochhuth’s contentious play The Deputy, drawing attention to Pope Pius XII’s still disputed stance on the Holocaust, is published in the United States.

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1965 October 28

1966

Pope Paul VI promulgates Nostra Aetate [In our time], the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions. The declaration rejects the charge that the Jewish people are responsible for Jesus’s death and condemns antisemitism. Richard L. Rubenstein, an American Jewish scholar, publishes After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, which argues that the Holocaust shattered the traditional Jewish concept of God, including God’s special covenant with the Jews.

December

Nelly Sachs, a German Jew who f led to Sweden from Nazi Germany in 1940, is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

June 5–10

The brief but bloody Six-Day War is fought between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Jerusalem is reunified under Israeli control.

September 25

In Washington, DC, the Library of Congress’s Humanities Section makes the following new entry for book classification: “Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945).”

1967

1968

1970

Under the organizing leadership of Franklin H. Littell and Hubert G. Locke, the first International Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches (also known as the International Scholars Conference on the German Church Struggle and the Holocaust) takes place at Wayne State University. The first continuous course on the Holocaust at an American church-related college—Wittenberg University—gets underway.

1972 September 5–6

During the 1972 Olympics in Munich, West Germany, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September takes eleven Israeli Olympic team members hostage and kills them. A West German police officer also dies in a failed rescue attempt.

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1973 October 6–25

Yom Kippur War: Egyptian and Syrian forces launch a coordinated attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

1974

Eli and Diana Zborowski, Holocaust survivors, establish the first academic chair in Holocaust studies in the United States at Yeshiva University.

1975

The National Institute on the Holocaust (Philadelphia) begins a series of annual conferences on “Teaching the Holocaust.”

1976

Facing History and Ourselves, an organization focusing on Holocaust education, is established. Holocaust survivor and educator Theodore “Zev” Weiss founds the Holocaust Educational Foundation, which supports Holocaust education and research in universities and colleges.

1978 April 16–19

The broadcast of Gerald Green’s Holocaust on American television advances interest in the Shoah.

November 1

American president Jimmy Carter creates the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, appointing Elie Wiesel as its chair. The commission’s charge is to submit a report “with respect to the establishment and maintenance of an appropriate memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust.”

June 7

During his first papal visit to his native Poland, Pope John Paul II goes to Auschwitz and celebrates Mass at Birkenau.

September 27

The President’s Commission on the Holocaust submits its report to President Carter, recommending the establishment of a memorial with three main components: a national Holocaust memorial/museum, an educational foundation, and a Committee on Conscience. It also recommends that the Holocaust memorial museum should help to make the Holocaust “a part of the curriculum in every school system throughout the country.”

1979

1980

The US Congress authorizes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) to be a permanent memorial to all victims who perished in the Holocaust.

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1982

The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, part of the Yale University Library, opens its doors to scholars, researchers, and the public.

1984 August 1

A small group of Carmelite nuns, with the approval of Polish authorities and Catholic Church officials, but apparently without any dialogue with members of the Jewish community either within or outside of Poland, moves into the Theatergebäude or Old Theater building on the site of Auschwitz I. The resulting “Auschwitz convent controversy” persists until at least the summer of 1993, when the nuns relocate.

September

The United States Holocaust Memorial Council (USHMC) organizes a conference, Faith in Humankind: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, in Washington, DC.

1985

The Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO) is established to serve as an international network of organizations and individuals for the advancement of Holocaust education, remembrance, and research. November

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, his 9.5-hour film on the Holocaust, is released in New York City.

Spring

The first issue of the USHMM journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies is published.

December 10

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel receives the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.

1986

1987

The National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education (NCCHE) is established by Sisters Gemma Del Duca, S.C. and Mary Noel Kernan, S.C. on the campus of Seton Hill College (now University), Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Its mission is to counter antisemitism and to foster Catholic-Jewish relations by making the fruits of Holocaust scholarship accessible to educators at every level, especially in Catholic colleges and universities throughout the United States. May

Elie and Marion Wiesel establish The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity in New York City. Its mission, rooted in the memory of the Holocaust, is to combat indifference, intolerance, and injustice.

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1988

Remembering for the Future, an international conference on the Holocaust, is held at Oxford University. In 2000, a second Remembering for the Future conference takes place, again at Oxford University.

1989

Illinois House Bill 3 mandates the teaching of the Holocaust in all public elementary and high schools in Illinois, making Illinois the first American state to mandate Holocaust education. November 11–13 Convened by the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the first biennial Lessons and Legacies conference is held at Northwestern University.

1992

Christopher R. Browning publishes Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Yugoslavia, formed as a kingdom in 1918, later as a Socialist state in 1945, falls apart as constituent republics in the federation break away. War, “ethnic cleansing,” and genocidal events occur in Croatia, Bosnia, and other areas of (former) Yugoslavia, only ending with the Dayton Agreement in November 1995. July 2

1993

The British Journal of Holocaust Education (now The Journal of Holocaust Education) begins publication in the United Kingdom. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem establishes the International School for Holocaust Studies as well as its International Institute for Holocaust Research, an autonomous academic research unit. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth publish Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, encouraging attention to hitherto underemphasized particularities of women’s experiences and issues of gender during the Holocaust.

April 22

USHMM (The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) opens in Washington, DC.

May 25

The United Nations Security Council adopts a binding resolution establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to investigate war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed in the Yugoslavian wars since 1991. The ICTY is the first war crimes court created by the UN and the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals.

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December

1994

Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List is released in the United States. In 1994, its seven Academy Awards include Best Picture. Steven Spielberg establishes the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (now the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education). Its holdings include fifty-five thousand audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. The Association of Genocide Scholars (now the International Association of Genocide Scholars) is established.

April 6

Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira are killed when their plane is shot down near Kigali airport. The genocide in Rwanda begins, lasting approximately a hundred days (until the middle of July 1994).

November 8

In response to the massive atrocities in Rwanda, the United Nations establishes the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania.

1995

The USHMC unanimously agrees to establish the Committee on Conscience at the USHMM. The Committee’s mandate is “to alert the national conscience, inf luence policy makers, and stimulate worldwide action to confront and work to halt acts of genocide or related crimes against humanity.” July 11

1996

The Rose Professorship, the first American endowed chair in Holocaust history, is established at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. June

1997

Bosnian Serb forces begin killing an estimated eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica (located in former Yugoslavia), the largest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust.

The Jewish philosopher Leonard Grob and the Protestant theologian Henry (Hank) Knight convene the Wroxton Holocaust Symposium, an international, interdisciplinary, interfaith, and intergenerational group of scholars, who advance research, education, and publication on the Holocaust and its reverberations. Aiming to produce what he calls an integrated history of the Holocaust, Saul Friedlander publishes Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939.

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A second volume, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945, appears in 2007.

1998

Swedish prime minister Göran Persson establishes the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research, an intergovernmental organization that unites governments and experts to strengthen, advance, and promote Holocaust education, research, and remembrance. In 2012, the Task Force changes its name to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The USHMM establishes its Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (CAHS), which supports research and publication about the Holocaust. The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (now Stockton University) establishes its MA Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies is established at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to train students for PhD degrees in Holocaust history and genocide studies. March 16

Under Pope John Paul II, the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issues “We Remember: A Ref lection on the Shoah.”

July 17

The Rome Statute establishes the International Criminal Court (ICC).

2000 January–April 11 The David Irving v. Penguin Books and Professor Deborah Lipstadt case is initiated by David Irving, a British author, asserting that Lipstadt, a historian at Emory University, had libeled him in her book Denying the Holocaust, the first book-length study of those who attempt to deny the Holocaust. The case, heard without a jury by Mr. Justice Charles Gray, is tried in a London court. A 335-page judgment is delivered on April 11, 2000. The judge decides the case in favor of the defendants, Lipstadt and Penguin Books. January 27–29

Swedish prime minister Göran Persson convenes The Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, which is attended by representatives of forty-six governments, plus numerous Holocaust scholars and survivors, and results in the creation of the Stockholm Declaration, the founding document of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

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March 23

Pope John Paul II visits Yad Vashem, the first pope to do so, and speaks of the need to remember the millions of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

September

A permanent exhibit devoted to the Holocaust opens in a new five-f loor wing of London’s Imperial War Museum.

2001

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs publishes “Catholic Teaching on the Shoah: Implementing the Holy See’s ‘We Remember.’” September 9

2002

The Jewish Museum Berlin opens. The International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (IIGHRS) is launched in Toronto, Canada. In 2003, it becomes a division of the Zoryan Institute, which has offices in Canada and the United States.

December

Imre Kertész, a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz, is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

May 26–30

Father Emil Shofani, principal of the Al-Mutran (St. Joseph) High School in Nazareth, Israel, leads a group of Arabs and Jews (125 Israeli Arabs [25 Christians, 100 Muslims], and 135 Jews) on a four-day pilgrimage to Auschwitz.

September 9

US secretary of state Colin Powell declares genocide is being committed in Darfur.

2003

2004

2005

Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History (formerly known as the British Journal of Holocaust Education [1992–1994] and The Journal of Holocaust Education [1995–2004]) begins publication in the United Kingdom. January 14

The International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS) is established. Its Journal of Genocide Research begins publication later in this year.

November 1

Resolution A/RES/60/7 on Holocaust Remembrance is adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. It designates January 27 as an annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and urges member states to

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develop educational programs that will teach about the Holocaust in order to help prevent future acts of genocide.

2006

The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) launches Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal. December 11

2007

Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world gather in Tehran, Iran, for the government-sponsored International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust. The International Tracing Service (ITS) archive, located in Bad Arolsen, Germany, is opened for research. On May 21, 2019, ITS begins operating under its new name, Arolsen Archives—International Center on Nazi Persecution.

October

2008

UNESCO’s 34th General Conference adopts General Resolution 61, requesting UNESCO to explore the role it can play in promoting Holocaust remembrance through education and in combating all forms of Holocaust denial. Father Patrick Desbois publishes The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, which draws new attention to the mass murder of Jews by shooting squadrons in Eastern Europe.

2009 September

2010

Keene State College, New Hampshire, becomes the first American college or university to offer an interdisciplinary baccalaureate degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth publish The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, which assesses the discipline’s accomplishments and prospects. Timothy Snyder publishes Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, focusing attention on the Holocaust and also on the murderous Soviet ideologies and mass killings in Eastern Europe between the Ukrainian famine in 1932–1933 and the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign after World War II.

August 7–11

Eight inf luential imams and Muslim leaders in the United States, led by Rabbi Jack Bemporad of the

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Center for Interreligious Understanding (New Jersey), make a historic trip to concentration camps in Germany and Poland.

2011 February

Yad Vashem establishes an International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. An international delegation, including many Muslim members from countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, visits Auschwitz as part of the French-based Aladdin Project, an initiative to curb Holocaust denial and disseminate information about the Holocaust in Muslim countries.

2012

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal (now Genocide Studies International) becomes a free-toall, online publication.

2013

Wendy Lower publishes Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. April

The Righteous Muslim Exhibition, which documents the role Muslims played in saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust, is launched at the Board of Deputies of British Jews in London, UK.

March

Professor Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi from Al-Quds University, Jerusalem, leads twenty-seven Palestinian university students on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

2014

2017

Pakistani Muslim scholar Mehnaz Afridi, Director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College since 2012, publishes Shoah through Muslim Eyes.

2018 August 11–12

A march of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, is emblematic of resurgent antisemitism and racism not only in the United States but also around the world.

March 4

Pope Francis announces that documents in the Vatican Secret Archive (renamed, in October 2019, the Vatican Apostolic Archive) relating to the wartime pontificate of Pope Pius XII (1939–1958) will be accessible to scholars beginning on March 2, 2020.

July 1

Hundreds of Holocaust scholars call on the USHMM to retract its June 24 statement that “unequivocally rejects

2019

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efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events.” December

Following organizational deliberations at the USHMM in 2017, the National Higher Education Consortium of Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Centers is formally established. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) publishes its Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust.

2020

The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic disrupts Holocaust-related activity, including research, education, and museum attendance. January 22

The Pew Research Center (Washington, DC), a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about issues, attitudes, and trends shaping America and the world, issues its report What Americans Know about the Holocaust. The Claims Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (New York, NY) releases Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, a comprehensive survey of adults in the United States, Canada, Austria, and France. It reveals that French adults have critical gaps in Holocaust knowledge.

January 23

The Fifth World Holocaust Forum, Remembering the Holocaust: Fighting Antisemitism, takes place at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. More than forty royals, presidents, prime ministers, and parliamentary leaders from Europe, North America, and Australia take part.

January 27

Seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz; it also is the fifteenth anniversary of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, as established by UN Resolution A/ RES/60/7 on November 1, 2005.

March 2

After decades of anticipation, the Vatican opens its archives to scholars wishing to study documents related to the wartime pontificate of Pope Pius XII.

April 21

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person community observances of Holocaust Remembrance Day are cancelled and, instead, virtual commemorative events take place online.

May 28

The US establishes the Never Again Education Act, which enlarges the USHMM’s responsibility and capacity to expand Holocaust education.

PART I

Journeys

Where are you going? That question leads in two directions. One involves travel and destinations. Another includes inquiry and explorations. The second direction does not require movement from one geographical place to another, but the first often entails research and investigations. The question’s dual directions are separable, but often they intersect. By mapping journeys the authors have taken—and are taking still—the chapters in Part I show how advancing Holocaust studies depends on the intersections—sometimes the collisions—that result when travel and inquiry mix and mingle. The best of the versatile writing—novels, essays, plays—by the Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel includes the brief Holocaust-related dialogues that appear in his books from time to time. Spare and lean, they often consist of a few hundred words or less. These dialogues are distinctive not only for their minimalist quality but also because their apparent simplicity, unidentified settings, unnamed characters, abrupt beginnings, and open endings raise fundamental questions in moving ways. In Wiesel’s A Jew Today, one of those dialogues is called “A Mother and Her Daughter.” “Where are we going?” it begins. “Tell me. Do you know?” The mother tells her daughter, “I don’t know,” but when the child asks again, “Where are we going?” her mother says, “To the end of the world, little girl. We are going to the end of the world.”1 Personal and poignant, this dialogue is ominous and dark, ref lecting, as it likely does, Wiesel’s attempt to retrieve a conversation that he could not have heard, if it took place, as his mother and little sister approached the gas chambers of Birkenau after he was separated from them there in May 1944. Where are we going? A Jewish child’s wartime question is a reminder that the Holocaust comprised one journey after another. Roundups and deportations, treks to shooting sites, and trains—everywhere trains—to killing centers were

26 Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

at the Holocaust’s epicenters. Those intersections eventually became departure points for inquiry and explorations, for Holocaust studies, as efforts grew to find out how and why the Holocaust’s travel and destinations came to be and what those realities may portend for responses to the contemporary question, Where are we going? Moved by Holocaust travel, scholars who study that disaster take one journey after another, often without maps to tell them where they will arrive or what they will find along the way. Odd intersections—sometimes collisions—happen. One of this book’s contributors spent a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary at Auschwitz. On another visit, a rainbow arched that place. At every turn, study of the Holocaust begins and ends with questions. Those who seek to advance Holocaust studies rarely planned in advance to begin the work that became their passion. Most would say that the Holocaust found them more than they found the Holocaust. But once that intersection is established, the field of Holocaust studies grounds them. Far from putting the question to rest, however, that realization leaves “Where are you going?” unsettled and unsettling. Find out why, and explore where you are going, by traveling into the chapters that follow.

Note 1 Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1978), 144.

1 PLACES I HAVE BEEN John K. Roth

An American Christian philosopher, I have studied, written, and taught about the Holocaust for half a century.1 During that time, fundamental assumptions about such work have included the conviction that advancing Holocaust studies could reduce antisemitism, decrease crimes against humanity, limit genocide, and champion human rights. Those goals inspired the creation of magnificent Holocaust museums and research centers, mandates for Holocaust education, international courts of justice, impressive publications, web sites, and films, as well as academic careers, like mine, which depend on the belief that learning and teaching about the Holocaust are essential human activities. It is scarcely possible to total the financial resources that have been dedicated to such causes and institutions, but the amount is huge. It is scarcely possible to know how much worse off humankind would be if those causes and institutions and the support behind them failed to exist and f lourish. But it is also true that advances in Holocaust studies have not been nearly enough to curb antisemitism’s global resurgence, curtail the wrack and ruin of crimes against humanity, check the devastation of genocide, and cut short relentless assaults on human f lourishing. So, key issues loom large: How much ethical weight can Holocaust studies bear? If assumptions about Holocaust studies have been too optimistic, then how should one understand what learning and teaching about the Holocaust are for? What are—what should be—the purposes and aims of Holocaust studies? What difficulties and opportunities are embedded in them? Such questions are personal. As I confront the world’s dismal state during the third decade of the twenty-first century, which includes the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic that wreaks global havoc, I think about the degree to which my life’s investment in Holocaust studies has been ethically worthwhile. In the few productive years that may remain for me as my eightieth year comes and

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goes, should that commitment remain mine? Why should I encourage colleagues and students to advance Holocaust studies? Responses to those questions require revisiting places I have been.

The right questions In 1972, when the philosopher Frederick Sontag, my teacher, friend, and colleague, encouraged me to read the writings of Elie Wiesel, I could not have imagined the places I would go and the persons I would meet by following his suggestion. During a sabbatical year in Norway, for example, I spent time in the city of Tromsø, which sits far above the Arctic Circle. Only a few Jews lived in that remote place during World War II, but for the Nazis’ “Final Solution” to be final, the seventeen Jews—mostly from three families—now named on a Tromsø memorial stone had to be identified and incarcerated, transported eventually to far-distant Oslo, and then by sea to the German port at Stettin (today, Szczecin, Poland) before rail shipment to Auschwitz, where all of them were killed. More than any other object I know, that modest memorial stone in Tromsø sums up for me what the “Final Solution” was all about. In the autumn of 1976, Richard L. Rubenstein introduced me to Michael Berenbaum. Friendship grew, deepened through shared commitment to teaching and writing about the Holocaust. About ten years later, over dinner at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, DC, Berenbaum and I outlined a book called Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications. Our outline emphasized writings frequently studied at the time, most of them authored by Holocaust survivors or pioneering scholars. Holocaust appeared in 1989 and has been in print ever since. Its contents—most of them first published before 1987, all of them emerging from events that took place long ago—remain significant. In our extremely dangerous world, they may even be more relevant than ever—unless, of course, they aren’t. Consider that possibility by noting that when Wiesel died, at the age of eighty-seven on July 2, 2016, his passing was emblematic of the fact that few Holocaust survivors remain and that the Holocaust itself recedes into the past even as other disasters, real and probable, vie for attention and resources. When Holocaust first appeared, dates like 9/11 and acronyms like ISIS meant nothing. Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda and Darfur, an ongoing refugee crisis of immense proportions, to say nothing of devastating terrorism, resurgent antisemitism and racism, upsurges of xenophobic nationalism and political tribalism, burgeoning threats of climate change and thermonuclear war, and the global pandemic caused in 2020 by the novel and notorious coronavirus could not have been on computer screens, partly because the technology and communication revolution that now dominates and complicates the world—including “tweets” and “hacking,” “fake news,” and “cyberwarfare”—had barely begun. In 1989, Berenbaum and I dedicated Holocaust to “our students.” Primarily we had in mind the young women and men who had recently been in our classrooms.

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Now, those learners are no longer young; like us, they have children and grandchildren. But the original dedication remains fitting because we continue to teach, and what we teach still emphasizes the book’s contents. Voiced from Holocaust testimony and ref lection, they remain crucial for currently treacherous times, underscoring what Wiesel called “the right questions,” the most real ones, because they are so fundamental: Who are we? What is right and what is not? What is good and what is most important? Are we doing the best we can? What about God, or is that question absurd? How can we forestall despair and resist injustice? Where are we/ should we be going, what are we/should we be doing? What must change to curb and heal the wasting of the world? Are our judgments true? Can our responses to such questions withstand scrutiny, or do they require further inquiry and evidence to support them? In my experience, no event has more power than the Holocaust to raise the right questions, the ones that we need to pursue to help make life worth living. Wrestling with those questions will not be enough to resist further disasters, but that struggle may be a necessary condition for doing so. Therefore, learning and teaching about the Holocaust remain imperative.

For as long as possible Convened on May 8, 2018, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) as part of its twenty-fifth-anniversary observance, a symposium on “The Ethical and Moral Foundations of Holocaust Studies” was the prequel to this chapter. The day before the symposium, I toured the Museum’s David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center, a $40 million storage and research facility—more than 100,000 square feet in size—that opened in 2017. The Center’s specialized laboratories, equipment, and climatecontrolled environments house the Museum’s artifacts, large and small, including more than 100 million pages of documents, 110,000 photographs and images, 1,000 hours of film footage, and more than 16,000 oral testimonies of survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. Travis Roxlau, the Center’s director, indicated that the Museum’s collection is likely to double during the next ten to fifteen years as aging Holocaust survivors die. Plans for the future project an additional 20,000 square feet of storage space. One stop at the Center put me in what seemed like a medical operating room. There, a highly trained technician performed exacting “surgery” on a stuffed toy animal, one of the countless many ensnared in the Holocaust. The teddy bear’s repairs, I learned, were not to make it “as good as new” but to prevent more decay. Roxlau and the technician muted sentimentality about the oncecuddled companion. Like the other objects in the Center’s holdings, they said, the teddy bear must be preserved because it is evidence of a crime, an understated but accurate way to identify the Holocaust, for if the Holocaust was not a crime, nothing could be. An artifact preservation project more impressive than the Shapell Center’s can scarcely be imagined. But, Roxlau stressed, preservation cannot be for eternity,

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just for as long as possible. No matter how careful the preservation, the Center’s holdings will eventually disintegrate. No matter how hard we try to salvage the material evidence of the Holocaust, Roxlau was saying, it will turn to dust and be no more. My friend Debórah Dwork, a superb historian and a contributor to Advancing Holocaust Studies, calls the Holocaust her compass. It works that way for me as well, orienting my attention, guiding my priorities, and directing my discernment about what’s right and wrong. But what about Holocaust studies and education? No matter how long and well I and my Holocaust-scholar colleagues work, will our efforts also turn to dust and be no more?

Confronting stupidity Preparation for the 2018 USHMM symposium made me aware of Victoria Barnett’s recent edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brief but powerful essay—written in December 1942—called “After Ten Years.”2 His thoughts crafted in seventeen short ref lections, Bonhoeffer shared them only with a small circle of friends. In the penultimate section, he wondered whether he and they were still of any use. Then and now, of course, their importance has been huge. The example of their resistance remains, and Bonhoeffer’s writings continue to be studied because they are timely, perceptive, and prophetic. “After Ten Years” fits that description and nowhere more so than in four paragraphs that he called “On Stupidity.” At least implicitly considering that the destruction of the European Jews could not have happened without well-educated people to launch, drive, and sustain it, Bonhoeffer’s observations epitomize the paradox that education does not preclude stupidity, at least not completely. His insights disclose the irony that mass murder not only depends on advanced learning but, stupidly, can thrive within it. “Stupidity,” wrote Bonhoeffer, “is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”3 Here’s why Bonhoeffer thought so. “There are human beings,” he observed, “who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid.” Sound reasons do not reach their deaf ears, facts that contradict their prejudgment “simply need not be believed … and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.” Such stupidity leads to self-satisfaction and thus to irritation that produces danger when attacks against opposition follow. Bonhoeffer’s implication, I believe, is that Nazi ideology was rife with educated stupidity, exemplified by the falsehood that Jews are a pestilential race that must be eliminated root and branch. Stupidity made Nazism lethal, because, as Bonhoeffer understood, stupidity is “not an intellectual defect but a human one”; it has sociological as well as psychological qualities that stand in fundamental opposition to what is right and good. “People,” contended Bonhoeffer, can be “made stupid or … they allow this to happen to them,” because “the overwhelming impact of rising power” can deprive people of “inner independence” so that one “feels that one is dealing not at all with … a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like.” Such

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stupidity could make people “capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.” An unrelenting effect of Nazi power, such stupidity was also essential to sustain the policies and practices that constituted the “Final Solution.” In Bonhoeffer’s view, such stupidity, once entrenched, would not yield to instruction or persuasion, at least not completely. Nevertheless, he was not hopeless. Stupidity, Bonhoeffer emphasized, is not “a congenital defect,” nor are most people stupid “in every circumstance.” Everything depends, he concluded, “on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.” Nazi stupidity cost Dietrich Bonhoeffer his life, long before I knew anything about him, but my friendship with a Holocaust survivor named Joseph Rebhun, a highly esteemed doctor who lived in Claremont, California, drove home insights related to Bonhoeffer’s.4 Rebhun was born and raised in the Polish city of Przemyśl. During World War II, it was under Soviet control for a time, but the Germans took over in late June 1941. The Jews were ghettoized, and then deportations to Auschwitz began. Rebhun, twenty-two, and his sixty-eight-year-old mother (the Germans had already killed his father) jumped from their deportation train. He never saw his mother again, but, escaping an Auschwitz death, he miraculously—at least to him—managed to get an identity card labeling him a Polish Catholic, survived the Holocaust, met Marie, his wife (a survivor of twelve concentration camps), in postwar Austria, and settled in Claremont after arriving in the United States via Ellis Island. On one occasion, we participated together in a panel on medical ethics at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine. Rebhun discussed his medical education, which had partly taken place in Austria after World War II ended. His teachers included former Nazi doctors. Rebhun emphasized their technical competence and their reliable teaching. But he probably agreed with Bonhoeffer that such educated men could also be stupid. I remember asking Rebhun if those erstwhile Nazi doctors knew that he, one of their students, was Jewish. With an ironic smile that I have not forgotten, he said, “Yes, and they treated me with courtesy and respect.” Most often I saw Rebhun when he visited my Claremont McKenna College courses on the Holocaust. He was patient and gentle with the students and their questions, but his intensity and urgency grew when he explained what he hoped to accomplish by teaching them about the Holocaust and his personal experience in it. He hoped that his testimony might inoculate them—his word, I remember it—against antisemitism and racism. By implication, he was also hoping to provide, even to be, a vaccine against stupidity. Rebhun knew that such inoculations and vaccines do not exist, but his point was neither naive nor lost. He prescribed what is needed, while realizing, like Bonhoeffer, that what had to be sought was inner independence and wisdom. Research and education are not enough to secure those virtues, but they are still essential if the stupidity that inf lames antisemitism, racism, and mass atrocity

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crimes is to be reduced and curbed. So, while “retirement” means that I no longer have the privilege of daily meetings with college students, I have found it worthwhile to return to seventh grade. For several years, I have met annually with girls and boys at Liberty Bell Middle School, which is near my rural, Cascade-mountain home in Winthrop, Washington. The students are part of a twenty-year tradition, inspired and sustained by dedicated teachers who spend six weeks guiding the students’ study of The Diary of Anne Frank and its context. In recent years, I have supplemented their teaching with background about the history of antisemitism and Nazism, the power of propaganda and hatred, the importance of resistance and rescue. In 2020, my seventh-grade teaching had to go online because COVID-19 shut the school. Like Bonhoeffer, I sometimes wonder if I am of any use, because what those young people are studying is full of more complexity, destruction, and loss than their early-teen awareness can fathom. But deep down, I know that I must try to impart some Holocaust insight to them. Occasionally, they show me that success is possible. They grasp, for example, that Anne’s diary contains a sad narrative because it bears witness, partly through Anne’s grit, determination, and hope against hope, that something badly wrong happened when Nazi power forced the Frank family to hide for their lives. They are troubled especially by the betrayal of the Frank family. They wonder who did that, and they experience a worthwhile frustration when they learn that we don’t know for sure. One year, while talking about antisemitism, discussion led to the swastika, its meaning and symbolism. When we focused on the fact that antisemitism by no means stopped when the Holocaust ended, and I asked the seventh graders if they knew that swastikas sometimes deface synagogues and schools in the United States today, we ended up talking about a place or two at Liberty Bell where the students had seen one. Together, we had a teachable moment as powerful as any I have experienced in fifty years. Holocaust studies will not eliminate stupidity, let alone ensure that humankind will avoid doing and suffering the worst. But learning and teaching about the Holocaust can change people for good. I have seen that happen enough to be immensely grateful that such work has been mine and to remain convinced that it must continue.

Next year In November 2004, the biennial Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust took place at Brown University. It included a panel, organized by the historian Christopher Browning, that was devoted to Raul Hilberg, the magisterial scholar who did as much as anyone ever will to advance Holocaust studies. A political scientist and historian, Hilberg did not think of himself as a philosopher, let alone a theologian, but I found his thought to be acutely ethical. So, with Browning’s encouragement, I presented some of my early ref lections

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on Hilberg’s ethics. After the papers were presented, Hilberg responded. Four aspects of his response remain vivid.5 First, Hilberg’s moral anger and his impassioned emphasis on the importance of truth-telling were evident as he spoke about the Holocaust’s perpetrators. Second, those moods were evident because Hilberg remained convinced that, for the most part, the perpetrators knew that their murderous policies and actions had crossed a moral line. Third, Hilberg’s attention riveted on key questions: Why did the perpetrators do what they did, especially if they knew that their policies and actions crossed that moral line? Why did they do those things so easily and persistently? Coupled with those questions were others pertaining especially to civilian bystanders who witnessed the Nazi onslaught against the Jews. Realistically, what could have been expected of them? Finally, there was Hilberg’s conclusion, which again put the emphasis on questions. For those who live after the Holocaust, he urged, we have to keep asking self-critically whether our own policies and decisions are right. We have to keep pressing the issue: How can the imperative “Never again!” be credible? As I listened to Hilberg’s response, I recalled a lecture on ethics that he had delivered at the University of Oregon several years earlier.6 Its melancholy moments had referred to an observation made by Sigmund Freud in 1915, while World War I was raging. Hilberg recalled Freud’s remarking that one should not be too disappointed about humanity’s fallen condition, for civilization’s moral progress had never been as great as most people believed or hoped. Like Freud, Hilberg kept wondering if anything more than such melancholy deserves to remain. As his passionate insight bears witness when he insisted that we must keep asking “Is it right?” and “How can ‘Never again!’ be credible?” the future of civilization is in our post-Holocaust hands. More than forty years ago, on November 1, 1978, the American president Jimmy Carter established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, tasked with the responsibility to prepare a report about the establishment of “an appropriate memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust.” 7 This initiative led to the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which opened on April 22, 1993. Chaired by Elie Wiesel, the Commission’s thirty-four members included Raul Hilberg, who departed for Europe with his Commission colleagues on July 29, 1979, for a two-week mission to visit sites of Holocaust destruction, study memorials and museums, and consult with leaders, historians, and archivists who had knowledge and expertise relevant to the Commission’s work. Sometime after his return, Hilberg wrote an essay called “The Holocaust Mission,” which ref lected on his experiences during that trip. I did not know about the essay until August 3, 2017, when my friend, the historian Jonathan Petropoulos, sent me an email message with a copy of the typescript. Subsequently, I learned that Hilberg had published the essay as a journal article in the early 1980s.8 Meanwhile, Petropoulos explained that our mutual friend and Claremont McKenna College colleague, Wendy Lower, had discovered the manuscript while

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exploring the USHMM’s archival records about Hilberg’s role on the Presidential Commission and especially his original vision for scholarship at the museum, work she did in conjunction with the USHMM’s twenty-fifth-anniversary observance in the spring of 2018. Knowing my appreciation for Hilberg, they kindly sent me a copy of his paper. It resounds a Hilberg theme that belongs in this chapter. Although he had been researching the Holocaust for thirty years, Hilberg noted that until the trip in 1979 he had never been in Poland or the USSR. Auschwitz and Treblinka were places he had never seen. The President’s Commission took him to those places and many more, but Hilberg did not count on such visits to make those sites understandable. One cannot be in Auschwitz anymore, he wrote, because that place is now a museum, not a camp. Nor can one be in Treblinka, where sculpture creates a memorial site. In my own ways, I identify with Hilberg’s observation. There was a time when I felt the need to visit such Holocaust sites. I have always been glad that I made those journeys, which gave me unexpected insight, because I expected to understand the Holocaust more and better by being in those places. But that was not quite the case. Yes, I could better “place” Holocaust history and testimony by being at those places. But overall, those experiences left me with more questions than answers. For example, I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau late one summer afternoon in 1996 when a thunderstorm drenched the remains of that Nazi killing center, where more than a million Jews were murdered. As the storm passed and the sun came out, a rainbow appeared over Auschwitz. The juxtaposition of Birkenau, the reality and aftereffects of that death camp, and a rainbow, with its awesome beauty and symbolic biblical meanings of life, hope, and promise, remains jarring and poignant to me. Memory of that intersection, even collision, between history and nature makes me wonder whether humankind can begin to repair the damage we have inf licted on each other. Years before and after he first went to Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hilberg said in his essay, he was on the Holocaust mission that took him deeply into German documents. It was in them, he said, that he had most profoundly seen those places—the terrain, operations, and logistics that distinguished them. It was that singular seeing of the Holocaust that took him to the Rose Garden of the White House during the afternoon of September 27, 1979, when the Commission on the Holocaust presented its report to Jimmy Carter. Walking afterward in Washington that evening, recalled Hilberg, he felt “slightly depressed” as was his usual reaction “after some concluding ceremony.” Fringed by that mood, another thought became the endnote for Hilberg’s meditation: “What I had to do now was to plan my research. There were documents I had to read, particularly the records in the Polish archives, and I would have to travel again soon. Next year, in Auschwitz.”

Rocking in the darkness With World War II and the Holocaust in mind, Albert Camus, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, made a statement as stark as it is bold. “Every

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action today,” he wrote, “leads to murder, direct or indirect. … Murder is the problem today.”9 His outlook implied that human beings live in a murderous web of responsibility that implicates us all. Camus thought that even by its greatest effort, humanity “can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world.” But, he insistently added, “the injustice and the suffering of the world … will not cease to be an outrage.”10 That outlook led him to contemplate the fate of Sisyphus, the mythical Greek king who passionately loved life and defied fate by thwarting death itself. The gods condemned Sisyphus to a ceaseless repetition that required him to push a weighty rock up a mountain only to have it roll back to the bottom as he neared the top. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus depicted Sisyphus in ways that hone a needed edge for advancing Holocaust studies. He wrote, At the very end of his long effort … Sisyphus watches the stone rush down … whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. … If the descent is … sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. … The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.11 As I age in the troubled and troubling twenty-first century, no insight about the importance of ethical resistance, no matter how great the odds or forlorn the prospects for lasting success, mean more to me than those embedded in Camus’s depiction of Sisyphus. For many years, another source of encouragement, my friend Jim Quay, who loves and writes poetry, directed the California Council for the Humanities (now Cal Humanities), one of the fifty-six humanities councils located in US states and jurisdictions. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, these vital organizations expand understanding of the histories, contexts, and cultures in which Americans live, work, and serve. Learning and teaching about the Holocaust primarily in academic settings, I became engaged in the work of the state councils in California and Washington and nationally through the Federation of State Humanities Councils, because I applaud the public outreach that makes the humanities fields—history, literature, philosophy and its emphasis on ethics—more fertile by cultivating them beyond college and university campuses. One day in February 1995, I received “For John Roth,” the calligraphed poem that Quay had written for me. I keep it near my writing desk. Day by day, I recognize its challenges. The scholar bends on his hands and knees over the deep hole of history. His light spills into the darkness, as he looks for ref lections Far beneath the surface.

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It’s work he does at night, better to see the faint glint, And without gloves, better to grasp the stories waiting to be Plucked from oblivion. This work can only be done by a hopeful man willing to be sad. Sometimes he cuts his fingers on a fragment, sometimes his vision blurs, Or he loses his balance, falls, and sits all night, Rocking in the darkness, until voices of the living lead him home. When, during the day, he discusses dreams with his students, The ashes on his pants and the scars on his hands make them listen, Make them believe. Their faith in dreams is the gift of a hopeful man willing to be sad. Friends who advance Holocaust studies—the contributors to this book primary among them—encourage me to affirm fundamental truths that must not be forsaken, even if the hope they contain is forlorn and fated to fail the unrelenting test of time. The following propositions express some of them. ••

•• ••

••

•• •• ••

•• ••

The Holocaust targeted a particular people, the Jews, for utter destruction. Reliable insight can emerge from that catastrophe only by carefully studying how and why it happened. Much is known about how the Holocaust happened and why. Therefore, build learning and teaching about the Holocaust on this foundation. Much remains unknown and arguably unknowable about the Holocaust, its vastness and reverberations. Therefore, inquire and teach diligently, persistently, and with the respectful modesty that the task requires. No event has more power than the Holocaust to raise the right questions, the ones that we need to pursue to help make life worth living. Therefore, learning and teaching about the Holocaust remain imperative. The Holocaust was wrong—or nothing could be. Affirm that fact, defend that truth. Lives hang in the balance. The Holocaust signifies immense failure—ethical, religious, and political. Therefore, refuse to let that fact be the last judgment. The Holocaust and its reverberations reveal “the fatal interdependence of all human actions.”12 Individuals remain responsible for their action and its consequences, but persons are and must be responsible for each other too. The Holocaust shattered trust in the world. Therefore, insist that we must be in the world to do good. The Holocaust did not have to happen. Therefore, resist the forces that made it happen, among them what Bonhoeffer called “the huge masquerade of evil” that throws “all ethical concepts into confusion” by making evil (including genocide) “appear in the form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice.”13 Remember, too, that there were people who risked everything to help others. Do not allow indifference to forget or abandon them; instead, try to follow their example.

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•• •• ••

••

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The Holocaust fractured and fragmented what we hold dear when we are at our best. Therefore, salvage the fragments and mend the fractures. The Holocaust is a warning. Therefore, do not overestimate the degree to which the Holocaust gave antisemitism and racism a bad name. The Holocaust can be a much-needed compass. Let the Holocaust-ascompass orient attention, guide priorities, and direct discernment about what’s right and wrong. Seeing differently, seeing better—sound learning and teaching about the Holocaust aim for what may be the most important Holocaust-related insight of all: Take nothing good for granted.

Does it withstand scrutiny to say that advancing Holocaust studies has been a good way for me—for anyone—to spend a lifetime? Places I have been, persons I have known, and the truths that I defend give me the answer.

Notes 1 Parts of this chapter are adapted from my book Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide (Eugene: Cascade Books/Wipf and Stock, 2020). 2 The Nazis arrested and imprisoned Bonhoeffer on April 5, 1943, and, at the age of 39, he was executed by hanging on April 9, 1945. 3 The quotations from “On Stupidity” are from Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years: An Account at the Turn of the Year 1942–1943,” in “After Ten Years”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times, ed. Victoria J. Barnett and trans. Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 22–23. 4 In addition to his medical expertise as an allergist and immunologist, Rebhun has been a writer who thoughtfully explored his Holocaust experiences. His numerous books include Leap to Life: Triumph over Nazi Evil (Valley Stream: Ardor Scribendi, 2000), God and Man in Two Worlds (Claremont: OR Publishing, 1985), and Crisis of Morality and Reaction to the Holocaust (Cabin John: Wildside Press, 2010). 5 I am indebted to the historian Gregory Weekes, who video-recorded Hilberg’s response at Brown University and kindly shared that document with me. 6 The University of Oregon conference on May 6–8, 1996, focused on “Ethics after the Holocaust.” Hilberg’s lecture can be seen and heard on YouTube, https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=fg0gLvAf Bf U. 7 See “Report to the President,” www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20050707-presidents-comm ission-holocaust.pdf. The report underscores two guiding principles that provided “the philosophical rationale” for the Commission’s work: “the uniqueness of the Holocaust” and “the moral obligation to remember.” The first principle entailed that “the systematic, bureaucratic extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators as a central act of state during the Second World War … was a crime unique in the annals of human history.” In the cover letter that accompanied the “Report to the President,” Elie Wiesel, the Commission’s chairman, augmented the first principle by adding a theme that achieved mantra status: “The universality of the Holocaust lies in its uniqueness: the Event is essentially Jewish, yet its interpretation is universal.” Although widely believed, these claims, whose meaning and validity hinge on how unique/uniqueness should be understood, have sparked controversy, not least because they seem to privilege the Holocaust as paradigmatic in ways that diminish genocides before and after the Holocaust. The second principle entailed a

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8

9 10 11 12 13

quest for “lessons of the Holocaust.” That concept has also generated debate, which often swirls around questions about what the “lessons” should be and how much or little they depend on Holocaust studies, memorialization, and education. The existence of such discussions corroborates Hilberg’s insight that “there is no finality. Findings are always subject to correction and reformulation” (Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001], 204). Raul Hilberg, “The Holocaust Mission: July 29 to August 12, 1979,” St. John’s Review 34 no. 1 (1982–83): 105–12, http://s3.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original /6d66f4e9b03c3d40ac2c638ecf38bcd1.pdf. The essay is reprinted in Raul Hilberg, The Anatomy of the Holocaust: Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship, ed. Walter H. Pehle and René Schlott (New York: Berghahn, 2020), 159–77. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 4–5. Ibid., 303. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 89–91. The quoted phrase is Gitta Sereny’s. See Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 15. Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” 18.

Bibliography Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. “After Ten Years: An Account at the Turn of the Year 1942–1943.” In “After Ten Years”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times, 17–31. Edited by J. Victoria Barnett and translated by Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. ———. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Translated by Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage Books, 1956. Hilberg, Raul. “The Holocaust Mission: July 29 to August 12, 1979.” St. John’s Review 34, no. 1 (1982– 83): 105–12. Also in Raul Hilberg, The Anatomy of the Holocaust: Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship. Edited by Walter H. Pehle and René Schlott. New York: Berghahn, 2020, 159–77. ———. Lecture at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, at a Conference on “Ethics After the Holocaust,” May 6–8, 1996. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =fg0gLvAf Bf U. ———. Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. President’s Commission on the Holocaust. Report to the President. Washington, DC, September 27, 1979. Rebhun, Joseph. Crisis of Morality and Reaction to the Holocaust. Cabin John: Wildside Press, 2010. ———. God and Man in Two Worlds. Claremont: OR Publishing, 1985. ———. Leap to Life: Triumph Over Nazi Evil. Valley Stream: Ardor Scribendi, 2000. Roth, John K. Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching About the Genocide. Eugene: Cascade Books/Wipf and Stock, 2020. Sereny, Gitta. Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

2 PERIPHERAL VISION Sara R. Horowitz

In Ida Fink’s stunning short story “A Scrap of Time,” the unnamed narrator recollects a long-ago morning when she and her younger sister, along with the other young Jews of her town, responded to an order to gather in the market square for “conscription of labor.”1 Although the young woman did not know so at the time, the gathering that morning would be the town’s first Aktion—the first round up of Jewish people for mass murder. She begins to recount how “each of us made our way, not willingly, to be sure, but under orders, to the marketplace in our little town.” She describes the marketplace in all its daily familiarity— shops, buildings, old sidewalks in need of repair. She remembers, “[I]t was right there … that we were ordered to form ranks” (4). Suddenly, in mid-story, she interrupts the f low of memory to correct herself: “I should not have written ‘we,’ for I was not standing in the ranks” (4). Although she had left her home intending to go to the marketplace, she chose an indirect route that followed the riverbank along the town’s periphery. She and her sister lingered along the riverbank, skipping stones and dangling their feet above the water as they sat on the bridge. By the time they continued on their route and caught sight of the market square, something about the crowd gathering there caused alarm. Instead of going where they were ordered, the two sisters ran in the opposite direction and hid in some bushes. When they returned home after nightfall, they learned that all of the Jewish men who had come to the market square had been marched off and never returned. Only much later were rumors confirmed: the men had been taken by truck to a location deep in the forest where they dug their own grave and were murdered. The story concludes with the narrator describing the final moments of her cousin David, who was among the victims of the Aktion.

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Encountering literature As a literary scholar who studies and teaches about the Shoah through the lens of the literary imagination, I find it fitting to plunge into an author’s subtle but powerful negotiation of history, memory, and imagination as a prelude to this ref lection on the continued significance of the Holocaust. Given the increasingly important place that gender has assumed in my engagement with the Shoah, it’s not by accident that I have chosen to begin with the extraordinary writing of a long-neglected female fiction writer. Fink’s story offers a fruitful starting point to explore the role of what I term “peripheral vision” in the study of the Holocaust. I intend to use the phrase “peripheral vision” in a number of ways that are connected but not identical and that—considered together—capture the central aspects of my engagement with the Shoah as a teacher, a scholar, and a person poised in the first decades of a new millennium. Therein, of course, lies the paradox, in what I research and how I think about it: periphery, center. Like many of Fink’s stories, “A Scrap of Time” builds on peripheral vision in its most literal sense. The narrator describes where she was during her town’s first Aktion. But the chilling center of the story is located precisely where she was not. She glimpses the town square from afar, where people have begun to gather in a prelude to mass murder. The path she travels, and the movement of the narrative itself, circles the terrible act that is disclosed to the reader only on the final page. Both the narrator and the reader hover at the periphery of dreadful knowledge, negotiating rumors “of soggy earth in the woods by the village of Lubianki, and of a blood-stained handkerchief ” (10). And, of course, it is precisely because the narrator remains at the periphery, not part of the “we” gathered in the marketplace, that she remains alive to recount the story of their death, can imagine her cousin’s last living moments as though she were there with him, can retrieve the dead from oblivion. But by peripheral vision, I intend something additional, something beyond the position of the observer, the witness who survives. I mean the vision of the imaginative writer who, like Fink, uses indirection and language to help us understand things that are often referred to as “unspeakable”—things so fearsome and searing that they def lect our direct gaze. In addition, by peripheral vision, I mean the insights that open up by viewing the Shoah and its implications through lenses—like those of literary analysis and gender studies—that have been long considered peripheral to the study of the Holocaust. Fink was an eighteen-year-old student and an aspiring pianist when the Nazi invasion of Poland jolted her life from its moorings. While crafted with the tools of a fiction writer, “A Scrap of Time” emerges from the author’s lived experiences, escaping not only her hometown’s first Aktion but also the genocidal net that tightened around the Jews of Europe, by keeping to the periphery of the murderous center of the Shoah. After a short time in the ghetto, Fink and her sister acquired false identity papers, hoping to live out the war years posing as

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non-Jewish Polish women. After their papers were confiscated by a suspicious foreman in a German factory where they had found work, they zigzagged the German countryside, working in factories or on farms, until someone’s suspicious eye impelled them to f lee. After the war, the sisters returned to Poland, and both got married. Alarmed by ongoing antisemitism in Poland, however, the two families moved to Israel. At the age of thirty-six, Fink began to learn Hebrew. She settled into a new life and volunteered at Yad Vashem, where she recorded testimonies of other Holocaust survivors. At home, she began to craft short stories in Polish based on her own experiences, those of her husband, and those of survivors she came to know in Israel—stories about the war and its aftermath. Her stories are lean, spare, slivers of time and memory, built on barely remembered phrases, partial witnessing, footprints in melting snow. They capture the daily details of life and death under the threat of genocide, as well as the interplay of memory, bereavement, and trauma.

Encountering a writer I first met Ida not long after the publication of her first collection of stories. When I read them, I was dazzled by her writing, chilled by her lucidity. Her book had sat on my shelf for several months before I reached for it. Someone had told me her stories were “sweet.” After I read them, I was so stunned by their power that I could not believe the book had allowed itself to sit unopened for so long, that it had not somehow catapulted itself into my hands. She wrote in a way that took you to the edges of what you could bear as a reader and plunged you into the unspeakable heart of catastrophe. I began to talk about her work at conferences and to write about it. I was a junior professor, young in my career, writing and teaching about the Shoah through the lens of literature. Planning a research trip to Israel, I thought I might interview this little-known writer whose work had affected me so powerfully. I sent her a letter of introduction through her publisher, providing my contact information in Israel. She phoned me the day after I arrived and invited me to her home. She lived in a modest apartment in a working-class area south of Tel Aviv. It featured a gleaming upright piano, a Polish typewriter poised on the dining room table, and a breezy, shaded balcony. We spoke for an hour or so, in the way that two people who have only just met begin to come to know each other. Our conversation touched on her writing, her life, her family, but she also wanted to know about me. I felt we connected easily and comfortably. At a lull in our conversation, she went into the kitchen to prepare some coffee. This meeting happened in the days before the advent of smart phones, miniature computers that could do it all. I had borrowed a small, portable tape recorder and tucked it away in my purse. This was the moment, I felt, to set it on her coffee table and to ask her for an interview. I knew she would agree. But I sensed, too, that I was at a crossroads. Was this a “business meeting” or a personal encounter?

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The interview would be a coup. Or I could leave the tape recorder in my purse, forgo the interview, and gain a wise and sensitive friend. I opted for friendship. After that meeting, we saw one another regularly—in Israel and during her few trips to North America. I would often come to see her a few days after arriving in Israel. Still struggling with jetlag, I would sometimes fall asleep on her sofa. In between visits, we wrote letters—about our lives, about my work, about her writing. We remained friends until her death in 2011. She would share with me what she was working on. I would sometimes send her drafts of articles I was working on, and she would offer comments. During the period of time we knew each other, her writing became more widely known, more acclaimed. She accepted an invitation to speak in Poland, and her books appeared in translation into a number of languages. Hebrew translations of her stories became part of the Israeli high school curriculum. She once told me with amusement that one of her grandchildren complained that his grandmother had become a famous writer. Her success meant that he had to be examined on her stories on the bagrut—or high school matriculation—exam. In 2008, she was awarded the prestigious Pras Yisrael, or Israel Prize for literature—the country’s highest cultural honor. Yet, notwithstanding this recognition, she carried a sense of the precarious place of her writing in particular, and of literary writing more broadly, in the study of the Holocaust. She told me that when World War II came to an end, she understood that too much time had passed for her to resume a career in music. But she sensed, even in the late 1940s, that she would write in some way about the Shoah. In Israel, living her life in an acquired tongue, she began to probe what she called “the ruins of memory” (3) and to write stories that were crystalline fragments of atrocity, bereavement, testimony. When she began to submit her stories to potential publishers—literary journals and magazines, book publishers—she received rejection after rejection. Some editors tried to be helpful to her as a “beginning” writer. They told her she had promising content but the tone, style, and approach were wrong. Her voice was simply too “soft.” They suggested she spell out her moral outrage in clearer terms, ramp up the emotional distress, introduce more factual details to ground her stories, and make them more “historical,” make the “message” more apparent. But even without the recognition conferred by publication, she had faith in her writerly voice. What some editors mistook for “soft” was a subtlety and leanness that drew readers into where they might not otherwise dare to go. Her stories were crafted in a way that brought readers to engage with them, and to begin to understand something of the way people behave under duress and afterward. Like the narrator of “A Scrap of Time,” Fink’s writing brings her readers to the edge of an abyss, peering into the human spirit in the moment of murder, or looking at parents who see their children taken away to be killed, or at “Aryan” Polish townspeople, who watch with disinterested “curiosity” or “concern” (39) as the Jews in their town are marched to the site of mass murder. Fink’s stories are populated by characters who speak out from the margins of history and its underbelly, marking the human toll and the human accountability. Far from

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being “soft,” Fink’s stories push you to probe your own knowledge, your own commitments, your own choices. You could not read her stories without asking: Where would I be, what would I do, what should I do?

Encountering resistance Fink and other postwar writers offer a portal that connects the present of the reader to the Holocaust past. Like Fink’s narrator, we become aware of both our distance and our proximity to catastrophe, cruelty, murder. We are prompted to pose questions about what it means to be a refugee, a fugitive, a victim, an exploiter, and to think about where we stand. And yet, to the researchers and scholars at the center of the study of the Shoah, the lens of literature has long been considered peripheral, secondary, even dangerous, to the field. As such, my own place as a literary scholar in Holocaust studies has sometimes seemed peculiar. In an area of study dominated by historians, looking at the Shoah through the lens of literature has long occupied a relatively small and contested space, at the periphery of Holocaust studies. When I first began my academic work, historians were prone to diminish the importance of literary works and literary analysis, challenging its relevance to understanding the Holocaust, or provisionally accepting a literary study on an exceptional basis. Even though by the 1980s there was already a cadre of fine literary scholars focusing their work on Holocaust literature and a recognized (if expanding) canon, and even though many universities offered courses in the area, many historians of the Holocaust did not see literature as a serious path to knowledge about the Shoah. At best, they tolerated it as a soft and emotionally driven window onto the past for those not up to the rigors of historical study. Historians would concede that literature allowed some people to “feel” something about the past, to humanize it. At worst, many historians believed that the imaginative license that defined literature threatened to upend the commitment to factualness and truthfulness about what happened to the Jews of Europe. Over the years, I have heard historians describe literary studies as “fascinating but not relevant,” “dangerous,” “entertaining,” or not really about the Holocaust. During the defense of my doctoral dissertation, the external examiner who was a historian was effusive about the analyses, insights, and writing of my dissertation. However, he observed, he didn’t see how “this kind of focus”—that is, on literature—“mattered” to the study of the Holocaust. This type of resistance was not about my work per se, or the work of particular literary scholars, but about the appropriateness of literature altogether in understanding the Shoah. Some historians—mostly social historians, and mostly women—were more receptive than others. The late Paula Hyman would often make a place for literary scholars at conference panels and symposia. Over time, Holocaust studies developed into a vast, multi-disciplinary field of study. Eventually, the disciplines made peace; literary studies and literary scholars taught historians how to enrich their work, expand the scope of materials they

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use, and read them with more sophistication. Still, if you centered your research on the literature of the Shoah, you worked at the periphery of Holocaust studies, something of an insider/outsider. At the same time, you remained tethered to history, answerable to it in ways that were not the norm for literary scholars. What made literature suspect was its very alliance with the imagination. More than that: Literature builds on ambiguities and ambivalences, on impossible perspectives that bring us to the boundary of what is bearable and then push us further. For example, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever’s 1946 poem “Poem about a Herring” is poised at the edge of a mass grave at the moment of murder. 2 The poem begins in the third person, describing the interaction between a mother and child, “[r]ight at the edge of the limepit.” The child begins to cry—not, as we might expect, out of fear, but out of hunger. He begs his mother, “Mameh, I’m hungry, something to eat.” Incongruously, the mother takes a herring out of her satchel and feeds her son. Incongruously, the boy “grabbed the herring with pleasure.” The poem is built on the discordance between maternal care and murderous action. As the boy places the herring in his mouth, he is shot. During the two years in which Sutzkever was confined in the Vilna Ghetto, he composed over eighty poems that contended with ghetto conditions, personal loss, collective suffering, and omnipresent death. Each of those poems bears the place and date of composition at the bottom of the page—“Vilna Ghetto March 1943,” for example—so that they serve not only as poems but as a testimony, as a relic. The place name and date make a claim on us: that the poet is not merely an artist but a witness, that he writes out of firsthand experience. In autumn of 1943, Sutzkever escaped with his wife to the forests and fought with a Jewish band of partisans. In 1944, he reached Moscow. In 1946, he testified at the Nuremberg trials. “Poem about a Herring” also bears the place and date of composition: “Warsaw August 1946.” Unlike his Vilna Ghetto poems, this poem did not focus on ongoing events. It was not born of the poet’s personal experience and did not depict things seen at firsthand. Rather, Sutzkever narrated an event where he was not present, an event he could narrate only because he was not present. Like the narrator of Ida Fink’s story, Sutzkever insists on a solidarity, a brotherhood with the “we” at the pit; like Fink’s narrator, only because he was not part of the “we” did he live to write about it. Like Fink’s story, the poem witnesses through the imagination. Its lines signal the unbearable without directly describing it. The bullets that end the boy’s life are “a fiery string of notes” that “gave his head such a jolt,” and then “the naked child / slid punctured into a pit.” The poet leaves us with a “frozen and grotesque” indelible image as he follows the boy’s body into the terrible pit: “a child with a bloody herring in his mouth.” And then the poet acknowledges that he can go no further. He has reached the limitations even of the imagination, and the divide that separates the living from the dead. In the poem’s closing lines, the poet acknowledges his own peripheral vision: “I search for that herring’s salt / and still can not find its taste on my lips.”

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The literary imagination is a mode of representation that encourages a complexity of thinking that is different from the complexity of the historian—closer, perhaps, to the practice of midrash. A classical mode of Jewish biblical commentary that some scholars see as a precursor to literary fiction, midrash responds to ethical, philosophical, and textual problems in the Bible by generating a story. Like midrash, literary responses to the Holocaust invite us to contemplate and to maintain a range of perspectives that are often in conf lict with one another. At their best, these responses ask us, for example, to imagine the unknowable and forbidding stories of the murdered and disappeared. Or to see memory as simultaneously f lawed and accurate. They open up the gray spaces, invite us to contemplate the fierce range of the human, to probe ourselves, asking that we recognize—to use Joseph Conrad’s term—our “secret sharer,” that we ask ourselves discomfiting ethical questions. You could say that literary studies, in that sense, is a sister discipline to philosophy, to psychology—approaches that have also fought for a place in Holocaust studies.

Encountering gender If literary studies held a contentious place in Holocaust studies, the introduction of gender as a category of analysis encountered even stronger resistance. There was a longstanding fear that incorporating the lens of gender would degenerate into a competition of suffering, would shift focus from antisemitism to misogyny, would distort findings by making them cohere to a political agenda. But the exclusion of gender was itself a distortion—a silencing of victims, an acceptance of assumptions that often proved not to be entirely true or sufficiently nuanced. Like early works of literary scholarship in Holocaust studies, early works of gender analysis took pains to assure readers that they took the Holocaust seriously. I was part of a small number of women working independently in several disciplines who had begun to think about how issues of gender bore on our understanding of the Shoah. When I first began to speak about women and the Holocaust, I was surprised at the reactions. Whether in broad academic gatherings or public events, no matter what aspect of women’s experiences and remembrances I addressed, the first question—always asked by a man—was always, “Were Jewish women raped during the Holocaust?” We didn’t yet know how to answer that question, did not yet know about the range of behaviors encompassing sexual barter, assault, forced prostitution, violent rape, and other experiences. At conferences and symposia that focused on the Holocaust, seasoned historians told us categorically that, no, Nazi racial laws precluded Jewish women from being victims of sexual assault. No one seemed to think that there could be anything to debate beyond the question of sexual violation. In those settings, we understood that the inf luential historians did not see our research as following a fruitful path. Focusing on women, we were told, was driven by “trendy” ideas in women’s studies, rather than by a pursuit of truth. Such work could only end in distortion and would not deepen our knowledge

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about what happened to the Jews of Europe. Even literary scholars, accustomed to asserting the value of an undervalued approach, cautioned me from pursuing an inquiry they saw as misguided. I remember being at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the mid-1990s and speaking about women’s memoirs. During the question-and-answer period, several academics protested the direction I was taking—not my findings, per se, but the very inclusion of gender as a category of analysis. A survivor stood up and declared that both men and women in his family had been murdered in Nazi death camps, and my suggestion of differences offended their memory. But several women survivors stood up as well. Yes, they insisted, their stories had yet to be told. As the event came to a close and the audience dispersed, more women sought me out. They wanted me to hear their stories, read their journals, and write them—write their mothers, sisters, aunts, daughters—into the master narrative of the Shoah. Over the years, I have been brought into the confidence of many women survivors—colleagues, literary authors, “ordinary” women. I’ve been the listening ear as they write their memoirs or tell me what they can’t bear to write or make public. Sometimes they “test” me before opening up about the past. They tell me a small anecdote and carefully watch my reaction. They want to trust their story not to a clinician, a researcher, a careerist, but to a human being who takes it in. They want to know what’s at stake for me—not as a professor but as a person—especially because I am not a descendant of Holocaust survivors. I told one woman, a survivor, who asked me what brought me to study the Shoah, that when I was first drawn to thinking about it, I was writing a master’s thesis on Mark Twain’s novel The Mysterious Stranger. By then, both of my parents had died—years apart, of different causes. I was grieving in ways I didn’t fully recognize. Twain’s novel, one of his darkest works, follows a disillusioned angel who comes to earth to shatter the false comfort that people derive from religion and philosophies that explain away undeserved suffering and injustice. Twain’s novel spoke to me because I had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, and I was struggling to make sense of a world fraught with loss and unfairness, and to make peace with the God of my childhood. In the midst of writing about Twain’s despair, I came upon some poems and works of fiction written by Holocaust survivors. I remember thinking that if they could find their way through the abyss, perhaps they could help me to navigate my own pressing questions. I said this somewhat sheepishly to the woman who had asked me about my engagement with the Shoah. I felt embarrassed by my own naivete, and by bringing my own small troubles into a conversation with someone whose experiences were of such a different order of magnitude. My response to her about my stake in studying the Holocaust was different than the one I would give publicly. When asked in a public forum, I would say that like the “plague” of Albert Camus’s novel of that name, the human forces that underwrote the Holocaust go underground, but never disappear. Both my private and public answers are truthful. You might say they fuel one another. In Risking Who One Is, Susan Suleiman observes that one’s academic writing serves as a form of “mediated

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autobiography,” where the “exploration of the writer’s self ” takes place indirectly, through “the mediation of writing about another.”3 As Suleiman’s own writing insightfully demonstrates, the radical otherness of the Holocaust does not preclude its serving as a mediation of self. Instead, I would argue that there is both a distance and a collapse of distance between the writer and the subject of the writing that clarify and intensify what is most profoundly at stake in studying and teaching the Shoah. Now, in a new millennium, more that seventy-five years after the events of the Shoah, I think about how long the interest in studying the Shoah will persist. How long, to use Primo Levi’s poignant phrase, until students see these events and the works that grapple with them as “distant, blurred, historical”?4 How long, in other words, until contemplating this terrible slice of the past no longer speaks to what we contend with in our own lives, in our world? Today, in my teaching, I see no sign that we are at that moment of distance and—dare I say it—indifference. Judged by one measurable index—class enrollment—interest has not diminished. Certainly, the disturbing power of the event itself accounts for its long reach. But also, the portal of literature brings the distant, the different, the other to us in a way that makes it near, intimate, relevant. The demographics of the students who take my courses have changed. When I first began teaching, many of my students were Jewish—often seeking to understand something about their parents or their inherited traditions—or non-Jews of European descent who felt some link with perpetrator cultures, and hence some accountability. A majority of my students these days are immigrants, or children of recent immigrants, many of them refugees from difficult and dangerous places. Many of them still contend with prejudice linked to ethnicity, gender, place of origin, social class. The danger of otherness speaks directly to them. My students come to class wearing turbans, hijabs, kippot. They recount family stories of refugee camps, prisons, genocides. I share with them what the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld often said to me, explaining why he was drawn again and again to write novels that contended with the Holocaust: that we cannot shy away from the parts of us that shame us, that we need to integrate even this into our sense of who we are, or we will live falsely. In a sense, my students are peripheral to the study of the Shoah, and the Shoah past is peripheral to their lives. But in a more important sense, they feel it as central to the issues they contend with. My students home in on the fraught psychological and ethical issues that Holocaust literature inspires. The issues of gender speak to them because they resonate in their own inherited memories. They ask for accommodations to observe Diwali, Yom Kippur, and Eid al Fitr. The issues we discuss in class—trauma, memory, commemoration, justice, power, accountability—help them probe their own lives, and also reach beyond experiences and cultures. The images in the works we read together are powerful enough to pull them across lines that sometimes divide them. For all of us, I think, our private lives underwrite our public commitments. Just as my own losses and struggles pulled me to study the Shoah and to engage with the web of human and ethical

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issues that emerge from it, so my students’ personal and inherited struggles link them to the lives and deaths of people in another time, another place and help them to shape an ethics for our time, our place.

Notes 1 Ida Fink, “A Scrap of Time,” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, trans. Madeline Levine and Francine Prose (New York: Schocken, 1987), 3–10. 2 Abraham Sutzkever, “Poem about a Herring,” in Burnt Pearls: Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever, trans. Seymour Mayne (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1981), 46. 3 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 4 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit, 1986), 183.

Bibliography Fink, Ida. “A Scrap of Time.” In A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, 3–14. Translated by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose. New York: Schocken, 1987. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Summit, 1986. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Sutzkever, Abraham. “Poem about a Herring.” In Burnt Pearls: Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever, 46. Translated by Seymour Mayne. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1981.

3 LIVING ALONGSIDE THE HOLOCAUST A personal and professional journey Edward T. Linenthal

The chapters in this book appear during difficult times. The COVID-19 pandemic takes its toll. In too many places, authoritarian movements are in vogue. In too many places, synagogues have armed guards to protect worshippers. A new generation of American Nazis marches on Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia campus, chanting their hatred of Jews. The era of Donald Trump has created an avalanche of books on the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, and the dangers of resurgent fascism. While most do not fall into the trap of simplistic comparisons of the Nazi era and contemporary America, the echoes, nevertheless, are chilling. In The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, for example, historian Benjamin Carter Hett records the words of German Social Democrat and World War I veteran Kurt Schumacher, who observed in 1932 that the Nazis offered a “constant appeal to the inner swine in human beings. If we recognize anything at all about National Socialism, it is the fact that it has succeeded for the first time in German politics in completely mobilizing human stupidity.” Might the same be said of our time? Isn’t our public culture infected with a toxic stew of willful ignorance and stupidity, when the times demand the wisest of global leadership?1 Still we write. While our circumstances are far less extreme, I think of the courage of those doomed in the Warsaw ghetto who chose to believe that someday the histories they painstakingly recorded and buried would give their voices meaning. In his compelling book Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, historian Samuel D. Kassow observes that for those brave few, “The ultimate surrender, the ultimate act of despair, was a failure to record what one saw.” We pay our respects to their work and their courage, I think, by also remaining firm that language matters, stories matter, intellect, imagination, and empathy matter.2

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My story My colleagues’ chapters ref lect careers immersed in Holocaust studies. My story is different. I would not describe my career in this manner, but I have lived alongside the Holocaust for a very long time, and in several distinct ways that experience has profoundly affected who I am and what I do. This chapter explores those relationships. As a young boy, I knew that many of my family members, forever unknown to me of course, had been murdered in the Holocaust, most of them at Auschwitz. I knew that my mother had friends who had returned to Europe before the war and perished. I remember that whenever she would talk about the Nazis, about the murder of her friends, her face would tighten in a particular way. It was as if she had to discipline her facial muscles to contain the toxic lava f lowing from memory to speech. I have a vivid memory—from junior high school years—of how immediate and intense could be the threat of contamination from the murderous world of the Nazis. One evening, my mother and I were eating dinner. She had just purchased tableware that she thought was from Denmark. I looked at the bottom of my fork and told her, no, the tableware was German. She dropped the fork with a look of horror on her face. I do not remember further conversation. What I do remember is that anytime a discussion about buying something German came up, she said, “I don’t know whose hands have touched it.” What does it mean to “touch” the Holocaust? What are the dangers? Recall an unsettling scene in Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s landmark film: the SS’s Franz Suchomel characterizes Belzec as a “laboratory” (for Treblinka) and mentions the name Joseph Oberhauser, who, with others, Suchomel informs Lanzmann, helped “to put the bodies in the pits themselves so that Wirth could see how much space he needed.” Then, Lanzmann immediately transports viewers to a beer hall in contemporary Munich, where he tries to engage bartender Oberhauser in conversation. Clearly nervous in the presence of a camera, Oberhauser grudgingly tells how much beer he serves daily, and that he has “reasons” for hiding his face. Not surprisingly, Lanzmann receives no response to further questions: “Do you remember Belzec? No memories of Belzec? Of the overflowing graves? You don’t remember?”3 In 1991, immersed in writing Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (USHMM), I spent ten days in Poland, visiting a number of Holocaust sites. We spent a full day at the substantial remains of the Majdanek concentration/death camp located on the outskirts of the city of Lublin. I was overwhelmed by what seemed like a living, breathing evil, intensified by the paradox that made the scene especially jarring. Standing near a huge urn of human ash and barrack after barrack of clothes and shoes of the murdered, I saw school children with colorful backpacks making their way home through the site, as crows f lew overhead. My memory recalls what I saw. My imagination, however, would never have been able to conjure it. That night we traveled eighty miles southeast to the site of the Belzec killing center. To reach the memorial—I could not see it in the darkness—one has

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to walk across a large field. I stepped out of the van and walked on what was sponge-like earth. I asked if it had rained and if it was going to be a muddy walk. I was told that we were walking on layers of human ash. Everyone else continued to the memorial, but I returned to the van. As my mother could not touch a fork that might be—in her mind—contaminated by the touch of a murderer, I could not walk on ground that contained, indeed consisted of, the ashes of hundreds of thousands of murdered Jews. The stain of defilement is an enduring threat when encountering the Holocaust. I recall, for example, that some tasked with the creation of the USHMM—particularly survivors—were uncomfortable with plans to display in the permanent exhibition material remains of the Holocaust, painstakingly gathered from sites throughout Europe. Historian and survivor Yaffa Eliach believed that the museum should display “what survivors and liberators brought back, for this material is a statement about what happened, but we should not contaminate the country with the murderers’ loot.”4 In his acclaimed 1973 BBC series “The Ascent of Man,” historian of science and survivor Jacob Bronowski offers a dramatically different attitude toward touching the Holocaust. In episode eleven, “Knowledge and Certainty,” Bronowski brings viewers to the ash pond at Auschwitz-Birkenau on a gray, gloomy day, a pond into which cremated remains were dumped. Dressed in a suit and tie, Bronowski wades into the pond, telling his audience, “I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness.” He reaches into the pond and pulls up a handful of matter, declaring, “We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.”5 So what moral “germs” might infect me had I, for example, drunk a mug of beer poured from Oberhauser’s hands? Was there “something” that would be transferred from him to me, or would it have been enough that I chose to disrespect those he murdered by touching to my lips a glass he had handled? One of the most compelling examples of struggling with a sense of defilement-bytouch is South African clinical psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s story of touching the hand—the trigger hand, she would learn—of Eugene de Kock, commander of a death squad of the apartheid regime during one of her meetings with him. She writes, In touching de Kock’s hand, I had touched his leprosy, and he seemed to be telling me that … I was from now on infected with the memory of having embraced into my heart the hand that had killed, maimed, and blown up lives.6

Challenges for historians I think of two challenges for historians evident in these stories. First, thinking about touch and contamination can lead students to the increasingly inf luential

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field of sensory history. Historian Alexis Peri, for example, includes remarkable sections “The Evolution of Sense Perception” and “The Unruly Body” in The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad. “Diarists,” she wrote, paid particular attention to their senses because the senses connect humans to the outside world and mediate their apprehension of reality. … And the perceptual and physiological changes incurred by starvation subsequently provided the foundation for the diarists’ reinterpretations of numerous aspects of their lives. We know much about the sensorium of the Nazis’ universe, but much less, I think, about the changing sensorium of their victims. Historian Tim Cole’s Holocaust Landscapes focuses on victims’ experiences of different spaces: ghetto, forest, train, attic and cellar, mountain and sea, river, road, camp. His description of sensory experience is compelling. Of sound and smell in Auschwitz, for example, a survivor “recalled hearing an incongruous mix of violin music and screams coming from the gypsy camp.” Birkenau, writes Cole, “is remembered as a unified olfactory landscape,” where survivors encountered “gruesome, overpowering stench,” and the “chimneys were very high and the smell of f lesh was very prominent.” 7 Were there different transgressive smells evident in journeys from ordinary life to constricted urban space, to ghettoization, to trains, to camps? And what about sounds? What did ghettos, death marches, the arrival of Allied troops— encounter and liberation—sound like? Were there distinct sensory worlds in occupied territory—Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North African countries? How did the sensory remnants of a pre-Nazi age—sounds of birds, the touch of a child, smells of f lowers, tastes of “real” food—register in a horrific new world? How did they register in the postwar years? How did age, gender, health, class, seasons render sensory worlds distinct? Historian Ronald Rosbottom argues in When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944, that “imagining and describing the claustrophobic trauma of living in a familiar environment that has suddenly become threatening” calls for “a new ecology of the Occupation.” There was, Rosbottom writes, “a reorientation of the habitual use of the senses as Parisians made their way through a changed city.” Perhaps, particularly using Tim Cole’s taxonomy of space, students could discover a new ecology of the Holocaust. Historians have provided superb examples of how to historicize sensory experience of other shattering transformative eras and events. I think particularly of Mark M. Smith’s The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War. The war, writes Smith, would “injure and pollute eyes, subjecting them to new, confusing sights; expose ears to sounds discordant and inhuman; bombard noses with odors rank, fetid, and impure; treat skin with a new, brutal contempt; and initiate radical changes in taste.” These aff lictions were also real for those who suffered the Holocaust. They were, after all, not merely

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stick figures—“victims” or “survivors”—but human beings who saw, smelled, touched, listened and heard, and tasted genocidal worlds. Attending to the sensory turbulence of their worlds humanizes people who tried to cobble together out of a murderous world a remnant of humane space.8 The second challenge: How do we, as historians, learn to respect the power of what historian of religions Robert Orsi characterizes as “real presence,” in, for example, place, object, ritual expression, and memory? Such presence, Orsi observes, “may refer, in one context, … to the sense of a greater-than-human power in the awesomeness of nature and, in another, to the presence of a saint in his or her image or a chip of bone.” I am intrigued by Orsi’s commitment to think of presence as “real,” because I continue to struggle to understand the overwhelming intrusion of such presence during my visits to battlefields, Holocaust locales, and terrorist sites (the island of Utøya in Norway, for example, or Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma City). One way to dismiss the awesome reality of presence is to reduce it to a mere psychological projection. In this case, we really do not need to think further, for example, about the words of a guide at Gettysburg who spoke of the “brooding omnipresence” of the site, nor about the matter-of-fact statement of a National Park Service guide at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument that she has seen “figures on the field,” nor about my mother’s fear of toxic presence in a German fork or my fear of walking on the “charged” ground of Belzec. Perhaps an eagerness to reduce or dismiss real presence is in itself a form of containment, for, as Orsi observes, “Presence is a fearsome thing. … Presence forever exceeds the bounds set for it.”9 Patricia Limerick, historian of the American West, situates presence in places transformed by violence: “We live on haunted land, on land that is layers deep in human passion and memory. … Here, land is to be reoccupied, revisioned by memory, by story, by reanimating the land with indigestible stories.” Ghostly presence can operate, argues Judith Richardson in Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley, as an “alternate form of history-making in which things usually forgotten, discarded, or repressed become foregrounded, whether as items of fear, regret, explanation, or desire.”10 The power of presence surfaced often as the USHMM came into being. For example, a museum colleague told me the story of a female survivor who visited the museum’s large storage facility in Maryland to look at the collection, much of which would be used in the permanent exhibition. A survivor of AuschwitzBirkenau, she stood next to part of the barracks brought from the camp. Its presence overtook her. As she left the facility, she walked with the peculiar “shuff le” of women in the camp. The complicating reality of presence can also result in tension between commemorative voices and historical voices, something I discuss in detail in Preserving Memory and summarize here. When the Russians liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they discovered 7,000 kilos of human hair. (The USHMM’s permanent exhibits include photographs of bales of hair ready for shipment back to Germany.) Germans used Jewish hair in a variety of ways:

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for example, transformed into yarn, it became socks for crews of U-boats; converted into felt, it served the furniture industry. The museum’s content committee—made up of historians, museum staff, and survivors—offered passionate defenses of using some of the nine kilograms of hair brought to the museum from the vast sea of hair on display in Auschwitz. The hair would serve, noted exhibition designer Ralph Appelbaum, as visceral evidence of how the extermination process “didn’t conclude with just the death of the victims, but … had to include their processing and the auctioning off of the products of their bodies. … If we didn’t tell that,” he went on to say, “we’re not really telling the whole story.”11 While the content committee voted nine to four to display the hair, several female survivors continued to object, insisting that something so intimate, something that could be from the body of a murdered relative, should not be on display. Several people spoke of the contamination that would attend the exhibition of the hair. For others, it was human “matter” out of place, its status unlike that of a railcar, or a prisoner uniform, or even shoes, eyeglasses, and so on. As one brief argued, If this museum were situated at Auschwitz or Treblinka or Mauthausen; if it were the very site of the atrocities and the place of death of the victims, then the evidence of their degradation, manifest in the remaining hair, bones and ashes, would have validity. Here, in Washington, D.C., that validity does not carry over.12 Museum director Shaike Weinberg had to weigh the impassioned arguments of some survivors and some museum staff against those who, like Ralph Appelbaum, argued that the hair was crucial to the telling of the “whole story.” In this case, Weinberg decided not to display the hair, honoring the commemorative voice. However, Weinberg chose the historical voice in other situations. For survivors especially, the USHMM was a sacred environment, not to be defiled by the presence of perpetrators, except for photographs of those everyone would expect: Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and so on. Out of respect for commemorative sensibilities, early exhibition plans did not include horrific images of murderers at work. The result was a visual record of people leading themselves to their own death, certainly not the reality of the Holocaust. While uncomfortable for many, in this case Weinberg insisted that such photographs populate the exhibition, as they most certainly do.

On a razor’s edge I lived alongside the Holocaust, intimately and intensely, when I began my work on the USHMM project in 1990. Every issue seemed situated on a razor’s edge: Why should the United States have a memorial to the Holocaust, when it was not an American event—or, in key ways, was it? If there was to be some memorial,

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where should it be, and what should it be? What was the significance of choosing the nation’s capital as the location, and from the many District of Columbia sites considered, what was the importance of one adjacent to the Washington Mall, the nation’s central memorial space? Did that location make the claim that the Holocaust is to be a component in the central narrative of American history? How so? More issues: Should the building be expressive of the event or a neutral container? Did it need to blend with the architecture of the Mall? What was to be the storyline of the museum’s permanent exhibition? How would the exhibition position the Holocaust in relation to other genocides? Who gets to tell the story; in other words, who owns the means of representation? What is the relationship between Jewish and so-called “other” victims? (Insistence on “correct” memorial hierarchy is one of the most volatile issues faced in the work of memorialization, particularly memorialization of violent events.) Do photographs of nudity victimize people yet again, and is there a danger that visitors look at many photographs that were taken with the eyes of perpetrators and through the lenses of their cameras? I carried a great deal from the USHMM project to my immersion in the life of the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, an attack carried out on April 19, 1995, by domestic right-wing terrorists who destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, murdering 168 people, including 19 children. In addition to those murdered, approximately 850 were injured, 30 children were orphaned, 291 children lost at least one parent, 462 people were left homeless, and 7,000 lost their workplace. … Many of the 12,384 volunteers and rescue workers were exposed to the horrors of the site, approximately 100 were injured, and nurse Rebecca Anderson died.13 I could never have undertaken this challenge without having learned so much during my years immersed in the USHMM project. What first comes to mind is a more developed sense of listening. I recall Michael Berenbaum, the project director at the USHMM, telling me early on that much of the museum’s creation story would not be found in written documents. Therefore, I interviewed many people, including, of course, survivors who were involved in the museum project. In Oklahoma City, I realized that much of my task involved listening to personal stories. I also learned from people in Oklahoma City to think of “visits,” rather than “interviews.” It is a huge difference. Beyond the contrast of formality and informality, “interview” implies a distinct power differential, an exercise in information extraction. I learned in Oklahoma City that a “visit” signifies a conversation, in which experience is shared. Out of my experience at the USHMM, I could bear being in the presence of stories of horrific pain and violence. I recognized and respected the firm and very real experiential membrane that separated our worlds. Yet, I hoped at least to “bump up” against these extreme experiences in order to share that world with

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readers. The years of living amid the world of the Holocaust helped me negotiate what were often extremely difficult visits. I offer one such moment from The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. The title ref lects my conviction that the “toxic” narrative—the ongoing assault of the bombing in people’s lives, which eludes consolation or redemption—is a powerful reality. Police chaplain Jack Poe shared this story with me: In spring 1996, a minister who had worked at the site came to see Poe. He told him that he had been conducting a christening at his church but could not bring himself to hold the baby in the birthing blanket. He had run out of the church without understanding why, and he was scared. When Poe asked the minister what he had done at the site on April 19, he remembered bringing out dead children and children’s limbs in blankets. Poe told me, “Even with all the help he can get, I don’t think he’ll ever be able to hold a child without triggering the bombing.”14 Such indigestible realities—what Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer characterized as “horror untempered by moral meaning”—make the allure of redemptive stories a constant presence in memorial processes. However, it is a kind of violence to rush by the horrific realities of mass murder and quickly proclaim “Let the healing begin” without bearing thoughtful witness to the enormity and chronic nature of the wounds. I share Langer’s passionate rejection of “preferred narratives.” He rightly insists: When we write of martyrs instead of victims; focus on resistance instead of mass murder; celebrate the human spirit and bypass the human body; invoke the dignity of the self and ignore its humiliation—we are initiating the evolution of preferred narratives that use embattled words to build buffers of insulation against the terrors of the Holocaust, without bringing us any closer to its complex and elusive truths.15 Here is an example of two very different ways of engaging preferred narratives. At the dedication of the Oklahoma City Memorial in 2000, President Bill Clinton said, “There are places in our national landscape so scarred by freedom’s sacrifice that they shape forever the soul of America—Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Selma. This place is such sacred ground.” In The Unfinished Bombing, I wrote that the president’s words were misleading, because the lives lost in Oklahoma City were not given in an act of conscious sacrifice for their nation: they were taken in an act of mass murder. The landscape to which Oklahoma City is connected is not Valley Forge, Gettysburg, and Selma, but sites of political terrorism and mass murder: the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, the McDonald’s in San Diego, and Columbine High School.

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Wondering if my criticism was too harsh, I sent these words to Pam Whicher, the wife of a Secret Service agent murdered in the bombing. Pam and her daughter were wise presences for me throughout the project. In response, she offered a remarkably courageous statement. Her husband, she wrote, was always prepared to defend the innocent, or put his life on the line to protect. He was given the opportunity to do neither in this situation. I believe we heal better when we accept the truth. This was nothing more than a damn waste of lives. All the more worthy of our heartbreak, and the families, all the more worthy of our sympathy.16 The USHMM project led me to other challenges in addition to Oklahoma City. It led to a 1994 invitation from the National Air and Space Museum to serve on the advisory committee for what became the ill-fated exhibition which was to focus on the use of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States on August 6 and 9, 1945. Using the restored fuselage of the B-29 which dropped the Hiroshima bomb—the Enola Gay—the exhibition was planned for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Bitter controversy featured the tension between the commemorative and the historical, the power of artifacts, and the resistance to looking under both sides— Japanese as well as American—of the mushroom clouds. Living next to the Holocaust at the USHMM also led to an invitation to join colleagues from Oklahoma City for a town meeting in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in December 2001, as that community began to struggle with what it meant to be “stewards” of the story and site, at first for family members of passengers and crew murdered with the crash of United Flight 93 during the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, and then for the wider public. Flight 93 was only a few minutes from its likely target, either the White House or the Capitol Building. Passengers and crew members learned through phone calls of the other attacks and tried to take control of the plane. As they fought their way into the cockpit, the terrorists were able to crash the plane into a large field in a rural area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I subsequently served for a decade on the Flight 93 Memorial Commission. I experienced a profound sense of real presence that December, as I walked in the wooded area where part of the plane exploded in millions of small pieces, leaving a scene of horror that greeted the first to arrive on the scene. Even three months later, the smell of jet fuel remained; the site contained tiny pieces of the plane and other material too painful to think about. The forest soil was wet, and someone said that for a long time “stuff ” would be coming out of the ground. I recalled hearing similar words at the killing fields of Chelmno, Poland, where more than three hundred thousand people were murdered, many in mobile gas vans, beginning on December 8, 1941, another date, like December 7, 1941, that deserves to live in infamy. There, too, stewards of the site collect the material witness the ground continues to offer up from mass graves—glasses and dentures,

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for example, and bits of clothing—each and all creating horrific senses of real presence, if we let them. I think often of one ordinary and extraordinary material presence in the USHMM: one of the milk cans in which the Warsaw ghetto archives were buried. Members of the Oyneg Shabes group buried several sets of archives in metal boxes and milk cans in the months after deportations to Treblinka began in July 1942. Some have never been found, but a set of boxes was unearthed in September 1946, with the help of one of the few remaining members of the group. The milk can on display in the USHMM was unearthed in 1950. It is a solitary, haunting material presence of unbearable loss and enduring courage. Some of the boxes found in 1946 contained the last words of those who buried them. David Graber, nineteen, wrote the following: What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world, we buried in the ground. I would love to see the moment in which this great treasure will be dug up, and scream the truth to the world, so the world may know all. So the ones who did not live through it may be glad, and we may feel like veterans with medals on our chest. We would be the fathers, the teachers and educators of the future. But no, we shall certainly not live to see it. Therefore, I will write my last will. May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened in the 20th century. We may now die in peace. We have fulfilled our mission. May history attest for us.17 Their mission was indeed fulfilled. Their names and their work endure. Their ghosts, however, would return to a world in which the assertion “never again” might better be replaced by the question, “Will it ever stop?” A world in which omnicide is a possible future. What could we possibly say to them? For me, Graber’s words are an enduring challenge. Will the work of those immersed in Holocaust studies continue to spark our moral imagination? Will it alert and alarm the world to what happened in the twentieth century and to what global dangers loom in the twenty-first—specifically, but certainly not only, the longing for strong, ruthless leaders who offer murderous visions of worlds purified from various “others”? Our response is in large part to study, write, and teach. How will history attest for us?

Notes 1 Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2018), 128. 2 Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 12. 3 Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust; The Complete Text of the Film (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 62–64.

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4 Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 213. 5 I thank James Blight and Janet Lang, our leading historians of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for telling me about this extraordinary scene. Quote from www.goodreads .com/author/quotes/10542.Jacob_Bronowski. The scene is available at www.brainp ickings.org/2014/04/24/jacob-bronowski-ascent-of-man-knowledge-certainty/. 6 Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 2003), 40. 7 Alexis Peri, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 47; Tim Cole, Holocaust Landscapes (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 79. 8 Ronald C. Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940–1944 (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), xxix, 124; Mark M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2. 9 Robert Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 8–9, 29. 10 Patricia Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 33; Judith Richardson, Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3; See also Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (New York: Viking, 2016); Andrew Lichtenstein and Alex Lichtenstein, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Geography of American Memory (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2017); Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). 11 Appelbaum quote from Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 212. 12 Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 212. 13 Edward T. Linenthal, The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 71. 14 Ibid. 77. 15 Lawrence L. Langer, “The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust Atrocity,” in Social Suffering, ed. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 53. Langer’s comments about “preferred narratives” are from an unpublished paper he shared with me many years ago. 16 Linenthal, Unfinished Bombing, 234–35. 17 For this text and helpful commentary about it, see the transcript for the USHMM podcast, “What a Secret Archive Taught the World,” www.ushmm.org/learn/podca sts-and-audio/12-years-that-shook-the-world/what-a-secret-archive-taught-the -world-transcript.

Bibliography Cole, Tim. Holocaust Landscapes. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Dickey, Colin. Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. New York: Viking, 2016. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid. Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 2003. Hett, Benjamin Carter. The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic. New York: Henry Holt, 2018. Kassow, Samuel D. Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Langer, Lawrence L. “The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust Atrocity.” In Social Suffering, 47–65. Edited by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

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Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust; The Complete Text of the Film. New York: Pantheon, 1995. Lichtenstein, Andrew, and Alex Lichtenstein. Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Geography of American Memory. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2017. Limerick, Patricia. Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Linenthal, Edward T. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. ———. The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Orsi, Robert. History and Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Parry, Richard Lloyd. Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Peri, Alexis. The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Richardson, Judith. Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Rosbottom, Ronald C. When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944. New York: Little, Brown, 2014. Smith, Mark M. The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

4 THE MEMORIALIST James E. Young

Because I was born in 1951, some six years after the liberation of the camps and the end of World War II, I don’t remember the Holocaust as it happened in real time. Instead, I remember the dozens and dozens of Holocaust diaries I have read, the hundreds of survivor memoirs I have read, and the thousands of pages of archival documents and artifacts I have studied and held in my hands in dozens of repositories around the world. I remember sixty years of Holocaust-themed novels, poems, and theatre productions. I remember the thousands of ghetto and camp photographs I have viewed, taken by both victims and perpetrators. I remember the hundreds of survivor audiovisual testimonies I have viewed and watched being made at the Fortunoff Archive at Yale University, and of course, I remember the hundreds of hours I have spent in the company of survivors, just listening, until their life stories seemed grafted onto my own.

In the beginning My entry into Holocaust studies involved a cold and rainy late September 1976 train ride from Amsterdam to Copenhagen, including a pilgrimage stop in Lübeck to visit Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks House. With the 1976 edition of Let’s Go: The Budget Guide to Europe as my handbook and map, I found Mann’s Buddenbrooks House, but after getting hopelessly lost and soaking wet in the steady Hanseatic drizzle, I missed my night train to Copenhagen. I was kindly directed to Lübeck’s youth hostel, but when I tried to check in, I was told firmly that it was full for that evening and that I would have to try the hostel in Travemunde, a small village nearby on the Baltic coast. After an hour in vain trying to hitch a ride to Travemunde, I marched back to the train station and caught a small commuter train to Travemunde, surrounded by boisterous gymnasium students returning to their Travemunde homes. A small group of

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students guided me onto a small ferry boat that crossed a harbor where the River Trave emptied into the Baltic Sea and to a little piece of their village surrounded by the sea, the river, and the East German frontier. The Jugendherberge is there, they pointed, about 300 meters down Mecklenburger Landstrasse, about 100 meters before you get to the Russian wall, by which they meant the East German border. “If you can’t find the hostel, please come back to us, and we’ll show you where it is,” they said, as one of them slipped through a small wooden gate between two tall hedges. Of course, I couldn’t find the hostel (which had actually closed for the season), and so returned to that little gate, defeated and drenched to the bone. I knocked on the door of the house nearest the gate, and a middle-aged, rosy-cheeked gentleman answered. He took one look at me and called for his daughter, Wiebke, to come downstairs. I recognized her as one of the students who had guided me this far. They took my soaking North Face jacket, backpack, and hiking boots and put them all in a bathtub. Within minutes, they had spread a dinner of cheese, wurst, cold cuts, bread rolls, and pickled cabbage, all washed down with bottles of Luck Pils, which I registered gratefully as an omen of my own good luck. The sixteen-year-old Wiebke called her boyfriend Peter to come over to meet this American backpacker, the first American they had ever met, and we stayed up well past midnight, sharing stories of our families during World War II, which turned out to be our common obsession and was all any of us wanted to talk about. Wiebke’s father, Friedrich, drafted as an eighteen-year-old into the German navy in 1939, was badly injured in the German invasion of Norway and was hospitalized in Bergen for the duration of the war. He had been born in Travemunde, a submarine base before and during the war, and was returned to his home village in April 1945, where he continued to recuperate in a hospital on the Priwall Peninsula overlooking the River Trave and the harbor beyond. Regaled by stories of Nazi atrocities and evil told by the Norwegian doctors and nurses who tended him for four years, he described himself as a hollowedout eggshell by the time he had returned home. Coming of age during the Nazi Reich, he came to understand during his convalescence in Bergen that all he had ever known and believed had been a lie. And then in the first days of May 1945, he watched as barge after barge, loaded with living concentration camp prisoners in striped uniforms, drifted down the river, past his hospital window and into the harbor. Invited to stay with the Suhrbier family as long as I wanted, I stayed for another week, going with Wiebke and Peter to their gymnasium in Lübeck for a couple of days, where I was asked to speak about the upcoming US presidential election. On one of the days when I stayed “home” to read and write in my journal, my head bursting with war history and memory that I didn’t even know how to process, Friedrich asked me to take a ride with him in his little VW Golf. He spoke little English, and at that point, my spoken German was pretty elementary. We drove for about twenty minutes to a little town called Niendorf, then to a

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narrow beach at Timmendorfer Strand on the Baltic Sea. After gazing at the sea for a few moments, Friedrich led me to a grove of trees, surrounding a rough, oval-shaped stone, with Gothic German script that read: Gendenkstatte fur die Opfer der Katastrophe S.S. Cap Arcona A short text followed, also carved into the stone. According to my diary notes, it read in part (in German): On 3 May 1945 the Royal Air Force bombed and sank the German cruise liner S.S. Cap Arcona and two other ships, the Thielbek and the Deutschland, in Lübeck Bay near Neustadt, killing 8,000 KZ Häftlinge from Neuengamme. A catastrophe, indeed, part of a much larger catastrophe, I remember thinking. Then I asked Friedrich what he thought the catastrophe was. He looked at the stone, and it was clear that he was very familiar with this place and with this particular event, which I was learning about for the first time. Again, from my notes and relatively poor German, I recall his answer: The first catastrophe is that these concentration camp prisoners from Neuengamme and Dora Mittelbau included many who survived the death marches from camps in Poland, and most of them were Jews. To survive the concentration camps and the death marches until the last day of the war, only to be killed by the Royal Air Force, which mistook these ships for troop transports with escaping SS officers, that was the first catastrophe. The second catastrophe was for the local residents of Timmendorfer Strand, Neustadt, and Niendorf who spent their entire summer and fall collecting and burying the bodies of the victims as they washed ashore for many months, in mass graves near these beautiful beaches. He gestured to what I now recognized were burial mounds, covered by brush and trees, with further small stone markers nearby. None of this history, however, was included on the memorial stone. As to where these Häftlinge had come from and where they were going, there was no clue. Friedrich knew the story well, as a local who had actually seen the prisonerladen barges come down the River Trave on their way out to the ships in the bay. Dozens of prisoners who had jumped into the icy water were saved by local townspeople on their fishing and pleasure boats; many were being reassured by their rescuers that there would be no more camps for them, since Neustadt was

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now occupied by British soldiers. When I asked Friedrich where he thought the ships were headed, he replied that nobody really knew, but that he suspected the SS had planned to take the ships as far out to sea as possible before scuttling them, killing the KZ inmates and thereby hiding their last victims beneath the waves. This simple stone, a multi-faceted monument that concealed much more than it remembered, would nonetheless be a revelation to me, my first Holocaust memorial epiphany. I returned to Travemunde to stay and visit with my German family every few months during my year and a half backpacking tour, sharing with them the growing files of research I had been collecting across Europe and in Israel. Wiebke came to visit me in California on my return to the United States in 1977, then in New York City when I moved there in 1978, and several times in New York and Boston since then. In 1990, I stood with her for her wedding, and then danced joyfully at her wedding party, which took place on the Passat, a nineteenth-century high-mast ship permanently moored on the Priwall, just a five-minute walk from her parents’ home in Mecklenburger Landstrasse. She and her husband are both physicians living in Hamburg. We continued to see each other at least once a year, and I have visited her family in Travemunde dozens of times since 1976. My last visit with Friedrich was in 2014, when Wiebke, her husband Konrad, daughter Jana, and I picked him up from the extended care home where he then lived. We had lunch at his favorite seafood restaurant in Travemunde, and Friedrich recalled, at age ninety-two, that rainy night in 1976 when they took in a World War II–obsessed American backpacker, whose first German Holocaust memorial in Timmendorfer Strand seems to have led many years later to his jurying Germany’s national Denkmal for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. I replied that I had shared this “first memorial” story with my fellow Findungskommission members in Berlin over dinner and much wine on the evening of our first meeting. It wasn’t a straight line from Timmendorfer Strand to Berlin, but it was a line, nevertheless. As we dropped him back at his facility, he gave me a big hug. “Auf Wiedersehen,” I choked out. “Alles gut fur Amerika, James!” he replied. “Alles gut fur Deutschland, Friedrich!” I answered. He passed away in 2015, and I didn’t get to see him again.

Different Holocausts It wasn’t long before I moved from learning to read Holocaust literature to learning “to read” the local and national memorial sites often housing this literature, as I described in a paragraph from the last chapter of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation: While I was carrying out archival research for this study of Holocaust literature, my eyes would occasionally wander from the pages of diaries, memoirs, and documents in front of me to the surrounding museum and

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exhibition halls. At these moments, the texts before me suddenly opened to encompass the very buildings and repositories—the times and places— in which I studied past events. Over the course of my research, it became impossible to ignore the extraordinary range of Holocaust memory I found in Europe, Israel, and America. The stacks at YIVO in New York, the archives at Dachau and Neuengamme in Germany, the study room at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the library and museum at Auschwitz, the State Jewish Museum in Prague, and the archives and museum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem: each place fostered its own texture of memory. In every country’s memorials, in every national museum and archive, I found a different Holocaust; and at times, I found no Holocaust at all.1 With these words, I hoped to introduce and explain my approach to multiple texts and topographical contexts of the Holocaust—i.e., how literature and narrative generate and shape historical memory and understanding of the Holocaust in ways wholly different from visual and material culture and artifacts. My excurses of Holocaust literature led to genealogies of Holocaust memorials and museums. Eventually, I would frame my resistance to the conventional monument and resulting alternative approach to it this way: Rather than continuing to insist that the monument do what modern societies, by dint of their vastly heterogeneous populations and competing memorial agendas, will not permit them to do, I have long believed that the best way to save the monument, if it is worth saving at all, is to enlarge its life and texture to include its genesis in historical time, the activity that brings a monument into being, the debates surrounding its origins, its production, its reception, its life in the mind. That is to say, rather than seeing polemics as a by-product of the monument, I would make the polemics surrounding a monument’s existence one of its central, animating features. For I believe that in our age of heteroglossia (Bakhtin’s term), the monument succeeds only insofar as it allows itself full expression of the debates, arguments, and tensions generated in the noisy give and take among competing constituencies driving its very creation. In this view, memory as represented in the monument might also be regarded as a never-to-be-completed process, animated (not disabled) by the forces of history bringing it into being.2 At first, during the forty-year arc and trajectory of my approach to Holocaust studies, I had no idea that in becoming a relative expert in how different national cultures, literary genres, and memorial forms have shaped Holocaust history and memory (both during and after the war), I would be asked to work on the memorial projects I had heretofore only interpreted and analyzed. But that is what happened.

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Memorial ferment The span of years between 1988 and 1998 was a period of exhilarating and often agonizing memorial ferment in the United States, Europe, Israel, and South America. A brief catalogue would include the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 and 10, 1989, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the fall of its communist-era monuments and those in Eastern Europe; a 1993 exhibition entitled “Monumental Propaganda,” curated by Soviet-émigré artists Komar and Melamid, on what to do with the authoritarian monuments of the Soviet era; the advent of Germany’s counter-monuments, challenging the conventional monument’s pretensions to permanence and authoritarian certainty, by artists like Horst Hoheisel, Jochen Gerz, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Stih and Schnock, and Misha Ullman; Poland’s post-1989 debates on how to preserve Auschwitz as a site of both Jewish and national Polish martyrdom; the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993; the debate around Daniel Libeskind’s deconstructivist design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin; the 1994 opening of the exhibition “The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History” at the Jewish Museum in New York City (for which I served as Guest Curator and which traveled to Berlin and Munich); the failed 1995 competition for Germany’s national Denkmal for Europe’s Murdered Jews, and the subsequent and successful new competition for the Denkmal in 1997 (on which jury I served); the complete redesign and re-curation of Israel’s Yad Vashem Memorial Museum, in light of the phenomenal success of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. All the while, artists, architects, critics, and historians began questioning the purpose and function of this Holocaust “memory boom” and whether memorials had begun to serve less as instigations of memory and more as substitutions for intervention against contemporary wars and genocide. This concern found early and profound expression in Jochen Gerz’s and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s disappearing 1986 “Monument against Fascism” in HamburgHarburg, Germany. This 12-meter tall lead-covered column was designed to sink a meter and a half at a time as sections were covered with the signatures of visitors. In 1993, it finally disappeared altogether: How better to remember a vanished people than by a vanished monument? The artists hoped that by vanishing, the monument would return the burden of memory to those who came looking for it. And as they made clear in their own explanatory signage at the monument, it was meant to provoke action, not quietude: We invite the citizens of Harburg and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12-meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day, it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice [my emphasis].3

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To their minds, “the monument” was not only still redolent of its consort with fascist and authoritarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but to the extent that any monument substituted itself for action against new and unfolding injustices, it would have to be considered an extension of the crimes it purported to be memorializing. Like Jochen and Esther, I was also preoccupied with both the utility and the futility of monuments, their potential for inspiring action on the one hand and for complacent self-satisfaction on the other hand. I worried about what the consequences of all this “looking back” and all this “memory work” would be if it took us out of the present moment and made us look away from unfolding genocides in the world around us. Toward what ends were we commemorating the genocide of Europe’s Jews, if not to warn that because it happened then, it can also happen now—to others? Here I recall watching on television Elie Wiesel’s April 1993 dedication speech for the opening of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, with President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton sitting behind him on the dais. Like many others, I was surprised but pleased when, as he neared the end of his speech, Wiesel stopped and turned toward the president and first lady, saying: Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something. I have been in Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since, for what I have seen [referring to Serb-run prison camps of emaciated Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina during Serbia’s ethnic cleansing program of 1992]. We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country! For which, Wiesel received a loud cheer and round of applause. But then I saw and heard something else as well. As the television cameras panned to President Clinton, it was clear that he was deeply moved by this appeal, his eyes glistening, his head nodding with clenched jaw. Because he had not yet acted to thwart the unfolding mass murder of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs, then two years in the making, I imagined hearing words that he never actually said: “But Elie, we are doing something! We’re here with you remembering the Holocaust!” We were getting it all backwards. Not only did I fear that we were turning Holocaust memory into a kind of national, self-congratulatory spectacle, but what if Holocaust memory was becoming a substitute for real action against contemporary genocide, instead of its inspiration? Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with such questions. Not long after its opening in 1993, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum established as part of its mission and mandate a “Committee on Conscience” and a “Center for the Prevention of Genocide,” both seeming answers to them. The stated aims of those museum initiatives include “early warning” of impending genocides and mass murder and also policy formulation for governments to intervene in new, unfolding genocides around the world. But of course, these plans raised still further questions, including at what point do words of warning, like artworks of

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warning, move from the symbolic realm to the concrete field of policy and even military action? Two years later, these questions continued to haunt me, as events in the Balkans grew desperate and then devastating. Between July 11 and 22, 1995, the world watched in horror as Serb forces rounded up and murdered en masse eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys in and around Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, in what the United Nations had declared a “safe zone,” in full view of blue-helmeted Dutch UN soldiers stationed there to protect this “safe zone.” Twenty thousand other Bosnian Muslims were expelled from this same region by Serb forces, in an ethnic cleansing that amounted to the genocide of Bosnian Muslims from lands the Serbs would claim as their own. Four years later, Serb forces launched yet another ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians, the last remaining Muslim population in what they called “Greater Serbia,” forcing nearly a million Kosovar Albanians to relocate and concentrate in a corner of Kosovo, where it seemed certain they would be destroyed. This time, President Clinton acted, marshaling NATO forces to begin a withering seventy-eight-day bombing campaign of Serb forces in Kosovo and in Serbia proper, beginning on March 24 and ending on June 10, 1999. On May 13, well into NATO’s “Operation Allied Force,” President Clinton justified NATO’s assault on Serbia in these words: “Though [Slobodan Milosevic’s] ethnic cleansing is not the same as the ethnic extermination of the Holocaust, the two are related; both are vicious, premeditated, systematic oppression fueled by religious and ethnic hatred.”4 Six years after the dedication of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, when Elie Wiesel implored President Clinton and the world to stop the Serb genocide and ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, NATO forces stopped the near-certain genocide of Kosovar Albanians at the hands of the Serbs. Now, of course, the largest monument in Prishtina, the capital of the new state of Kosovo, is to President Bill Clinton—a memorial to genocide prevented. As it turns out, Germany’s national Denkmal for the Murdered Jews of Europe also had baked into its very origins the capacity for acting in the name of Holocaust memory. In September 1998, federal elections were called in Germany, right in the midst of intense national debate over whether or not to go forward with building the design for Germany’s Denkmal, for which our competition design jury had chosen Peter Eisenman’s waving field of stelae. Winning a 43.8 percent plurality, Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party invited Joschka Fischer’s Green Party into a governing coalition. But by then, the Denkmal had become a political f lashpoint, with Schroeder and his minister of culture Michael Naumann declaring that they would not go forward with the Denkmal, which they identified too closely with Helmut Kohl’s previous government. Joschka Fischer, however, agreed to join the coalition only on condition that the Denkmal be built after all. He would go on to become the government’s vice chancellor and foreign minister and mounted a strenuous campaign for the German Air Force to join its NATO allies in “Operation Allied Force,” arguing

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in part that given Germany’s past, it was especially obligated to intervene in what was certainly unfolding as a new European genocide. For the first time since World War II, the German government allowed its warplanes to cross over its borders, sanctioned now by the memory of a genocide once perpetrated in the national name. On June 25, 1999, fifteen days after the end of “Operation Allied Force,” with its intervention fresh in mind, a full session of the German Bundestag convened in public view to debate and finally vote on Berlin’s Denkmal for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Both opponents and proponents were given time to make their cases, each presentation followed by noisy but civil debate. Finally, by a vote of 314 to 209, with 14 abstentions, the Bundestag approved the memorial in four separate parts: (1) the Federal Republic of Germany would erect in Berlin a memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe at the site of the former Ministerial Gardens in the middle of the city; (2) the design of Peter Eisenman’s field of stelae would be realized; (3) an information center would be added to the memorial site; and (4) a public foundation would be established by the Bundestag to oversee the building and to provide continued maintenance of the memorial and its information center. Six years later, in May 2005, Germany’s national Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was dedicated and opened to the public. In the next few years, I would be asked to serve on the jury for the American National September 11 Memorial and to serve as an academic advisor on the National September 11 Museum. I would also be invited by the Norwegian government and its Labor Party to advise them on how to commemorate the terrible mass murder of children at a Labor Youth summer camp on the Island of Utøya and the destruction of the Government Center in Oslo by a white nationalist, anti-immigrant fanatic in July 2011. And I would be asked to advise the Jewish community in Pittsburgh on how to commemorate the eleven victims of the deadly antisemitic attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27, 2018. In all of these cases, we would need to ask, Toward what national, political, social, and aesthetic ends are we remembering these victims of terror? What will be the policy consequences of these memorials, and how will we and future generations be shaped inwardly by them? Will these memorials actually move us to stand up and act against national, ethnic, and racial hatred? Or will they culminate only in themselves, fixed places where we grieve endlessly in repetitive loops? But even these civic questions must necessarily follow the more conventional, if essential, personal needs of mourners grieving lost loved ones, according to their cultural and religious traditions. They cannot be exclusive of each other, but they need to be added to each other. In mourning one loss, our therapists tell us, we

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mourn all of our losses. To what extent will such mourning allow us to internalize and manage such terrible loss? To what extent will such mourning enable us in our ongoing lives, and to what extent might it disable ongoing life with paralyzing grief? The memorial needs of those most directly affected by these terrible events vary greatly. Most of the family members of 9/11 victims will gratefully visit the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in lower Manhattan, but most other New Yorkers will never visit it. Between six and seven million people from around the country and the rest of the world, however, will visit the memorial every year. The congregants at Tree of Life Synagogue wonder whether their tragedy must be mourned both locally by families of murdered loved ones and communally as one more terrible antisemitic attack in a long history of “the longest hatred.” They wonder, too, whether their tragedy is also one more dot on this era’s map of fanatical anti-immigrant racial hatred and white nationalist terror, beginning with the July 22, 2011, attacks in Norway, continuing through numerous antisemitic and anti-Muslim attacks in New Zealand, Canada, and California, continuing with anti-immigrant attacks in El Paso in 2019. Or is this tragedy in Pittsburgh to be remembered as part of America’s epidemic of gun violence, kin to Columbine, Newtown, Orlando, and Dayton? Or do these memorial maps overlap, and if so, how will their memorials allow for both private grief and civic meaning? Has commemorating the victims of these attacks inoculated any of these communities against further race-hatred or gun violence? Or must we simply have space to grieve our personal losses, without turning our families’ losses into civics lessons to be learned? As I write in the autumn of 2019, Turkey has prepared its own “final solution” to what it regards as its Kurdish problem, and an American president has cleared the way for it. For more than a century, Turkey has denied its ethnic cleansing and genocide of Armenians between 1915 and 1923. Unlike Germany, Turkey has not built into its national legacy the memory of a genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Unlike Germany, which invoked the memory of its mass murder of Jews during World War II as its rationale for intervening against a new and unfolding mass murder of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs, Turkey “has no memory” of its mass murder of Armenians—which is to say that it has no memorial rationale standing in the way of its planned ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Syria’s Kurds. But NATO does have just such a memorial rationale for intervening against Turkey’s planned genocide of the Kurds, which is only amplified and hardened by the fact that Turkey is a member state of NATO. Will NATO allow one of its own member states to perpetrate a genocide of the Kurds, an ally in its war with the Islamic State? Or will NATO invoke its institutional memory of past genocides perpetrated by its own member states (Turkey during World War I and Germany during World War II) as rationale for intervening against a new genocide now? An intervention in the name of such memory—i.e., a “memorial action”—would surely stand as the greatest of all genocide memorials.

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Notes 1 James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 172. 2 From James E. Young, The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 16. 3 For an early discussion of this and other counter-monuments, see James E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 267–96. Eventually, I expanded on this article at length in James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) and at further length still in James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 4 For the full text of Clinton’s remarks on this occasion, see www.cnn.com/ALLPO LITICS/stories/1999/05/13/clinton.kosovo/transcript.html.

Bibliography Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. “The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 267–96. ———. The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. ———. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. ———. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

PART II

Challenges

What are you thinking? Responses to that ordinary question could involve extraordinary challenges. Consider, for example, Reinhard Heydrich, the highranking SS officer who headed the German Security Police and Security Service during the Nazi era. On July 31, 1941, what was he thinking when he got what he wanted: authorization for the directive that Heydrich himself had prepared for Hermann Göring’s signature. In Raul Hilberg’s concise description, Heydrich got “an authorization to invent. It was an authorization to begin something that was not as yet capable of being put into words.”1 It gave him freedom to determine how to solve the Nazi’s Jewish problem once and for all. That mandate for the “Final Solution” required thinking at every turn—not only Heydrich’s but also careful, meticulous, unrelenting thought from agencies and personnel throughout the Third Reich. The thinking had to be creative too, because every office and official faced unusual challenges. Nothing quite like the envisioned “Final Solution” had been enacted before. The challenges were fraught; they comprised a multitude of new problems. Nevertheless, thinking found the words and ways to handle them. The destructively successful thinking of Heydrich and his vast company of Holocaust perpetrators creates primary challenges for Holocaust studies—primarily how to describe and understand what took place in that catastrophe. The discipline tries to cope with them, but the constant difficulty is that study and education about the Holocaust are not equipped as robustly as one might think. Here’s why. Thinking is an action that usually depends on words. Words, in turn, communicate concepts, identify goals and plans, arouse passions, and energize activity. Words are especially effective at deepening divisions and intensifying tribal loyalties that are often based on the lies that words can tell, the prejudices that words can encourage, and the hatred that words so often inf lame. Words can kill. Arguably, history shows that words are better for inciting killing

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than for deepening understanding and compassion or for defending justice and truth. At their best, the thinking encouraged by Holocaust studies and the words that are its primary tools try to serve good ends. Daunting obstacles reduce the chances for success. First and foremost, words cannot do justice to the Holocaust. Every analysis or narrative, every argument or conclusion, every “lesson of the Holocaust” or moral imperative derived from the genocide reveals that the Holocaust eludes words. The most eloquent Holocaust survivors—Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, and Elie Wiesel come to mind—were minimalists. They wrote unembellished words spare and lean, realizing that the silences between their lines might say the most. Raul Hilberg’s scholarly writing emulated theirs, but none of those writers assumed that their words would block harmdoing, let alone save the world. And yet the thoughts and words of Holocaust scholars and Holocaust studies can help. They can increase knowledge, warn about danger, resist injustice, strengthen ethical awareness, and change people for good. Acutely aware of the challenges that confront Holocaust studies, the authors of the five chapters in Part II show that what they are thinking not only deserves thoughtful attention but also mandates action that resists allowing Nazi thinking and its ilk to have the last word. Travel with them and see what you are thinking about that.

Note 1 See Hilberg’s comments in Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust; The Complete Text of the Film (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 72–73.

5 HOLOCAUST STUDIES A compass Debórah Dwork

If knowledge undergirds memory—and I believe it does—the aim of Holocaust studies is the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Over the years, I have researched Jewish victims, gentile and Jewish rescuers across Europe, and German perpetrators. I seek to recover the threads of their lives—their decisions, choices, and actions—and to weave them into a historical narrative. But I know that I will never really know. Still: in specific and concrete ways the history I ponder shapes my outlook, everyday choices, teaching philosophy, and social activism. It frames how I interpret the daily news and how I vote. Startled by my open admission of atheism, a rabbi friend rejoined, “How can you not believe in God? God is my up, my down, my compass!” “Really?” I asked with genuine wonderment. “The Holocaust is my compass.” And I meant it. I still do. Yet I backed into Holocaust research. When I went to university, the institution I attended did not offer a course on Holocaust history. As I recall, and from what I can reconstruct from syllabi, none of the many modern European history courses I took addressed this subject. Not even in a single lecture. And not even when a couple of the professors—as I learned later—were refugees from Nazi Europe. In that environment, I had no inkling that I might study the history of the Holocaust. And I didn’t. My first book, War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children, explores the development of a modern welfare system prior to the introduction of the welfare state. Nothing to do with the Holocaust. While writing it, however, I realized that the history of childhood is not the history of children. Our dominant paradigm is that society consists of productive, or voting, or participatory members: the world of adults. The only place children have in that scheme is as the citizens of tomorrow. Thus, historians analyzed how adults develop the next generation of adults; they relegated the experiences of children to psychologists and investigative journalists.

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I sought to develop a new theoretical approach: “child-centered” history. Just as women’s history tells us as much about men as it does about women, and the history of black America tells us as much about white Americans as it does about Americans of African descent, so the history of children (I argued, and argue still) is as informative about adults as it is about the young people themselves. Child life is a subculture of the dominant society, and examining the experiences of children lays bare how society functions at its most fundamental level. Eager to deploy my new lens, I set my sights on a subject. At this point I could say that, as a social historian of modern Europe, I had noticed that while there was a rich Holocaust memoir literature by child survivors, not a single critical history of Jewish child life during the Nazi years had been published. That would be true, but not the truth. The truth is that the stories I had heard all my life from my mother’s eldest sister, a survivor who was the sole member of the family still in Lodz when the Germans invaded, did not figure in Holocaust-related scholarly literature.

Larger questions My aunt’s history proved pivotal. It prompted me to ask larger questions. What (at that time, in 1990) were the foci of Holocaust scholarship, which subjects mined, and which elided? Why, for example, was there so much about the establishment of the Lodz ghetto and so little about the daily life my aunt experienced—which was, after all, typical of lower-middle-class Lodz Jews—in the historical literature? And the even larger structural question: Why did so few colleges and universities offer courses in this subfield of history? Indeed, why wasn’t Holocaust studies a formally acknowledged area of research and teaching, routinely included in higher education curricula? Answers abound. At that time, the Holocaust was a relatively recent event. Just fifty years prior, the Jews of Europe had not yet been murdered. The Holocaust had not begun. And it takes time for current events to move into the realm of history. Then too, in the balkanization of knowledge we call departmental responsibilities, the history of the Holocaust fell in the fissure between European history and Jewish studies. European historians and Jewish studies scholars were sincerely baff led as to where the study of the Holocaust fits in the university world. European historians simply assumed, without much critical thought— and, I believe, incorrectly—that the history of the Holocaust fell within the domain of Jewish studies, while Jewish studies professors felt—quite rightly, I believe—that the Holocaust, a pan-European phenomenon, properly fell within the realm of European history. Wherever the proper place, Holocaust studies had much to offer. The history of the Holocaust is a story of utter perdition and ruin. It poses an existential question mark to the very notion of “western civilization.” What do such words mean? What, in light of the Holocaust, is the definition of the word “civilization”? In the first instance, the purpose of Holocaust studies was and

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remains to increase knowledge; indeed to ensure that knowledge, and not only memory, evolves and grows. Studying this seminal event that reached across Europe and to points on every peopled continent opens investigation of ethnicity, geography, and genocide. It prompts analysis of collusion and resistance; of the hot violence of mass murders and the cold violence of modern bureaucratic and technological mechanisms of death; of suffering and adaptation to suffering. Study of the Holocaust reveals how societies disintegrate step by step, and how ordinary men, women, and children both participated in and were affected by this disintegration.

A vaccination and a vehicle These insights are not the avowed goals of most Holocaust memorialization initiatives or school and non-profit organization educational programs. The sheer moral weight of this history led to the popular assumption that education about the Holocaust would be transformational for students. This aim soon moved from ambition to claim: Holocaust education serves as a vaccination against antisemitism, racism, human rights abuses, and, most recently, bullying. “In order to prevent such an atrocity from ever happening again, those who care must tell the story,” US vice president Al Gore averred on the first anniversary of the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.1 Instituting Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001, Britain’s home secretary Jack Straw noted the benefits for all. “The universal lessons of the Holocaust make this commemoration day relevant to everyone in our society. We all have a shared responsibility to fight against discrimination and to help foster a truly multicultural Britain.”2 Nearly a decade later, Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations struck a more sober note of concern about the efficacy of education programs, noting that “more and better teacher training is surely needed.” Still, the core principle remained: “educators and policy-makers believe Holocaust education is a vital mechanism for teaching students to value democracy and human rights, and encouraging them to oppose racism and promote tolerance in their own societies.”3 With such a significant mandate, it is no surprise that buckets of treasure are poured into memorial events and educational programs. Until recently, however, there was a paucity of data to support the claims, justify those programs, or point the way forward to more effective classroom education. An English study, What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust (2015), offers an empirical basis for pedagogical policy and practice. The sheer numbers are impressive, with 7,952 survey responses from students and focus group interviews with 244 young people.4 Happily, a lot of positive indicators emerged. Most encouraging was with regard to the enterprise of education itself: student knowledge and understanding as measured by their survey responses increased with age. On the whole, their answers to content-based questions grew more accurate and sometimes more sophisticated with grade level. The bottom line: education is indeed effective—which is good news for all of us.

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But not good enough. What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust reveals that student knowledge of history in a number of areas is not sufficiently thick to underpin their larger understanding of the Holocaust. They valued their education in this subject, found it interesting, and wanted to learn more.5 Yet they knew little and evinced limited, confused, and downright incorrect information and understanding about key aspects of the Holocaust. Clues emerged about the apparent disconnect between student receptivity and their factual knowledge. The primary reason they should learn about the Holocaust, they opined (mirroring popular wisdom), is to understand where prejudice and racism can lead. This rationale was followed by “to respect the memory of victims” and “to stop something similar happening again.” Significantly below that came: “to deepen historical knowledge” and “to learn about what caused the Holocaust.”6 Students stressed the importance of knowing about the Holocaust as a parable—what it stands for or represents—rather than as a historical event. Yet, even a student who prioritized “the concept of the Holocaust” over knowledge or understanding of the actual events challenged the notion that learning about the Holocaust stands as a bulwark against racism and prejudice. “Even when I was little, before I really knew anything about [the Holocaust], I wasn’t [racist]. I didn’t stop being racist because of the Holocaust; I wasn’t racist and then not racist. I’ve always not been racist.” 7 Although there is no empirical evidence that Holocaust education either is needed to serve as a vaccination against racism or in fact does so function, students clearly believe that is its role. Holocaust studies, rooted in institutions of higher education, does not make the same claims. Yet many, perhaps most, of the philanthropic donors who support our teaching and research are powered by those beliefs. “I’m angry,” a donor emailed me not long ago. I have contributed over two million dollars to both the Shoah Foundation and to Clark University’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center. What have I gotten for my money? Antisemitism is up 60 percent around the globe and children are starving in Yemen by the tens of thousands. And that’s just for hello. He has a point. I solicited his funding. To be fair to me, I never claimed that the education we offer and research we do would scotch antisemitism or prevent civil wars or proxy wars. But it is also true that I never plumbed the assumptions that governed my donor’s investment. I am a Holocaust historian and a university teacher; I am a champion of historical analysis rather than history as a vehicle for moral instruction. My goal is to demythologize, indeed, to normalize study of the Holocaust. Why do we shoulder the Holocaust with the responsibility for teaching about democracy and human rights? Why not task the history of the Enlightenment, or the history of the civil rights movement? The education I offer does not aim to shape students’

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behaviors. Rather, I seek to explore and lay bare underlying social processes and political, bureaucratic, and economic structures. By plumbing and analyzing events at specific times and places, the foundational skeleton of genocide (enactment, responses, resistance) and the structural mechanisms emerge. And this knowledge (I trust) will help us identify systems and processes that will spur change. We may not be able to alter how human beings wish to act, but we may well be able to alter the conditions that prompt those wishes or allow them to be actualized. That would be good enough. Actually, that would be great. The students’ second reason to learn about the Holocaust—to respect the memory of the victims—also echoes a popular imperative: Remember. But if their historical knowledge is not so muscular, what will they remember? As the American journalist Dan Rather observed as the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 (9/11) terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York neared, “We cannot rely on memorials and museums alone.” Prompted to think about the history his generation saw—the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the massacre on Tiananmen Square—he concluded: “We can tell ourselves we will never forget and we likely won’t. But we need to make sure we teach history to those who never had the opportunity to remember in the first place.”8

Navigating intersections Plumbing the history of the Holocaust teaches me what is important to remember. It also helps me navigate life’s myriad intersections. If I am allergic to the instrumentalization of the Holocaust to serve as a convenient moral lesson, I embrace the study of 1930s and 1940s Europe as a source of insight. I do not credit the assumption that learning about the Holocaust will prevent racism or homophobia or bullying. But I have found that study of the Holocaust has afforded me opportunities to consider quotidian questions through a rich historical lens; it offers past experiences and conundrums to consider as I chart my way forward. For example: There are a host of excellent reasons for choosing a religion-based educational institution for one’s children, but all of them are secondary to my calculus of decision-making, which was grounded in Mariella Milano-Piperno’s history. The passage in November 1938 of Italy’s racial laws excluded her from public school. She felt “marginalized.” That was, she said years later, the heart of the matter. “The day that we could not return to school, I remember that I was ashamed before my companions, to tell them: I cannot come because I am a Jewish girl.” And then the questions came. “Why? What did I do to be forbidden from going to school?” Like other Italian Jewish families, the Pipernos had two choices: send their children to a Catholic school with its Catholic rituals, or to a non-denominational private school designed for remedial students who had to repeat a year, having failed in the public schools. Rome—and many other cities in Italy—had a Jewish primary school (grades one through five), but there was little in the way

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of Jewish secondary education. To meet that need, a number of Jewish communities organized schools for their young people; they were taught by the very teachers and professors dismissed by the same racial laws. By all accounts, La Scuola Ebraica di Roma, like its counterparts elsewhere, was an extraordinary institution. When we went to the Jewish School, Mariella Piperno explained, “we asked: ‘Who are we? What does it mean to be Jews?’” They, who had been very assimilated before and lived among Catholics all their lives, now were on the outside. What to make of that? This was the great discovery of the Jewish School: when we began to understand that to be Jewish was not only to be of the Jewish religion. A Jewish culture existed, a Jewish civilization existed, that, in other words, all that is meant by Judaism existed. And this was very important. In my opinion, the Jewish School was like the opening of a book for us, and we began to read in this book which had been completely closed to us before.9 New Haven, Connecticut (my hometown at the time), was not Rome, Italy. We did not live in a fascist state or suffer racial laws. But the positive experiences of youngsters in newly established Jewish schools in fascist and Nazi Europe taught me something significant about educational choices and robust ethnic identity formation. If this example illustrates how insights from my research shaped my analysis of basic choices like schooling, the following will show how the Holocaust serves as my moral compass in parenting decisions. Every year, graduating high school classes across the United States hold festive dances, proms. Who will go with whom is a major social issue. My daughter Miriam accepted her friend Kit’s invitation to be his date. But she had her eye on another boy, Dave Rose. And lo and behold! Dave Rose asked her to the dance. Jubilant, she bounded in to tell me the wonderful news. “Great! But what about Kit?” I asked. “You can’t leave him in the lurch.” She could not see the problem. Dropping friend for heartthrob was accepted practice: “Everybody does it.” “What are you, a good German? Everybody does it? Just because everybody does it doesn’t it make it right!” I thundered. “Mama! Not everything is about the Holocaust!” she cried. I adduce this trivial incident precisely because it illuminates how, for me, studying the Holocaust has served to endow the insignificant with ethical valence. My perspective on ordinary events is refracted through the prism of my work. Bat mitzvah decisions prove a weightier example. Notwithstanding their atheist beliefs, both daughters became bat mitzvahs. Why? Working with the Holocaust entails (for me) accepting a certain responsibility and obligation, which is passed on through the assumption of responsibility of becoming a bat mitzvah. God is not part of this social contract. The community stands at the core here. Knowing my daughter Hannah’s convictions, Rabbi Rick asked her why she chose to become a bat mitzvah, and indeed, to run the whole service herself. “Because if I were the only Jew to survive Auschwitz, I would need to

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be able to re-create the entire Shabbat liturgy,” she explained. Rabbi Rick soon sought me out. “Isn’t that a heavy burden to put on the girls?” he suggested politely. Perhaps. But it was also a privilege, Hannah’s privilege. Her education about the Holocaust served as her compass: she knew what she wanted to do and why she wanted to do it. I draw upon knowledge gained from my research to interpret current events, understand social problems, and decode political positions. Some years ago, a number of adoption questions jumped into the public arena. Should a woman who had given her baby up for adoption be permitted to reassert custody? Are the courts acting in the best interest of the child—or the mother? Most recently: Should a white couple be allowed to adopt a native American baby? I had studied the return of hidden Jewish children to parents, other family members, or the Jewish community after the war. The historical perspective I brought helped me navigate the arguments to what I thought was the better (not best) path forward. Similarly, reports about persistent gender inequality prompted scrutiny of the micro-measures that both create and sustain the status quo. Again Holocaust studies offered insights. If the shift in 1930s Germany from the time-honored public salutation “Grüss Gott” or “Guten Tag” to the Nazi “Heil Hitler” served as both a social control mechanism and a signal of support for the regime, the shift in a woman’s appellation upon marriage from Ms. Smith to Ms. Jones or Ms. Smith Jones serves as both a social control mechanism and a signal of support of patriarchy. Women who take their husband’s name as their own are saying “Heil Hitler” to patriarchy every single time they identify themselves. And we who so address them do the same. Every day, new events prompt deep concern about political leadership and civil society. Many of these developments resonate with Holocaust-era phenomena. Authoritarian, nationalistic governments now rule or claim an increasing share of the electorate in countries where political parties of that stripe were utterly marginal just a decade ago. Equally unexpected and unwanted, antisemitic acts are on the rise in the United States, nearing a historic high, according to the Anti-Defamation League. And no less a person than the president of the United States deployed the antisemitic loyalty trope to attack the Democratic Party and its candidates. “I think any Jewish people who vote for a Democrat, I think it shows a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” he declared to reporters at a meeting in the Oval Office (August 20, 2019).10 If some of his supporters tried to mitigate the damage by asserting that Trump meant disloyalty to oneself, the president stripped away that defense the following day. “If you vote for a Democrat, you’re being disloyal to Jewish people and you’re being very disloyal to Israel.”11 His suggestion that Jews are loyal to each other and to the ( Jewish) State of Israel, rather than to their fellow Americans and their country of citizenship, where they live, the United States, draws on the particularly toxic antisemitic canard of dual loyalty. It questions Jews’ loyalty to the nation and frames them as untrustworthy outsiders, charges the Nazis used to lethal effect and charges that prior to 2017 Holocaust studies scholars would never have

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expected from the president of the United States. I researched and taught the dual loyalty trope as history in the Western world, not current events. Yet, here we Americans were—Jews and gentiles alike—startled by our president’s accusation. Happily, my past and present students observed, they felt armed by their education to interpret his words and confront his assault.

What is Holocaust studies for? These turns in the public arena challenge the whole project of Holocaust studies. What in the world is Holocaust studies for, if authoritarian nationalistic governments once again find favor with electorates, if Jews face greater antisemitism in the West than they have since the war’s end, if the Oval Office provides cover for white nationalists? One might logically say: Not much. And one would be wrong. Indeed, as my students’ observations suggest, Holocaust studies has never been more urgently needed. Holocaust studies offers us a vocabulary to talk about the grave problems we face, a structure for analysis, and knowledge and insights to interpret unfolding events. My compass remains true, as two recent examples will illustrate. President Trump has persistently used venomous language to characterize asylum seekers and immigrants from many non-white parts of the world, perhaps most especially Latin America. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” candidate Trump lied to his supporters when he announced his run for president. And he continued his false accusation: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [sic] us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”12 Dog-whistling to white nationalists while demonizing people who knock at our doors led to murder. Robert Bowers hated asylum seekers as much as he hated Jews, and his assault (October 27, 2018) on congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, which claimed eleven lives, was the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. Just hours before he stormed the synagogue, Bowers posted on his social media account, “HIAS [a Jewish nonprofit organization that aids refugees worldwide] likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”13 Unfazed, President Trump continued to use his bully pulpit to vilify refugees, identifying their entry into the United States as an invasion. “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border,” he tweeted just two days after the Pittsburgh massacre. “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” Trump’s attacks continued. November: “The U.S. is ill-prepared for this invasion, and will not stand for it. [Migrants] are causing crime and big problems in Mexico. Go home!” January 2019: “I just got back [from the southern border] and it is … an invasion!” Later that month: “More troops being sent to the Southern Border to stop the attempted invasion of Illegals.”

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The verbal barrage did not abate. Among the many tweets and public comments: “How do you stop these people? You can’t,” Trump screamed at a rally (May 2019). To which someone yelled back, “Shoot them.” Trump smirked; the audience cheered.14 And as in Pittsburgh, violence followed. Patrick Crusius, a twenty-one-year-old white man opened fire (August 3, 2019) on shoppers in a crowded Walmart in the Texas border city of El Paso, murdering twenty-two and wounding dozens more. And again, the perpetrator left a written record of his motivation in an online essay. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” he declared. He was, he said, “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”15 Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman who represented El Paso, was among the public figures to highlight the narrative arc from Trump to violence. And he framed his criticism in the context of Nazi rhetoric. For O’Rourke, the Holocaust served as a compass, and it pointed in a most unwelcome direction. “We have a president right now who traffics in this hatred, who incites this violence, who calls Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, calls asylum seekers animals and an infestation,” he observed at a vigil mourning the El Paso victims. You may call a cockroach an infestation, you may use that word in the Third Reich to describe those who are undesirable, who must be put down because they are subhuman. You do not expect to hear that in the United States of America in this age, in our generation.16 Knowledge of the Nazi regime shaped O’Rourke’s understanding of the significance of dehumanizing language. He did not say that Trump was like Hitler, or Himmler, or even Goebbels. But he heard a rhyming rhetoric, and it served as a warning. And that is the point. The particulars of this event mattered mightily in August 2019, but O’Rourke’s analytic framework—Holocaust studies—stretches into the future. A second example, also from summer 2019, lays bare how Holocaust studies reveals what I call the underlying grammar of current events. The Trump administration’s harsh refugee and immigration policies have led to mass detentions on the southern border of the United States. “According to Border Patrol statistics, the Rio Grande Valley sector … [saw] nearly a quarter million apprehensions in the first eight months of FY 2019,” an Office of Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security, report ( July 2, 2019) noted. Two unannounced inspections (May and June 2019) at five facilities had led to the document. Management Alert—DHS Needs to Address Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley detailed punitive conditions. “Border Patrol was holding about 8,000 detainees in custody [at the five facilities] at the time of our visit.” Furthermore, “826 (31 percent) of the 2,669 children at these facilities had been held longer than the 72 hours generally permitted.” Children at three of the detention centers “had no access to showers … few spare clothes and no laundry facilities.”17

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At one center, some single adults were held in standing-room-only conditions for a week, and at another, some single adults were held more than a month in overcrowded cells. A photo illustrated “eighty-eight adult males in a cell with a maximum capacity of 41.” Poor hygienic conditions prevailed. “Most single adults had not had a shower in CBP [Customs and Border Protection] custody despite several being held for as long as a month,” and “most single adult detainees were wearing the clothes they arrived in days, weeks, and even up to a month prior.” Still, government officials continued to catch and detain hopeful entrants who lacked proper papers. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) increased “capacity at its Port Isabel facility from 800 beds to an ‘emergency level’ of 1,200, and then further increased capacity to 1,500 by adding plastic beds in some cells.” Space was not increased, just the number of berths.18 When Karl Bischoff, chief of the Auschwitz Building Office, planned for an expansion of Birkenau’s capacity from 97,000 to 125,000 inmates, he made a single alteration. A drawing, illustrating a section of the standard hut to be built, makes it absolutely clear that this increase was achieved simply by cramming more inmates into the same space. The original drawing, signed by Bischoff on October 8, 1941, listed a capacity of 550 men. A week later Bischoff crossed out “550” and replaced it with “744.” Nothing else had changed.19 I doubt that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knew this detail when she recorded an Instagram live video to address the detention centers. “The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border,” she lamented. Referencing the Holocaust but not using the word, she continued, “I want to talk to the people concerned enough with humanity that ‘never again’ means something.” For her, too, the Holocaust served as a compass. “The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing.” And not a new phenomenon. We had experienced it before. The antecedent Ocasio-Cortez referenced was American, not German. “This week, immigrant children were moved to the same internment camps where the Japanese were held” during World War II. In her view, “This is a crisis on whether America will remain America in its principles and its values.” Conservative Republicans and some Jewish-American organizations lashed out at Ocasio-Cortez for trivializing the Holocaust by using the words “concentration camps.” Scholars, liberal Democrats, and other Jewish-American organizations defended her use of the term. In “A Crime by Any Name” Atlantic journalist Adam Serwer summed up the shift in conversation from the responsibility of the state for the human lives it is destroying to whether those who object to that destruction have exhibited proper etiquette. If congressional Republicans—or, for that matter, their constituents—had expressed a fraction as much outrage over the treatment of migrant children in American detention facilities as they did in response to Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, she never would have had cause to make them in the first place.20

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The storm over Ocasio-Cortez’s historical frame—the Holocaust—for her criticism of our government’s policies and practices highlights the vital importance of Holocaust studies as a compass to help us analyze current events and to chart our way forward. I thus hope for and work toward ever more robust teaching, research, and scholarship in this field. I do not know what future generations will make of Jewish life under fascism and Nazism—at home, in hiding, in ghettos, transit camps, forced labor camps, and death camps—or what they will make of the decisions and choices made by those Jews’ neighbors and oppressors. But I want to leave the road marked and lighted, so that they can travel into the darkness ahead, as I do, sure of the road behind and with the compass in hand.

Notes 1 “Gore Urges, ‘Tell the Story’ in a Speech at DC Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony,” Jewish Post and News, April 13, 1994. 2 Quoted in Victoria Combe, “Prince Leads Holocaust Memorial,” Telegraph, January 26, 2001, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1319494/Prince-leads-Holocaust-memo rial.html. 3 Kofi A. Annan. “The Myth of ‘Never Again,’” New York Times, June 17, 2010, www .nytimes.com/2010/06/18/opinion/18iht-edannan.html?searchResultPosition=1. 4 Stuart Foster et al., What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust: Evidence from English Secondary Schools (London: University College London Centre for Holocaust Education, 2015), 1, www.holocausteducation.org.uk/wp-content/uplo ads/What-do-students-know-and-understand-about-the-Holocaust2.pdf. 5 Ibid., 1. 6 Ibid., 85. 7 Ibid., 86. 8 Dan Rather, “A History Lesson,” HuffPost, September 9, 2011, updated December 6, 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-rather/a-history-lesson_b_955418.html. 9 Mariella Milano-Piperno, oral history conducted in Rome, Italy, June 6, 1985. 10 See Felicia Sonmez and John Wagner, “Trump Says Any Jewish People Who Vote for Democrats Are Showing ‘Great Disloyalty’ or ‘Lack of Knowledge,’” Washington Post, August 21, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-questions-sinceri ty-of-tlaibs-tears-as-she-talked-about-her-grandmother/2019/08/20/03d7b532c339-11e9-b72f-b31dfaa77212_story.html. 11 See Eli Stokols, “Trump Again Says Jewish Voters Who Support Democrats Are ‘Disloyal,’” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 2019, www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019 -08-21/trump-again-says-jewish-voters-who-support-democrats-are-disloyal. 12 See “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech,” Time, June 16, 2015, https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/. 13 Quoted in Campbell Robertson, Christopher Mele, and Sabrina Tavernise, “11 Killed in Synagogue Massacre; Suspect Charged with 29 Counts,” New York Times, October 27, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/us/active-shooter-pittsburgh -synagogue-shooting.html. 14 See Anthony Rivas, “Trump’s Language about Mexican Immigrants under Scrutiny in Wake of El Paso Shooting,” ABC News, August 4, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com /US/trumps-language-mexican-immigrants-scrutiny-wake-el-paso/story?id=647 68566. 15 Philip Rucker, “‘How Do You Stop These People?’: Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Looms over El Paso Massacre,” Washington Post, August 4, 2019, www.w ashingtonpost.com/politics/how-do-you-stop-these-people-trumps-anti-immigra

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18 19 20

nt-rhetoric-looms-over-el-paso-massacre/2019/08/04/62d0435a-b6ce-11e9-a0916a96e67d9cce_story.html; Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear, “El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language,” New York Times, August 4, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/us/politics/trump-mass-shootings.html. Quoted in Dominique Mosbergen, “At El Paso Vigil, O’Rourke Says Trump ‘Traffics in Hatred’ with His ‘Third Reich’ Rhetoric,” HuffPost, August 5, 2019, www.huf fpost.com/entry/beto-o-rouke-trump-el-paso-vigil_n _5d47b258e4b0ca604e3 44276. O’Rourke had drawn attention to this connection at least four months earlier, to conservative as well as liberal audiences. See Holly Bailey and John Wagner, “Beto O’Rourke Compares Trump’s Rhetoric on Immigration to that of Nazi Germany,” Washington Post, April 5, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/beto-orourkecompares-trumps-rhetoric-on-immigration-to-that-of-nazi-germany/2019/04/05/ 66ce763a-5796-11e9-9136-f8e636f1f6df_story.html. Office of Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security. Memo to the Honorable Kevin K. McAleenan, Acting Secretary Department of Homeland Security. Management Alert—DHS Needs to Address Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley, July 2, 2019, 2–3, 5, www.oig.dhs.gov /sites/default/files/assets/2019-07/OIG-19-51-Jul19_.pdf. Ibid., 8–9. See Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 263. Adam Serwer, “A Crime by Any Name,” The Atlantic, July 3, 2019, www.theatlantic .com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/.

Bibliography Annan, Kofi A. “The Myth of ‘Never Again.’” New York Times, June 17, 2010. www.nyt imes.com/2010/06/18/opinion/18iht-edannan.html?searchResultPosition=1. Bailey, Holly, and John Wagner. “Beto O’Rourke Compares Trump’s Rhetoric on Immigration to that of Nazi Germany.” Washington Post, April 5, 2019. www.was hingtonpost.com/politics/beto-orourke-compares-trumps-rhetoric-on-immigrati on-to-that-of-nazi-germany/2019/04/05/66ce763a-5796-11e9-9136-f8e636f1f6df_ story.html. Baker, Peter, and Michael D. Shear. “El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language.” New York Times, August 4, 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/08 /04/us/politics/trump-mass-shootings.html. Combe, Victoria. “Prince Leads Holocaust Memorial.” Telegraph, January 26, 2001. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1319494/Prince-leads-Holocaust-memorial. html. Dwork, Debórah, and Robert Jan van Pelt. Auschwitz. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Foster, Stuart, Alice Pettigrew, Andy Pearce, Rebecca Hale, Adrian Burgess, Paul Salmons, and Ruth-Anne Lenga. What Do Students Know and Understand About the Holocaust: Evidence from English Secondary Schools. London: University College London Centre for Holocaust Education, 2015. www.holocausteducation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/ What-do-students-know-and-understand-about-the-Holocaust2.pdf. Jewish Post and News. “Gore Urges: ‘Tell the Story’ in a Speech at DC Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony,” April 13, 1994. Mosbergen, Dominique. “Et Al. Paso Vigil, O’Rourke Says Trump ‘Traffics in Hatred’ with His ‘Third Reich’ Rhetoric.” HuffPost, August 5, 2019. www.huffpost.com/ entry/beto-o-rouke-trump-el-paso-vigil_n_5d47b258e4b0ca604e344276.

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Office of Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security. Management Alert – DHS Needs to Address Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley, July 2, 2019. www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2019-07/ OIG-19-51-Jul19_.pdf. Rather, Dan. “A History Lesson.” HuffPost, September 9, 2011, updated December 6, 2017. www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-rather/a-history-lesson_b_955418.html. Rivas, Anthony. “Trump’s Language About Mexican Immigrants Under Scrutiny in Wake of El Paso Shooting.” ABC News, August 4, 2019. https://abcnews.go.com/US /trumps-language-mexican-immigrants-scrutiny-wake-el-paso/story?id=64768566. Robertson, Campbell, Christopher Mele, and Sabrina Tavernise. “11 Killed in Synagogue Massacre; Suspect Charged with 29 Counts.” New York Times, October 27, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/us/active-shooter-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting .html. Rucker, Philip. “‘How Do You Stop These People?’: Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Looms Over El Paso Massacre.” Washington Post, August 4, 2019. www.washingt onpost.com/politics/how-do-you-stop-these-people-trumps-anti-immigrant-rhet oric-looms-over-el-paso-massacre/2019/08/04/62d0435a-b6ce-11e9-a091-6a96e67 d9cce_story.html. Serwer, Adam. “A Crime by Any Name.” The Atlantic, July 3, 2019. www.theatlantic.c om/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/. Sonmez, Felicia, and John Wagner. “Trump Says Any Jewish People Who Vote for Democrats Are Showing ‘Great Disloyalty’ or ‘Lack of Knowledge.’” Washington Post, August 21, 2019. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-questions-sincerity-of-t laibs-tears-as-she-talked-about-her-grandmother/2019/08/20/03d7b532-c339-11e9 -b72f-b31dfaa77212_story.html. Stokols, Eli. “Trump Again Says Jewish Voters Who Support Democrats Are ‘Disloyal.’” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 2019. www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-08-21/ trump-again-says-jewish-voters-who-support-democrats-are-disloyal. Time. “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech,” June 16, 2015. https ://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/.

6 THINKING BACK AND LOOKING FORWARD Holocaust education in a troubled world Alex Alvarez

I never planned on becoming a university professor, much less a scholar of genocide. But given my personal biography, those professional identities may not be all that surprising. I grew up in a military family and spent most of my childhood and teen years in Europe. We lived in France, Spain, and at various locations in what was then West Germany. My father was in the US Air Force. His wife, my mother, was German. Often, when he was stationed in remote locations without family housing, we would live with my mother’s family in the south of Germany, near the city of Augsburg. During those years, we traveled to sites of central importance to World War II and the Holocaust. Whether it was seeing Dachau for the first time, crossing over the Berlin Wall into East Berlin, or visiting Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest and staying at the General Walker Hotel and learning that it had been called the Platterhof and had hosted various Nazi dignitaries before becoming a military hospital at the end of the war, it was impossible to grow up in Germany at that time and not be exposed to the history of Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. In those years, many of the historical sites were largely unreconstructed, unsanitized, and somehow remained rawer and more visceral, with the scars of war sometimes still visible. Such experiences made a big impression on me. My awareness of the past was made all the more real—and personally problematic—by hearing stories from my German relatives about their experiences during the war as civilians and as soldiers. My grandfather had served in the German Air Force in France, Poland, and the Soviet Union, while my grandmother’s brothers had both been killed on the Eastern Front. While only my mother directly shared stories with me about growing up during the war years, I still learned a great deal by listening to other adults, such as my grandmother and grandfather, who would sometimes talk with each other about their experiences and memories from that era. Family photo albums also sometimes shed light on

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that period of history with pictures of family members and other relatives in military uniform. I remember being fascinated by these stories and images. The consciousness of German history that this family history evoked, including awareness of my own personal connection to that past, raised difficult questions that still puzzle me. It’s hard to reconcile your personal experience of loving German relatives and friendly villagers with knowledge of the crimes and complicity of ordinary Germans during the Nazi era. Even though the Holocaust was not taught as widely as it is nowadays, awareness of Nazi Germany’s crimes was not hard to come by. Interestingly, my German cousins knew much less about the Holocaust than I did as we grew up in an era before German schools included Holocaust education as part of their curriculum. Growing up, my aspirations and career goals were pretty far afield from what I now do and did not build at all on my early formative experiences growing up in Germany. But now, as an adult with a little more self-awareness, I have belatedly come to recognize the profoundly important role that my early experiences in Germany played in shaping and guiding my professional choices and scholarship.

Everything is connected My ambition as a young man entering college was to get a degree in outdoor education and work for an organization such as Outward Bound where I could lead climbing, backpacking, and canoeing trips. While an undergraduate student, I helped support myself with a variety of jobs doing precisely this kind of work, but soon realized that I didn’t want to make a career out of these activities. Not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I did what so many young people do when they need more time to find their path forward: I decided to go to graduate school. I ended up in the sociology department at the University of New Hampshire where I studied lethal violence, specifically variances in homicide rates across communities, states, and regions. Trained as a sociologist and criminologist, my subsequent scholarship involved statistical analysis of various forms of interpersonal violence such as murder, justifiable homicide, and school violence. Eventually, however, that exclusive focus changed as my personal biography and my professional training converged. The extensive criminological literature developed to explain violent criminality, I saw, could help explain genocidal violence. In other words, I realized that the scholarship concerning the ways in which individuals come to engage in violence, how they justify their actions, and how they view their victims could help make sense of genocidal participation. My first article connecting criminological theory to genocide turned into a book, then another, and so on. Without advance planning, I had become a scholar of genocide. A big part of what motivates me to continue this work is my conviction that we need scholars and educators to help make sense of this destructive form of collective behavior and to teach others about the causes and dynamics of mass violence,

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persecution, and extermination. Identifying and understanding the factors that facilitate the victimization of others are critical to building a less violent world. Furthermore, the older I get, the more I believe everything is connected. The violence of genocide, whether the Holocaust or any other example, sits at the extreme end of a broad spectrum of collective and interpersonal violence. Various forms and expressions of violence along that continuum share important qualities and dimensions in terms of how that violence is enabled. Riots, pogroms, wars, mass murders, and many other forms of violence are all linked, directly or indirectly. Hence, the study of the Holocaust and genocide has profound implications beyond the particularities of those disasters. Teaching about these forms of violence, in other words, helps provide important lessons and insights about violence, both individual and collective, more generally. Moreover, while it is widely understood that genocide has been the single most destructive form of collective organized violence in human history, I fear that we are poised to enter an era in which its perpetration may become even more pronounced.

Climate threats For several years, a major emphasis of mine has been on tracing the implications of climate change for humanity. I believe that climate change will increasingly foster conf lict in communities and societies around the world. While most of the attention on climate change has concentrated on understanding the consequences of a warming world for plants, animals, and ecosystems, my concern has been on trying to understand the ways in which a warming world will impact human communities. I contend that the stresses and strains of reacting and adapting to climate change in the coming years and decades will dramatically heighten tensions and competitions between and within populations, communities, and nations and consequently increase the likelihood of war and genocide.1 This is not simply idle theorizing on my part, since a close reading of a number of historic and contemporary examples of war and genocide reveals underlying climate-related sources of that conf lict. The genocide in Darfur, for example, was as much a consequence of water scarcity and desertification, as it was about the political, economic, and religious tensions within the Sudanese society.2 As economic, political, and social pressures mount, states and societies may struggle to cope with and adapt to a wide range of problems posed by a changing climate. These challenges may involve lost or diminishing resources and the heightened competition such a situation tends to generate can trigger preemptive wars to protect territorial integrity, hold onto resources, or acquire new ones.3 We also know that climate change is expected to dramatically increase the number of displaced persons.4 Seeking refuge from environmental degradation, poverty, and conf lict, refugees and migrants may face scapegoating and persecution because of prejudices and perceptions that they pose an economic and/or a social threat. In such situations, preexisting tensions between religious, ethnic, racial, or political groups can intensify and radicalize as the stakes become ever higher.

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Any or all of these conditions could facilitate violent conf lict, especially when they lead to state failure. When a state weakens and fails, that nation typically experiences more criminal and political violence since the government can no longer assert its authority over its own territory, meet the needs of its citizens, or effectively govern.5 Failed states are not peaceful places. Most of them are extremely dangerous because of violent crime, ethnic conf lict, terrorism, and civil war. Such settings are breeding grounds for human rights violations, mass atrocities, and genocide. Now, more than ever, we need to advance our understanding of how these different forms of violence come about and how they can more effectively be prevented.

Nationalism and authoritarianism We also need to understand that these stresses are occurring in a world in which nationalism and authoritarianism have made significant gains in the last decade while democracy has been on the retreat, a deeply concerning trend. Genocide scholars have long identified authoritarian states as being particularly at risk for the development of genocidal ideologies and practices.6 Genocide does not happen in a vacuum. Instead, we must acknowledge that the perpetration of such atrocity occurs within particular political, social, economic, religious, ideological, and historical contexts. Consequently, the current increase in populist and dictatorial societies has strong implications for those of us who study and teach about the Holocaust and genocide. In Poland, for example, the conservative Law and Justice Party (PIS) has pursued a strongly nationalistic political agenda that includes centralizing power, constraining the ability of the judiciary and the legislature to operate independently, expanding its surveillance of the citizenry, and undermining critical media outlets. These are classic strategies employed by authoritarian states.7 Importantly, for our purposes in this book, the Polish regime also passed legislation criminalizing assertions that the Polish people were “responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.”8 In other words, anyone who suggested that Poles collaborated or contributed to the Holocaust could potentially have been fined or incarcerated for that assertion. The heaviest penalties were reserved for those who referred to the Nazi concentration camps as “Polish death camps” and the only exceptions were for scholarly and artistic work. Due to international pressure and condemnation, the Polish government eliminated criminal penalties for those who broke this law, but the legislation itself remains a potent warning of how Holocaust education can itself be threatened.9 For educators, such legislation is highly problematic given the centrality of Poland for much of the history of the Holocaust. Consider Auschwitz, for example, a popular destination for school trips and private excursions for those learning about the Holocaust and which saw over two million visitors in 2018 alone.10 What does such legislation mean for educators in Poland and abroad?

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The Polish legislation is the result of a strain of nationalism that seeks to create a unifying, heroic, and largely mythical national narrative, discrediting and dismissing those who highlight the complicity of Poles in the Holocaust, or of Poles who perpetrated their own crimes against Jewish neighbors such as documented by the historians Jan Grabowski and Jan Gross.11 Even though historians have long outlined the pervasive antisemitism in Poland at that time, and the willingness of many non-Jewish citizens to aid the Nazis or exploit the persecution of the Jews for their own personal gain, the current government in Poland is seeking to erase that past and replace it with a narrative that extols Polish resistance and suffering in the face of Nazi oppression. For Holocaust educators interested in historical accuracy and illustrating the ways in which genocidal crimes depend on the complicity of a wide range of citizens and others who share the prejudices and intolerance of genocidal leaders, such distortions directly challenge the ability of scholars and teachers to inform and educate future generations. Think also about the ways in which historic perceptions of victimization and trauma have often been used to justify contemporary repression and persecution. Unfortunately, Poland is not unique in its retreat from Western liberal democracy and its embrace of a renascent nationalism. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has also moved away from democratic governance and become more authoritarian and nationalistic. In power since 2003, Erdoğan has become ever more autocratic, especially in the wake of a coup attempt in 2016, after which he declared a state of emergency and purged the military, public officials, teachers, and the judiciary and arrested more than fifty thousand individuals including educators, judges, and journalists, among many others.12 In a country that continues to deny the Armenian genocide, this drift into authoritarianism does not bode well for those seeking to advance Holocaust and genocide education in Turkey.13 Similar kinds of processes with local variations have occurred in Hungary, Egypt, South Sudan, Brazil, and the Philippines, while citizens in many other nations have been f lirting with far-right political parties. Consider Austria, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy where radical nativist political groups have made significant electoral gains in recent years, often on explicitly antiimmigrant platforms.14 In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland party has become a powerful force in that country’s government,15 while in Italy, two populist political parties (the Five Star Movement and the Northern League) have made significant electoral gains on platforms advocating the mass deportation of immigrants. Everywhere one looks, as the third decade of the twenty-first century begins, democracy appears to be on the retreat. Initiatives to advance support for learning and teaching about the Holocaust and genocide cannot have the success they deserve unless these realities are confronted. A recent Freedom in the World report from the nonpartisan Freedom House paints a depressing picture. According to Michael J. Abramowitz, president of Freedom House,

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Political rights and civil liberties around the world deteriorated to their lowest point in more than a decade in 2017, extending a period characterized by emboldened autocrats, beleaguered democracies, and the United States’ withdrawal from its leadership role in the global struggle for human freedom.16 The political scientist Yascha Mounk put it even more succinctly: “It has been a good decade for dictatorship,” he wrote. “Conversely, it has been a terrible decade for democracy.”17 There is much in the Freedom House report to be concerned about, but most relevant for the purposes of this book is the observation that Perhaps worst of all, and most worrisome for the future, young people, who have little memory of the long struggles against fascism and communism, may be losing faith and interest in the democratic project. The very idea of democracy and its promotion has been tarnished among many, contributing to a dangerous apathy.18 Such concern was echoed by Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, who, in an op-ed published on August 31, 2019, the eve of the eightieth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, which began World War II, suggested that “extremist far-right movements and political parties are winning power and inf luence at alarming speed—fueled by Donald Trump, the global poster-boy for white nationalism. … An entire generation of brave men and women around the globe sacrificed everything to defeat the singular evil of Nazism and fascism,” but, he continued, “for the first time in more than 70 years, it seems the lessons of the Second World War are genuinely at risk of being forgotten or, worse still, being rewritten.”19 It wasn’t supposed to be this way. With the end of the Cold War in late 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, many believed that a new, more democratic era had begun. Indeed, there was cause for great optimism with a proliferation of countries instituting more democratic systems of governance. In fact, so pervasive was this trend that the inf luential historian Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man in which he argued that humanity had reached the end of its ideological and political evolution and that liberal democracy represented the apotheosis of forms of government.20 As events stand presently, however, the results haven’t quite worked out that way. Apathy and political disillusionment with democratic forms of governance have been fueled by economic stagnation and recession, as well as by increases in economic and social inequality, while political partisanship has often hindered the ability of states to effectively address these challenges. At the same time, endemic poverty, environmental degradation, criminal violence, terrorism, civil war, and genocide have resulted in large numbers of displaced populations, f leeing their homes and seeking refuge in other nations. Yet all too often, their arrival has sparked a surge in nationalism and nativist anger

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targeted against the “other” and fostered the rise of authoritarian leaders who have capitalized on the fears and anger of their citizens. These are the forces that Holocaust and genocide education must confront and the context within which educators must teach.

More than ever As I hope I have illustrated in this chapter, scholarship and teaching about the Holocaust and other genocides matter tremendously for our future. The threats posed by climate change and the rise of authoritarianism make identifying and understanding the mechanisms and processes of extreme violence more critical now than ever before. I believe that education is one important component for ameliorating, if not averting, genocidal catastrophes. While not a panacea for the world’s ills, education nevertheless represents a powerful tool for confronting the attitudes and perceptions that make genocidal violence possible. When I first began doing work on genocide in the 1990s, very few people beyond a small number of scholars seemed to have much awareness of the word, let alone its connotations and implications. That is no longer the case. Even though it is gratifying to see the proliferation of scholarship, teaching, and popular awareness about genocide, that sense of satisfaction is increasingly tinged with concern as I wonder about the effectiveness of such efforts. Every year, the Anti-Defamation League conducts an Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents. In 2017, that study documented a 57 percent increase of such incidents in the United States, the largest single-year increase on record.21 While that statistic alone is alarming, even more concerning is that much of this dramatic rise was due to a large upsurge in antisemitic behavior in schools and college campuses despite the fact that Holocaust education has been a curricular staple in many schools across the country for more than twenty years. Unfortunately, this large uptick in antisemitism has been mirrored in Europe, even though Holocaust education is present in almost every European country.22 Why does antisemitism continue to thrive and grow in an age of Holocaust education? Is it simply a case of “the situation would be worse if we weren’t teaching about the Holocaust,” or are we simply not achieving our goals? If the purpose of Holocaust education is to inoculate a population against hatred and intolerance, we clearly need to be doing a much better job. Over the years, I have given many Holocaust and genocide presentations and workshops to teachers— both university and K–12—and my work with these educators suggests a number of possible strategies for Holocaust education moving forward. First, educators must strive to make the lessons of the past much more relevant for today’s students and world. For many young people today, the Holocaust increasingly seems to belong to a distant and long-ago era that isn’t relevant to their present-day issues and concerns. Educators must emphasize and stress that the lessons of the past inform our understanding of the present and are critical for helping us make sense of the forces shaping our world today. Of necessity,

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such a pedagogical approach must involve a more comparative focus in order not to give the impression that the Holocaust was an isolated event and to assist in uncovering common patterns that transcend a particular time and place. This is how we build relevancy in Holocaust education. As part of this educational process, the insights derived and the lessons and implications of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide must be made unambiguous and clear, rather than remaining implicit. How else do we expect students to appreciate the significance and applicability of the Holocaust to their own lives in which climate change, immigration, and authoritarianism have emerged as some of the most pressing issues of the day? Relatively few scholars and educators make these connections explicit, especially concerning climate change. One notable exception is the historian Timothy Snyder, who, in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, devotes an entire concluding chapter to connecting the lessons of the Holocaust to current climate change issues. Specifically, he highlights the ways in which Nazi ideologies and policies were shaped by the pressures of that time and place and how climate change can foster the development of similar destructive attitudes and practices. In fact, Snyder goes so far as to suggest that “understanding the Holocaust is our chance, perhaps our last one, to preserve humanity.”23 In a similar vein, the philosopher and co-editor of this volume, John K. Roth, has suggested that the devaluing of human life and of the environment go hand in hand.24 In other words, when human life is not respected and protected, neither is the natural world. Moreover, he points out not only that climate change can facilitate genocide but also that the destruction of human life is often accompanied by the destruction of the environment. In my opinion, the work of Snyder and Roth on these issues represents exactly the kind of approach we must foster and encourage in Holocaust and genocide education. Second, educators must have a stronger grounding in the knowledge base of their subject matter. Far too many who teach about the Holocaust and genocide lack an understanding of key aspects or awareness of good pedagogy. Consider, for example, that one of the Holocaust-related videos most commonly shown in American public schools is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a movie that is highly problematic fiction.25 Of course, teachers and professors face immense challenges in teaching about the Holocaust, an incredibly complicated, sometimes contradictory, and ever varied set of processes and policies that scholars spend their entire careers trying to fathom. Furthermore, our understanding of the Holocaust continues to evolve and change. Teaching about the Holocaust is not something one can do quickly and easily; yet it appears that is exactly what we often expect. Third, Holocaust education programs must reinforce the need to avoid simplistic narratives about the nature and origins of the Holocaust. Often done with the best of intentions to provide students with uplifting messages of hope and empowerment, I doubt whether such teaching will help students confront real world situations that are not clear-cut or simplistic. Furthermore, teaching about demonic perpetrators, passive victims, and willfully ignorant bystanders neither accurately

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ref lects Holocaust history nor informs students adequately. If all perpetrators were simply evil or monsters, for example, then we don’t have to critically examine or recognize the patterns or processes by which “normal” individuals can participate in the persecution of others. Teaching that oversimplifies also produces facile “lessons” of the Holocaust that will not be very helpful in difficult, complex circumstances. Even worse, poorly done Holocaust education can produce a dangerous kind of false consciousness such as when teachers and students are appalled that the United States refused entry to Jewish refugees aboard the German liner St. Louis in 1939, yet fail to see the disconnect in their own support for policies denying asylum to refugees seeking a safe haven in the 2020s. Similarly, Holocaust education often elicits condemnation of the scapegoating of Jews during the Nazi era, but does that sensibility extend to condemnation of the scapegoating of Muslim Americans or Mexican Americans in the present day? There are teachers and students who do not shy away from making such connections, but others, seeking not to offend by being “too political,” avoid making legitimate and instructive linkages between the past and the present. Admittedly, such comparisons need to be done carefully to avoid invalid or trivializing comparisons, but absent such appraisals, Holocaust education risks becoming irrelevant. As Holocaust educators, we must embrace complexity but not be paralyzed by it. Only then can we grasp the intricate and sometimes contradictory ways in which mass atrocity crimes are committed by ordinary people. People never act solely out of one motivation, nor do they ever inhabit only one role or status, yet this is often how we approach teaching about genocide. It is not helpful, for example, to contend that genocide entails three separate and distinct categories—victims, bystanders, and perpetrators—because that classification ignores the reality that individuals can and sometimes do move between roles or embody multiple roles simultaneously. Recent research on the Holocaust in Poland, for example, reveals individuals who were simultaneously rescuers and perpetrators, such as guards and policemen who sheltered and rescued Jews while participating in hunting and shooting operations that destroyed Jewish lives.26 Scholarship on other genocides, such as Rwanda, reveals similar patterns in which perpetrators sometimes rescue, and members of targeted population sometimes join perpetrator organizations.27 Such examples tremendously complicate traditional narratives that delineate people into completely separate categories that are somehow supposed to encompass and explain everything about those individuals, their choices and behavior. But, difficult though it may be, striving to understand and communicate the varied impulses, motives, and changing roles any one person can inhabit is critical if we are to develop more nuanced and truer lessons from the Holocaust and other genocides. Largely shaped by my personal biography, my journey as a scholar and teacher of the Holocaust and genocide continues. Frustrating and discouraging though the work can be, I keep studying, writing, and teaching about these matters, because I find it incredibly meaningful and important to do so and because I believe that such work can help make this world a slightly better place. Furthermore, I

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believe that, for all of its faults and shortcomings, Holocaust and genocide education is important because it helps to give voice to all those who suffered persecution and death and also because it contributes to raising awareness about the dangers of fascism, intolerance, prejudice, xenophobia, nationalism, and all of the other forces and factors that help create genocidal violence. These dangers are still very much with us and need to be continuously confronted and challenged if we are to have any hope of creating a safer and saner world.

Notes 1 Alex Alvarez, Unstable Ground: Climate Change, Conflict, and Genocide (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 2 Ibid., 108–14. 3 Thomas M. Nichols, Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 4 Oli Brown, Migration and Climate Change (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2008). 5 Patrick Stewart, Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 6 See, for example, Alex Alvarez, Genocidal Crimes (London: Routledge, 2010), 41–42; R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996); Michael P. Jasinski, Examining Genocides: Means, Motive, and Opportunity (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017). 7 Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown Books, 2018), 72–96. 8 Editorial Board, “Poland’s Holocaust Blame Bill,” New York Times, January 29, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/poland-holocaust-bill-parliament.html. 9 Marc Santora, “Poland’s Holocaust Law Weakened After ‘Storm and Consternation,’” New York Times, June 27, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/world/europe/polan d-holocaust-law.html. 10 Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, “2 Million 152 Thousand Visitors at the Memorial in 2018,” April 1, 2019, http://auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/2-mi llion-152-thousand-visitors-at-the-memorial-in-2018,1341.html. 11 Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 12 Yascha Mounk, “The Dictators’ Last Stand: Why the New Autocrats Are Weaker than They Look,” Foreign Affairs 98 (September/October 2019): 138–48; Kaya Genc, “Erdogan’s Way: The Rise and Rule of Turkey’s Islamist Shapeshifter,” Foreign Affairs 98 (September/October 2019): 26–34. 13 Pınar Dost-Niyego and İlker Aytürk, “Holocaust Education in Turkey: Past, Present, and Future,” Contemporary Review of the Middle East 3 (2016): 250–65. 14 Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (London: Verso Books, 2019). 15 Rick Noack, “Germany’s Far Right Is Set to Challenge Angela Merkel’s Grip in Upcoming Elections,” Washington Post, August 30, 2019, www.washingtonpost.co m/world/2019/08/30/germanys-far-right-is-set-challenge-angela-merkels-gripupcoming-elections/. 16 Michael J. Abramovitz et al. Freedom in the World 2018: Democracy in Crisis (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2018), 1, www.freedomhouse.org/report/ freedom-world/2018/democracy-crisis. 17 Mounk, “Dictators’ Last Stand,” 138.

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18 Abramovitz, Freedom in the World 2018, 1. 19 Sadiq Khan, “Lessons of the Second World War Are at Risk of Being Forgotten, or Even Rewritten,” The Guardian, August 31, 2019, www.theguardian.com/world /2019/aug/31/second-world-war-lessons-risk-being-forgotten-sadiq-khan. See also Mary Papenfuss, “London Mayor Calls Trump ‘Global Poster Boy for White Nationalism,’” HuffPost, September 1, 2019, www.huffpost.com/entry/sadiq-khan -london-donald-trump-poster-boy-white-white-nationalism-wwii-holocaust_n _5d6ae389e4b09bbc9ef00d7d. 20 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 2006). 21 Anti-Defamation League, “2017 Audit of Anti-Semitic Events,” www.adl.org/res ources/reports/2017-audit-of-anti-semitic-incidents. 22 Eva Cossé, “The Alarming Rise of Anti-Semitism in Europe: European Governments and Public Should Stand Up against Hate,” Human Rights Watch, June 4, 2019, www.h rw.org/news/2019/06/04/alarming-rise-anti-semitism-europe. See also Peter Carrier, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Torben Messinger, The International Status of Education about the Holocaust: A Global Mapping of Textbooks and Curricula (Paris: UNESCO, 2015). 23 Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 342. 24 John K. Roth, The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 164–70. See also John K. Roth, “The World around Us: What Have We Learned from the Holocaust?” in Holocaust and Nature, ed. Didier Pollefeyt (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2013), 13–35. 25 Matthew Rozell, “Why I Loathe ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,’” Teaching History Matters, November 7, 2016, https://teachinghistorymatters.com/2016/11/07/why-i -loathe-the-boy-in-the-striped-pajamas/. See also Jennifer Rich and Mark Pearcy, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: Critical Analysis of a Film Depiction of the Holocaust,” The Social Studies 109, no. 4 ( January 2019): 1–15. 26 Tomasz Frydel, “The Devil in Microhistory: The ‘Hunt for Jews’ as a Social Process, 1942-1945,” in Microhistories of the Holocaust, ed. Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 171–89. 27 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 221–25; Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 139–47.

Bibliography Abramovitz, Michael J., Elen Aghekyan, Rukmani Bhatia, Jennifer Dunham, Shannon O’Toole, Arch Puddington, Sarah Repucci, Tyler Roylance, and Vanessa Tucker. Freedom in the World 2018: Democracy in Crisis. Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2018. www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/democracy-crisis. Alvarez, Alex. Genocidal Crimes. London: Routledge, 2010. ———. Unstable Ground: Climate Change, Conflict, and Genocide. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Anti-Defamation League. “2017 Audit of Anti-Semitic Events.” www.adl.org/resou rces/reports/2017-audit-of-anti-semitic-incidents. Brown, Oli. Migration and Climate Change. Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2008. Carrier, Peter, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Torben Messinger. The International Status of Education About the Holocaust: A Global Mapping of Textbooks and Curricula. Paris: UNESCO, 2015.

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Cossé, Eva. “The Alarming Rise of Anti-Semitism in Europe: European Governments and Public Should Stand Up Against Hate.” Human Rights Watch, June 4, 2019. www .hrw.org/news/2019/06/04/alarming-rise-anti-semitism-europe. Dost-Niyego, Pınar, and İlker Aytürk. “Holocaust Education in Turkey: Past, Present, and Future.” Contemporary Review of the Middle East 3 (2016): 250–65. Editorial Board. “Poland’s Holocaust Blame Bill.” New York Times, January 29, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/poland-holocaust-bill-parliament.html. Frydel, Tomasz. “The Devil in Microhistory: The ‘Hunt for Jews’ as a Social Process, 1942–1945.” In Microhistories of the Holocaust, 171–89. Edited by Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Fujii, Lee Ann. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 2006. Genc, Kaya. “Erdogan’s Way: The Rise and Rule of Turkey’s Islamist Shapeshifter.” Foreign Affairs 98 (September/October 2019): 26–34. Grabowski, Jan. Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Gross, Jan T. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Jasinski, Michael P. Examining Genocides: Means, Motive, and Opportunity. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. Khan, Sadiq. “Lessons of the Second World War Are at Risk of Being Forgotten, or Even Rewritten.” The Guardian, August 31, 2019. www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug /31/second-world-war-lessons-risk-being-forgotten-sadiq-khan. Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Books, 2018. Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. “2 Million 152 Thousand Visitors at the Memorial in 2018.” April 1, 2019. http://auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/2-million -152-thousand-visitors-at-the-memorial-in-2018,1341.html. Mounk, Yascha. “The Dictators’ Last Stand: Why the New Autocrats Are Weaker Than They Look.” Foreign Affairs 98 (September/October 2019): 138–48. Nichols, Thomas M. Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Noack, Rick. “Germany’s Far Right Is Set to Challenge Angela Merkel’s Grip in Upcoming Elections.” Washington Post, August 30, 2019. www.washingtonpost. com/world/2019/08/30/germanys-far-right-is-set-challenge-angela-merkels-gripupcoming-elections/. Papenfuss, Mary. “London Mayor Calls Trump ‘Global Poster Boy For White Nationalism.’” Huffpost, September 1, 2019. www.huffpost.com/entry/sadiq-khan -london-donald-trump-poster-boy-white-white-nationalism-wwii-holocaust_n_5 d6ae389e4b09bbc9ef00d7d. Rich, Jennifer, and Mark Pearcy. “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: Critical Analysis of a Film Depiction of the Holocaust.” The Social Studies 109, no. 4 ( January 2019): 1–15. Roth, John K. The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ———. “The World around Us: What Have We Learned from the Holocaust?” In Holocaust and Nature, 13–35. Edited by Didier Pollefeyt. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2013.

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Rozell, Matthew. “Why I Loathe ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.’” Teaching History Matters, November 7, 2016. https://teachinghistorymatters.com/2016/11/07/why-i -loathe-the-boy-in-the-striped-pajamas/. Rummel, R. J. Death by Government. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996. Santora, Marc. “Poland’s Holocaust Law Weakened After ‘Storm and Consternation.’” New York Times, June 27, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/world/europe/po land-holocaust-law.html. Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015. Stewart, Patrick. Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Traverso, Enzo. The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right. London: Verso, 2019.

7 CULTURE MATTERS Warnings and implications from the Holocaust Jonathan Petropoulos

I can date the emergence of my interest in National Socialism and the Holocaust fairly precisely: a kind of epiphany occurred at a concert by the rock band The Who, which took place in Nuremberg in 1979. An eighteen-year-old touring Europe for the first time, I had seen advertisements in Vienna for the concert and had made my way to the Franconian city to see the first performance the band played after the death of drummer Keith Moon. The Who came on after dark, and as they sang a refrain about how they prayed they “don’t be fooled again,” I realized where I was standing: as the light show played out, I recognized that the stadium was actually Albert Speer’s Zeppelin Tribune and that I was at the site of the Nazi Party rallies. I momentarily stopped focusing on the concert and began to think about the space I was occupying, as well as the behavior of the tens of thousands of others in the audience: the similarity between a rock concert and the Nuremberg rallies was not lost on me. That evening affected me profoundly. It felt like a coming of age, as I was finally mature enough to place myself in a more tangible historical setting and ref lect on the ways that performers, including politicians, manipulated audiences. I spent the rest of my trip in Germany looking for National Socialist buildings and came to believe that they possessed a kind of aura that made them distinctive. Other kinds of Nazi culture—including officially sanctioned painting and sculpture—also seemed to have something ineffably strange and disturbing about them. They drew me in and eventually compelled me to devote my career to the study of culture during the Third Reich.

My upbringing My upbringing played a key role in determining my current profession. My father was born in Athens in 1930 and experienced the German occupation as

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a youth. I was raised with stories about those times, including the privation (a month with scarcely more than black-eyed peas for food—my grandmother was a magician in the kitchen), the Jewish friends lost (my grandfather had a shop in the center of Athens with many Jewish associates and neighbors), and the liberation in 1944.1 My father even claimed to have a piece of a German f lag that f lew on the Acropolis, just above the family home. Years later, after I had become an academic, he told me a story of how his parents hid Jewish friends for a week, prior to their escape by boat to Egypt. I confirmed the story with my aunt in a separate interview: considering the “happy ending” (the family survived and returned to Greece after the war to claim their property, before emigrating to Palestine), I was surprised not to have heard the story earlier. Although my father was not fully forthcoming about his wartime experiences when I was growing up, the fact remained that for my family, World War II was the central event of the twentieth century. My father’s life inf luenced me in another way too. After arriving in the United States via Paris in 1950, he matriculated at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in engineering and became involved with a German-Jewish émigré, who was also a student. A child and marriage ensued, and for financial reasons, the young family moved in with her relations in the San Fernando Valley. The family included my father’s in-laws, a grandmother, and a great aunt. Culturally bourgeois, they nevertheless had become egg farmers, and they continued to speak German at home, and there were a lot of people living in a small house in the Valley. The marriage did not last, and my father moved on to marry my mother (they are still married sixty years later). However, as a result of my father’s first marriage I have a half-sister who not only speaks German but also identifies as a Jew. I grew up knowing her mother and being conscious of that family’s history—they had f led from Breslau in the mid-1930s. I grew up in Pacific Palisades, a town that attracted many German-Jewish émigrés in the 1930s. Thomas Mann had a house there (now a German cultural institute), and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora sits less than a mile from my family home. I grew up with the children of émigrés. I recall bar mitzvahs with Torah scrolls that were centuries old. We were told that they had been recovered from Central Europe at war’s end and distributed around the world by a Jewish organization. There were also Holocaust survivors in my parents’ circle of friends, although they did not talk about their experiences, at least in my hearing, when I was growing up. One close friend of my father’s, with whom he had coffee several times a week, had been in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz and became the last surviving member of the notorious squad.2 In removing corpses from the gas chambers to take them to the crematoria, Dario Gabbai and his cousins had been at ground zero of the Holocaust. They had seen things that few others lived to talk about. While Gabbai did not discuss Auschwitz when I was younger, that changed by the 1980s, and he often came to talk to my students. This was always a painful, emotional experience for him, and he cried a great deal as he related his story. But living day-to-day, he seemed to find ways to deal with his past, and this included

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using the number tattooed on his arm to play the lottery: it was a way for him to display his ironic sense of humor as he struggled with his demons. In short, I grew up with people who had experienced the Holocaust, and they helped me appreciate its importance. But this occurred in a subtle way. More formally, in my education, I made the switch from French cultural and intellectual history to German history at the end of my first semester of graduate school, so I cannot say that I had always planned to study the Holocaust. I decided to study Nazi art looting after writing a seminar paper for Professor Charles Maier at Harvard University. He had told us students that we would soon focus on our dissertations and that for the research paper topic we were to focus on another country. I could not fulfill this assignment by concentrating on France. I had taken a year and a half of German and could read the documents, so I decided to work on something German. I had long been interested in art (and taken many courses in college), so I combined those two interests and wrote a paper on the art collections of the Nazi elite. Maier liked the paper and scribbled among the comments that I could write a dissertation on this topic. He noted there was no scholarly work about it. While this would factor into my decision, I was more drawn to the philosophical issues that connected to the topic: in particular, the nexus between culture and barbarism. I ref lected then on the paradox that the most malevolent men in history dedicated such an extraordinary amount of time to art and cultural pursuits. Clearly, the notion that culture helps make for more ethical and compassionate human beings is naive (at best). Culture, I began to realize, was often used for more nefarious purposes. I made an appointment to see Maier and indicated that I would like to pursue his suggestion. He responded that he normally counseled students to work on political or economic history—“bread and butter history,” he said; he was concerned that “cultural history was dessert.” But after we talked further about the idea, he agreed. When I met him about a decade after I finished my dissertation on the Nazi leaders’ obsession with art, I took great satisfaction when he acknowledged that Nazi art looting was indeed an important and worthwhile topic.

What do I want to accomplish? As I completed my first major project, the dissertation-book on the Nazi leaders’ interest in art (both making policy and collecting it), I realized that they could not have amassed the huge collections of pictures and sculptures without the assistance of art experts: dealers, museum officials, and art historians who aided them in the search for, and acquisition of, important works. This recognition of the crucial role played by art experts induced me to move on to the history of the second-rank figures involved in the Nazi state (including the plundering bureaucracy). While the first generation of scholars after 1945 focused on the top Nazi leaders, current researchers have concentrated more on the second rank.3 The opening of archives, the lapsing of time with data-protection laws (thirty years after death is the rule in Germany in its most simplified form), and even just

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the passage of time help make it possible to study those figures who had largely evaded justice (as Mary Fulbrook’s recent study Reckonings shows) and who also escaped historical scrutiny.4 This effort to hold Nazi perpetrators accountable is one thing that connects the art plunderers and princes, who have served as the main subjects of my work. Most of the plunderers and princes—some of the latter helped Nazi leaders acquire art in dubious ways—experienced lenient justice and resumed their lives and careers in the postwar period. Holding them accountable is necessary and ethical. While writing about the second rank and seeking to identify their roles in the Nazis’ criminal programs, I am mindful of advice offered by Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans: current historians do not live in those times, and making moral judgments from our contemporary vantage point can prove problematic.5 It is our job to capture what transpired, and also to provide analysis, but a sense of humility is helpful when evaluating the ethical comportment of historic subjects. Moral relativism remains a pitfall, and it is important for the historian not to let the aforementioned humility lead down this path. Clearly, certain actions cross ethical boundaries regardless of the epoch, and this includes not only murder, but also a host of other offenses (including theft). There is a “sweet spot” between humility and moral judgment, although this may not be static: in part, because it depends on the underlying facts and the quality of evidence (an air-tight case for murder allows for a different basis for judgment than an instance where there is only the probability of culpability). Such considerations only affirm the importance of developing as strong an empirical foundation as possible. We can never fully get into the heads of our subjects and experience what they experienced at a specific moment in time. Some perpetrators behaved in ways in which they experienced shame or were puzzled by their own actions. Even the worst of the Einsatzgruppen, mass murderers who were convicted in an air-tight case (Nuremberg Military Tribunal Case 9), developed various coping mechanisms, diversions, and rationalizations for their deeds.6 They were human. If history serves as a lesson and a warning, then we must draw reasonable conclusions and learn from the individual actions on display, since they caused such misery and destruction. In genocide studies, the study of the crime of all crimes, we can hardly avoid describing our subjects in morally laden categories such as greedy, murderous, criminal, and even evil. As Richard Evans observed, The Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. … It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives, of conformity or resistance, action or inaction in the particular situations with which we are confronted. That is why the Third Reich will not go away.7 In addition to focusing on important second-rank figures in Nazi Germany, my work has emphasized the importance of greed in understanding the descent into barbarism. The expropriation programs almost always involved graft. In

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particular, plundering art showed the perpetrators that they could profit from the persecution of Jews—and the plunders did, as I have found in my current study of Dr. Bruno Lohse, who worked as Hermann Göring’s art agent in Paris during the war.8 With Jewish property targeted, the Nazis established a kleptocracy, and greed permeated its ranks, from top to bottom. Götz Aly has argued for the importance of spoliated property in sustaining the Reich, and Frank Bajohr has provided jaw-dropping statistics about “Aryanization” in Hamburg (there was an auction of Jewish property almost every day from 1942 to 1944).9 The current generation of scholars has advanced our understanding of the role of greed and plunder in Nazi-dominated Europe.10 My scholarship also has had practical applications. I have helped Holocaust victims and heirs recover artworks that were taken from them and then never restituted properly after 1945. I have been engaged as an expert witness in about twenty cases, starting with Austria v. Altmann, which involved six paintings by Gustav Klimt taken from the Bloch-Bauer family. Two of the pictures were portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a striking and progressive Viennese Jewish patron of the arts. Her husband, Ferdinand, who outlived her, had to f lee the German Reich after the Anschluss, and he never saw the pictures again before his death in 1945. More than sixty years later, in 2006, five of the stolen paintings were restituted to the heirs in what is now a well-known story told in books and films.11 My report included biographies of the paintings—from the time they were commissioned to their current disposition—and showed how the BlochBauers were persecuted and then unjustly deprived of their art. This experience (it helped that it turned out well for the heirs) led to other work as an expert witness. While every case is different, there is a common thread: I help families recover their property. Identifying and returning Nazi-looted art is part of what Stuart Eizenstat rightly calls the “unfinished business of World War II.”12 I hope to continue this work, and also realize the educational opportunities that come with these often-dramatic tales about recovering Nazi-looted art. My work now also extends to documentary films, which contributes to my overarching goals of teaching students and educating a broader public. The story of a single artwork sometimes can tell profound tales—about the best and worst in human behavior—and utilizing modern media seems increasingly important in terms of reaching key audiences. While I am not advocating history in the form of video games, I think we can regard images, film, and sound as tools in our historians’ kit. Non-written media can often move people on an emotional or visceral level, and this, when combined with cognitive understanding, can lead to a transformative learning experience—one where the study of the Holocaust has informed a person’s life.

What is the study of the Holocaust for? Restitution of property looted by the Nazis is important in my work, but I do not study the Holocaust primary for that purpose. I recall comments made by Elie Wiesel at the opening of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets

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at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum back in 1998. Wiesel said, “We come here to speak about conscience, morality and memory. Usually antiSemites say about us Jews that we speak about lofty things, but we mean money. Just the opposite. Here, we speak about money but think of other things.”13 The study of Nazi art looting is not just about the objects: it’s about the stories they tell. I am not alone in maintaining that Nazi art looting and the Holocaust are inextricably interlinked. Taking the property, especially the cultural property of a people, contributes to a dehumanization and distancing of the victim. Cultural property also extended to archives, and even during the war, individuals like Emanuel Ringelblum realized that safeguarding the records of the aff licted population constituted an act of resistance—an effort to preserve the humanity of the victims.14 And, as David Fishman explored in The Book Smugglers, which documents the story of what he calls “the paper brigade” that operated in the Vilna ghetto, “ghetto inmates rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts—first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets—by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders.”15 The Jews of Vilna knew that books mattered. Articulated more than a century before the Nazis came to power, Heinrich Heine’s warning still stands: “Where books are burned, in the end, people will also be burned.”16 The study of the Holocaust shows that in almost every profession and avocation, people collaborated with the Nazis. Of course, there was a wide range of behavior in terms of complicity in criminal acts, but the Holocaust is a warning. We can all succumb—well-educated or not. George Steiner asked if humanists not only failed to prevent this seismic event, this rupture in Western civilization, but actually contributed to it.17 In that Steiner views religion as an important part of culture and then indicts Christianity as a major factor in preparing the way to genocide, he was certainly right. Steiner also suggests in a general way that intellectuals in a wide array of fields contributed to the inhumanity and misery; but in the nearly fifty years since Steiner penned his provocative tract, we have learned so much more about specific groups. We now know about the economists who helped develop Generalplan Ost, with their scheme for the elimination of millions; about the physicians and nurses who carried out the murderous T-4 program; and about the museum officials who staffed the plundering commandos that stole Jews’ property, both prior to and after their murder.18 No profession was immune from the co-optive power of the Nazi regime. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the Holocaust raises profound questions in every academic discipline.19 I am reminded of Thomas Nipperdey’s comment, “All German history is related indirectly to Hitler.”20 That is, as one studies nineteenth-century German history, one anticipates Hitler and the Holocaust, and in thinking about the postwar period, as well as the present, the subject also is seemingly ever-present. There is a reason why there are so many books about the Third Reich that use the word “shadow.”21 The Holocaust casts a metaphoric shadow in innumerable ways, some of which remain obscured. It bears acknowledging that those engaged in the field of Holocaust studies, in fact, have done

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a fine and needed job in looking into these shadows: Holocaust studies boasts a rich and robust historiography, a tradition to build upon, which should be a source of strength in terms of advancing the field.

Holocaust studies amid current global threats Propaganda was “the war that Hitler won.”22 Six years of indoctrination preceded the war and the crimes committed under its cover. Cultural conditioning was a prerequisite for the Holocaust. Certain scholars portray the Germans as murderous from the start of the Third Reich, but while it is important not to minimize the violence perpetrated early on, one must also appreciate the gradual radicalization in Jewish and foreign policy that played out after 1933.23 Culture played a central role in this process. The propagation of antisemitism and a broader indoctrination in Nazi precepts were preconditions for the murderous behavior so common during the war years.24 The Nazis came to power amid a revolution in media. Utilizing film, radio, and transportation networks to connect audiences to cultural products (for example, the mobile cinema that came to the provinces, or expeditions to art exhibitions), the Nazis exposed more German people to culture than ever before. Many did not have the sophistication to understand the power or dangers associated with the new media and succumbed to the efforts at indoctrination coordinated by Goebbels. In that we Americans more recently were naive about the weaponization of social media in a presidential election, there is a link to the present times. The Holocaust shows us how new media, especially when not properly understood, can be exploited for nefarious purposes. We also need to understand this history in order to protect existing civil liberties and political rights. As is now well-understood, the Nazis’ Gleichschaltung included not only political institutions such as the Reichstag but also cultural ones such as universities, museums, publishing houses, and film companies. Churches also count as cultural institutions, and George Steiner’s assertion about the “religious character of genuine civilization” (and his insistence that the “Holocaust must be set in the framework of the psychology of religion, and that an understanding of this framework is vital to an argument on culture”) also must factor into the mix.25 Too few in 1933 grasped the implications of the Nazi takeover of these cultural institutions: how this undermined potential resistance, how these institutions would help glorify Nazi rulers, and how they would indoctrinate a subsequent generation. Certain scholars today, such as historian Timothy Snyder, have attempted to articulate the myriad lessons from this Gleichschaltung, and in doing so, he advocates for readers to uphold professional standards; to be wary of an attack or a national emergency as a pretext for the state usurping power and eroding civil liberties; and to “listen for dangerous words.”26 We must also be cognizant that the Germans’ sense of cultural superiority contributed to their brutal actions, both before and during the war: their arrogance helped them justify their criminal behavior. While one can indeed celebrate the

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“German genius” over the centuries, the Germans’ sense of cultural superiority helped many justify criminal actions.27 National chauvinism today also presents grave dangers: the sense of exceptionalism, the jingoism associated with populism, and the way that racism can be intermixed all echo themes found in Nazi Germany. While scholars debate the issue of the comparability of the Holocaust (and in particular, “analogizing”), we cannot refrain from trying to learn from the past.28 As Snyder has noted, “The point of historical comparisons is not to seek a perfect match—which can never be found—but to look out for warning signs.”29 On a more general level, he rightly has observed, “The Holocaust matters to Americans as the source of moral lessons.”30 In short, the study of the Holocaust may provide an opportunity to prevent a descent into disaster. To borrow from Mark Twain, “History does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.”

What is to be done? I believe that the study of the Holocaust must include a recognition of the importance of artistic property and also the institutions that foster and protect culture. Two imperatives follow. First, cultural property must be better protected. When the US military entered Baghdad in 2003 and paid no attention to artifacts in the city’s museums (but placed a tank in front of the oil ministry to discourage looters), this policy led to the theft of tens of thousands of artworks and objects. Perhaps American might was powerless to prevent the Taliban fighters’ attacks on the statutes carved in the cliffs of Bamyan in Afghanistan or to thwart the decimation of the world heritage site in Palmyra, Syria, by ISIS.31 Greater leadership in this regard by the United Nations, including funding for experts who might be able to intervene in a crisis, as well as a dedicated Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives force in the US military would be positive steps. A new initiative involving the US Army Reserve, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, and Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command is now in the works. These agencies aspire to create a group that will be “tasked with ensuring that the Army is ready to deal with the complex cultural challenges commanders are sure to face.”32 Proposals to eliminate funding for US government offices for culture, such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian, National Public Radio, and the Public Broadcasting Service, among others, must be resisted (for starters, by making the funding of culture a more prominent issue in presidential elections). Second, provenance research must be better supported and heeded. The Germans now have academic positions for specialists in provenance research, which is a burgeoning subfield, especially in Europe. With thousands of artworks still not restituted to their rightful owners, much work remains to be done. Advancing Holocaust studies in this way can contribute to gains, admittedly small but still significant, in post-Holocaust justice. The advancement of Holocaust studies requires robust institutional support for research and public engagement. We currently have such institutions, including

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the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the USC Shoah Foundation. Building on their success, it would be worthwhile to create a museum to house the art displaced during World War II, including the so-called heirless works in Western Europe and the “trophy art” in Russia. It might make sense to situate the museum in a place like Warsaw, which itself was devastated during the war. These steps not only would take artworks out of storage (often in substandard conditions) but also would create a meaningful monument, as well as an institution with pedagogical and research potential. For art displaced by war to sit in storerooms—unseen, like hostages of history—is a failure. If this art is displayed properly, it has the capacity to inspire. Not only on campuses but also among the wider public, interest in the Holocaust remains strong. There are many successes to build upon with regard to Holocaust studies and, more specifically, research into Nazi-looted art. A rich historiography has evolved, perhaps the richest of any academic field during this time. There is a healthy number of faculty positions, although one hopes that colleges and universities lacking faculty in this field will take steps to remedy the shortfall. Recent films treating Nazi art looting and the press coverage associated with events like the revelation of the Gurlitt cache have helped create a greater awareness of those topics. Holocaust studies is a big tent. Holocaust scholars don’t all need to write the same kinds of books and articles, or teach the same courses, but our work needs to be accessible so it can reach broad audiences. Holocaust studies and education are not vaccines against unethical behavior, but considering the current threats to democracy, there is an obligation to advance Holocaust studies with the hope, the conviction, that doing so can help to avert future disasters.

Notes 1 For a related exploration of stories passed down from a Greek father about World War II, see Irene Kacandes, Daddy’s War: Greek American Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 2 Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, eds., Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise during and after the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 390–93; and Gideon Greif, We Wept without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Dario Gabbai died on March 25, 2020, at the age of ninety-seven. 3 See Jonathan Petropoulos, “The Importance of the Second Rank: The Art Plunderer Kajetan Mühlmann,” Contemporary Austrian Studies 4 (1995): 177–221. 4 Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 5 Ian Kershaw quoted in Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2004), xx. 6 Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 7 Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2008), 764. 8 Jonathan Petropoulos, Göring’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

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9 Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan, 2005) and Frank Bajohr, “Aryanization” in Hamburg: The Economic Exclusion of Jews and the Confiscation of Their Property in Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2002), 279. 10 See, for example, Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Ronald Zweig, The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003); Jan Tomasz Gross and Grudzinska Gross, Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Peter Hayes, From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 11 See, for example, Anne Marie O’Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece (New York: Knopf, 2012). 12 Stuart Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II (New York: Public Affairs, 2003). 13 Elie Wiesel, “Opening Ceremony Remarks at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” in Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets Proceedings (Washington, DC, 1998), 13, www.lootedart.com/web_images/pdf2014/Chapter%201%20Open ing%20Statements.pdf. 14 Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 15 David E. Fishman, The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2017). 16 Heinrich Heine, “Almansor” (1821), in Heinrich Heine, Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973–97), V, 16. The German reads, “Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.” 17 George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes toward a Redefinition of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 30. 18 See, for example, Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, trans. A. G. Blunden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Heather Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (Boston: Hachette, 2006); Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die Deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland, 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999); and Isabel Heinemann and Patrick Wagner, eds., Wissenschaft—Plannung— Vertreibung: Neuordnungskonzepte und Umsiedlungspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006). 19 See, for example, the interdisciplinary study by Claudio Fogu, Wolf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner, eds., Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 20 Quoted in Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 139. 21 See, for example, Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow (New York: Scholastic Press, 2005); Tim Heath, In Hitler’s Shadow: Post-War Germany and the Girls of the BDM (New York: Pen and Sword History, 2018); and Dean G. Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). 22 Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War That Hitler Won: The Most Infamous Propaganda Campaign in History (New York: Putnam, 1978). 23 For an example of a scholar who sees the Germans as murderous from an early stage in the Third Reich, see Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996). 24 Florent Brayard, Auschwitz Enquête sur un Complot Nazi (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2012).

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25 Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, 34. 26 Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan, 2017), 22, 38, 99; and Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Random House, 2018). See also Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Broadway Books, 2019). 27 Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010). 28 Timothy Snyder, “It Can Happen Here: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Decision to Speak Out against Holocaust Analogies Is a Moral Threat,” Slate, July 12, 2019, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/holocaust-museum-aocdetention-centers-immigration.html. See also Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen, Andrea Orzoff, Timothy Snyder, Anika Walke et al., “An Open Letter to the Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” New York Review of Books, July 1, 2019, www .nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/01/an-open-letter-to-the-director-of-the-holocaust -memorial-museum/. 29 Snyder, “It Can Happen Here.” 30 Ibid. 31 Neil Brodie, “The Internet Market in Antiquities,” in Countering Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods: The Global Challenge of Protecting the World’s Heritage, ed. France Desmarais (Paris: International Council of Museums, 2015); P. B. Campbell, “The Illicit Antiquities Trade as a Transnational Criminal Network: Characterizing and Anticipating Trafficking of Cultural Heritage,” International Journal of Cultural Property 20 (2013): 113–153; Stefano Manacorda and Duncan Chappell, eds., Crime in the Art and Antiquities World: Illegal Trafficking in Cultural Property (New York: Springer, 2011); and Noah Charney, ed., Art Crime: Terrorists, Tomb Raiders, Forgers and Thieves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 32 Matthew Cox, “The New ‘Monuments Men’: These Soldiers Will Help Protect Treasures in Combat Zones,” in Military.com, November 27, 2019, www.military.co m/daily-news/2019/11/27/new-monuments-men-these-soldiers-will-help-protecttreasures-combat-zones.html. See also Matthew Bogdanos, Thieves of Baghdad (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005); Lawrence Rothfield, ed., Antiquities under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War (Lanham: AltaMira, 2008); and Peter Stone and Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, eds., The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008).

Bibliography Aly, Götz. Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. Translated by Jefferson Chase. New York: Metropolitan, 2005. Aly, Götz, and Susanne Heim. Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction. Translated by A. G. Blunden. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Bajohr, Frank. “Aryanization” in Hamburg: The Economic Exclusion of Jews and the Confiscation of Their Property in Germany. New York: Berghahn, 2002. Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow. New York: Scholastic Press, 2005. Bartov, Omer, Doris Bergen, Andrea Orzoff, Timothy Snyder, and Anika Walke. “An Open Letter to the Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.” New York Review of Books, July 1, 2019. www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/01/an-open-letter -to-the-director-of-the-holocaust-memorial-museum/. Bogdanos, Matthew. Thieves of Baghdad. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Brayard, Florent. Auschwitz Enquête sur un Complot Nazi. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2012.

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Brodie, Neil. “The Internet Market in Antiquities.” In Countering Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods: The Global Challenge of Protecting the World’s Heritage, 11–20. Edited by France Desmarais. Paris: International Council of Museums, 2015. Campbell, P. B. “The Illicit Antiquities Trade as a Transnational Criminal Network: Characterizing and Anticipating Trafficking of Cultural Heritage.” International Journal of Cultural Property 20 (2013): 113–53. Charney, Noah, ed. Art Crime: Terrorists, Tomb Raiders, Forgers and Thieves. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Cox, Matthew. “The New ‘Monuments Men’: These Soldiers Will Help Protect Treasures in Combat Zones.” Military.com, November 27, 2019. www.military.com/ daily-news/2019/11/27/new-monuments-men-these-soldiers-will-help-protect-tr easures-combat-zones.html. Dean, Martin. Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933– 1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Earl, Hilary. The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity. Law, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Eizenstat, Stuart. Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II. New York: Public Affairs, 2003. Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin, 2004. ———. In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past. New York: Pantheon, 1989. ———. The Third Reich at War. New York: Penguin, 2008. Fishman, David E. The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2017. Fogu, Claudio, Wolf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner, eds. Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Fulbrook, Mary. Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Gerlach, Christian. Kalkulierte Morde: Die Deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland, 1941 bis 1944. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999. Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 1996. Greif, Gideon. We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Gross, Jan Tomasz, and Grudzinska Gross. Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hayes, Peter. From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Heath, Tim. In Hitler’s Shadow: Post-War Germany and the Girls of the BDM. New York: Pen and Sword History, 2018. Heine, Heinrich. “Almansor” (1821). In Heinrich Heine, Gesamtausgabe der Werke, V. 16. Edited by Manfred Windfuhr. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973–97. Heinemann, Isabel, and Patrick Wagner, eds. Wissenschaft—Plannung—Vertreibung: Neuordnungskonzepte und Umsiedlungspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006. Herzstein, Robert Edwin. The War That Hitler Won: The Most Infamous Propaganda Campaign in History. New York: Putnam, 1978. Kacandes, Irene. Daddy’s War: Greek American Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

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Kassow, Samuel. Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Broadway Books, 2019. Maier, Charles. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Manacorda, Stefano, and Duncan Chappell, eds. Crime in the Art and Antiquities World: Illegal Trafficking in Cultural Property. New York: Springer, 2011. O’Connor, Anne Marie. The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece. New York: Knopf, 2012. Petropoulos, Jonathan. Göring’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. ———. “The Importance of the Second Rank: The Art Plunderer Kajetan Mühlmann.” Contemporary Austrian Studies 4 (1995): 177–221. Petropoulos, Jonathan, and John K. Roth, eds. Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise during and after the Holocaust. New York: Berghahn, 2005. Pringle, Heather. The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust. Boston: Hachette, 2006. Rothfield, Lawrence, ed. Antiquities under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection After the Iraq War. Lanham: AltaMira, 2008. Snyder, Timothy. “It Can Happen Here: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Decision to Speak Out Against Holocaust Analogies Is a Moral Threat.” Slate, July 12, 2019. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/holocaust-museum-aoc-deten tion-centers-immigration.html. ———. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan, 2017. ———. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Random House, 2018. Steiner, George. In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Toward a Redefinition of Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971. Stone, Peter, and Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, eds. The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008. Stroud, Dean G., ed. Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013. Watson, Peter. The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. Wiesel, Elie. “Opening Ceremony Remarks at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” In Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets Proceedings, 14–17. Washington, DC, 1998. www.lootedart.com/web_images/pdf2014/Chapter%201 %20Opening%20Statements.pdf. Zweig, Ronald. The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003.

8 CATHOLICS, THE HOLOCAUST, AND THE BURDEN OF HISTORY Robert A. Ventresca

A few years ago, I was invited to give a public talk about the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust. It was an event jointly sponsored by the local Jewish community center and the local Catholic university, both of which wanted me to address some redemptive and reconciliatory aspect of this deeply painful chapter in the history of Jewish-Catholic relations. Above all, my hosts implored, could I see my way to avoid relitigating the divisive and contentious “Pius war”—the widely publicized and polarizing debate over the role of Pope Pius XII and the Vatican during the Holocaust era? After all, they reasoned, so much had already been said about the Vatican and the Holocaust. And, besides, with the Vatican’s wartime archives still mostly inaccessible to scholars, was there really anything new and instructive, let alone revelatory and definitive, to add to the debate? I readily obliged. Having written a major biography on Pius XII, the controversial wartime pope, and having spoken at length in various media about his role during the Holocaust and in its aftermath, I was eager to move on to other research questions related to the role of religion, especially Catholicism, in the time of the two world wars.1 So, my talk focused on some lesser-known stories about Catholics from diverse walks of life, who provided shelter, assistance, or safe-passage for persecuted Jews during the Holocaust. I studiously avoided saying much about Pius XII and the Vatican.

Unsettled and unsettling questions Invariably, however, the ensuing question-and-answer period forced me to confront compelling and consequential questions about Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust that “remain unsettled and unsettling.”2 An audience member asked me one of them: How could I reconcile the courage and

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conviction of the comparatively few individual rescuers with the apparent silence, indifference, and complicity of the most powerful men in the Church hierarchy? I struggled to respond. During the long drive back home, that pointed question kept recurring. It nagged me. I concluded that there is no obvious or easy way to reconcile the moral choices and actions of individual rescuers during the Holocaust and the diplomatic caution and public restraint of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church, starting with the pope, the most powerful man in the Church. How could it be that Pius XII, arguably the most inf luential Christian leader in the world at the time, chose to react to the systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews with so much hesitancy, caution, and restraint in the exercise of diplomatic and pastoral responsibilities of his office? Here, after all, was the supreme authority of the largest and arguably most powerful religious institution in the world. Here was a man who had far-reaching powers to teach and to govern the Church, the heir in an unbroken line of leadership reaching all the way back to the apostle Peter and the very founding of the Church. And here was a man who, by virtue of the Lateran Treaty, a major diplomatic agreement negotiated with Mussolini’s Fascist regime in the late 1920s, could engage in international affairs confident that he enjoyed effective civil sovereignty as head of Vatican City, a fully independent state created purposefully to afford the pope “absolute and visible independence” from any and all civil jurisdictions, while also assuring the pope and his government “its indisputable sovereignty in international matters.” Its content informing the Vatican’s policy toward the Third Reich, the historic 1929 pact acknowledged the de facto and de jure “absolute independence” of the Holy See precisely in order to allow the central government of the Church to fulfill “its exalted mission in the world.”3 What did Pope Pius XII make of these powers? How did he use his authority when confronted with unprecedented crimes of the fascist regimes and their collaborators across Europe, crimes that bespoke what Hannah Arendt described as “the collapse of the whole moral and spiritual structure of Europe”?4 Why didn’t Pius XII condemn by name Hitler or Himmler or, for that matter, Mussolini, Pétain, Horthy, or Pavelić—all of them were powerful political and military leaders who collaborated with the Nazis or enacted their own persecutory and murderous policies against Jews and other victims? To borrow from Elie Wiesel, how are we to explain that the pope “never thought it necessary, not to say indispensable, to condemn Auschwitz and Treblinka?”5

How do we judge? Much of the controversy about the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust hinges on how we judge, historically and ethically, Pope Pius XII’s exercise of clerical power and religious leadership in a time of political extremism, war, and genocide. And more than any other dimension of his leadership, it

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is Pius XII’s refusal to intervene directly, forcefully, and, above all, publicly and persistently on behalf of persecuted Jews that has elicited the most intense and sustained debate, which is evidence of ongoing academic and public interest in the subject. Pius XII was not mute about these matters; he spoke about them from time to time. But his tone and style of speaking, as well as its content, remain vexing because they reveal and mask a kind of silence. How do we explain that silence, the pope’s unwillingness to speak out forcefully and publicly, when Nazi shooting squadrons and death camps murdered millions of Jews? That question shadows Holocaust studies. Answers to it have tremendous implications for moral and theological judgments about Christian leadership during the Holocaust and for what it means to advance Holocaust studies. For all that has been written and said in the past forty years or so about the Catholic Church and the Holocaust—that discussion is voluminous, to say the least—the need to bring a full and proper historical analysis to bear on our moral evaluations of Christian religious leadership in a time of war and genocide remains to be one of the major tasks and challenges for Holocaust studies in the twenty-first century. Questions about Pope Pius XII’s spiritual authority and political inf luence in a time of war and genocide haunt me as a Catholic and motivate me as a historian. My work tries to make sense of how and why the pope exercised his religious leadership as he did in a time of extreme crisis. Why did he make the choices he did, and what were the consequences for the victims of European fascism and for the moral prestige and international standing of the papacy? Focusing my inquiries about those issues is a vast and complex task that requires untangling, to the extent possible, the snarled threads of theology, religious identity, culture, and politics that not only affected the decisions and actions of an individual, Pius XII, but also governed the context of his agency, namely, the Catholic Church’s responses to the rise of fascism and Nazism after World War I and to the ensuing persecution and eventual mass murder of Europe’s Jews. Only when I began to research, write, and teach in earnest about Europe’s twentieth century, and specifically about the history and legacy of fascism, was I compelled to confront these painful, complex historical questions, as well as the ethical dilemmas they contain. It is a testament to some very good teachers working in Catholic education during the decade after the epochal transformations ushered in by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that I grew up in an educational setting infused with a lively sense of Catholic identity and mission. As I remember it, that educational setting seemed, fortunately, to be the living embodiment of Vatican II’s call for healing and renewal in Jewish-Catholic relations. As I probe my recollections further, however, a failing in my schooling was that it obscured—unintentionally, I believe—the unsettling question of Catholic responsibility for the cultural, social, and political milieu that enabled the persecution and then the murder of millions of European Jews. That the Church shared a “patrimony” with the Jewish people, as the Second Vatican Council teaches, was readily acknowledged; that the Church had played a role in the

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toxic mix of theological, social, and political prejudice that fueled exclusionary violence against Jews for centuries was scarcely, if ever, taught. When the newly elected Pope John Paul II went to Auschwitz-Birkenau on June 7, 1979, during his historic first papal visit to his Polish homeland, he said, “I am here today as a pilgrim. … I have come and I kneel on this Golgotha of the modern world.”6 I found those words jarring, troubling; they struck me like proverbial lightning. They move and trouble me still with their evocative and provocative commingling of the suffering and death of millions of twentieth-century European Jews with the suffering and death of a first-century Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. By what tortured path, I wondered, did humankind travel the path from Golgotha to Auschwitz? What did it mean, theologically and historically, to link, as John Paul II did, the suffering of Jesus on the cross at Golgotha outside the city walls of ancient Jerusalem with the suffering and death of Jews at Auschwitz in the heart of Nazi-occupied but supposedly Christian Europe? The Catholic writer James Carroll also made a provocative connection between these two sites of profound suffering and remembrance when he described the notorious death camp as the “climax of the story that begins at Golgotha.” 7 To say that Auschwitz—the Holocaust, in other words—is the culmination of a story that begins with the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth some two thousand years earlier is to claim a causal link between Christianity and the Holocaust. It is to say that Christian history itself is part of a long, unbroken chain of beliefs, practices, processes, and events that relentlessly led to genocidal Nazi plans and systematic mass murder of Jews, policies intent on eliminating from history and memory all traces of an ancient people whose origins and history formed an elemental base of Western civilization.8 Even if Carroll’s claims are sometimes problematic, their outlook provides an instructive starting point for a deeper ref lection on the hostility and violence that many Christians have inf licted on Jews over time and across vast geographical and cultural spaces. This commingling of the iconic representation in Christianity of suffering and death—the cross—with the most notorious site of Jewish suffering and death in the Holocaust raises a troubling specter that Wiesel warned against: “good Christians,” as he put it, wanting to “Christianize the Holocaust,” which usually includes attempts to universalize the Holocaust as a crime against all of humanity rather than emphasizing its particularity as a singular Jewish tragedy. If Wiesel saw that outlook as a coping mechanism, a way for people of genuine Christian faith to come to terms with the painful legacy of mass murder in ostensibly Christian Europe, he never wanted Christians to rest easy with it, and I do not. I believe, as Wiesel insisted, that the Holocaust must always be understood first and foremost as a Jewish tragedy, one that changed irrevocably the course and even the meaning of Jewish history. And yet the Holocaust was also in profound and inescapable ways a turning point in Christian history. As Leon Klenicki observed, if the Holocaust demands of Jews a “rethinking” of Jewish history and of the Jewish “vocation” in the world, nothing less—indeed, even

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more—is demanded of Christians. As Klenicki put it, the Holocaust calls for “a Christian reckoning of Christian silence, indifference, complicity, despite the heroic deeds of some Christians in saving Jewish lives.”9

Nagging questions, unsettling answers Because of the Catholic Church’s hierarchical structure and clearly demarcated lines of governance, reckoning with its role in and response to the Holocaust needs to start at the top—with the central government of the Church, which is headed by the pope. True, focusing on a largely Italian, male-dominated ecclesial hierarchy centered around the Vatican risks missing the far more expansive and diverse reality that constitutes modern Catholicism.10 Still, any proper account of Catholic responses to the Holocaust must of necessity grapple with the consequences that f lowed from the Church’s governing functions and lines of authority—more specifically, from the ecclesial authority of the papacy and the international power of Pius XII.11 For this reason, students of the Holocaust must continue to interrogate the pope’s actions and motivations, and their consequences, both for European Jews and for the moral and political standing of the papacy. Doing so does not mean relitigating the “Pius war.” It does entail renewed study and sound judgment informed by it. Emphasizing that “the Church is not afraid of history,” Pope Francis announced on March 4, 2019, that the opening of the Vatican’s archives for the pontificate of Pius XII, which spanned the tumultuous years from 1939 to 1958, will take place on March 2, 2020, the eighty-first anniversary of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli’s election as pope.12 This announcement garnered excitement and skepticism. The excitement is understandable. We have waited a long time, unnecessarily long to my mind, for full access to records that heretofore have only been available in the form of highly selective archival material from the Vatican’s Secret Archives, published between 1965 and 1981. Historians are eager to know more about the genesis of the Vatican’s acknowledged policy of diplomatic caution in refusing to condemn unequivocally Nazism and its systematic persecution and mass murder of Europe’s Jews. But skepticism has its place because, frankly, there is reason to doubt that any new source that will come to light will cause a seismic shift in our understanding. I doubt very much that the Vatican’s archives will yield a so-called smoking gun. Time will tell, but I doubt that the archival opening will reveal documentation that definitively justifies judgments that condemn or exonerate Pius XII’s wartime choices and rationale. In part, this result is likely because the persistent questions about the pope’s role during the Holocaust are not concerned primarily with a historical evaluation of what he said or did not say, or what he did or did not do. Rather, they are more properly understood as moral issues about what Pius XII ought to have done when reliable reports told him that the Nazis were carrying out an unprecedented campaign of brutalization, dehumanization, and extermination of Jewish communities across Europe. Inquiry along those lines, however, will

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be too abstract, insufficiently grounded historically, unless future research and interpretation deeply probe the pope’s stated rationale, offered to anyone who would listen at the time and in subsequent years, for not condemning—unequivocally, publicly, and repeatedly—the Nazi assault against the European Jews. Newly opened archives are unlikely to change what is already known, namely, that Pius XII chose the path of caution and restraint—or at least said that he did—because, as he put it, he wished to “avoid a greater evil.” That commitment was the corollary of a longstanding policy of papal impartiality. Underscoring the Vatican’s priority not to be seen as taking sides in armed conf licts, that policy was intended to facilitate the Vatican’s chosen role to be a mediator among combatant states, which included using its material resources to give humanitarian aid to all victims of war, irrespective of nationality or ethnic origin.13 But the Vatican’s archives about Pius XII must be explored thoroughly and carefully for any and every insight they contain. It is conceivable, perhaps even likely, that the Vatican’s archives for the period of Pius XII’s leadership will yield new material that goes beyond previous sources to document in greater detail private discussions between the pope, his immediate advisors, and his nuncios (akin to ambassadors), as well as bishops and state diplomats from around the world. A more detailed description of these discussions may help to deepen or sharpen our understanding of the logic and wisdom of Pius XII’s decisions. We know—because the documents released so far show as much—that such discussions did occur, quite frequently in fact. The 2020 opening of the Vatican archives may yield new understanding about the kind of information available to the pope and his advisors—and when—regarding the destruction of the European Jews. Scholars hope to learn more about the sources, methods, and reasoning behind the Vatican’s decision-making. If the newly opened archives reveal such evidence, it will be indispensable to evaluate more fully and fairly on both a historical and ethical plane the pope’s wartime options and decisions. There are other important historical and ethical questions about which the archives may yield original and consequential insights. One of the murkiest chapters of the Vatican’s role during the Holocaust pertains to that disaster’s immediate aftermath, when Jewish authorities scrambled to identify the many Jewish children who had survived the war years in Catholic homes or religious institutions. Some of them had been baptized with or without their full knowledge and consent. Leading Jewish organizations made it an urgent priority to identify and, where possible, recover these children so that they could be reunited with their Jewish families and communities, even if the children had been orphaned. For Jewish leaders, the fate and future of these children was a profound matter of survival—the physical and cultural survival of Jewish identity and community in the wake of the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people. Jewish advocates lobbied Pius XII and his advisors to have the Vatican mobilize its considerable resources and authority within the Church to help in their vital task. The fragmentary documentation currently available suggests that these efforts were met

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in the highest Vatican circles with varying degrees of incredulity, hesitancy, and even outright opposition, especially in cases where Jewish children had been baptized, an action that the Church saw as making them genuine members of the Christian f lock. It is reasonable to expect that the archives may help us to provide a fuller, clearer account of the Vatican’s policy vis-à-vis Jewish child survivors, its rationale and motives, and what this policy meant for these children, their families and communities, and more broadly for Jewish-Catholic relations in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Basic premises, fundamental conclusions For Holocaust studies to advance in fostering sound understanding about the Catholic Church’s place in that history and particularly about the accountability of Pope Pius XII, what basic premises should govern that inquiry, including its direction once the Vatican archives are opened? I propose, first, that no serious study of these issues can cling to what I call caricature versions of Pius XII, selective and distorted evaluations of a religious leader whose decision-making and rationale defy simplistic description and characterization. To see Pius XII simply as complicit with Nazism or as a valiant rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust is to proffer mythical versions of the past rather than the critically nuanced analysis that results from the best of the historian’s craft.14 Of course, serious students will have legitimate disagreements about Pius XII’s stance toward the Third Reich, or his response to the racist, exclusionary policies and violence of fascist regimes and their collaborators. The challenge is to move beyond the tired and counter-productive arguments of the “Pius war.” The need is to obtain a better explanatory framework, one equipped to cope with the Catholic Church’s complexity. Pius XII was both a product of and a contributor to that complexity, which conditioned his responses to Nazism and the Holocaust and profoundly affected post-Holocaust theology, the material and moral reconstruction of Europe, and ongoing Jewish-Catholic relations. We need to avoid thinking of the Catholic Church, including the Vatican in particular, as a monolithic institution. Advancing Holocaust studies in this area requires the hard work of coming to terms with the diverse and complicated nature of the Catholic Church—its beliefs, practices, governing structures, transnational presence, and various loci of power and decision-making, as well as the vast reaches of its institutional and social life. In short, we are dealing here with a distinctive religious “organization,” for lack of a better word, comprising multiple and diffuse communities of faith marked by tensions and contradictions.15 As we think about advancing our understanding of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust era, we should also resist the temptation to engage in so-called counterfactual history, in speculation about “what might have been.” True, historical and moral judgment of the Vatican’s role during the Holocaust will always be haunted by the deeply unsettling question: What if …? What if Pius XII had issued that direct, unequivocal, forceful condemnation of Hitler and the Nazis,

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and especially of their persecution and murder of Jews? What if the pope had used the unparalleled prestige and reach of the teaching office of the papacy, not to mention its effective mass media resources, to lead Catholics everywhere in a humanitarian crusade on behalf of persecuted minorities and vulnerable communities? How many lives might have been saved? Might the whole tragedy have been avoided altogether if the most inf luential figure in the Christian world, and a world statesman in his own right, had made an early, prewar condemnation and moral crusade against the already manifest antisemitic crimes of Nazism?16 It is impossible to know how or if events would have transpired differently had the most powerful man in the Christian world decided differently or, perhaps, if there had been a pope different than Pius XII. Here we confront the serious limitation of counterfactual approaches to complex historical and ethical questions. In my view, Richard J. Evans, a noted historian of Nazi Germany, provides a sound basic premise when he says that “in the effort to understand, counterfactuals aren’t any real use at all.”17 Applying this reasoning to our study of the Vatican’s role during the Holocaust means focusing interpretive efforts squarely on the choices the pope and his advisors made, choices they explained and defended persistently during the war itself and after. Pius XII’s choices and the motives behind them—these factors should ground the questions that bear investigation and judgment in our efforts to understand what happened and why. This outlook does not mean that we should avoid grappling with fundamental moral and theological questions that inevitably arise from the historical study of religious leadership in the Holocaust era. To the contrary, it is entirely appropriate and even indispensable for us to consider what we think the pope ought to have done with his considerable inf luence and authority when millions of civilians faced displacement and death. Was the Vatican’s policy of impartiality, deliberate and reasoned though it may have been, the right policy, not just diplomatically but morally? Was it right for the world’s most powerful Christian leader to adopt a policy of caution and prudence, presumably to avoid, as he put it, a “greater evil”? Given the pope’s spiritual authority, were prudence and impartiality in a time of extreme humanitarian crises consistent with the judgment and action expected, even demanded, of the Vicar of Christ? To my thinking, the answer to those questions is a resounding no. As a historian who is also a practicing Catholic, I cannot shy away from my responsibility to use my understanding of the past to inform moral judgments about the decisions and policies of Pius XII. Accepting that responsibility has nothing to do with “counterfactuals,” because it is a matter of historical and ethical fact to affirm, in the words of Hannah Arendt, that Pius XII made serious “errors in judgment.”18 One of the most grievous was to offer half-hearted, muddled, and at times muted responses to the political persecution of Jews in Germany, Italy, Slovakia, and Hungary before and during the war. I would go further and argue that, in so many decisive ways, Pius XII and much of the Church’s clerical leadership failed the Jewish people before, during, and after the Holocaust. Through much of the 1930s, when he—Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli at the time—was the

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Vatican’s chief diplomat and the person most directly involved in guiding the Vatican’s relationship with the Hitler regime, the soon-to-be Pius XII failed needlessly to grasp fully and resist the dangerous implications of Nazi anti-Jewish policies. He failed to see beyond the narrow parameters of his own worldview. He could have stayed ahead of the curve, realizing that effective responses to the Nazis’ racial antisemitism required new papal engagement with the politics of the day. To say otherwise is to deny Pacelli/Pius XII the intelligence and accountability that his personhood and position entailed. Pius XII was human, all too human. Like most Catholics of his generation, he was beholden to a traditional view that Jews were to be tolerated in society. But their marginalization could also be justified; it was not inconsistent in states organized along Christian ethical lines. At play here was ambivalence, if not covert hostility, about Jews and Judaism. For Pius XII, the roots of this outlook extended back to skepticism about the nineteenth-century project of integrating and assimilating Jews into the civil, social, and political life of the secular nation-state. He showed little vision—no “forward thinking,” as we might say today—nor anything like prophetic insight into the dangers posed to civilians by leaving Europe’s Jews without full civil and political equality. To say that he could not have thought and acted differently and better shortchanges the mental and moral agency that were his. As the pope during the Holocaust, Pius XII was not determined or fated to fail to lend his uniquely authoritative voice to arouse individual and collective conscience in a humanitarian defense of European Jews. Whatever the boundaries he faced, none entailed, let alone necessitated, that doing his best meant limiting himself to cautious, restrained, and politically ineffective public statements and never once naming the Nazis—or their victims for that matter—by name. And after the war, Pius XII was not helpless to see and understand the obvious spiritual need within the Christian world for a public accounting of what had been done to millions of Jews and others in the heart of Christian Europe. It is clear from the historical record that the pope failed to appreciate how a word from the foremost spiritual leader of the Christian world could serve as a powerful symbol and as a practical impetus for Christian action on behalf of the persecuted Jews of Europe. In a similar manner, Pius XII failed to see how a word from the foremost spiritual leader of the Christian world was essential for atonement and for reconciliation after Auschwitz. But none of these shortcomings had to be, absolutely, the way they were. Controversy continues to swirl about Pope Pius XII. It includes an issue especially fraught in Catholic-Jewish relations: Will the Catholic Church confer sainthood upon him? Important action in that direction took place in late 2009, when Pope Benedict XVI confirmed Pius XII’s “heroic virtues,” a key step on the way to canonization. At the time of this writing, it remains to be seen whether Pope Francis will pursue that path. But in light of the historical record that my years of research confirm, it is hard to make the case that Pius XII had the stuff of a saint.19

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The burden of history Ref lecting on the achievements of some forty years of Holocaust scholarship and public outreach, one can say confidently that the state of the field is rich and robust. It is that way partly because issues and findings about the Catholic Church and the Holocaust, including analysis of the roles played by Pope Pius XII, stand in bolder relief than ever before. Yet I feel the burden of history and the responsibility of the historian more than ever because of nagging doubts and anxiety about the future. I do so because my research and teaching about the Catholic Church and the Holocaust help me to see that too little has changed for the better in our post-Holocaust circumstances. I worry especially about two principal warning signals. The first is the upsurge of antisemitism as a potent mobilizing force in public life. The sight of white supremacists marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us” and the horrific mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018, to name two prominent manifestations of resurgent antisemitism, reveal the perennial power of anti-Jewish prejudice to fuel social isolation, marginalization, and exclusionary violence.20 The second warning signal relates to what has been identified as a “decline in historical thinking,” characterized by the waning of the history major at colleges and universities across North America.21 There also are troubling gaps in public knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust specifically. Recent studies in the United States and Canada, for instance, have found that roughly half of those polled could not identify a single Holocaust-era concentration camp or ghetto. Many people simply are ignorant of basic facts about the Holocaust, including the number of Jewish victims and the names of pivotal figures in the Nazi war of annihilation. The problem appears to be especially serious among so-called millennials, those between eighteen and thirty-four years of age, who, one report concluded, were “particularly uninformed.”22 Such an astonishing degree of ignorance about the basic facts of the Holocaust should compel us to confront the painful possibility that forty years and more of sustained, serious Holocaust research and teaching have not been as effective as we Holocaust scholars imagined. We have, perhaps, comforted ourselves too readily in the belief that educating students and the public about the history of the Holocaust would constitute a powerful antidote to ignorance and prejudice and that education above all else could actualize what the pioneers of JewishChristian dialogue after the Holocaust envisioned, namely, the intellectual and emotional formation of young people in the humane and civic values essential for open and democratic societies. What, then, is to be done? One of the most urgent priorities of the field should be to advocate in new and concerted ways to combat obvious gaps in public understanding of the Holocaust as well as the general decline in historical studies. At the same time, mobilizing knowledge about the Holocaust to combat

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resurgent forms of political antisemitism or to counter prejudice and discrimination can be truly effective only if our norms of civic engagement and political discourse are factually grounded in reliably firm understandings of how our world was made, of how and why it works the way it does, and of how it can and should work. A key point that I hope this chapter leads its readers to remember is that study and teaching about the Catholic Church and the Holocaust have significant contributions to make by helping us to understand what can go wrong and what is needed to prevent that wrong from prevailing.

Notes 1 See my Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 2 I take the quoted phrase from Carol Rittner and John K. Roth’s “Calls for Help,” the introduction to their edited volume, Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust (2002; repr., New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 4. 3 For the quotations from the preamble to the Lateran Treaty, 1929, see the English translation at https://archive.org/details/TheLateranTreaty11thFebruary1929. The original Italian text is accessible at www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/ archivio/documents/rc_seg-st_19290211_patti-lateranensi_it.html. 4 Hannah Arendt, “The Deputy: Guilt by Silence?” in her book Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 216. 5 Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1978), 11. 6 “Homily of His Holiness John Paul II,” Auschwitz–Birkenau, June 7, 1979, https ://vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1979/documents/hf_ jp-ii_hom_19 790607_polonia-brzezinka.html. 7 James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History (Boston: Houghton Miff lin Harcourt, 2001), 22. 8 Alon Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 9 Leon Klenicki, “From Historical Mistrust to Mutual Recognition,” his introduction to Pope John Paul II on Jews and Judaism: 1979-1986, ed. Eugene J. Fisher and Leon Klenicki (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1987), 3. 10 This important ref lection is offered by Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen, “Transcending Boundaries: Hungarian Roman Catholic Religious Women and the ‘Persecuted Ones,’” in In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 222–42, esp. 223. 11 See John P. Langan, “The Christmas Messages of Pius XII (1939–1945): Catholic Social Teaching in a Time of Extreme Crisis,” in Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, ed. Kenneth Himes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005) 175–90. See also Arendt, “The Deputy: Guilt by Silence?” 12 See Elisabetta Povoledo, “Pope Francis to Allow Access to Holocaust-Era Documents of Pius XII,” New York Times, March 4, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/wor ld/europe/pope-francis-pius-xii-archives.html. For the full text of Pope Francis’s announcement, see “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis to Officials of the Vatican Secret Archive,” March 4, 2019, http://vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches /2019/march/documents/papa-francesco_20190304_archivio-segretovaticano.html. 13 My Soldier of Christ provides a detailed account of the future Pius XII’s diplomatic and humanitarian record in World War I and its impact on his leadership style and choices later as secretary of state and then pope.

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14 For examples of these two extremes, see John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999) and Ronald J. Rychlak, Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis (Dallas: Spence, 2005). 15 I have adopted and adapted here aspects of the very instructive analysis provided by Timothy Longman for the Rwandan genocide. See his Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 19–20. 16 On these possibilities, see my Soldier of Christ, 308–11. 17 Richard J. Evans, “‘What if ’ Is a Waste of Time,” The Guardian, March 13, 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/13/counterfactual-history-what-if-wasteof-time. See also Richard J. Evans, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (New York: Little, Brown, 2014). 18 Arendt, “The Deputy: Guilt by Silence?” 223. 19 In reaching my conclusion about Pius XII, I have been profoundly inf luenced by the postwar critique of the pope offered by the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who appreciated Pius XII’s positive attributes while acknowledging grave limitations to his pastoral leadership when it came to reckoning with the Church’s relationship to the Jewish people and its role during the Holocaust. See Soldier of Christ, 310–11. For links to numerous significant discussions on the fraught topic of Pius XII’s possible sainthood, see the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations (CCJR) site called “Canonization of Pope Pius XII?” www.ccjr.us/dia logika-resources/themes-in-today-s-dialogue/p12. Among other things, this site provides access to “Rescuing a Pope’s Spiritual Legacy,” my essay in The National Post (Toronto), December 26, 2009, www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/themes-in-tod ay-s-dialogue/p12/ventresca09dec26#ges:searchword%3DVentresca%26searchphras e%3Dall%26page%3D1. 20 Franklin Foer compiled a disturbing 2019 snapshot of headlines from around the world chronicling antisemitism’s recent upsurge. See his “This Week in AntiSemitism,” The Atlantic, February 22, 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive /2019/02/week-headlines-tell-story-anti-semitism/583393/. See, too, Ben Judah, “Europe’s Ubiquitous Anti-Semitism,” The Atlantic, February 21, 2019, www.theatl antic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/european-jews-dont-need-be-defined-anti-sem itism/583270/. 21 On these points, see Benjamin M. Schmidt, “The History BA since the Great Recession: The 2018 AHA Majors Report,” Perspectives on History, November 26, 2018, which reports findings by the American Historical Association, www.histor ians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2018/thehistory-ba-since-the-great-recession-the-2018-aha-majors-report. See also Eric Alterman, “The Decline of Historical Thinking,” The New Yorker, February 4, 2019, www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-decline-of-historical-thinking. 22 Karen Zraick, “Many Canadians Lack Basic Knowledge about the Holocaust, Study Finds,” New York Times, January 24, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/world/ca nada/canadians-holocaust.html.

Bibliography Alterman, Eric. “The Decline of Historical Thinking.” The New Yorker, February 4, 2019. www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-decline-of-historical-thinking. Arendt, Hannah. “The Deputy: Guilt by Silence?” In Responsibility and Judgment, 214–26. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken, 2003. Carroll, James. Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History. Boston: Houghton Miff lin Harcourt, 2001.

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Confino, Alon. A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Cornwall, John. Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. New York: Viking, 1999. Evans, Richard J. Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History. New York: Little, Brown, 2014. ———. “‘What if ’ is a waste of time.” The Guardian, March 13, 2014. www.theguardian .com/books/2014/mar/13/counterfactual-history-what-if-waste-of-time. Foer, Franklin. “This Week in Anti-Semitism.” The Atlantic, February 22, 2019. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/week-headlines-tell-story-anti-semi tism/583393/. Francis (Pope). “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis to Officials of the Vatican Secret Archive.” March 4, 2019. http://vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2019/ march/documents/papa-francesco_20190304_archivio-segretovaticano.html. John Paul, I. I. (Pope). “Homily of His Holiness John Paul II.” Auschwitz–Birkenau, June 7, 1979. https://vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1979/documents/hf_ jp -ii_hom_19790607_polonia-brzezinka.html. Judah, Ben. “Europe’s Ubiquitous Anti-Semitism.” The Atlantic, February 21, 2019. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/european-jews-dont-need-be-defined -anti-semitism/583270/. Klenicki, Leon. “Introduction: From Historical Mistrust to Mutual Recognition.” In Pope John Paul II on Jews and Judaism: 1979–1986, 1–5. Edited by Eugene J. Fisher and Leon Klenicki. Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1987. Langan, John P. “The Christmas Messages of Pius XII (1939–1945): Catholic Social Teaching in a Time of Extreme Crisis.” In Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, 175–190. Edited by Kenneth Himes. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. Longman, Timothy. Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Povoledo, Elisabetta. “Pope Francis to Allow Access to Holocaust-Era Documents of Pius XII.” New York Times, March 4, 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/world/ europe/pope-francis-pius-xii-archives.html. Rittner, Carol, and John K. Roth. “Introduction: Calls for Help.” In Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, 1–13. Edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth. 2002; repr., New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Rychlak, Ronald J. Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis. Dallas: Spence, 2005. Schmidt, Benjamin M. “The History BA Since the Great Recession: The 2018 AHA Majors Report.” Perspectives on History, November 26, 2018. www.historians.org/pub lications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2018/the-history-ba-s ince-the-great-recession-the-2018-aha-majors-report. Sheetz-Nguyen, Jessica A. “Transcending Boundaries: Hungarian Roman Catholic Religious Women and the ‘Persecuted Ones.’” In In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, 222–42. Edited by Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack. New York: Berghahn, 2001. Ventresca, Robert A. “Rescuing a Pope’s Spiritual Legacy.” The National Post (Toronto), December 26, 2009. www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/themes-in-today-s-dialogue/ p12/ventresca09dec26#ges:searchword%3DVentresca%26searchphrase%3Dall%26pa ge%3D1. ———. Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

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Wiesel, Elie. A Jew Today. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Random House, 1978. Zraick, Karen. “Many Canadians Lack Basic Knowledge About the Holocaust, Study Finds.” New York Times, January 24, 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/world/ canada/canadians-holocaust.html.

9 INTERSECTIONS Holocaust studies, personal lives Wendy Lower

I prefer to think that my personal life can be sealed off from my scholarly work. After all, isn’t a good historian the one who presents a critical, objective interpretation of a past that was not one’s own? One’s personal life is not supposed to become tangled up in one’s work. Furthermore, I came of age among founding luminaries of Holocaust studies—for example, Henry Friedländer, Raul Hilberg, and Gerhard Weinberg—who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust but nonetheless maintained a scholarly detachment. Only toward the ends of their careers did they openly share their own stories about surviving the Nazi onslaught as youths.1 And then I realized just how valuable their biographies were in the creation of their seminal studies of the Nazi euthanasia campaign, the machinery of destruction, and Hitler’s foreign policy and global war. Subjectivity is another lens of reality that reveals truths and biases of the time otherwise obscured in the bald facts. Indeed, personal experiences can be the most powerful driver of scientific inquiry and exactitude. The nineteenthcentury Prussian philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt captured this when he wrote: The more deeply the historian comprehends, through genius and study, humanity and its deeds, or the more humane he is made by his circumstances, and the more purely he lets his own humanity reign, the more completely he fulfills the task of his profession.2 Von Humboldt developed an understanding of humanity and the natural world through scientific study and personal experience. As a model scholar and global citizen, he pursued his subject area as a dialectical process of discovery—of himself, his profession, and humanity.

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How I became a Holocaust scholar After my public lectures, I am often asked, “How did you get into Holocaust studies?” The question almost always comes from adult Jews who look at me in a puzzled way, trying to ascertain if I am Jewish without asking me directly. The underlying assumption is that one who researches and writes about the Holocaust must be personally motivated as a Jewish person, perhaps even the descendant of a victim. Why else would one commit to study such a depressing topic? Or maybe because of my blonde hair and blue eyes and focus on German history, one might have suspected that I am the descendant of a perpetrator and pursued the history to make amends and combat denial. The first few times this question was posed to me, I did not have a satisfying answer. I confessed that I was not Jewish and not related to any Nazis. I muttered something about just falling into the topic in the early 1990s during my graduate studies in German history. I believed that my biographical distance from the events and sources gave me an advantage in terms of objectivity, and I felt privileged to be able to study the Holocaust in the comforts of my life. It was not “my” history to champion or reckon with. At the end of the day, I could close my file cabinet of Nazi documents, shut down my computer, turn off the light in my study, and rejoin my family and friends in good spirits. Over time I started to ref lect on how I discovered the subject and how it entered into my personal life as I matured, especially when I became a parent. I thought back to my youth when I was growing up in a New Jersey suburb in the late 1970s and as a study abroad student in Vienna during 1985–1986. I was thirteen years old when I watched Holocaust, the 1978 TV miniseries, which gave me sleepless nights. While the series aired, an antisemite burned a swastika on the lawn of the local synagogue not far from my childhood home. In response, the school principal gathered students in the auditorium and invited a Holocaust survivor to the stage to tell her shocking story. Years later when I was studying abroad at the University of Vienna, the Kurt Waldheim scandal erupted over his Nazi past; his postwar career as secretary general of the United Nations (1972–1981) became an international sham, and yet he still won his bid for the Austrian presidency. I remembered the local pubs in Austria. At the Stammtische were seated veterans of the war who had been on the Eastern Front. After consuming a few beers and schnapps, their war stories of Moscow or Stalingrad turned to genocide stories of the mass shootings of Untermenschen. As they spoke to me in their slurred, Austrian accents, they nodded to one another as old comrades with inside knowledge of another war behind the front lines. I realized that the history of the Holocaust as I had first seen it on the television screen was present and still unfolding in my lifetime. 3 My personal experiences continued to intersect with global events and started to shape my intellectual interests in German language and modern history. When I applied for graduate school, the Iron Curtain was falling, democracy

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and free market capitalism were prevailing over Soviet communism, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) was getting ready to open its doors, and the United Nations General Assembly convened a global conference on human rights, resulting in the appointment of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights in 1993. Aspiring members of the expanding European Union established historical commissions to examine their wartime pasts and possible collaboration in the Holocaust. Countries like Romania, Hungary, and Lithuania were supposed to confront their history of antisemitism and learn from it.4 I met other aspiring historians of my generation who were working on doctoral theses, including one on the history of the pumpkin in America, another on the dime. At the time I shook my head, like, “really that is your life’s pursuit?” I was interested in more serious subjects. During graduate school, the history of the Holocaust became palpable in other ways. My mentor Richard Breitman asked me during his office hours if I had time to check some files in the captured German documents at the US National Archives and Record Administration (NARA). He was working on a case for the Australian Special Investigations Unit against a Nazi collaborator in a police unit in Belarus. I went to NARA, cued up the microfilm reel, and started scanning the reports. The German signatures, Nazi letterhead, swastika stamps, and the terse after-action reports on killings sucked me into the bureaucratic machinery as Raul Hilberg masterfully reconstructed it. Luckily, I found a report that contained the unit that Breitman was looking for, and I brought it back to his office. His face lit up as he read it. I had found possible evidence to help the case. I realized that I could contribute to the cause of justice. Elie Wiesel spoke of the chain of witnessing that crosses generations. Maybe I, even as a non-Jew born decades after the war, could be a link in that chain? I started to take notice of the history as I traveled throughout Europe: the bullet holes in the buildings in Munich; the eerie vacant blocks of bombed cities in Germany; the bone shards, ash, and personal effects that surfaced near the gassing centers and at the mass grave sites in Ukraine; and the pained faces of the survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders whom I interviewed. In the 1990s, I joined a post-1968 generation of young scholars, especially in Germany, who were looking anew at perpetrator studies as regional case studies of Nazi occupation and at the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union.5 As I finished my doctorate, I married another historian, a German scholar who was completing his habilitation on the Office of Strategic Studies. We talked a lot about World War II, and when visiting his family near Stuttgart, I learned more about the travails of ordinary Germans subjected to Allied bombing raids. After the birth of our two sons in 1995 and 1997, it became harder to keep my emotional distance from the material, especially the testimony about children and photographs of them. I remember two moments especially when the history hit home. The USHMM had just opened up another stunning exhibit, this one on the Lodz ghetto. One section included a blown-up

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image, one that I had seen before as an illustration in the publication of David Sierakowiak’s diary (Photo 9.1). The photograph was taken by Mendel Grossman, who was an official photographer in the Lodz ghetto and used his position and access to film to secretly document the famine and history of deportations.6 In it, a young woman wearing a house apron over her winter coat, perhaps a teacher, aunt, or mother, speaks through the fence to a boy. We see her distraught face as she seems to comfort the frightened lad; her hands are nervously clenched together. That boy had been selected, separated from family, and awaited deportation to the unknown. Rumors at the time spoke of “extermination.” 7 She could no longer protect him from the horrors of mass murder. On another occasion, I was sitting on my couch at home and reading the testimony of a German housewife Erna Petri, one of the female perpetrators of the Holocaust featured in my book Hitler’s Furies. Petri confessed to shooting Jewish boys in a gully near her garden. In unusually shocking detail, she described how they cried and whimpered as she drew her pistol. As I paused imagining this terrible scene, I looked up and saw my own ten- and eight-year-old sons playing on the f loor with their Legos.

PHOTO 9.1

Family members say goodbye to a child through a fence at the ghetto’s central prison where children, the sick, and the elderly were held before deportation to Chelmno during the “Gehsperre” action. Lodz, Poland, September 1942. Photographer: Mendel Grossman, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,Washington, DC.

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Why stick with it? Now instead of ref lecting on how I entered this field, I ask myself: “Why have I stuck with it?” Upon the completion of each book or article, I would tell myself, “this is the last one,” “I need a more uplifting topic,” “I need a break.” But again the material was too compelling, there was more to discover, learn, and teach. I was experiencing what might be called a “Humboldtian dialectic”—grasping fundamental truths about human behavior as a synthesis of scientific study and personal ref lection. As I learned more about “humanity and its deeds” in Holocaust history, I strove to become a better person and scholar. I committed to finding and communicating what happened to the missing victims and to pursuing justice through historical research and writing. The global archive of the Holocaust is the largest of any historical event on record. Hundreds of millions of pages and the variety of sources (visual, artifactual, written testimonies, physical structures, scarred landscapes, and mass graves) have demanded interdisciplinary research and analysis, indeed, well before that approach was fashionable. One can evolve intellectually in a rewarding way and the source material can consume one for a lifetime. First I wrote a book on Nazi SS police officials and governors as a study of colonialism and genocide in Ukraine. Then I delved into a victim’s 1943 diary and grasped the power of his last words. In Hitler’s Furies, I documented the participation and scale of women in the Holocaust and learned how to reach a broader audience. Now I am finishing a book on one 1941 atrocity photograph as a visual testimony of resistance. I have benefited from the institutional support of the USHMM and Claremont McKenna College, received funding for my research, and enjoyed a collegial community of scholars. These are critical factors for sustaining a field and keeping scholars at work in it. As an established historian, I am now grappling with my role, more specifically with the relationship between activism and scholarship and with identitybased scholarship. Historians are supposed to explain the past for the sake of the future. As a chronicler and messenger, Thucydides understood that “an exact knowledge of the past” would “aid to the interpretation of the future.” Similarly, historian Marc Bloch, a Nazi Holocaust victim in wartime France, exhorted us to study the past not as something dead but alive, stressing the vibrancy and vitality of history and arguing that the past should serve the cause of life and the future.8 David Blackbourn remarked that historians recover those who had no voice for those who do and will. Whether we like it or not, our work is political; it can be applied to a cause and promote change. We produce knowledge that shapes the future and teach youth who will apply it. We advocate for the importance of “our” field of research, but to what end?

Holocaust lessons The discipline of Holocaust studies is profoundly ethical, partly because one of its imperatives is to get the history right. So, Holocaust studies invites, even

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requires, ref lection about Holocaust lessons. My ref lection leads me to affirm that Holocaust studies does indeed involve “lessons of the Holocaust,” but not as we may usually think of them. The most important lessons are not primarily imperatives or injunctions but more matters of character and disposition—what philosophers would call virtues. Much has been said and written about lessons of the Holocaust that we must teach and heed. But scholars, educators, genocide prevention activists, and the general public too have grown weary and wary of this charge because the lessons seemed ill-defined, antisemitism and genocide persist, and “never forget” rings hollow. In his autobiography, Raphael Lemkin, father of genocide studies, wrote that “the function of memory is not only to register past events but to stimulate human conscience.”9 For decades we have adopted this Lemkin logic: remembering the Holocaust will spur awareness of other genocides to be registered in history, and halted if they are ongoing. But survivor and professor emeritus of German literature, Ruth Kluger, author of Still Alive, one of the most powerful Holocaust-related memoirs ever published, scoffed at the notion of deriving lessons from places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau where she was a prisoner with her mother: “Auschwitz was no instructional institution, like the University of Göttingen. … You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance.”10 What can one learn from a glimpse into hell? she asked. Actually, that “glimpse into hell” is the special knowledge that survivors carry with them and that audiences, especially youth, with their “thirst for knowledge,” want to learn. As Wiesel put it: It all comes down to this for me: We discovered absolute Evil. And not absolute Good. So what can we do for the young people who are kind enough to read what we have written or to listen to us, so that they won’t fall into despair? How can we go about telling them that it is nonetheless given to man to thirst for the absolute in Good and not only in Evil?11 Wiesel agreed with another victim, Jorge Semprún, who observed that bearing witness to absolute Evil took an emotional toll on his life but it was a necessary “pedagogical rite” that one could not abrogate. These eminent survivors struggled to turn their encounters with the worst into revelations about what is good and life affirming. Even Kluger, who rejected the notion of lessons from Auschwitz, wrote about the profound love of her mother and solidarity of women who saved her. I have learned and continue to learn many lessons as a scholar of the Holocaust, not from reading the history as a morality tale but from working with mentors and colleagues, Holocaust victims and witnesses, and students. I have been guided by best practices modeled by Holocaust scholars and enlightened by survivors’ insights into their individual experiences during and after the war. I have come closer to understanding (not condoning) the cruelty of perpetrators and passivity

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of bystanders. Often in their fearless questioning and stark observations, students raise fundamental truths that I have lost sight of or have avoided probing. I entered the emerging field of Holocaust studies when leading scholars hotly debated the timing of Hitler’s decision to embark on a total extermination campaign against Europe’s Jews. Genocide stems from an “intent to destroy in whole or in part,” and like prosecutors, historians have sought to pinpoint that intent, whether it was solely Hitler’s motive or his minions’ or some combination of those aims. They have also tried to date key decision points as precisely as possible.12 While observers may have shaken their heads at the seemingly esoteric disputes about specific dates, the stakes were high because the inquiry’s goal was to identify historical agency and shared culpability in the worst of all human acts. Precision mattered in every way—in determining the exact ranks, persons, and places identified in documents, in translating the German language that was often veiled in euphemisms, and in authenticating the documents and citing their provenance. This first generation of political scientists and historians set standards of scholarly excellence in research and writing to which I continue to aspire. They scrutinized the evidence not simply for the pursuit of the details as such, rather for the sake of truth, to figure out what went fundamentally wrong in the Nazi era, to explain when a moral Rubicon was crossed. The primary question that they asked was: How could this happen? This generation of scholars (many of them also survivors) taught me another lesson as well: in this pursuit of knowledge and truth, every shred of evidence must be taken seriously. As Hilberg aptly remarked, “Any source may have significance.”13 While Hilberg privileged Nazi documentation, for too long, as Saul Friedländer rightly argued, histories of the Holocaust failed to integrate the victims as historical subjects, actors, and witnesses. Omitting them was not only an imbalance in the scholarship and weighing of evidence. It was also ethically f lawed. The intent of the “Final Solution,” in Nazi thinking, was for Jews to disappear as a race, and in the early 1990s, it seemed that they were vanishing on the pages of the history books too.14 But as I completed my doctorate and started teaching at the university, survivors and victim sources emerged as voices of moral authority. Whether in print or in person, Holocaust survivors have revealed truths that stick with me. For example, Helen Tichauer (1918–2018), who was among the first to be deported to Auschwitz and the last to leave on a death march, assisted historians with her deep knowledge of the functioning of Birkenau and its personnel.15 Nicknamed “Zippi,” she became my friend and advisor. She admonished me to be careful with survivor testimony since the ability to recollect varies; many witnesses lacked a vantage point to see or comprehend what was happening writ large. Not everyone “saw” Mengele, the infamous SS doctor, on the ramp directing “selections,” she stated. And I learned from her to be more empathetic in my questioning. Once, as Tichauer recalled the sadism of an SS guard, I asked her what motivated that guard to be so cruel. She snapped: “Do

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not ask me about what was in the heads of those brutes!” I realized that it was insensitive on my part to ask a victim to think about a perpetrator’s mindset. The cruelty that she witnessed and experienced defied a rational explanation. Seeking one was a path to understanding the perpetrator that she refused to take. Other survivors taught me scholarly humility when they told me stories about how their traumatic pasts resonated in their daily lives. One spoke about the frenetic days of raising a family, running errands, and managing the household. She lived in the warm climate of California, so her tattoo was often visible on her bare arm. Shop clerks and customers noticed it while she was rushing to check out of Gelson’s grocery store. People stopped her, and asked questions. She wanted to avoid them and go about her daily business without interference, but she could not deprive them of an answer as she looked into their sympathetic faces and thought of all those who didn’t survive. For her, bearing witness was an everyday event. She could not escape the Holocaust even in the most intimate settings. When she embraced her husband in bed, she recalled, he saw the tattoo. Sometimes he just pulled away. Another female survivor told me that she came to America as “damaged goods” because she had been tortured and sexually violated by Ukrainian police. Survivors of the Holocaust, resilient and heroic though they may be, continue to go through its hell in these everyday and even intimate ways. And often we expect too much from them. Interviewing wartime witnesses, including Holocaust perpetrators, opened up another world for me. During 2008–2009, I met several times with a highranking SS officer whose signature appeared on Nazi documents that recorded the mass shootings of some seventy thousand Jews in Ukraine. He had escaped justice and retired comfortably in a wealthy suburb of Frankfurt. Exchanges with him were not a shared pursuit of the truth. I questioned him with documents in hand, and he answered with enough crumbs to keep me hungry for more. I showed him 1941 “after-action reports” that bore his initials. As a chief operations officer in Himmler’s Command Staff Headquarters during Operation Barbarossa, he processed the field reports containing tallies of dead Jews. I pointed to the numbers on the report: “What about these women and children massacred in Kamianets-Podilskyi, they were not partisans and combatants?” He replied with a Gallic-like shrug and then looked out his window into the garden below and spoke about his love of poetry and nature. Social psychologists, such as Ervin Staub and James Waller, explain that perpetrators of genocide do not see themselves as evildoers.16 I experienced firsthand the ways that genocidaires repress, deny, and obfuscate. This SS officer expressed no remorse. He was an unrepentant antisemite. He felt no need to confess to anything since his actions were sanctioned by the state. In his autobiography, he indicates that the Third Reich chapters were the best years of his life. He too was defined by the Holocaust but saw it as an achievement, not a source of trauma and loss. He regretted that the Third Reich had been defeated and lived in that glorious past surrounded in his home with swastika-adorned furniture and Nazi art.17 Interacting with this living perpetrator was illuminating and revolting. I

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began to grasp how an individual adopts hateful ideas to make sense of the world, and how tenacious these ideas can be. After showing a colleague at the Sigmund Freud Institute the interview footage that I taped of this Nazi, I asked my colleague: “Why doesn’t this elderly man show remorse?” He replied that the man’s entire “sense of self ” would be shattered if he faced and accepted the truth of his own evil. In other words, this man chose self-preservation over the truth, which is a lesson that I share with students. The students I teach about the Holocaust have taught me too. At the University of Maryland, I was lecturing about the Einsatzgruppen and presented slides with wartime images of the mobile killing units’ operations in the Baltics. One featured a photograph of the Epstein family—actually, what was left of it in December 1941. The matriarch stands upright in the center surrounded by other women and girls, all in their undergarments. The photo was taken as they were led to the mass shooting dunes of Liepaja, Latvia. After class, a student approached me, a young man who stated bluntly that he was Jewish and those photos of the nearly naked women reminded him of his own relatives. He asked: “Did you need to show such graphic images?” I apologized for offending him. I learned that my scientific approach to Holocaust research and evidence needed to be modified and supplemented by different approaches in the classroom. Sentimentality has no place but neither does a dispassionate objectivity that produces numbing shock. More recently, a Claremont McKenna student who had just read a book called Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide wrote to me after our class discussion: “Professor Lower, this all makes me ashamed to be a human being.” I realized that the silence of some students during discussion is not because they have not done the reading nor have nothing to share in discussion. Perhaps they get a glimpse of what Wiesel called absolute Evil and fear what they are capable of.

What can Holocaust studies do? Can Holocaust studies combat the atrocities that make my students ashamed to be human? What is this discipline’s potential to nurture what Peter Hayes calls “anti-antisemites” and to encourage people—students as well as leaders in the global community—to be human rights defenders? Historians of modern Germany know what can go wrong when scholars and teachers too easily occupy a bully pulpit. In the late nineteenth century, German historians and other humanists became the Kaiser’s and eventually Hitler’s intellectual bodyguards. In his book In Defense of History, Richard Evans argues that scholarship should be pursued for the sake of discovery not to champion a cause per se.18 But that prescription isn’t enough. Holocaust studies will fall short if the scholarly community fails to acknowledge that it can do more in fraught and precarious times. So, what, in particular, can Holocaust historians do? Elazar Barkan is among those who have called for activism, direct participation in public debates and

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in conf lict resolution.19 I agree with Barkan that historians wherever possible should lend their expertise to correct mistakes and clarify where comparisons with the past are faulty or used as a blunt political tool.20 Historians are engaged in more than a battle for accuracy. Over time the impact of the Holocaust’s historical events will diminish and knowledge about them will decrease. Major institutions such as the USHMM are invested in sustaining scholars and advancing research. Yet in the public at large there is a growing sector that views Holocaust history narrowly (and cynically) as a “Jewish” topic, and worse, as an instrument of Israeli policy or a “Jewish” agenda, turning it into an object of identity politics and not into a source of universal lessons and collective wisdom. These heightened concerns of fading memory and the power of the Holocaust to mobilize people against mass atrocities coincide with the passing of survivors and direct witnesses. Who will carry on the work of bearing witness? Many survivors have approached me and other Holocaust scholars to express their gratitude and hope that as experts in the field we should lead in passing down the stories and injunctions to never forget (i.e., education) and to mobilize prevention (i.e., activism). What can we do with this serious charge and expectation to carry the torch? I support three important strategies, which are as fundamental as they are realistic, as foundational as they are practical. First, at the level of institutional support, current scholars should continue to participate and support the missions of the USHMM, Yad Vashem, and other established educational and memorial sites. These government-sponsored research programs will outlive and transcend us. Second, we should embody the best practices of our profession, which will uphold the value of critical inquiry and civic discourse. That commitment means abiding by rules of academic rigor and precision in our research and teaching. We should remain true to the stories that constitute the history of the Holocaust and continue to uncover more of them, focusing on the human experience as specific to that time and showing its relevance for our own. Third, I believe that solidarity is a powerful force, ideally across diverse segments of society. I have started to build it within the higher education system. In the past few years, I utilized my former role as the acting director of the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the USHMM to establish a new national consortium of institutions and faculty specializing in the Holocaust, genocide, and human rights studies. Since the 1990s, some two hundred centers, institutes, and programs have been established in colleges and universities across North America, including at my own Claremont McKenna College. These initiatives respond to the ongoing challenges of upholding rights, preventing genocides, and teaching Holocaust-related ethics. I hope that the work advanced by these three strategies defends what is good and just. It stands up for truth. Those realities were lost to millions during the Holocaust. They are endangered now. When Holocaust studies go deep down into our personal lives, something I experience again and again, they can resurface dialectically in the form of fundamental lessons that must be taught to help curb the danger and, at least to some extent, restore what was lost.

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Notes 1 See Doris Bergen’s description of Henry Friedländer’s life in War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 2–3. Friedländer described his childhood in Berlin, Germany, Lodz, Poland, and Birkenau, Poland, during a keynote dinner presentation at the Lessons and Legacies Conference, Northwestern University, Evanston IL, 2008. For Gerhard Weinberg’s biography, see the tribute volume edited by Alan Steinweis and Daniel E. Rogers, The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Raul Hilberg wrote autobiographically in The Politics of Memory: Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). 2 Quoted in Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2001), 105. 3 See Eli Rosenbaum, Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993) and Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4 Alexander Karn, Amending the Past: Europe’s Holocaust Commissions and the Right to History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 5 Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn, 2000). 6 Mendel Grossman, With a Camera in the Ghetto, ed. Zvi Szner and Alexander Sened (New York: Schocken, 1977). 7 Alan Adelson, ed. The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto, trans. Kamil Turowski (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 215, entry of September 3, 1942. 8 David N. Myers, The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018) and Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage, 1964). 9 Quoted in A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology,” in The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 276. 10 Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: Feminist Press, 2001), 65. 11 Jorge Semprún and Elie Wiesel, It Is Impossible to Remain Silent: Reflections on Fate and Memory in Buchenwald, trans. Peggy Frankston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 32. 12 Christopher Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press / Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004). 13 Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 184–85. 14 Saul Friedländer. “An Integrated History of the Holocaust: Possibilities and Challenges,” in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies, ed. Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (New York: Continuum, 2010), 21–29. 15 Jürgen Matthäus, ed., Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Helen Tichauer’s story was featured in the New York Times. See Keren Blankfeld, “Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later,” New York Times, December 9, 2018, www.nytimes.com /2019/12/08/nyregion/auschwitz-love-story.html. 16 Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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17 Former SS officer Bernhard Frank (1913–2011). See “after-action” reports with his signature in the Kommandostab RFSS, Military History Institute, Prague, carton 1. Microfilm at the USHMM, RG 48.004M, reel 1. For additional information on Frank, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Frank. 18 Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). 19 Elazar Barkan, “Historians and Historical Reconciliation,” The American Historical Review 114, no. 4 (October 2009): 899–913. 20 Comparisons of detention centers along the US-Mexican border to concentration camps in Nazi Germany triggered a public discussion on Holocaust analogies. See a critique by Timothy Snyder, “It Can Happen Here,” Slate, July 12, 2019, https:// slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/holocaust-museum-aoc-detention-centers-im migration.html.

Bibliography Adelson, Alan, ed. The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. Translated by Kamil Turowski. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Barkan, Elazar. “Historians and Historical Reconciliation.” The American Historical Review 114, no. 4 (October 2009): 899–913. Bergen, Doris. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Blankfeld, Keren. “Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later.” New York Times, December 9, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/nyregion/auschwitz-love-story. html. Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It. Translated by Peter Putnam. New York: Vintage, 1964. Browning, Christopher, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press / Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004. Evans, Richard J. In Defense of History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Friedländer, Saul. “An Integrated History of the Holocaust: Possibilities and Challenges.” In Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies, 21–29. Edited by Christian Wiese and Paul Betts. New York: Continuum, 2010. Grossman, Mendel. With a Camera in the Ghetto. Edited by Zvi Szner and Alexander Sened. New York: Schocken, 1977. Herbert, Ulrich, ed. National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies. New York: Berghahn, 2000. Hilberg, Raul. The Politics of Memory: Journey of a Holocaust Historian. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. ———. Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. Karn, Alexander. Amending the Past: Europe’s Holocaust Commissions and the Right to History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Kluger, Ruth. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: Feminist Press, 2001. Matthäus, Jürgen, ed. Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and Its Transformations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Moses, A. Dirk. “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology.” In The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, 272–89. Edited by Dan Stone. New York: Berghahn, 2012.

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Myers, David N. The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Rosenbaum, Eli. Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Semprún, Jorge, and Elie Wiesel. It Is Impossible to Remain Silent: Reflections on Fate and Memory in Buchenwald. Translated by Peggy Frankston. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Shandler, Jeffrey. While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Snyder, Timothy. “It Can Happen Here.” Slate, July 12, 2019. https://slate.com/news-an d-politics/2019/07/holocaust-museum-aoc-detention-centers-immigration.html. Staub, Ervin. The Roots of Evil: Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Steinweis, Alan, and Daniel E. Rogers, eds. The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Waller, James. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Zimmerman, Andrew. Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2001.

PART III

Prospects

What are you doing? That everyday question usually asks for matter-of-fact information about a person’s activity. Asked that way, the query underscores what is being done. “I am going to class,” for example, or “I am writing an essay for Advancing Holocaust Studies” could be answers sufficient to put the question to rest. Other responses, however, might produce a rejoinder that underscores what in tones that question prospects or expectations of success. “You’re doing what?” In response to “I am advancing Holocaust studies,” that question might express bewilderment. In response to “By advancing Holocaust studies, I am doing the world good,” the question “you’re doing what?” might voice astonishment or disagreement. Holocaust scholars and educators face both questions: What are you doing? You’re doing what? Much hinges on the responses. Primo Levi, whose writings pervade Holocaust studies, helps to show why. Levi credited Lorenzo Perrone with saving his life in Auschwitz. Not a Jew but an Italian civilian, Lorenzo, a skilled brick layer, was “officially” a “voluntary” worker helping to build the industrial plant that the Germans were constructing at Monowitz, an Auschwitz satellite. After meeting Levi in late June 1944 as they labored in Auschwitz, Lorenzo decided to help his fellow Italian, although it was a crime with grave consequences for Lorenzo even to speak to a prisoner. For months, Lorenzo got Levi extra food, which was the physical difference between life and death. “I believe that I owe it to Lorenzo if I am alive today,” Levi would write, underscoring that Lorenzo’s help meant much more than food alone. What also sustained him was that Lorenzo constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that a just world still existed outside ours, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, unconnected to

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hatred and fear: something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.1 When liberation came, Levi lost track of Lorenzo, but later he became determined to find out what had happened to his life-saving friend. They reconnected in Italy after the war, but soon Lorenzo died. Levi’s recollections of him are memorable. “He was not religious,” Levi said. He didn’t know the gospel, but instinctively he tried to rescue people, not for pride, not for glory, but out of a good heart and for human comprehension. He asked me once in very laconic words: “Why are we in the world if not to help each other?” Stop. Period.2 At one of their postwar meetings, Levi learned that he was not the only Auschwitz prisoner whom Lorenzo had helped, but Levi’s friend had rarely told that story. In Lorenzo’s view, wrote Levi, “we are in the world to do good, not to boast of it.”3 Lorenzo could not rescue everyone, but he helped Primo Levi. Metaphorically speaking, if Holocaust studies and education could do as well, that would be no small advance, no insignificant accomplishment. Identifying key prospects for Holocaust studies, the chapters in Part III head in those directions. They suggest that Holocaust studies is in the world to help and to do good. That’s what most Holocaust scholars hope they are doing. But they also know that “you’re doing what?” haunts those prospects. That recognition is a saving grace. It allows the prospects for advancing Holocaust studies to be bold and significant while retaining realistic humility that keeps them from shouldering more weight than they can bear.

Notes 1 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf, in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 3 vols., ed. Ann Goldstein (New York, Liveright, 2015), 115. 2 See Levi’s 1985 interview with Gabriel Motola, “Primo Levi: The Art of Fiction No. 140,” Paris Review 37 (1995): 201ff., www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1670 /primo-levi-the-art-of-fiction-no-140-primo-levi. See also “A Conversation with Primo Levi by Philip Roth,” in Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 179. 3 Primo Levi, “The Return of Lorenzo,” in Lilith and Other Stories, trans. Ann Goldstein, in Complete Works, 1408. Despite the medical assistance that Levi arranged for him, Perrone, wracked by tuberculosis and alcohol, died in 1952. Significantly, Levi’s daughter, Lisa Lorenza, and his son Renzo were named after Perrone. On June 7, 1998, Perrone was recognized by Yad Vashem, the State of Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a special honor for non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. For more detail on Perrone, see the Yad Vashem article about him in “The Stories of Six Righteous among the Nations in Auschwitz,” www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/righ teous-auschwitz/perrone.asp.

10 HOLOCAUST STUDIES Why, how, and wherefore Robert P. Ericksen

This chapter is my personal ref lection on a forty-year career in Holocaust studies. Why did I study the Holocaust? How did I approach the issues of the Holocaust? What is the purpose or goal of Holocaust studies, the sort of purpose which makes it an important part of our educational establishment? My approach has involved a look at what I sometimes label “good Germans,” pastors and professors, and theologians and other scholars within the impressive German university system. To my surprise, I had to conclude that being a Christian in 1930s Germany was more likely to produce pro-Nazi than anti-Nazi attitudes. I also concluded that the intelligence and knowledge base of German professors did not protect them from praising rather than criticizing the ideas promoted by Adolf Hitler, despite his eighth-grade education and the fact that Nazi ideas today are almost universally condemned and ridiculed. My critique is rooted in a respect for democratic values, especially as they developed by the second half of the twentieth century, with its advances in freedom of speech; freedom of the press; and equal rights across lines of race, religion, class, gender, and sexual orientation. I also respect the professed values of the three Abrahamic faiths, especially including the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and the importance of empathy and compassion. The authoritarian, racist, and ethno-nationalistic politics of Adolf Hitler f lew in the face of these values, and my work suggests that his prejudices were shared by far too many pastors and professors, far too many Christians and people with education. A resurgence of authoritarian, racist, and ethno-nationalistic politics, often with religious backing, has been part of the story of politics in the twenty-first century. I hope knowledge of the Holocaust will provide at least a partial antidote to those anti-democratic and inhumane tendencies.

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My path to Holocaust studies I first studied the Holocaust in 1967–1968, with a graduate directed-reading course on Nazi concentration camps. I first taught an undergraduate Holocaust course in 1978, a telecourse I created to accompany the television miniseries broadcast that year. I then taught a Holocaust course regularly throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999, I had the good fortune to succeed Christopher Browning at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU), when he was recruited to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Building upon Browning’s impact at PLU, I then taught a Holocaust course every semester I was on campus, due to the high level of student demand. I also helped develop by 2007 an endowed program in Holocaust studies, with an annual Holocaust conference, a minor in Holocaust and genocide studies, and the Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies, which I held from 2007 until my retirement in 2015. All of this took place at a small Lutheran university in Tacoma, Washington. My path to Holocaust studies was not direct, even though I have been involved for four decades. This path at first glance might also seem unexpected. I grew up among Lutheran pastors, including my father, his two younger brothers, his Norwegian uncle, and two of my four brothers. All my grandparents immigrated to the United States at about the turn of the last century, two from Sweden and two from Norway. Shortly after my birth, my paternal grandmother moved from her Scandinavian neighborhood in south Chicago to western Washington. She did so mainly, I think, to help care for me, the fourth of five sons. She is the one primarily responsible for the plethora of Lutheran pastors in my life, having been part of the pious Hans Nielsen Hauge movement in Norway before she emigrated. It was no accident that all three of her children, and those several other family members, became Lutheran clergy. My four brothers and I all graduated from Pacific Lutheran University, courtesy of my father’s support for that institution. I chose to study German history, inf luenced by two of the best professors at that time. I arrived at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1967, where my entry into graduate school proved momentous for at least two reasons. First, 1967–1968 was the year that Lyndon Johnson disallowed the graduate school draft deferment, with a one-year grace period for people in my class. This was also the year of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, with growing student protest at places such as Stony Brook, and with even newscaster Walter Cronkite turning against the war. I got a teaching deferment for three years, having parlayed my one-year MA first into a position at a women’s college in Pennsylvania and then at Willamette University in Oregon. In 1971, I was free to begin a doctoral program at the London School of Economics, studying under James Joll and working on the topic I had proposed, “Professors of Theology in National Socialist Germany.” I mention all of these events and relationships because I think they prepared me for the career I have had since my arrival in London, including the substantial shift in expectations once I began my doctoral work. That work was not yet

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directly in Holocaust studies, but rather an intellectual history project. I expected to find German professors—heirs to the best university system in the world at that time—smart enough to see the f laws in Nazi ideology, even if not all would take the risk of open opposition. I expected to find German professors of theology—heirs to the Protestant Reformation and the strongest theological tradition of their day—morally and spiritually acute enough to reject Nazism, even if they were not ready to follow the path of a dissenting Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I soon found that my expectations had been far too optimistic, colored by a postwar historiography that focused on people like Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller but ignored the large number of pastors and professors who welcomed Hitler with open arms. My first article appeared in 1977, describing Gerhard Kittel, an internationally renowned Protestant theologian whose Nazi-era work began with vicious anti-Jewish arguments in his book Die Judenfrage. It then continued with Kittel’s becoming the most prolific contributor to the Nazi journal Forschungen zur Judenfrage.1 Short of funds, I did not finish my PhD until 1980. My revised dissertation then appeared in 1985 as Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch.2 From the early stages of my career, I attended meetings of the German Studies Association and Lessons and Legacies, the conferences sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation. I began to see antisemitism as a large part of the story within my work, both because of antisemitism’s extremely deep roots within the Christian tradition and because of its especially horrific manifestation in the murder of six million Jews. I met and worked with Susannah Heschel, in conference presentations, in several articles, and in a co-edited book, Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust.3 In 2012, I summed up much of my work in Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany.4 During my academic career, the profile and study of the Holocaust have grown from a marginal to a quite central place in our educational establishment and our culture. One measure is the range of Holocaust courses now offered from middle school through college and university education. Another measure is the number of Holocaust museums and monuments now present in virtually every major city in North America. The Holocaust is also a topic widely treated in film, on television, in print, and online. Not all such ventures are of equal quality. However, I do think this spread of Holocaust awareness across our North American culture (and in Germany and much of Europe) is a good thing. It is very important to create a widespread cultural truth that the Holocaust really happened and that it was entirely unacceptable. In the 1980s, I spent six years giving statewide lectures for the Washington Commission for the Humanities (now Humanities Washington). My audience sometimes included Holocaust deniers, and cars in the parking lots were sometimes leaf leted with their claims. In 2002, I hosted my first Holocaust conference at Pacific Lutheran University.5 German and other European guests were surprised to see outside picketers holding signs, some of which denied the Holocaust and some that complained, “Hitler did not go far enough.” Clearly,

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those sentiments have not disappeared. By some measures they have increased in recent years, with white-supremacist websites and rallies, with occasional whiterobed appearances of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and with murderous attacks on synagogues. I do think our efforts must not f lag in affirming the realities of the Holocaust and holding antisemitic forces at bay.

My view of Holocaust studies in contemporary life My introduction to Holocaust studies began with a look at churches and universities in Nazi Germany. I started with the assumption that these two institutions would have been and should have been sources of opposition to the Nazi regime, and especially to the increasingly harsh treatment of Jews and other “lives unworthy of life.” I concluded, however, that German churches and universities more frequently found a way to support rather than to oppose the Third Reich. I believe that my focus on pastors and professors, on Christians, and on highly educated people gives us an important warning about “good” people gone bad. I also believe that the many ways people find to justify brutality, especially on behalf of national strength and in opposition to the danger of “others,” represent a broadly human characteristic, rather than a German one. (By the way, my viewing of events in the American South in the late 1950s and early 1960s, from the opposite corner of the United States, plus my growing critique of the Vietnam War by the late 1960s, modified my grade school version of American history and helped convince me that not only Germans can make big mistakes.) At the collapse of the Nazi regime, overwhelming evidence deeply shamed most Germans. The photos and film footage of death camps, piles of corpses, and brutally emaciated survivors spread throughout Germany and around the world. The most widespread German response was denial, not of the criminality, but of personal responsibility or participation. Blame focused on an inner core of the Nazis, those guilty of leading Germans astray or forcing them to go along. Even those who committed the murders claimed they did so under duress—they would have been shot themselves, they said, if they had not shot the Jews. Importantly, no single instance has ever been found of Germans shot (or even seriously punished) for refusing to shoot Jews or other victims. No postwar defense attorney could find an example. Recent studies, including but not limited to Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men in 1992, have all pointed the other way. I am happy to see studies that describe the few exceptions we can find of Christians in Germany who resisted the Nazi state and tried to help Jewish victims. Even fewer professors or students can be found in the opposition, with the White Rose in Munich as one exception, but I welcome acknowledging bravery and moral courage where it occurred. However, I do think that the overwhelming story in church and university involved willing and often enthusiastic complicity. It was Christian voters (especially Protestants in northern Germany) who gave Hitler the electoral support he needed to come to power.6 It was universities that enthusiastically burned books in May 1933 and turned their curriculum and

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hiring policies in a Nazified direction. They also trained the administrators and implementers of genocide, including seven PhDs among the fifteen participants at the Wannsee Conference, which organized the program of mass murder.7 Thinking back to my grandmother, I continue to value spiritual values. All three Abrahamic faiths have a version of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” All have teachings in favor of empathy and compassion. In the Christian tradition, we have Jesus teaching the “greatest” commandment: “Love God above all things and love your neighbor as yourself.” I also am an advocate of university education. I am a strong believer in the Enlightenment and its aspiration toward honest inquiry based upon factual evidence, plus democratic values, including equality across gender and race. Thomas Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident” should remain a core value, in my view, even though we have had to reject several conf licting attitudes from Jefferson’s own time and place in order to salvage the main idea that “all men and women” are indeed “created equal.”

My research on churches and universities in Nazi Germany Where do spiritual values and democratic beliefs fall short and, in that sense, go wrong? Most Christians in Germany, especially Protestants, thought they had a special place in God’s plan. It was a German, Martin Luther, who led the Protestant Reformation, taught Germans to read the Bible, and convinced them to recognize the importance of spiritual values. It was a Lutheran, Otto von Bismarck, who created a powerful, unified Germany in 1870. It was the Lutheran Kaiser Wilhelm II, also head of the Protestant church in Germany, whose push for colonies and a strong navy led to World War I, a brutal war and a lost war. Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated at the end of World War I and f led to Holland. Germany then suffered the costly and bitterly criticized Versailles Treaty. It was only at this point of crisis that democracy arrived in Germany with the creation of the Weimar Republic. Democratic values were welcomed by many on the left. Suddenly free speech, a free press, voting rights for women, full legal rights for Jews, and a government based on majority rule became reality. Critics on the nationalistic right, however, deeply resented all of it. In response to the trauma of a lost war, right-wing nationalists invented the comforting myth that Germany had been “stabbed in the back.” Germany had not really lost the war, they claimed. Instead, Germany had been undercut by “socialists and Jews” who had fatally weakened the war effort. No serious historian today would accept this opportunistic and distorted interpretation of Germany’s defeat. However, democratic values in Germany were established in defeat at a time of national humiliation rather than strength. Over the next decade, the Weimar Republic had to contend not just with a lost war, lost colonies, and German borders shrunk east and west, but also with the considerable cultural change represented by the Roaring Twenties. Germany also faced extraordinary hyperinf lation in 1922–1923 and the Great Depression, beginning

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in 1930. These crises left many Germans deeply critical of democracy which seemed to be doing them little good. Ironically, it was the democratic system of Weimar Germany and German voters that eventually made the anti-democratic Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party the strongest single force in Germany, and it was what we now see as f laws in the Weimar Constitution which allowed Hitler to grab complete power. He became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. The German Reichstag then granted him an “Enabling Act” on March 23, 1933, which handed him the emergency powers necessary to establish his dictatorship. As much as we might condemn Hitler’s subsequent crimes and abuse of power, during most of his regime, many or most Christian Germans saw these developments as a renewal of God’s plan. Most educated Germans thought Hitler was giving Germany the leadership they needed. As the historian Peter Fritzsche has written, “It should be stated clearly that Germans became Nazis because they wanted to become Nazis and because the Nazis spoke so well to their interests and inclinations.”8 That was certainly true for the theologians I studied—even though the Nazi state today is appropriately condemned by almost everyone for its racism, violence, and criminality. Paul Althaus (1888–1966) was a widely admired professor of theology at the prestigious Erlangen University. The leading Luther scholar of his day, he served as president of the international Luther Society from the mid-1920s to the mid1950s. Those of his works translated into English were assigned at Lutheran seminaries in the United States, at least into the 1960s. In 2013, Althaus’s German biographer described his career in positive terms, giving only minor attention to the Nazi era. His subtitle “Professor, Preacher and Patriot in his Time” points toward this benign interpretation.9 Is “patriot” too gentle a term to designate someone who supported the Nazi state as enthusiastically as Althaus? In 1933, he greeted the rise of Hitler with these words, “Our Protestant churches have greeted the turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle from God.”10 In 1935, Althaus added, As a Christian church we bestow no political report card. But in knowledge of the mandate of the state, we may express our thanks to God and our joyful preparedness when we see a state that after a time of depletion and paralysis has broken through to a new knowledge of sovereign authority, of service to the life of the Volk, of responsibility for the freedom, legitimacy and justice of völkisch existence. We may express our thankfulness and joyful readiness for that which manifests a will for the genuine brotherhood of blood brothers in our new order of the Volk. … We Christians know ourselves bound by God’s will to the promotion of National Socialism, so that all members of the Volk will be ready for service and sacrifice to one another.11 Althaus’s references to Volk and völkisch ref lect his leading role in a newly popular völkisch theology. This was a theology by and for Germans, in which the German

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people, the Volk, were tempted to see their place as special within God’s plan. Althaus helped give support to this ethno-nationalistic theology by creating an “orders of creation” theology, a belief that God’s intentions can be read into the present structures of human life. This outlook allowed Althaus to sanctify the traditional values and traditional elements within his own German society: the dominance of men over women, the natural order of social classes, the gaps between rich and poor, and the love Germans felt for their own nation and their fellow Germans. All of this had been created by God and should be honored as being in accord with God’s will. In this theory, Jews, of course, did not have a natural place within the German “orders of creation.” Althaus’s son, born in 1935, studied theology under his father in the 1950s and, as a young German, had become aware of his nation’s crimes. Conscience-stricken, he asked his father about German mistreatment of Jews in the Nazi era. Althaus simply replied with the unimproved prejudice of his earlier years, “You did not know the Jews.”12 Emanuel Hirsch (1888–1972), a professor of theology at Göttingen University, had been a close friend of Paul Tillich in their early years. He became a colleague and rival of Karl Barth in the 1920s, when both were members of the theological faculty at Göttingen. Among other things, Hirsch translated Kierkegaard’s works into German and wrote the definitive study of Kierkegaard for Germans of his day.13 He was widely recognized as brilliant.14 There is a “Hirsch circle” to this day, made up of postwar theology students who met privately in Hirsch’s home, since he was not allowed on campus. They are bitter that he is not given his due. In the view of at least some of them, he was the greatest theologian of the twentieth century. At the very least, they think, he should be honored as peer to Tillich and Barth. The problem, of course, is that both Barth and Tillich opposed Hitler and fled Germany. By contrast, Hirsch welcomed Hitler as the solution to Germany’s problems. Hirsch announced his support for Hitler in the Göttinger Tageblatt in April 1932, indicating his intention to vote for Hitler and encouraging others to do the same.15 In the summer of 1933, much like Althaus, Hirsch made clear his view that Adolf Hitler was a gift from God: All of us who stand in the present moment of our Volk experience it as a sunrise of divine goodness after endless dark years of wrath and misery. … We all thought we must bear it that the taking seriously of simple faith in God and the keeping holy of moral values and discipline would restrict itself to the private sphere of small circles, that the large masses of our Volk would fall into godlessness and indiscipline, separated from the Christian proclamation as by a wall. Now new hope has been given to us.16 Hirsch then made another extraordinary claim about Hitler: No other Volk in the world has a leading statesman such as ours, who takes Christianity so seriously. On 1 May when Adolf Hitler closed his great speech with a prayer, the whole world could sense the sincerity in that.17

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These statements are striking. Today most would question the sincerity of Hitler’s prayers and any hints at Christian faith. We know that Hitler had no adult connection to Christianity, and we certainly do not see “simple faith in God” and “the keeping holy of moral values” as emblematic of Nazi Germany. We might expect that Hirsch would notice this and change his mind in subsequent years. But he did not. He joined the Nazi Party. He served as dean of the Göttingen Theological Faculty from 1933 to 1939, when that position had become a political appointment, rather than a shorter term voted by one’s peers. As a secret member of the SD (Security Service) of the SS, Hirsch spied on his students and colleagues and sent sometimes damning reports to officials in Berlin.18 With Germany’s defeat in May 1945, Hirsch’s twelve-year celebration of the Nazi regime came back to haunt him. Warned by the Rektor at Göttingen, he sought and received a medical retirement, based on his near blindness. This condition had not hampered his career in prior years, but at the end of the war it protected him from immediate dismissal by British occupation forces. Then, when other Nazi professors gradually found their way back to previous professorships, Hirsch did not, neither was he ever granted the honor of emeritus status. Hirsch was only fifty-seven at the end of the war. He also was the most famous and well-published member of his theological faculty. However, his hard-bitten support for the Nazi regime stood out and made his return unwelcome. He suffered this ignominy until his death in 1972, nor is there a plaque on his home of many years, as there is for other famous professors with ties to Göttingen, including Karl Barth. Gerhard Kittel (1888–1948), a professor of New Testament in the theological faculty at Tübingen University, is still widely known as the founding editor of a major resource, the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. In the spring of 1933, he joined the Nazi Party and gave a public speech, later published as Die Judenfrage. This work accepted the seemingly absurd idea that Jews, who made up less than one percent of the German population, were a threat to destroy Germany. Kittel argued that Jews should lose their citizenship rights and be granted a lesser “guest status.” This would allow special restrictions upon Jews, ranging from a strict ban on marriage with the so-called Aryans to the removal of Jews from any significant job or position in German life. As Kittel wrote, It is not a question of whether individual Jews are respectable or disrespectable; also not a question of whether Jews are unjustly ruined, or whether that occurs justly to individuals. The Jewish question is absolutely not a question of individual Jews, but of Jewry, the Jewish Volk. And, therefore, whoever wants to get to the root of the question may not first ask what shall become of the individual Jew, but what shall become of Jewry.19 Kittel worried that Christians in particular might be sympathetic to Jewish neighbors (or, of course, to Christians of Jewish descent who worshipped next to them in church). “But,” he writes,

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we also may not become soft. … It is hard if officials, teachers and professors, who have no guilt except that they are Jewish, must move aside. … But such considerations must never lead to a sentimental softening and paralysis.20 Finally, Kittel adds, We must not allow ourselves to be crippled because the whole world screams at us of barbarism and a reversion to the past. … How the German Volk regulates its own cultural affairs does not concern anyone else in the world.21 For the next twelve years, Kittel considered himself the most important Christian expert in Germany on the “problem” of Jews. He joined the Reich Institute for History of the New Germany, an organization founded in 1935, which tried to give academic credibility to Nazi ideas. He also joined the Research Section on the Jewish Question as a charter member and became the most prolific contributor to its journal Forschungen zur Judenfrage. His six articles culminated in 1943 in Volume 7, the final published volume, produced almost entirely by Kittel. He did have some assistance from a co-author, Eugen Fischer, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Genetics in Berlin.22 Although Kittel does not mention the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, his work here resembles that infamous document forged by Russian secret police a generation earlier. His goal is to explain how Jews degenerated from the ones he was willing to admire in the Old Testament to the Jews he considered the scourge of humanity in modern times. According to Kittel, the diaspora was at fault. Living among others with no nation or soil of their own, Jews became a racially mixed, mongrel race of unethical traders and merchants. To prove that Jews were trying to take over the entire world, Kittel used the story of Esther in the Old Testament as an illustration of Jewish efforts to infiltrate and dominate the governments of other nations. As late as 1943 and 1944, despite his knowledge of the murder of Jews on the Eastern Front, Kittel praised Adolf Hitler as a twin bulwark alongside Christianity, together saving Germany from the Jewish menace.23 When French troops arrived in Tübingen in May 1945, they arrested Kittel. He never admitted fault, citing passages in the New Testament in his defense and arguing that he was no more antisemitic than Paul or Jesus. He spent seventeen months in prison, however, and was never allowed to return to his position at Tübingen or his home. He died in 1948 at the age of fifty-nine. These three theologians were among the most prominent of their generation, internationally known and widely admired. Occasionally, when I have spoken to American audiences on this topic, some have responded with the view that these theologians are not a problem for Christianity, because Althaus, Hirsch, and Kittel simply could not really have been Christians. But this defense is not credible. Each of these men recognized the difference between being a nominal

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Christian by birth and being the sort of Christian who had a personal relationship with Jesus. Each claimed to be a believing Christian who had met and accepted Jesus into his heart. Also, since I first wrote about these men, I have continued to look at churches and universities.24 My work and that of others has underscored the uncomfortable conclusion that good Christians as well as prominent German intellectuals found it easy to support the Nazi state that we condemn.

Ethno-nationalism, illiberalism and democratic values Adolf Hitler preached the greatness of Germany. He urged Germans to love only those neighbors who were truly members of the Volk. He shouted that liberal democratic values—free speech, free press, human rights—stood in the way of German greatness, as did giving in to empathy and compassion. Many Germans, including pastors and professors, agreed. They learned to revel in the hope that a strong, nationalistic, autocratic leader could marshal German pride and make Germany great again. Althaus, Hirsch, and Kittel accepted Hitler’s values. Their concern for the German people, the German Volk, convinced them they could ignore the rights and needs of others. When they read Jesus’s words, “love your neighbor as yourself,” they could not see Jews as their neighbors, or even as full human beings who possessed human rights. Nor could they see Poles, Danes, Norwegians, Belgians, Dutch, French, or Russians as their neighbors when Germany invaded these nations without cause. They disparaged the liberal values of a modern, democratic state as weakness. They were not willing to accept a free press, freedom of speech, freedom of belief, equal human rights, or the give-and-take of democratic government. Germany could be stronger and closer to its traditional roots with an autocratic leader, they thought, so they viewed Hitler as a gift from God. It seems obvious they were wrong. I hope and believe that identifying the markers on the paths they followed, as they did such damage to their reputations, and studying the Holocaust itself might help us avoid falling victim to similar temptations.

Notes 1 See Robert P. Ericksen, “Theologian in the Third Reich: The Case of Gerhard Kittel,” Journal of Contemporary History 12 (1977): 595–622. 2 Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 3 Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel, eds., Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999). 4 Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 5 I edited the papers from that conference, which appeared under the volume heading, “Christian Teachings about Jews: National Comparisons in the Shadow of the Holocaust,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 16, no. 1 (2003): 1–238. 6 See Hartmut Lehmann, Protestantischen Weltsichten: Transformationen seit dem 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1998), especially chapter VII, “Hitlers evangelische Wähler,” 130–52.

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7 See Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 18. 8 Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8. 9 Gotthard Jasper, Paul Althaus (1888–1966): Professor, Prediger und Patriot in seiner Zeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2013). 10 Paul Althaus, Die deutsche Stunde der Kirche, 3rd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1934), 5. 11 Paul Althaus, Kirche und Staat nach lutherische Lehre (Leipzig: A. Deikert, 1935), 29. 12 My interview with Pastor Gerhard Althaus, September 30, 1982. 13 See Emanuel Hirsch, Kierkegaard-Studien, 2 vols. (Gütersloh: H. Spenner, 1933). 14 On December 12, 1921, Karl Barth wrote to the Danish expert on Kierkegaard, Eduard Geismar, “For I am unfortunately not as industrious and clever as my neighbor, Hirsch, who learned Danish in an instant and can step forth as a translator.” This statement is quoted in Jens Holger Schjorring, Theologische Gewissensethik und politische Wirklichkeit: Das Beispiel Eduard Geismars und Emanuel Hirschs (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1979), 122, n. 8. 15 Emanuel Hirsch, “Ich werde Hitler wählen!,” Göttinger Tageblatt, April 9–10, 1932. 16 Emanuel Hirsch, Das kirchliche Wollen der Deutschen Christen (Berlin: M. Grevemeyer, 1933), 7. 17 Ibid., 24. 18 See my description of these matters in Theologians under Hitler, 166–76. 19 Gerhard Kittel, Die Judenfrage (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1933), 12. 20 Ibid., 61–62. 21 Ibid., 39. 22 See Gerhard Kittel and Eugen Fischer, “Das antike Weltjudentum: Tatsachen, Texte, Bilder,” Forschungen zur Judenfrage 7 (Hamburg: Hanseatischer Verlag, 1943). See my treatment of this work by Kittel and Fischer in Complicity in the Holocaust, 133–35 and 155–58. 23 See the lectures Kittel gave in Vienna on March 22, 1943, “Die Entstehung des Judentum,” and on June 15, 1944, “Das Rassenproblem der Spätantike und das Frühchristentum,” which I found as manuscript copies in the theological library at Tübingen University. 24 See especially Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust. Bibliography Althaus, Paul. Die Deutsche Stunde der Kirche, 3rd ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1934. ———. Kirche und Staat nach lutherische Lehre. Leipzig: A. Deikert, 1935. Ericksen, Robert P. Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ———. “Theologian in the Third Reich: The Case of Gerhard Kittel.” Journal of Contemporary History 12, no. 3 (1977): 595–622. ———. Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. ———. ed. “Christian Teachings About Jews: National Comparisons in the Shadow of the Holocaust.” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 16, no. 1 (2003): 1–238. Ericksen, Robert P., and Susannah Heschel, eds. Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999. Fritzsche, Peter. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Hirsch, Emanuel. “Ich werde Hitler wählen!” Göttinger Tageblatt, April 9–10, 1932.

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———. Kierkegaard-Studien, 2 vols. Gütersloh: H. Spenner, 1933. ———. Das kirchliche Wollen der Deutschen Christen. Berlin: M. Grevemeyer, 1933. Jasper, Gotthard. Paul Althaus (1888–1966): Professor, Prediger und Patriot in Seiner Zeit. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2013. Kittel, Gerhard. Die Judenfrage. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1933. Kittel, Gerhard, and Eugen Fischer. “Das antike Weltjudentum: Tatsachen, Texte, Bilder.” Forschungen zur Judenfrage 7. Hamburg: Hanseatischer Verlag, 1943. Lehmann, Hartmut. Protestantischen Weltsichten: Transformationen seit dem, 17. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1998. Schjorring, Jens Holger. Theologische Gewissensethik und Politische Wirklichkeit: Das Beispiel Eduard Geismars und Emanuel Hirschs. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1979. Wildt, Michael. An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office. Translated by Tom Lampert. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

11 MY UNORTHODOX PATH Toward integrative, interdisciplinary, and comparative Holocaust studies Wolf Gruner

Advancing Holocaust studies raises challenging questions. To explain why so many people participated in the destruction of the European Jews should scholars and teachers concentrate on beliefs and ideologies or focus on human actions and societal conditions? Should the perpetrators or their victims receive most of the attention? Does the field of Holocaust studies suffer from oversimplifications? Does it need to be liberated from disciplinary confinement and historical isolation? What can and what shall Holocaust studies teach us?

An unorthodox path As our perspectives on life are shaped by our upbringing, socialization, and societal surroundings, so are our academic interests and methodological approaches. Questions like those above arose for me from a personal journey that was unorthodox in decisive ways. Growing up behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) profoundly inf luenced the course of my life and my scholarship on the Holocaust. Personal experiences under a dictatorship gave me motivation and methodological insights for my studies. When I was growing up as part of the socialist middle-class establishment, challenging East Germany and its policies was unthinkable. But in eighth grade, I started to see cracks in the polished socialist image of an infallible state. One hot school day, our Russian language teacher from Moscow became angry when the unruly class requested early dismissal. She singled me out and demanded my immediate expulsion. Calling me a fascist, she threatened the principal that she would inform the Soviet embassy about me. My parents intervened, pleading with the superintendent that I had never done anything wrong and was one of the best students. A compromise allowed me to finish tenth grade but not high school.

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After I graduated second best in my tenth-grade class, I started a printing apprenticeship that was combined with the pursuit of a high school degree, which was an educational option to boost the GDR working class. At my vocational school, I met students interested in the arts. Others came from families critical of the East German regime. Witnessing the punishment of fellow students who displayed the “swords to plowshares” symbols of the church-based peace movement on their clothes, I started writing critical poems and short stories. At the same time, I encountered racist prejudices among East Germans. When I was dating my first love, who was half-German and half-Vietnamese, I frequently heard racist slurs directed at her. Her visible distress made me feel furious and helpless. Such experiences ended up galvanizing my scholarly work. Where did such racist behavior come from? It directly contradicted the Communists’ declared agenda of equality. While working day and night shifts in a printing house, I began to educate myself about the origins of racism. In the early 1980s, most books on this topic focused on Nazism and offered one simple explanation: discrimination against a people is driven by a state-sponsored ideology. Yet it seemed in the GDR that nothing could be further from the truth. Everywhere, one could find banners with the slogan “workers of the world unite” or posters promoting solidarity with people in Africa, Asia, or the Americas. In daily life, however, state or party officials often made dismissive comments about foreigners. In addition, the state cracked down on “enemies” of the regime, including anyone who allegedly thought or looked “different”— political dissidents, for example, or hippies and punks. The Stasi, the GDR secret police, and regular police stopped and interrogated those “enemies” in public, as I experienced firsthand. Such displays of hostile state attitudes against foreigners and outsiders emboldened ordinary East Germans to express prejudices openly. One day, when I was waiting at a train station, with my hair hippie-style long and wearing a parka, a group harassed me by shouting that people like me would be better off in Sachsenhausen (the former Nazi concentration camp near Berlin). I heard similar stories from other outsiders, whom I frequently met in East Berlin’s cultural “underground,” where defiant artists, homosexuals, and dissidents clandestinely gathered for private exhibitions, concerts, political discussions, and parties. Disturbed by these personal experiences and unable to explain them, I decided to study on my own the real reasons for the emergence of racist attitudes by focusing on the prime German example: the history of the Holocaust. At first, probably because of my engagement in dissident circles, Berlin’s Humboldt University rejected my application. For help, I approached the historian Kurt Pätzold, the only professor in East Germany who was researching the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and after two years, the university admitted me in 1984. Almost twenty-four, continuing to move in dissident circles and with several years of work experience under my belt, I had developed a deep skepticism toward all dominant ideologies and schools of thought. Although studying the

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Third Reich was common in the GDR, academic lessons tended to concentrate on the fascist ideology and imperialist structure of the dictatorship as well as on communist resistance to the Nazis. The persecution of the Jews was scarcely acknowledged in East German academia. Its emergence was explained as a Nazi capitalist distraction of the masses. By contrast, Pätzold’s classes introduced me to a more complex understanding of the events since 1933 and obliged me to study original documents from the period of the Holocaust. At the East Berlin municipal archive, I found letters dealing with the coerced recruitment of unemployed Jews that was organized by German labor offices after 1938. The discovery led to my diploma thesis topic. Since scholars had ignored this aspect of the persecution, I was able to publish the unknown sources in the East German historical journal, a rare opportunity for an undergraduate student. I graduated from Humboldt University in June 1989, and my research on the origins of Jewish forced labor in Nazi Germany received the Alfred Meusel Prize for the best history thesis of that year. But because I had resisted becoming a member of the Socialist Party, and once had almost been expelled from the university for opposing orders, the history department ranked me only sixth for its three PhD fellowships. Then, during the stormy autumn of 1989, the head of state Erich Honecker lost his power, the history department abruptly revised its view, and I received a PhD fellowship to extend my studies on Jewish forced labor. Witnessing the lightning-fast change of East German minds after the GDR collapsed in 1989–1990, a time when many people chose material benefits and freedom to travel instead of forty years of socialist ideals, provided me with fresh perspectives on 1933. Rather than solely a product of indoctrination and propaganda, the mass participation of Germans in the Nazi project might also have been driven by private interests and shared goals. Just a year into my dissertation project another unexpected turn occurred. After German unification, my “doctor father” Kurt Pätzold at the Humboldt University convinced me to do my PhD with Wolfgang Benz, director of the Center for the Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University in West Berlin, to prevent my becoming a victim of the looming West German colonization of East German academia. Pätzold was right. Soon, many of the East German scholars at Humboldt University were fired or retired. West Germans took their places. As I know now, after forming close relationships with my own graduate students, to hand over a promising student to another advisor could not have been easy. Pätzold’s self less act showed foresight and opened paths in my academic life. While Benz accepted me as his student without any hesitation, my research proved to be difficult. Almost all German labor offices had destroyed their records at the end of the war. To fill this void, I started to locate documents in the holdings of partner institutions, and I conducted interviews with survivors, which was rare for German historians to do at the time. Based on archival work

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in reunified Germany, Austria, Israel, and the United States, my dissertation research established forced labor as an essential element of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany after 1938. Besides investigating this neglected program in detail, the study also highlighted the hitherto equally ignored yet important role of local and regional administrations in the persecution of the Jews. After successfully defending my dissertation in 1994, I worked at a research institute, and at the same time helped to mount the 1933–1945 part of a new exhibition on the Jewish history of Berlin at the “Topography of Terror” memorial site. Research on the capital of the Third Reich gave me a detailed look into the role of one specific municipality in the formulation and radicalization of anti-Jewish policies. At this point, I had decided against a regular academic career. In the hierarchical German system, entry-level university faculty are “assistants”; they do research for the established professors. While living first on unemployment benefits and later on research grants was a much riskier path, it allowed me to pursue my own Holocaust research. At this time, an international debate about compensating victims of Nazi forced labor had emerged. The German government invited me to join its expert commission, where I lobbied for the recognition of the hitherto neglected Jewish forced labor outside of concentration camps and ghettos. During the international discussion about compensation of Nazi victims, one could often read that Eastern bloc countries had not accepted their responsibility for the Holocaust. However, an honest look revealed a similar situation for Western Europe. Since the end of the war, France and the Netherlands, for example, promoted views that were similar to socialist countries such as Czechoslovakia and Poland by presenting themselves as victims of Nazi occupation and focusing on their nations’ anti-Nazi resistance while obfuscating how their population had participated in and benefitted from the persecution of the Jews. Such memory politics created many different Holocausts.1 In the 1990s, the opening of Eastern European archives, an expanding internationalization of Holocaust studies, and a new generation of scholars with questions of their own challenged simplistic understandings of the Shoah. Fueled by a deep skepticism toward dominant schools as well as supported by insights gained from personal experiences of the functioning of a dictatorship, my own studies collided with standard Holocaust paradigms and contributed to questioning traditional views. Like young historians who focused on regional developments in occupied Poland, my research on city governments in Germany and Austria revealed that anti-Jewish policies were not developed top-down, but rather in a mutual dynamic between center and periphery and between local and central authorities. My comparative study on the exclusion of poor Jews from public welfare in various cities demonstrated the important role of mayors and municipal department heads in initiating and radicalizing Nazi policy. Surprisingly, some of the most radical city officials were not members of the Nazi Party, which complicated conventional views about perpetrators.

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A history of choices Since the 1990s, researchers have concentrated on character, socialization, generation, social standing, and belief systems as explanations for perpetrator behavior. Group dynamics and, more recently, war duties perceived as labor have played an increasing role in discussions about the motivations for mass murder.2 Although the results of perpetrator research have greatly enriched our views, one fundamental question still looms large: Why did hundreds of thousands of men and women participate in persecution, plunder, and murder? One often overlooked factor is that the Nazi regime offered careers, power, and enhanced reputations for many young Germans, including non-Nazis, as part and parcel of a “revolution” against the democratic establishment. In 1933, for instance, twenty-nine-year-old Dr. Kurt Jeserich suddenly led more than two hundred employees as the director of the new German Council of Municipalities. During the war, a Hamburg entrepreneur with a small company headed one of the biggest ghetto administrations. Small town mayors ran large cities in occupied Poland. Countless lifetime opportunities made the Third Reich attractive for many, erased individual concerns, and produced grateful loyalty, and not just in Germany proper. During the past twenty years, research, including my own, has demonstrated that many leading officials had more leeway to act than the traditional view of a top-down dictatorship has allowed us to see. While municipal housing departments in Leipzig and Dresden established “Jew houses” in 1939 to separate Jewish tenants, Hannover only followed suit in 1941. Unlike Prague and Vienna, Berlin seems never to have fully implemented such a segregation policy, although all three capitals dealt with large numbers of Jewish tenants. Room for maneuvering at all levels was an important factor in the radicalization and productivity, as well as in the complexities and contradictions, of the Nazi regime’s policies. As I know from personal experience under a dictatorship, choices had to be made on a daily basis depending on situations, relationships, and dependencies. Many scholars simply assumed that most Germans welcomed the exclusion of Jews from the “people’s community.” Yet, the complex intersections of external conditions and individual experiences could result in decisions that ran contrary to expected behavior. One example: In summer 1939, Ludwig Lenz, a merchant in Berlin, filed a complaint with the police against a Jewish woman who lived in the basement of his apartment building. He blamed Miss Salz for refusing to hand over her shop to him in 1937 and supposedly hampering his new business, for committing “race defilement,” and for spreading venereal diseases. The police dropped the case after they interrogated the neighbors, and all of the tenants, including several Nazi Party members, expressed solidarity with the elderly Jewish woman, an unexpected response after six years of Nazi rule. This case and others challenge the conventional view of an all-encompassing participation in the persecution of Jews and allow room for the complexities that determine daily life in a dictatorship. Since 1933, Germans saw themselves

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constantly confronted with discrimination and violence. There was no way to stay indifferent. Police and court records reveal that Germans frequently debated anti-Jewish policies, whether in private with relatives and friends or in public with neighbors, colleagues, and strangers. Surprisingly, the critical voices reached their crescendo not during the regime’s early years but at the height of Nazi success in 1938, when fear of war was rising. Such evidence contradicts the common belief in the people’s growing conformity due to Nazi indoctrination.

Interdisciplinary history Changing political, economic, social, and psychological conditions inf luence an individual’s attitudes and behavior. They foster or decrease the enthusiasm about a political project or the loyalty to a state; they can enhance or limit support or resistance. Personal relationships and networks have a similar impact on individual choices and actions, as sociological studies have demonstrated. Decades ago, while investigating personal relationships and social networks, sociologist Mark Granovetter made a case for the importance of “weak ties” with neighbors, acquaintances, and work mates.3 Many of these “weak” relationships, he argued, serve better than “strong ties” to mobilize resources and facilitate access to information. The latter, focused on a limited number of family and friends, would be more important to confirm or challenge personal choices. Granovetter’s approach could be productively applied to the analysis of actions during the Holocaust, especially regarding resistance and rescue. The complex picture of relationships is evident in the study of Berlin wartime rescue networks for Jews, in which the sociologist Susanne Beer pointed out that someone who was directly approached by a victim with a rescue request would more likely respond positively, regardless of socialization, beliefs, and generation.4 This affirmative reaction might be applicable equally to cases when Germans and other people were asked to participate in persecution and murder. Recent efforts to explore the potential of digital humanities have opened further opportunities for Holocaust studies to raise new questions, including, for example, issues about the value of relationships for survival. Using the massive metadata (including Geographic Information System analysis) of more than fiftythree thousand Holocaust survivor testimonies at the USC Shoah Foundation, the “geographer collective,” consisting of historians, art historians, and geographers, can address such matters in ways that go well beyond the anecdotal evidence that heretofore characterized Holocaust studies. Did sticking with family in the transports and camps create better survival chances than bonding with Jews from the same place of origin or linking up with strangers, who became new friends? By following thousands of individual deportation trajectories, interdisciplinary teams can investigate the kinds of social networks that gave the individual Jewish deportee the best chances for survival. Research results and methodological possibilities from disciplines other than history need to be taken seriously to advance Holocaust studies. Rather than

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limiting study to character or origin to detect motives for perpetration or rescue, as traditional historical interpretations have often done, I suggest we benefit from broader insights and study individual actions during the Holocaust through at least five perspectives, each of which entails interdisciplinary analysis: (1) the individual situation, which is determined by available options and the immediate access to resources; (2) the personal constellation, which refers to a person’s relationships and networks; (3) the contemporary context, which is shaped by local, national, and international conditions and politics; (4) personal interests, either non-material or material, but also corporate and institutional; and (5) the risks for the actors, their families and friends.

Integrative history Neither perpetrator nor resister actions should be investigated in isolation. They are intertwined and interdependent. The often-contradictory development of local and central anti-Jewish measures raises questions about how such diverse policies affected the Jewish population and how the latter responded, individually and collectively. For too long, the false assumption of the passive suffering of the Jews has prevented analysis of the many acts of Jewish resistance. An archive in Berlin contains more than thirty logbooks from various Naziera police precincts. Before moving to the University of Southern California in 2008, I spent several months exploring these rare, unstudied sources. Among thousands of police officers’ handwritten diary entries about drunk people, stolen bicycles, lost keys, and arrested exhibitionists, some astonishing evidence emerged: dozens of Jewish men and women had been apprehended for public protest against Nazi persecution.5 Previously, Holocaust historians understood resistance primarily in terms of organized or armed group activities, and thus mostly neglected individual acts of opposition. Although moral and spiritual resistance had been discussed since the end of the war, especially in Israel, individual Jewish acts of resistance, such as public protest, were missing in prominent Holocaust narratives, surprisingly even in books that focused on the integration of Jewish voices.6 However, based on my personal experiences in East Germany, it seemed impossible to ignore the wide range of individual oppositional acts in a dictatorship. Hence, working with older ideas and building on a definition by the historian Yehuda Bauer, I (re)defined resistance as “any individual or group action in opposition to known laws, actions, or intentions of the Nazis and their collaborators.”7 With this new broader perspective, my research on Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia unearthed an array of individual Jewish reactions to the changing forms of oppression since 1933: from destroying Nazi propaganda and fighting economic exclusion to defying anti-Jewish measures, protesting in public, and using physical self-defense. Only with an action-centered, comparative, micro-historical approach toward resistance, which includes individual responses, will we be able to write a truly integrative history of the Holocaust.

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Comparative history Comparative Holocaust history should not be limited to the territories annexed or occupied by Nazi Germany or even to the European continent. The investigation of other instances of mass violence in world history helps to challenge and revise assumptions about the Holocaust. However, for a time, the emerging field of genocide studies was consumed with debates about the definition of genocide and the proper application of that term. At the same time, Holocaust studies was ensnared in debates about the Holocaust’s “uniqueness.” But especially in the past fifteen years, scholars have demonstrated how genocidal societies develop similar concepts of homogenization, tools of persecution, and forms of mass murder.8 Striking similarities to aspects of Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish policies can also be found in non-genocidal cases, such as South Africa, the United States during the Jim Crow era, and Bolivia.9 In ways akin to Nazi Germany’s pre-genocidal policies, the postcolonial Bolivian Republic excluded Ayamara and Quechua from politics, citizenship, education, and public spaces and exploited them as forced laborers. Even extermination fantasies against the indigenous majority population emerged among the white creole elites in Bolivia at the end of the nineteenth century. These realities raise an important question: Why didn’t mass murder take place in Bolivia when the conditions we usually find in genocidal states—racist ideology, fierce segregation, and sufficient political power—dominated there? The comparative study of mass violence makes us reevaluate fixed assumptions about what causes genocide, including Nazi Germany’s assault on the European Jews. Equally, comparative studies help to inform or trigger new methodological approaches in Holocaust studies. For example, the discovery of a trove of indigenous petitions in Bolivian archives, which revealed those people’s voices and resistance to oppression, made me rethink how we had carelessly discounted thousands of petitions authored by Jews during the Holocaust, regarding them as written in vain. This outside perspective forced a reevaluation of Jewish entreaties as a form of resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe.10 Analysis of religion is another area where comparative research has much to teach us about the Holocaust and other genocides. Scholars in Holocaust studies tend to lament that, with a few exceptions, Protestant and Catholic churches supported or appeased Hitler. But Christian support for a genocidal Third Reich cannot be too surprising. As illustrated by the destruction of indigenous peoples during the Spanish conquest of the Americas and during the westward expansion of the United States, Christianity has a long history in fostering genocide. Nor is Christianity exceptional among religions in supporting or fueling genocide as demonstrated by the role of Islam in the 1915–1916 extermination of the Christian Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Buddhism in the 2016 assault on the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar. Rather than dwelling on the failure of one religion to stand up against mass violence, as Holocaust studies has often done, comparative analysis helps to show how and why religious institutions often do not resist and how and why religions are used as vehicles to serve genocidal political aims.

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In addition, an emphasis on the Third Reich’s anti-Jewish ideology dominates Holocaust studies in ways that underplay other factors—economic interests, for example, or competition for resources—in the radicalization of mass violence. During the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, but also during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, security concerns and the need to feed armies off the land, as well as fierce racism, drove mass murder. Holocaust and genocide studies complement, reinforce, and challenge each other. Comparative studies make it crystal clear: mass violence against perpetrator-defined groups of people was not an invention unique to Hitler. Rather, such violence constitutes a basic pattern of societal behavior in world history. Comparative approaches help to advance Holocaust studies by liberating that field from isolationism.

Advancing means transforming Advancing Holocaust studies means transforming that field so that it becomes interdisciplinary, integrative, and comparative. Presently, when democracy is under threat, the discipline of Holocaust studies needs more than ever to explain how and why a democratic German society collapsed into an authoritarian regime. Instead of simply emphasizing ideological fanaticism, we need to identify the complex motives that led Germans and many others in Nazi Europe to join and drive the persecution, expropriation, and ultimately the murder of the European Jews if we want to understand the massive and swift reorientation of the people after 1933. Could that reorientation and its outcomes have been prevented? Why does mass violence evolve in some societies, yet not in others? To what end do we study the Holocaust if we fail to answer such questions? Traditional, isolationist studies of the Holocaust are not sufficiently equipped to deal with those pressing issues. Insights and methods from other disciplines, and particularly from genocide studies, illuminate the complex social and political processes leading to authoritarianism and genocide. Such a broader approach helps us to understand better the often-contradictory local politics, personal relationships, and economic interests that inf luence people’s behavior more than ideology and media propaganda. Dictatorships suppress individual freedom and human rights. Despite this known fact, all over the world, democratic societies have recently been dismantled step by step, and a growing number of people support authoritarian politicians and regimes. Holocaust memorials and decades of teaching “the lessons of the Holocaust” have not been sufficient to block these dangerous political developments. Transformed Holocaust studies can help to demonstrate why people are attracted to authoritarian politics. But that contribution cannot take place unless the field of Holocaust studies changes so that education and educators are liberated from reductionist and, in all honesty, naive thinking that teaching tolerance and non-discriminatory ideologies will rid the world of racist attitudes and “hate” and thus prevent authoritarian societies and mass murder.

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Beholden to untransformed Holocaust studies, education about the Holocaust suffers from a widely neglected inherent antagonism: the claim of the uniqueness of the Nazi annihilation of the European Jews versus the promotion of the lesson of “never again.” Transformed Holocaust studies provides a solution by diving into discussions about personal interests, responsibilities, and choices, which show how decisions by German people shaped their society during the Nazi era, and by reminding students today that they are building their societies and the future. Such inquiries will make students understand that a transition to authoritarianism is not a result of “evil” forces armed with propaganda that brainwashes people, but an outcome of a deliberate political, social, and cultural process, not only driven by a group seeking to seize power over a society but also dependent on the decisions made on a daily basis by the members of this very society. Authoritarian developments depend on the willing cooperation of many people, individuals and groups, who decide that the changes serve their interests. Transformed Holocaust studies aims to revise Holocaust education so that teaching and learning highlight the material and immaterial attractions as well as the social and political dependencies that make people susceptible to strongman politics and dictatorships. Holocaust studies and education must leave behind the apologetic German postwar notion that the Third Reich’s existence was enabled by indifference or bystanding of the German population and illuminate instead the hitherto neglected leeway to act that all individuals exercised in Nazi Europe, be it in private settings or in public at their work places or in political functions. Then and now, people make choices on a daily basis to support or oppose democracy or authoritarianism and to support or oppose policies that lead to persecution and mass violence. Transformed Holocaust studies and the education promoted by that field underscore alternatives in history. The political and social processes that lead toward authoritarian rule are avoidable; they can be stopped, and they can be reversed. Such an alternative course of action depends on the personal responsibility of every individual in authoritarian regimes as well as in endangered democracies. Transformed, the field of Holocaust studies thus speaks to everybody. We now know that thousands of Jewish men and women individually contested Nazi persecution. Even under the most cruel circumstances, Jews were able to resist. Thus, transformed Holocaust studies’ main lesson for the 2020s and beyond may well be that there is no excuse: everyone has the individual possibility—indeed, responsibility—to oppose authoritarian developments. There is a choice and an alternative.

Notes 1 On this point, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), esp. viii–ix, and also Young’s chapter in this volume. 2 See, for example, Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996); Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert

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(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldiers: German POWs on Fighting, Killing, and Dying, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Vintage Books, 2013). Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80. See Susanne Beer, Die Banalität des Guten: Hilfeleistungen für jüdische Verfolgte 1941– 1945 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2018). Wolf Gruner, “Defiance and Protest: A Comparative Micro-Historical Re-evaluation of Individual Jewish Responses towards Nazi Persecution,” in Microhistories of the Holocaust, ed. Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 209– 26. See also the discussion about Jewish resistance in Wolf Gruner, The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses (New York: Berghahn, 2019). See, for example, Saul Friedländer’s two volumes: Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997) and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Wolf Gruner, “The Germans Should Expel the Foreigner Hitler: Protest and Other Forms of Jewish Defiance in Nazi Germany,” Yad Vashem Studies 39, no. 2 (2011): 18. For Bauer’s original definition, see Yehuda Bauer, “Forms of Jewish Resistance,” in The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, ed. Donald L. Niewyk, 4th ed. (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2011), 151. See, for example, Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006) and Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). See Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), James Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), and Wolf Gruner, Parias de la Patria: El mito de la liberación de los indígenas en la República de Bolivia (1825–1890) (La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 2015). See Thomas Pegelow Kaplan and Wolf Gruner, eds., Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn, 2020).

Bibliography Bauer, Yehuda. “Forms of Jewish Resistance.” In The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed., 150–65. Edited by Donald L. Niewyk. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2011. Beer, Susanne. Die Banalität Des Guten: Hilfeleistungen für jüdische Verfolgte 1941–1945. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2018. Bloxham, Donald, and A. Dirk Moses, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Clark, Nancy L., and William H. Worger. South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. ———. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Goldhagen, Daniel J. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 1996.

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Granovetter, Mark S. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80. Gruner, Wolf. “Defiance and Protest. A Comparative Micro-Historical Re-Evaluation of Individual Jewish Responses Towards Nazi Persecution.” In Microhistories of the Holocaust, 209–26. Edited by Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann. New York: Berghahn, 2017. ———. “The Germans Should Expel the Foreigner Hitler: Protest and Other Forms of Jewish Defiance in Nazi Germany.” Yad Vashem Studies 39, no. 2 (2011): 13–53. ———. The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses. New York: Berghahn, 2019. ———. Parias de la Patria: El mito de la liberación de los indígenas en la República de Bolivia (1825–1890). La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 2015. Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006. Kaplan, Thomas Pegelow, and Wolf Gruner, eds. Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust. New York: Berghahn, 2020. Neitzel, Sönke, and Harald Welzer. Soldiers: German POWs on Fighting, Killing, and Dying. Translated by Jefferson Chase. New York: Vintage, 2013. Whitman, James. Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Wildt, Michael. An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office. Translated by Tom Lampert. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

12 A STONE UNDER THE WHEEL OF HISTORY Lisa Moses Leff

In late 1942, after most of the other Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had been murdered, writer Gustawa Jarecka summoned her strength to fight the Nazis with the weapon she knew best: her pen. The essay she wrote miraculously survived the ghetto’s destruction in a milk can secretly buried underground as part of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archive. For Jarecka and her Oyneg Shabes colleagues, assembling firsthand evidence of Nazi crimes and saving it for posterity was a form of resistance. Increasingly certain that none of them was likely to survive, they worked tirelessly to document Jewish experiences in the ghetto so that the story of Nazi destruction could be told from the point of view of the victims, not the perpetrators. Although starved and miserable, she and her fellow contributors put everything they had into the project. It was, she wrote, their way to “a stone under history’s wheel.”1 Gustawa Jarecka did not survive the Nazi onslaught; she was murdered in Treblinka in 1943. But her essay was found when one of the Oyneg Shabes milk cans was recovered in 1950. The fact that it and other Oyneg Shabes archive documents are today widely used by historians writing about the Holocaust is the result of many strokes of luck: that a few members of the collaborative survived; that they were able to locate the milk cans beneath the rubble that had once been the ghetto; and that most of the contents were still intact and legible. But the fulfillment of Jarecka’s wish to tell the story of Jewish suffering is the result of a much more deliberate shift in how the scholars who conduct research in this field understand the purpose of their work. While the wheel of history still certainly turns—historians in many fields still write history from the self-justifying point of view of the victors—Holocaust studies is one of the fields in which scholars have worked to do something different. Since its emergence during the Holocaust itself in projects like the Oyneg Shabes archive, Holocaust studies has

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positioned itself as “a stone under history’s wheel,” using the scholar’s toolkit to describe and understand past crimes and even, for many scholars, to serve as a call for vigilance against similar threats that still exist.

History as a form of resistance I came to be invested in Holocaust studies because I found its mission deeply compelling. It connects me not only to people like Jarecka but to her mentors as well. The particular version of the Holocaust historian’s mission that inspired her—and me—has its roots in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe, where Ringelblum and other Jewish historians associated with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research embraced a form of “history from below.” YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Yiddish Scientific Institute) was established in 1925. It became the leading institution for scholarship in Yiddish and about the history and culture of East European Jews and their emigrant communities. Inspired by the democratic political movements in the Jewish world of the day, YIVO scholars valued ordinary Jewish people’s experiences, even when they added up to a very different story than the powers that be would have liked, because they revealed the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful. In this sense, YIVO’s historical and social scientific work was a nationalist as well as a democratic project, not unlike those of scholars in other East European nations— Czechoslovakia, for example, or Poland—looking to be recognized as legitimate in the interwar era.2 But during the Holocaust itself, and increasingly in its wake, this dedication to history as a form of resistance to power took on new meaning and force and evolved into something much more powerful. Documentation centers sprang up across the Jewish world like wildf lowers after a storm, and their researchers dedicated their lives to gathering the evidence of Nazi crimes with a focus on Jewish suffering that went far beyond what postwar trials and restitution processes had done. Some founded small research institutes that operated independently of universities and operated on shoestring budgets. They included Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute, Paris’s Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Haifa’s Institute for the Documentation of Nazi Crimes, and Austria’s Jewish Documentation Center. Independent scholars such as Joseph Wulf in Berlin and Zosa Szajkowski in New York also made important contributions to the burgeoning field.3 Most of these scholars understood the challenge their field posed to the accepted “truths” of the day, as their commitments often entailed conclusions that brought them into conf lict with the victors (and sometimes, surviving Jewish leaders). A few, including Simon Wiesenthal in Austria and Tuvia Friedman in Haifa, went so far as to use their research to participate in the tracking and capture of Nazi war criminals who had escaped prosecution by the opportunistic victors. I admire these scholars for their independence of mind and their dedication to the cause of the oppressed, even when it meant working without much in the

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way of material support. They were dedicated to the highest standards of academic professionalism, careful to base all their claims on documentary evidence. Some were pioneers of the judicious use of victims’ testimonies for scholarship as well. For all their dedication to academic norms, however, for the most part they were working outside of traditional academic settings like universities and even Jewish research centers.4

Emerging from the shadows Institutional isolation was not the only reason for these scholars’ lack of participation in mainstream conversations in Jewish history and European history for the first forty or so years after the end of the war. As David Engel has argued, most Jewish historians working within the mainstream academic institutions of seminaries and university-based Jewish studies programs in Israel, the United States, and Europe ignored the Holocaust or minimized its centrality. (In fact, as Engel argued in 2009, most working in this field still minimize its importance to Jewish history—something that has changed to some degree since his book’s publication, but not entirely.) This gap, he argues, exists largely because the guiding ideological assumptions of scholars in the field, be they Zionist or assimilationist, have made the Holocaust appear as either outside their purview (i.e., simply a German story) or, even more surprisingly, unimportant in the scheme of Jewish history as just another example of persecution.5 Similarly, for some time, German historiography failed to incorporate the Holocaust. Although the Third Reich quickly became an important topic of study following the Nazi rise to power, few scholars in that field devoted their attention to the destruction of the Jews, nor did they recognize its centrality to Nazi aims. Even fewer German historians sought to understand the deep roots of the “Final Solution” in German history, although many did explore the question of the roots of other aspects of Nazism, such as its authoritarianism and its imperial ambitions. This approach did not really change until the Historikerstreit, the German controversy in the 1980s about how Nazi Germany and the Holocaust should be remembered.6 In Eastern European historical traditions under communism, the study of World War II did not involve any attention to the specific fate of the Jews but rather focused on the struggle of those in the conquered nations against the Germans. In Western European countries, the situation was not very different. The overall result was that until the 1980s and 1990s, Holocaust studies was a small field with limited resources, cut off from the surrounding fields of history where its impact should have been felt. Far from the stone under the wheel of history that Jarecka and her colleagues had imagined, the Holocaust and its victims had little effect on how scholars and their students understood the world from which it had emerged and the postwar histories which it shaped. And yet, there were some scholars within the academy who recognized that knowledge of the Holocaust and its root causes was a fundamental challenge to basic assumptions in their fields. In the aftermath of the war, refugee philosophers

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and social theorists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse wrote about the particular dynamics of human psychology, social and economic life, and cultural production that gave rise to fascism and Nazism rather than to human liberation. In the 1960s and 1970s, social psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo pioneered new ways of thinking about authority, peer pressure, and science that changed the way scholars and students thought about modern social norms and values. Philosopher Hannah Arendt advanced similar arguments in her reporting from the Eichmann trial in 1963, arousing much controversy by writing that the Holocaust was less a moral aberration than the result of instrumental reasoning in the “dark times” of modern life. As Holocaust consciousness began to emerge from the shadows in the 1980s, social theorist Zygmunt Bauman further developed these arguments with his claims that the Holocaust was not a return to a barbaric past, but rather fully a product of modernity, built by men dedicated to science and technology, and facilitated by modern tools, including, importantly, bureaucracy itself. These theorists were not historians, and their theories were not based on documentary evidence but rather philosophical argumentation and psychological experiments. Even so, like their predecessors in the documentation centers, these philosophers and social scientists understood the study of the Holocaust to be by its nature disruptive and used it to critique the fundamental pillars of modern life.7 Such perspectives eventually came to inform conversations among German, European, and Jewish historians when they began to grapple more directly with the Holocaust, seeking to explain its roots and its impact. Eventually, many German historians took the issues raised by these scholars to heart and, since the 1990s, have set out on new research paths that made the Holocaust much more central to their work.8 The same trend can now be observed in the national and transnational historiographies of the other countries in Europe where the Holocaust took place, as well as in Jewish historiography. The f lowering of Holocaust studies since the 1990s has not only greatly expanded our knowledge of the variety of experiences, causes, and results of the Holocaust; it has also led to a fundamental questioning of many long-held historiographical assumptions about the decline of prejudice in democratic societies; about secularism; about the ethics of science, bureaucracy, and technology; and about the efficacy of international law to maintain peace. Indeed, much of Holocaust studies today could certainly be described as “a stone under history’s wheel.”

Disruptive power My passion for Holocaust studies is, at core, about its disruptive power. To me, what’s special about this field is how its scholars seek to give voice to the victims and to challenge the most basic assumptions of the histories that justify the perspective of the victors at the expense of everyone else. I am impressed by researchers who have demonstrated the persistence and even acceleration of prejudice and persecution in modernity and have sought to account for it.

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I came to this field from my work on the Jews in nineteenth-century France, focusing on the non-linear path of Jewish modernization. My interest in that subject—and in approaching it with the intent to disrupt long-held assumptions about historical “progress” that ignore the history of the oppressed—has roots in my personal history and intellectual development. As a teen, I spent a year as an exchange student in Alsace, living with a family that was profoundly generous in taking me into their home but deeply uncomfortable with my Jewishness. (Memorably, when I was fasting for Yom Kippur, my host father told me that refusing to be like everyone else was the reason that so few Jews were left in Alsace.) Having grown up in suburban northern Virginia, I had not had experiences like this one before, at least not directly. But stories from my parents had, in a certain way, prepared me, and comfortable though I had been growing up Jewish in postwar America, I was not surprised that antisemitism still lurked. The question was why, and how to understand its existence today. Was it a medieval Christian prejudice that modernity had not yet entirely conquered? Or was what I was experiencing but the tip of something that was, in fact, a feature of modernity itself, and in that sense, possibly getting worse rather than better? My parents had always put these types of questions about antisemitism into a larger context when we had discussed them. From their point of view, antisemitism was the European version of the racism I had grown up noticing all around me, including in the halls of my high school, which had admitted African American students only a little over a decade before I started there. My parents had come to Virginia from New York in the era of the civil rights movement, eager to make a difference in the world. Their commitment to antiracism had everything to do with their Jewishness, and with their belief that prejudice against Jews and prejudice against African Americans were fundamentally linked in some larger logic of oppression still to be overcome. My mother was also a feminist and a women’s studies scholar, an expert on the history of European feminism. To her thinking, sexism too was connected to these other forms of prejudice and oppression, and that insight also informed the way I understood what happened to me in Alsace. But it was not just my parents’ voices that shaped my thinking that year. I had also heard other theories about antisemitism growing up, ones that were far less universalistic. I’m not sure how they came to me—perhaps in things I had read or in conversations I’d had along the way. The explanation that haunted me the most was the possibility that antisemitism was unique and different from other types of prejudice, somehow emerging wherever Jews lived. Another scary possibility was that this uniquely vicious prejudice was endemic in Europe, where Jews had lived as hated outsiders for a thousand years before that hatred culminated in the Holocaust. All these competing explanations were very much on my mind as I tried to make sense of the different kinds of experiences I had had as an exchange student in France. On the one hand, I had heard repeated expressions of casual antisemitism and learned about the terrible local history of the

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Holocaust. At the same time, my friends took pride in the French traditions of democracy, equality, and secularism; they offered an honestly warm and friendly welcome, with many curious questions about my background, including my Jewishness. How to reconcile the contradictions was not entirely clear to me. Processing what had happened to me as a young adult, I wasn’t sure exactly what I thought about where antisemitism came from and how it was related to other forms of prejudice, but I did know that I cared deeply about these questions. I attended college in the late 1980s, at the height of the culture wars, and there, I became increasingly aware that debates over the persistence of prejudice were raging all around me, in classrooms and outside of them. Where Jews, the long history of antisemitism, and even the story of Jewish “progress” in the modern world belonged in our understanding of history was not at all clear. These issues led to ongoing conversations that produced no easy answers. I see my own scholarly work on the history of Jews in modern France as an attempt to make sense of the paradoxical reactions my Jewishness elicited among my hosts and friends in Alsace that year, and the deeper questions that it raised for me in the years that followed. Discovering the voluminous literature on the paradoxes of French universalism when I was in graduate school in the 1990s was eye opening. Feminist theory and postcolonial theory were particularly illuminating and helped me to think in productive ways about the experience of Jews in France. Scholars working in these traditions have shown that our modern, democratic political traditions were founded not only on universalizing and egalitarian ideals, but also on a series of important exclusions, subjugations, and deferrals. Feminist scholars (including my mother, Claire Moses) have shown how beneath the seemingly “universal” language of modern political traditions like liberalism and even socialism lay a limitation—sometimes explicit—of rights to men only. Postcolonial theorists and historians have likewise shown that liberals came to embrace imperialism despite its seeming incompatibility with their faith in equal rights and free trade. Generally speaking, scholars working in these theoretical traditions in the 1990s were doing much the same thing that many Holocaust researchers were doing at the very same moment, even though they were not talking directly to one another. Both were pushing beyond traditional understandings that modernity and democracy signaled the end of oppression, showing, rather, that modernity could just as easily foster and strengthen it. And when possible, they were using sources created by the marginalized rather than the powerful in order to do that work.9 I was eager to try out these theories and methodologies for myself. I did not begin in Holocaust studies, but I was pursuing related approaches that attempted to disrupt triumphalist narratives about modernity in much the same way. My work has focused on the ambiguity of the liberal promise for Jews in France from the time of the Revolution to the present. In this, I have been inspired by historians like Zosa Szajkowski and his circle of YIVO historians, who on the eve of the Holocaust in France, began to question inherited narratives of whether the Jewish encounter with modernity was in fact as uniformly positive as had been assumed.10

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Taking their cue, I have approached the story of the establishment of democracy in France from the point of view of the Jews themselves and have found the story to be far more complicated than a simple tale of progress toward greater and greater inclusion, equality, and prosperity. On the one hand, Jews have had unparalleled opportunities in modern France, largely because the revolutionary tradition has insisted on the equality of all citizens before the law and the irrelevance of difference to social and civic inclusion. But antisemitism has colored the experience of Jews as well, and it has sometimes come from proponents of democracy as well as from democracy’s detractors. The Holocaust was an important moment in this broader, ambivalent history of the Jewish encounter with liberal modernity, and we can understand it much better by rooting it in that larger history. My current research continues to push forward with these disruptive questions. I am currently working on a book about the antisemitic movement of the 1890s in light of the ambiguities of the liberal promise that have long interested me. I focus on the Panama Affair, a scandal in which the French Panama Canal Company was accused of financial malfeasance and corruption, including the bribery of scores of deputies, senators, and newspapers. Although just a few Jews were among the accused, the affair became an important vehicle through which the antisemitic movement went from marginal to mainstream, channeling the populist impulse in France toward a new, politically potent, xenophobic, antiJewish racism. As such, the antisemitic movement was not so much a rejection of a liberal democracy (as traditional historians of antisemitism have read it), but rather an attempt to rescue liberal democracy from its contradictions by excluding the group that antisemites understood to have perverted it. This history helps explain how the Holocaust could happen in Western Europe, where the basic ideals of liberal democracy were so widely accepted, because it shows that there was in fact no necessary contradiction between antisemitism and liberalism. That history also remains troublingly relevant today, especially in Europe and the United States, when growing economic inequality, new media technologies, mass migration, and the expansion of politics to new social groups once again inf lame populist xenophobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism. My connection to Holocaust studies, as both a scholar and a teacher, has been made possible by the increased integration of this topic into the wider historical and thematic frames of European history, Jewish studies, and human rights. The questions have become broader and deeper, the roots traced to earlier moments and the impact detected far beyond the traditional boundaries of the years 1933– 1945. This increased integration is a very positive trend in Holocaust studies, for it has brought to light new answers to the question of how the Holocaust could happen. It has also forced difficult conversations in scholarly fields where—like my own field of nineteenth-century French history—narratives of progress once reigned supreme. For Holocaust studies itself, greater integration has gone hand in hand with greater visibility and impact, as well as support and popularity. This popularity has been buttressed by the fact that knowledge of the Holocaust has also

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increased greatly across the world. On university campuses, the increase in Holocaust awareness has been particularly remarkable: Holocaust courses and books have become more popular than ever and the questions at the heart of the field have brought questions about human rights to center stage.

New challenges And yet, increased support and legitimacy for Holocaust studies are also creating new challenges. In the broader culture, the Holocaust—once completely ignored—has become the subject of countless books, films, and educational programs. The messages embedded in many of these popular representations, however, can be quite simplistic. Over and over in our culture and our political life, Holocaust-talk is now used to advance a wide variety of agendas—even, at times, to support a victor’s view of the past. This can produce a discourse about the Holocaust that is quite contrary to the spirit of early Holocaust scholarship, where careful attention to base all claims on evidence was of utmost importance. What is more, it is no longer a given that scholars, writers, or public figures who talk about the Holocaust are doing so in the spirit of disruption and attention to the voices of the oppressed that animated the field in its early years. As Holocaust scholars become insiders rather than outsiders, we must remain true to the vision of our field as casting “a stone under history’s wheel.” This is challenging in the current climate. We must studiously avoid the temptation to draw oversimplified lessons about complex subjects such as tolerance and democracy, for to do so risks using the Holocaust for ideological ends. Instead, we need to work with, and not against, the ambiguities that lurk in the Holocaust and the study of it. It is in the embracing of ambiguity that we can teach the lessons that really matter and unsettle assumptions that serve only to support the status quo. Perhaps the most powerful way that Holocaust studies can continue to serve as a stone under the wheel of history is to use our subject matter to encourage learning about and practice in the basic skills of humanities research. The study of the Holocaust is particularly suited for such purposes. The events of the Holocaust were so horrendous, so contrary to our expectations about advanced civilization, that they seem to defy easy explanation. The disruptive power at the heart of the story we tell compels us to focus our attention on questions of evidence, causality, and responsibility, and to reexamine how the values we may still hold dear actually contributed to oppression and mass murder. We cannot truly understand the crimes of the Holocaust through an assertion of platitudes. This subject requires the best of what humanities scholarship is built on: careful work with primary sources; an investigation about which sources get preserved and how; attention to how claims are buttressed with evidence; an engagement in ongoing scholarly debates; and a serious understanding of who gets to tell the story of the past. In embracing these skills of critical thinking, we advance Holocaust studies by resisting the urge to simplify. Like the earliest Holocaust scholars, we must continue to support the voices of those whom history would

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forget by looking at the evidence they left behind, particularly when the conclusions we draw compel us to rethink our assumptions. Such work not only advances the field of Holocaust studies; it also teaches the skills necessary for good citizenship. It gives us practice in questioning authority, engaging in meaningful debate, and valuing diverse points of view. We need it now more than ever.

Notes 1 Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, The Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 7. 2 Cecile Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 3 Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Postwar Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 4 For more on what this isolation meant for them, materially as well as spiritually, see Lisa Moses Leff, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 141–204. 5 David Engel, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 6 Alfred D. Low, The Third Reich and the Holocaust in German Historiography: Toward the Historikerstreit of the 1980s (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1994). 7 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectics of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991); Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (London: Tavistock, 1974); and Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007). 8 For example, witness the importance of the social psychologists Milgram and Zimbardo to the thinking of Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). On developments in German history writing since the Historikerstreit, see Mark Roseman, “German History Writing and the Holocaust,” Central European History 51, no. 1 (2018): 96–101. 9 Examples of these types of studies include Claire Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Social Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 10 See Leff, Archive Thief.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. The Dialectics of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

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Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Conklin, Alice. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Engel, David. Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Jockusch, Laura. Collect and Record! Jewish Postwar Documentation in Early Postwar Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Kassow, Samuel. Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Kuznitz, Cecile. YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Leff, Lisa Moses. The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Low, Alfred D. The Third Reich and the Holocaust in German Historiography: Toward the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. Boulder: East European Monographs, 1994. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. Mehta, Uday Singh. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Social Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority. London: Tavistock, 1974. Moses, Claire. French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. Albany: SUNY Press, 1984. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Pitts, Jennifer. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Roseman, Mark. “German History Writing and the Holocaust.” Central European History 51, no. 1 (2018): 96–101. Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Zimbardo, Philip G. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007.

13 WORDS MATTER Carol Rittner

The Canadian Catholic theologian Gregory Baum (1923–2017) once asked a group of scholars, primarily theologians and historians, what the relationship was between their personal lives and their academic interests. He did so because he believed that one’s research and thinking are always based on personal concerns. In other words, he believed there are always highly personal reasons why certain issues mean so much to us, but we do not always recognize that relationship.1 In this chapter, I ref lect on Baum’s observation that research and thinking are based on personal concerns and how that has been true for me. I also want to suggest that while these concerns may be personal to me and to why I have devoted so many years to thinking, researching, writing, and teaching undergraduate and graduate students about the Holocaust, these concerns should not be overlooked by anyone involved in Holocaust studies.

Early life and education I was born in February 1943, in the middle of World War II and the Holocaust (in Hebrew, Shoah)—Nazi Germany’s systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews (1933–1945). By the time the war and the Holocaust were over, and my father and uncles returned from their American military service, I was a toddler, unaware of the evil and suffering so many people had experienced during the devastating years of Nazi persecution and destruction in Europe. I grew up in Central Pennsylvania in a family of four children, with a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. I went to public school through eighth grade, then on to a Catholic high school for my secondary education. In the autumn of 1958—I was a sophomore at Bishop McDevitt Catholic High School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—Pope Pius XII died. A few weeks later, a fat, outgoing, happy Italian cardinal named Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli

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was elected pope. He took the name John XXIII. Probably the reason “fat, outgoing, and happy” struck me about the new pope was because the previous one, Pius XII, was skinny, introverted, and dour, or so he seemed to me. On January 25, 1959, the new pope, John XXIII, unexpectedly announced he intended to convene an ecumenical council. It would take nearly four years to organize and would be known as Vatican Council II. At the time, I didn’t know what an ecumenical council was, but what I eventually learned was that Pope John XXIII wanted to bring together all the Roman Catholic bishops, archbishops, and cardinals of the world, “open the windows of the Catholic Church and let some fresh air in.” I was all for it, because I used to hear Catholics say extra Ecclesiam nulla salus—“outside the Church there is no salvation.” That always annoyed me. How could it be that “outside the Church” there was no salvation? What that meant to me was that heaven was only open to us kids and our mother, but not to my father because he was Protestant. How mean-spirited! Yes, I thought, a little “fresh air” in the Roman Catholic Church would be helpful. During the late 1950s and into 1960, a Boston-born Irish Catholic named John Fitzgerald Kennedy ran for president of the United States. I couldn’t vote because I was too young, but Kennedy won, even without my vote. It was a very exciting time to be an American Catholic. So much seemed possible. I remember listening to President Kennedy’s stirring inaugural address on a cold, snowy day in January 1961 and hearing his challenging words: “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” I remember how deeply those words resonated with me. Just as Pope John XXIII was organizing his ecumenical council and President Kennedy was organizing his new administration, I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my “one wild and precious life.” While I knew that I wanted to be a teacher, I also knew that I wanted something more. But what? After graduating from high school, I went to Immaculata College outside of Philadelphia for a year. Throughout high school and into college, I was active in all sorts of things, had a few boyfriends and dated, but I wanted something different than getting married, settling down, having kids, being a housewife. I looked around, considered various possibilities, and I also thought about those nuns who taught me in high school and college. I thought some of them were very smart and creative. They were teachers and administrators, and they seemed like “take-charge” women. I liked that, and I liked them. The ones I admired the most exemplified Gospel values: love God and neighbor, serve others, do what you can to make this world a better place for everyone. That also resonated with me. On September 8, 1962, my parents very reluctantly drove me to the campus of College Misericordia—now Misericordia University—in Dallas, Pennsylvania, to the motherhouse of the Religious Sisters of Mercy, where I “entered the convent,” as we used to say. One month later, October 11, 1962, in Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope John XXIII opened the first session of that ecumenical council he had convened four years earlier. He died before the council could

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complete its work, but thanks in large part to the pastoral tone John XXIII set, the Roman Catholic Church underwent an enormous transformation. Among the many changes initiated by the council, two seemed—and still seem—particularly important to me. First, the Roman Catholic Church came to a new appreciation of Judaism and has since tried to free its teaching from inherited anti-Jewish rhetoric. And second, the Roman Catholic Church discovered a new sense of solidarity with other religious communities and with the whole human family. Both of these major changes significantly impacted me.

From hostility and hate to persecution and genocide In August 1967, after completing my bachelor’s degree at College Misericordia and the religious formation program of the Religious Sisters of Mercy, I was sent to Dunmore Central Catholic High School outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, to teach English to high school students. Four years later, in June 1971, I was sent to graduate school at the University of Maryland. Just as I was making the transition from teaching to studying, someone gave me a copy of Victor Frankl’s Holocaust memoir Man’s Search for Meaning.2 I had never heard of Victor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist whose entire family, except for his sister, perished in Nazi Germany’s death camps, but I did know about Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl who died at the hands of the Nazis. To be honest, at the time, I knew very little about the historical events surrounding Anne Frank and the Jews of Europe when I taught about her diary to my Catholic high school students. Of course, I knew Jews had suffered during World War II, but about the Holocaust, about Hitler’s planned systematic attempt to annihilate every Jew on the face of the earth, I still had much to learn. Consequently, it did not occur to me at the time to raise questions with my students about antiJudaism in Christian theology or about antisemitism, nor did it occur to me to raise questions about collaboration with or resistance to the Nazis in Holland, Germany, or any other place in Nazi German-occupied Europe.3 My ignorance about the historical issues surrounding the Holocaust, not to mention my ignorance about Judaism and the Jews of Europe, disabled me. I was not able to probe beneath the surface of the words Anne Frank had written during those two years she lived in the shadow of death, in that cramped attic on the top f loor of the narrow building on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam. I read—and taught—the diary of Anne Frank as a story about the “triumph of the human spirit,” not as a primary document revealing a historical catastrophe.4 But what I missed when I read Anne’s diary, I could not avoid when I read Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Perhaps it was because when I read Frankl’s book, I was a bit more mature and freer, emotionally and intellectually. I cannot say now, but I do remember that when I finished reading Man’s Search for Meaning, I was shattered. How, I asked myself, could a place like Auschwitz have existed within the very heart of so-called Christian Europe? How could human beings turn their most heinous ferocious powers on themselves? How could they separate Jews from others

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in the human family, force them into concentration camps, demean and starve them, and then funnel them into gas chambers and burn them in ovens? Where were the Christian churches? Where were Christians? Why didn’t they help Jews in their time of need? What happened to the great teachings of Jesus taught to Christians through the ages? “Do unto others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31). “What you do to the least of your brothers and sisters, you do unto me” (Matthew 25:40). “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” ( John 15:13). Today, those questions seem naive to me. But as a very young teacher and Sister of Mercy, I did not yet know that Hitler and the Nazis had built their deadly ideology on the twin foundations of Christian theological anti-Judaism and racist antisemitism.5 It was only later, after much study—in scripture and theology, renewed and re-energized as a result of Vatican II—that I came to see an anti-Jewish underside to Christian theology. It was something about which I was completely ignorant, yet it was this anti-Jewish underside to Christian theology that over the centuries had inf luenced millions upon millions of Christians, and not just Roman Catholic Christians, but all Christians—Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians—regarding what we believed and thought about Jews and Judaism. And what we Christians believed and thought about Jews and Judaism was nothing short of deadly. In 1948, just three years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, a French Jewish scholar named Jules Isaac published Jésus et Israël, a book that sent shock waves through the French Christian communities, Catholic and Protestant alike.6 Jules Isaac lost his wife, daughter, son, and son-in-law during the Holocaust. He survived only because he was not at home in Riom, a small town in Central France, when the Germans and their collaborators came calling. Isaac also survived because French Catholics hid him, but what he could not understand, either during the war and the Holocaust or after, was why the Nazis and their collaborators targeted and killed people simply because they were Jews. From where, he wondered, did this murderous antisemitism spring? What was its origin? Why didn’t the pope in Rome—Pius XII—speak up and condemn the Nazis? Why didn’t other Christian leaders—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian—speak up about what was happening to the Jews? Isaac was determined to find out, and he began his research, even while he was still in hiding from the Nazis. Working with borrowed books supplied by priests, pastors, and friends, Isaac set out to document his intuition that antisemitism, more precisely anti-Judaism, was a teaching of contempt about Jews and Judaism founded upon and elaborated from false and mendacious readings of the Gospels. He compared texts from the New Testament (Christian Scriptures) with various Catholic and Protestant commentaries on those texts. Isaac showed how many Gospel commentaries presented a completely distorted picture of Jesus’s attitude toward Israel and Israel’s attitude toward Jesus. He argued that these commentaries—which for centuries had inf luenced Christian teaching, preaching, and liturgy—were inaccurate,

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even though they were widely used by priests, ministers, seminarians, teachers, catechists, and students as the basis for their own learning, teaching, and preaching. Many of these commentaries demonized Jews and Judaism. Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, a German Protestant Christian scholar, says that “religious hostility toward Jews was a central element of Christian theology from the start.” 7 This “religious hostility toward Jews” became embedded in the formation and interpretation of the Christian New Testament. It found its way into the writing and preaching of some of the early Church Fathers—St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine, for example. For nearly two millennia, the persistent Christian belief that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus—the so-called deicide charge—fed and kept alive anti-Jewish prejudice and hatred in the Christian churches, among Christians, and in civil society. As SiegeleWenschkewitz rightly puts the point, Anti-Judaism was and is an essential component of Christian theology inasmuch as Christian theology traditionally distinguishes between Christianity and Judaism with the aim of showing that there ought not be any more Jews after Christ. To this extent anti-Semitism is a secular form of anti-Judaism.8 From the late Middle Ages on, antisemitism was expressed in many ways. In Christian worship and art, preaching and teaching, Jews were blamed for the death of Jesus, accused of kidnapping and murdering Christian children and then using their blood to make matzo for Passover Seder (the blood libel). Jews were expelled from cities, forced to live in restricted areas, and compelled to wear distinctive clothing. Jews became an outcast people. They were religiously marginalized, pushed to the periphery of society, and cast outside the universe of moral obligation, beyond the boundaries of normal care and concern. Prohibited from occupying various professions and denied citizenship, Jews were expelled from several countries, including England in 1290 and Spain in 1492. While the eighteenth-century Enlightenment led to the emancipation of Jews in some European countries, economic and social restrictions persisted, as did antisemitic myths, superstitions, feelings, and beliefs. By the nineteenth century, European society, particularly in the West, became more secular, less religious, and so did prejudice against Jews. Antisemitism took a racial form. As Carrie Supple has argued: This important change coincided with the spread of ideas of Social Darwinism, taken from the ideas of Charles Darwin in his book, Origin of Species (1859). … Although Darwin had not intended his evolution principles to be applied to humans [in that way, they were] soon extended by others to a notional “ladder” of races with white, “Aryan,” Anglo-Saxons at the top and blacks, Slavs and Jews at the bottom. This fitted in well with Christian antisemitism and racism.9

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Because many Jews never assimilated into the surrounding dominant Christian society, they were easy targets in societies undergoing rapid industrialization and change. They were easily identifiable: they went to synagogue on Saturday, not to church on Sunday; they celebrated Hanukkah and Passover, not Christmas and Easter; they often observed special dietary regulations. Jews became “the other”—marginalized, persecuted, and blamed for every woe, from unemployment and slums to military defeats and unsolved murders. We Christians must not delude ourselves about what a destructive inf luence repetitive anti-Jewish teaching and preaching has had on the Christian psyche through the centuries. It has attributed diabolic and cosmic evil to Jews. The classic teaching of contempt, a tradition which stigmatized Jews as practitioners of a degraded fossil religion, sustained by demonic elements, created an aura of hatred around the Jews. Elie Wiesel often used to say that words matter. The Holocaust, as John K. Roth contends, “depended on words. Laws, decrees, orders, memoranda, even schedules for trains and specifications for gas vans and crematoria—all of these underwrite Wiesel’s insistence that care must be taken with words, for words can kill.”10 We need to keep in mind that words matter. Words do damage when they stoke antagonism. Calling Jews “Christ-killers” and “stiff-necked,” referring to them as willful blasphemers, unrepentant sons and daughters of the devil, to name only a few anti-Jewish images that words have deeply rooted in Christian preaching and teaching, helped to normalize hatred of Jews, setting them up for isolation and murder during the Nazi era.11 By the 1920s and 1930s, Hitler and the Nazis had a fertile seedbed to exploit for their own vicious purposes. The Nazis used racist antisemitism, bolstered by Christian theological anti-Judaism, to justify the “legal” discrimination and persecution of the Jews of Germany in the 1930s, the deportation of Jews from throughout German-occupied Europe to the Nazi death camps in the 1940s, and the use of modern industrial methods to exterminate the Jews in the very heart of Christian Europe during World War II and the Holocaust. To quote Roth once more, Holocaust history testifies to a disturbing fact, namely, that while Christianity was not a sufficient condition for the Holocaust, nevertheless, it was a necessary condition for that disaster. That statement does not mean that Christianity caused the Holocaust. Nevertheless, apart from Christianity, the Shoah is scarcely imaginable.12

Forty years on Forty years ago, when I taught my Catholic high school students about Anne Frank and her diary, I did not know that antisemitism had developed out of Christian theological anti-Judaism. Forty years ago, I was unaware of the antiJewish underside of Christian theology. Forty years ago, I was unaware of just

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how much destructive centuries of Christian “teaching of contempt” toward Jews and Judaism had warped and distorted the Christian psyche. Forty years ago, I was uninformed, unaware, and ignorant about so much concerning the Nazi genocide of the Jews during World War II and the Holocaust. Forty years ago, after reading Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, I asked myself a question: If Jesus, a faithful religious Jew, had lived in Nazi Germany or in another part of Nazi German-occupied Europe during World War II and the Holocaust, where would he have ended up? I could not escape the thought that he probably would have ended up in Auschwitz, or in some other Nazi death camp, put there by baptized Christians who saw no contradiction between their allegiance to Hitler and Nazi Germany and their allegiance to their Christian religious faith. For several years before his death, Franklin H. Littell (1917–2009), a wellknown Protestant Christian scholar of the Holocaust, was my colleague at Stockton University in New Jersey. He used to remind us that Germany had some of the best universities in the world, but he would ask, “What in the world were students learning in those universities?” The “death camps,” he would thunder, “were not planned and built, and their operational scheme devised by illiterates, by ignorant and unschooled savages. The killing centers were, like their inventors, products of what had been for generations one of the best university systems in the world. [Heinrich] Himmler [head of the SS in Nazi Germany] was always proud of the high percentage of Ph.D.’s in his officer corps!”13 In that booming voice of his, Littell would remind us that the “teaching of contempt” about Jews and Judaism, so prevalent in the Christian churches for centuries, had murderous implications. And one major implication was that baptized Christians murdered six million Jews during the Nazi era, World War II, and the Holocaust. He would remind us that the Holocaust was not just the result of a perfect storm of historical, cultural, economic, and political forces colliding and exploding and then settling on the Jews of Europe as cultural, social, and religious pariahs. The Holocaust was that, but it also was so much more, and a great part of that “so much more” included the murderous implications of 1500 years of Christian teaching and preaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. Forty years on in my life, what do I think all of this has to do with advancing Holocaust studies? Indeed, what does it mean to advance Holocaust studies? How does one advance Holocaust studies in a world in which the Holocaust sometimes seems to be one horrendous case in a plethora of genocides?14 (I am thinking of the genocides and genocidal events of the post-Holocaust world. For example, Indonesia in 1965–1966; Bangladesh [former East Pakistan] in 1971; Cambodia between 1975 and 1979; former Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995; Rwanda in 1994; Chechnya between 1994 and 1999; and Sudan, Myanmar, and Syria today to name but a few places where genocide and genocidal events have taken place, or are taking place.) Does one advance Holocaust studies by claiming “uniqueness” for that disaster and thereby perhaps diminishing the importance of studying other genocides? Or, does one advance Holocaust studies by utilizing the insights

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and methodologies of other “studies”—gender studies, for example, or trauma studies, colonialism studies, comparative genocide studies—to gain insight into the Nazi genocide of the Jews? Forty years on in my life as an American Catholic contributor to Holocaust studies, I have to ask whether one can advance Holocaust studies without forcefully confronting an American president, Donald Trump, who has used the power of words and the power of his position to demean and marginalize religious and minority groups, acting in a manner similar to the ways that Hitler and the Nazis behaved as they consolidated and advanced their political, social, cultural, and military agendas. How does one advance Holocaust studies in a world where the internet and social media are used by individuals and groups to advance their divisive messages and racist manifestos and their “fake news” and outright lies to stir up animosity and hatred against those they despise because of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, political views, or disability? Honestly, I am not sure I know how one responsibly advances Holocaust studies in the third decade of the twenty-first century, despite the fact that forty years on I continue researching, writing, and teaching about the Holocaust as I have done during a long career. But here are three suggestions. First, teach about the historical anti-Jewish underside of Christian theology and about the pernicious effect it has had on Christian teaching and preaching about Jews and Judaism through the ages. Do not shy away from doing so. Do not leave it up to Catholic scholars and teachers like myself to do this. While much has changed for the better since Vatican II, regarding how Christians— Catholics, Protestants, and Christian Orthodox alike—now teach and preach about Jews and Judaism, it is, nevertheless, clear to me that while Christianity did not cause the Holocaust, apart from Christianity, the Holocaust is scarcely imaginable.15 Second, remind students that words matter. Remind them that what we say, and how we say it, has implications. Words mattered during the centuries leading up to the Holocaust. Words mattered during the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Words still matter, especially in a Trumpian world in which the leader of the most powerful country in the world uses words via Twitter to denigrate and demean individuals and groups—racial, ethnic, religious, and national—that he despises. That world is likely to persist even after Donald Trump’s departure from the White House. The Holocaust did not begin with guns and bullets, or with Auschwitz and the other Nazi concentration and death camps. The Holocaust began with words—hateful words aimed at people who were considered different. As Elie Wiesel often said, “Be careful with words. Words matter. Words can kill.” Only if Holocaust studies decisively advances that teaching can there be any responsible advancing of Holocaust studies. Third, in a time when more and more students are going to colleges and universities to continue their education after secondary school, we frequently should ask ourselves: What are students learning in their colleges and universities? Are they learning how to think, really think about the implications of their words and

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actions on others? What kind of education can help them do that? Can Holocaust studies help students do that? Truly advancing Holocaust studies hinges on doing research, writing, and teaching about the Holocaust in ways that make it possible to say an honest yes to those questions.

Notes 1 Gregory Baum, ed. Journeys (New York: Paulist Press, 1975), 1. 2 Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, trans. Ilse Lasch (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006). 3 For a significant contemporary analysis of antisemitism, see Deborah E. Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now (New York: Schocken, 2019). With approval, Lipstadt cites words from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, adopted by the European Parliament, that define antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities” (15). Antisemitism ranges from quiet contempt to bullying, persecution, and racist violence directed against Jewish people. Its distinguishing mark is hatred or contempt for Jews. It goes beyond normal political conf lict, even beyond the normal hostilities and prejudices that arise between different peoples. Antisemitism attributes to Jews some quality of cosmic and diabolic evil. 4 Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, trans. B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday (New York: Bantam, 1993). 5 As John K. Roth and I argue, Christian theological anti-Judaism stems from centuries of Christian teaching and preaching “that the Jewish people never understood the prophetic message, that they lived in blindness and inf idelity, that they rejected Jesus as the Messiah because they were hard-hearted and stubborn, and that they condemned Jesus to death. In the Christian worldview, Jews were a people excluded from grace, reprobated and condemned, preserved in history only as a sign of God’s wrath.” See Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, “Indifference to the Plight of the Jews during the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust and the Christian World, 2nd ed., ed. Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, and Irena Steinfeldt (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2019), 66. 6 In 1971, Jésus et Israël was translated into English by Claire Hutchet Bishop and published as Jesus and Israel: A Call for the Necessary Correction of Christian Teaching on the Jews (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). 7 Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, “The Contribution of Church History to a PostHolocaust Theology: Christian Anti-Judaism as the Root of Anti-Semitism,” in The Holocaust as Interruption, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and David Tracy (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1984), 61. 8 Ibid., 61. 9 Carrie Supple, From Prejudice to Genocide: Learning about the Holocaust (Stoke on Trent: Trentham, 1998), 26. 10 John K. Roth, Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide (Eugene: Cascade Books/Wipf and Stock, 2020), 36. 11 John K. Roth, “What Does the Holocaust Have to Do with Christianity?” in The Holocaust and the Christian World, 9. 12 Ibid. 13 Franklin H. Littell, “The Credibility Crisis of the Modern University,” in The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy and Genocide; The San Jose Papers, ed. Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (Millwood: Kraus International Publications, 1980), 9, https://di gital.library.temple.edu/digital/collection/p16002coll14/id/4594/.

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14 See further, The 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/ pages/CrimeOfGenocide.aspx: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: a. Killing members of the group; b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c. Deliberately inf licting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” 15 For an excellent overview of just how significantly and substantively Roman Catholic teaching and preaching—and other mainstream Christian denominations’ teaching and preaching—about Jews and Judaism have changed since Vatican II, see John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933– 1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

Bibliography Baum, Gregory, ed. Journeys. New York: Paulist Press, 1975. Connelly, John. From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Translated by B. M. MooyaartDoubleday. New York: Bantam, 1993. Frankl, Victor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Translated by Ilse Lasch. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Isaac, Jules. Jesus and Israel: A Call for the Necessary Correction of Christian Teaching on the Jews. Translated by Claire Hutchet Bishop. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. Lipstadt, Deborah E. Antisemitism: Here and Now. New York: Schocken, 2019. Littell, Franklin H. “The Credibility Crisis of the Modern University.” In The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy and Genocide: The San Jose Papers, 271–83. Edited by Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton. Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1980. https://digital.library.temple.edu/digital/collection/p16002coll14/id/4594/. Rittner, Carol, and John K. Roth. “Indifference to the Plight of the Jews during the Holocaust.” In The Holocaust and the Christian World, 2nd ed., 65–68. Edited by Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, and Irena Steinfeldt. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2019. ———. “What Is Antisemitism?” In The Holocaust and the Christian World, 2nd ed., 59– 62. Edited by Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, and Irena Steinfeldt. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2019. Roth, John K. Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching About the Genocide. Eugene: Cascade Books/Wipf and Stock, 2020. ———. “What Does the Holocaust Have to Do with Christianity?” In The Holocaust and the Christian World, 2nd ed., 8–13. Edited by Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, and Irena Steinfeldt. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2019. Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Leonore. “The Contribution of Church History to a PostHolocaust Theology: Christian Anti-Judaism as the Root of Anti-Semitism.” In The Holocaust as Interruption, 60–64. Edited by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and David Tracy. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1984. Supple, Carrie. From Prejudice to Genocide: Learning about the Holocaust. Stoke on Trent: Trentham, 1998.

EPILOGUE Why? Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

Will you participate in a project called “Advancing Holocaust Studies?” Thirteen scholars said yes. The result is this book; its thirteen chapters and their thirteen perspectives all focused on the question Why? Why have we committed our lives, personally and professionally, to remembering the Holocaust, to doing research about it, and to teaching and writing about that catastrophe? What has it all been for? Why do we keep trying to explain the inexplicable to ourselves and to others? Why do we keep trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, trying to figure out the irrational rationality of an event that happened years ago and far away? What does our research, teaching, and writing about the Holocaust mean in a post-Holocaust world still wracked by antisemitism and racism, by intractable and violent conf licts, by immigration and refugee crises, by human rights abuses and mass atrocity crimes, and by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the threats of nuclear war and environmental degradation? What does our work mean in a world where leaders so often lie with impunity and govern by corruption and chaos? Why do we continue to write and teach about the Holocaust?

Questions, not answers Debórah Dwork says that the Holocaust is her compass. The Holocaust history she ponders shapes her outlook, her everyday choices, teaching philosophy, and social activism. It orients how she interprets the daily news and how she votes. But, what about her students? Is the Holocaust a compass for them? If not, what is it? Wendy Lower says that her students have glimpsed what Elie Wiesel called “absolute Evil.” Are they afraid of what they might be capable of doing? Can Holocaust studies combat the atrocities that sometimes make her students ashamed to be human? Perhaps, as Wolf Gruner suggests, “transformed Holocaust studies” can provide credible warnings to curb democracy’s demise. Does such study

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contribute to raising awareness about the dangers of fascism, intolerance, prejudice, xenophobia, nationalism, tribalism, and all of the other forces and factors that help to create genocidal violence? Alex Alvarez thinks it can. In Robert Erickson’s view, knowledge of the Holocaust can provide at least a partial antidote to the anti-democratic and inhumane tendencies we see today, such as a resurgence of authoritarian, racist, and ethno-nationalistic politics, often with religious backing that increasingly is part of the story of politics in the twentyfirst century. Has it? Does it? Jonathan Petropoulos says that Holocaust studies and education are not vaccines against unethical behavior, while Sara Horowitz thinks study of the Holocaust can help students shape an ethics for our time, for our place. But can it? Edward Linenthal asks if the work of those immersed in Holocaust studies can continue to spark our moral imagination. Does that matter? If it does, why does it matter? Can Holocaust studies explain Pope Pius XII’s decisions during the Holocaust? Can studying the Holocaust help us to understand the pope’s unwillingness to speak out forcefully and publicly, when under his very windows Jews were deported from Rome and when millions of Jews were murdered by Nazi shooting squadrons and in the gas chambers of Treblinka and Auschwitz?1 Robert Ventresca thinks so, but, honestly, can we ever get to the bottom of what motivates a person to act, or not act, to speak out, or to remain silent when others’ lives are in danger, when one’s very own life might be in danger for trying to intervene and get hapless people out of harm’s way? Can Holocaust studies teach students the skills necessary for good citizenship, as Lisa Leff suggests? Does such study encourage students to question authority, engage in meaningful debate, and value diverse points of view? Or, does our lived reality in a post-Holocaust world contradict such assertions? Can studying the Holocaust convince students that the Holocaust did not begin with guns and bullets, with concentration and death camps, but with words—hateful words—aimed to isolate and exclude Jews and others who were “different”? Will such education help students to understand that words matter, that words can kill? Carol Rittner hopes so, but does she hope in vain? John K. Roth admits that advances in Holocaust studies have not been nearly enough to curb antisemitism’s global resurgence, nor have they stalled the wrack and ruin of crimes against humanity, checked the devastation of genocide, or cut short relentless assaults on human f lourishing. So, does Roth put too much stock in the Holocaust’s presumed power to raise the right questions? And how much weight can those questions bear anyway? Not long after its opening in 1993, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum established as part of its mission and mandate a Committee on Conscience and a Center for the Prevention of Genocide. The stated aims of those museum initiatives included “early warning” of impending genocides and mass murder and also policy formulation for governments to intervene in new, unfolding genocides around the world. How effective have those efforts been? Have the

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Committee on Conscience and the Center for Prevention of Genocide even partially accomplished their stated aims? Have any of the Holocaust monuments, museums, and memorials we have erected and continue to support, financially and otherwise, in the United States and beyond, actually moved people to stand up and act against national, ethnic, and racial hatred? Or will they, as James Young wonders, “culminate only in themselves, fixed places where we grieve endlessly in repetitive loops?”

And yet? Literally, millions and millions of people—young and old, Jews and non-Jews, in the United States and around the world—have heard, read about, studied, researched, and commemorated the Holocaust. They have visited Holocaust museums and viewed Holocaust exhibitions; they have watched films and done projects about the Holocaust; they have listened to survivors tell of their experiences during the Holocaust; and they have heard political, religious, educational, and civic leaders pledge that never again will such things ever be allowed to happen to anyone. And yet, in the seventy-five years since the end of World War II and the Holocaust, our world is still wracked by antisemitism (Charlottesville and Paris, Pittsburgh and Berlin, Monsey and Copenhagen), intractably violent conf licts (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan), immigration and refugee crises (Europe and the United States), human rights abuses (China, Saudi Arabia, India), mass atrocity crimes (Central African Republic, Honduras and Guatemala, Myanmar), threats of nuclear war (North Korea and Iran, India and Pakistan, the United States and Russia), and global environmental degradation (Brazil and Australia). Concurrent with the publication of this book in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic further complicates the fraught circumstances in which advances in Holocaust studies must be made, if they are to be made at all. Thirteen scholars. We have taught many of the students who have studied about the Holocaust in our schools, colleges, and universities. We hope some of them will read our thirteen chapters. We have spoken to many people in churches, synagogues, and Holocaust museums. We also hope some of them will consider our thirteen chapters. And yet, John Roth says that we have to confront the painful possibility that forty years and more of sustained, serious Holocaust research and teaching have not been as effective as we hoped. What difference has all our teaching, all our writing, all our work made? In an as yet unpublished essay, Henry (Hank) Greenspan, for many years a teacher of Holocaust studies at the University of Michigan, says he knows of only one instance “in which Holocaust memory—in this case, simply an image— made a direct and immediate difference in principled moral action.” On March 16, 1968, [American] reconnaissance pilot Hugh Thompson was f lying his helicopter over the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Thompson

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was hard-core and favored the war. He did not hesitate to shoot the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese enemy. But what he saw below him that day horrified him: women, children, and elderly people—obviously civilians—being herded into an irrigation ditch and machine gunned to bits. Images of Nazi mass shootings flashed through his mind. His two-man crew reported that he “snapped.” Setting the copter down between the ditch and the shooters, he ordered the crew to turn their guns on the Americans. Miraculously, the intervention stopped at least this part of the My Lai massacre.2 Sure, “there are other such instances,” says Greenspan, “but they are almost certainly few and far between.”3 Without concrete evidence, it’s hard to prove or disprove what Hank Greenspan has to say about the “direct and immediate difference” Holocaust memory—and by extension, Holocaust studies and education—has had on “principled moral action.” Nevertheless, it is sobering to ponder his assessment. As Holocaust Remembrance Day and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz came and went on January 27, 2020, the rhetoric voiced in those commemorations seemed to express little confidence in the worn-out motto “Never Again,” whose credibility has diminished with time’s passage. Coinciding with awareness that dwindling numbers of Holocaust survivors remain, a more modest slogan—“Never Forget”—resounded instead. Never forgetting the Holocaust may be a necessary condition to support a waning hope that human beings will no longer unleash mass murder, but “Never Forget” is scarcely sufficient to achieve that goal. Human beings are adept at forgetting. So much so that “Never Forget”—like “Never Again”—is likely to be a forlorn hope. Haunting this book, that threat is what Advancing Holocaust Studies resists. Thirteen scholars. Thirteen chapters. Thirteen perspectives. And for sure, many more than thirteen questions. We have all been writing and teaching about the Holocaust for many years, and we do so because, despite the seemingly small, perhaps one might even say insignificant effect our work has had in our postHolocaust world, we refuse to give up. We may not yet have educated enough potential Hugh Thompsons to counteract antisemitism, to check genocide, or to interrupt other mass atrocity crimes, but we can keep trying to do so. And yet the nagging Why? remains. One thing the thirteen of us know for sure: learning, teaching, and writing about the Holocaust quite literally changed our lives—not just professionally but personally. The chapters in this book testify to that. Although perhaps not in the direct ways that Greenspan’s perspective highlights, we have seen other people— especially students—deeply moved and changed for good by their Holocaustrelated experiences. Sometimes the subtlety of that movement may be that it keeps us from doing destructive things. One can never be overly confident, let alone certain, about that, but in good senses, what we don’t do—as well as what we do—has moral significance. Be that as it may, Elie Wiesel’s story of the Just

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Man who tried to save Sodom from destruction offers some insight about why we keep doing what we do. One of the Just Men came to Sodom, determined to save its inhabitants from sin and punishment. Night and day he walked the streets and markets preaching against greed and theft, falsehood and indifference. In the beginning, people listened and smiled ironically. Then they stopped listening: he no longer even amused them. The killers went on killing, the wise kept silent, as if there were no Just Man in their midst. One day a child, moved by compassion for the unfortunate preacher, approached him with these words: “Poor stranger. You shout, you expend yourself body and soul; don’t you see that it is hopeless?” “Yes, I see,” answered the Just Man. “Then, why do you go on?” “I’ll tell you why. In the beginning, I thought I could change man. Today, I know I cannot. If I still shout today, if I still scream, it is to prevent man from ultimately changing me.”4 Thirteen scholars. Thirteen chapters. Thirteen perspectives. All focused on the question Why? Why have we committed our lives, personally and professionally, to remembering the Holocaust, to teaching and writing about the Holocaust, and to advancing Holocaust studies in a world that seems increasingly deaf to what we have to say? Despite what may be the adequacy or inadequacy of our responses, we are convinced that our work must continue. It must do so even though we have come to know the hard truth of resistant melancholy that the poet Jim Quay once shared with John Roth: Such work “can only be done by hopeful persons willing to be sad.”

Notes 1 See further, Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 2 Henry Greenspan, “Does Holocaust Education Matter?” 1. Unpublished essay in the authors’ possession (2020). Our emphasis. 3 Ibid., 1. 4 Elie Wiesel, One Generation After, trans. Lily Edelman and the author (New York: Schocken, 2011), 77.

Bibliography Wiesel, Elie. One Generation After. Translated by Lily Edelman and the author. New York: Schocken, 2011. Zuccotti, Susan. Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

INDEX

Page numbers in italic denote figures 9/11 28, 57, 70, 79 Abramowitz, Michael J. 92 Adorno, Theodor 170 Aktion 39–40 Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building 55 Althaus, Paul 148–49, 151–53 Alvarez, Alex 7, 188 Aly, Götz 105 Annan, Kofi 77 anti-Jewish: measures 161; policy 122, 158, 160, 162; prejudice 123, 181 antisemitism 1–2, 7, 14, 16, 22, 27–28, 31–32, 37, 41, 45, 77–78, 82, 92, 94, 107, 122–24, 125n20, 130, 133, 145, 171–73, 179–82, 185n3, 187–90 Appelbaum, Ralph 54 Appelfeld, Aharon 47 Arendt, Hannah 13, 115, 121, 170 Armenians 70, 92, 162 Auschwitz 1, 4, 15–16, 20, 22–23, 26, 28, 31, 34, 50, 53–54, 65–66, 91, 102, 115, 117, 122, 133–34, 141–42, 179, 183–84, 188, 190; survivor 25, 52–53, 80; see also Birkenau Auschwitz Building Office 84 Austria 23, 31, 92, 129, 158, 161, 168 authoritarianism 91–92, 94–95, 163–64, 169 Bajohr, Frank 105 Barkan, Elazar 136–37 Barnett, Victoria 30

Barth, Karl 149–50, 153n14 Bauer, Yehuda 161 Baum, Gregory 177 Bauman, Zygmunt 170 Beer, Susanne 160 Belzec 50, 53 Bemporad, Rabbi Jack 22 Ben-Gurion, David 12 Benz, Wolfgang 157 Berenbaum, Michael 28, 55 Berlin Wall 66, 79, 88 Birkenau 15, 22, 25, 34, 51–53, 84, 117, 133–34, 138n1 Bischoff, Karl 84 Blackbourn, David 132 Bloch, Marc 132 Bloch-Bauer family 105 Bloomfield, Sara J. 4 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 30–32, 36, 37n2, 37n3, 145 Bosnian Muslims 18, 67–68 Bowers, Robert 82 Breitman, Richard 130 Bronowski, Jacob 51 Browning, Christopher R. 17, 32, 144, 146, 175n8 camps: concentration 2, 22, 31, 50, 62–63, 84, 91, 123, 139n20, 144, 156, 158, 180, 188; death 34, 46, 50, 85, 91, 116–17, 146, 179, 182–84, 188 Camus, Albert 34–35, 46

194 Index

Canada 20, 23, 70, 123 Carmelite nuns 16 Carroll, James 117 Carter, Jimmy 15, 33–34 Catholic Church 16, 114–16, 118, 120, 122–24, 162, 178–79, 186n15 Catholics 16, 79–80, 114–16, 118–19, 121–22, 177–80, 182, 184 Center for the Prevention of Genocide 67, 188–89 Center for the Research on Antisemitism 157 Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (Paris) 168 Charlottesville, Virginia 22, 123, 189 Claims Conference 12, 23 climate change 6, 28, 90, 94–95 Clinton, Bill 56, 67–68 Cole, Tim 52 Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany see Claims Conference Conrad, Joseph 45 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 12, 186n14 coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) 1, 23, 27–28, 32, 49, 187, 189 crimes against humanity 11, 13, 17–18, 27, 188 Cronkite, Walter 144 Crusius, Patrick 83 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) 84 Czechoslovakia 158, 168 Dachau 65, 88 Daoudi, Mohammed S. Dajani 22 Darfur 20, 28, 90 Darwin, Charles 181 de Kock, Eugene 51 Delbo, Charlotte 4, 6, 74 Denkmal for Europe’s Murdered Jews 64, 66, 68–69 Desbois, Father Patrick 21 Dwork, Debórah 7, 30, 187 East Germany see German Democratic Republic Eastern Europe 1, 21, 52, 66, 158, 168–69 Eichmann, Adolf 13, 170 Eisenman, Peter 68–69 Eizenstat, Stuart 105 El Paso 70, 83 Eliach, Yaffa 51

Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity 16 Engel, David 169 environmental degradation 2, 90, 93, 187, 189 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 92 Ericksen, Robert P. 7 ethnic cleansing 17, 28, 67–68, 70 Evans, Richard J. 104, 121, 136 “Final Solution” 2, 13, 28, 31, 73, 134, 169; Turkey’s 70 Fink, Ida 39–44 Fischer, Eugen 151 Fischer, Joschka 68 Fishman, David E. 106 forced labor 85, 157–58, 162 France 23, 88, 92, 103, 132, 158, 171–73, 180 Frank, Anne 12, 32, 179, 182 Frank, Otto 12 Frankl, Victor 179, 183 Freedom House 92–93 Freud, Sigmund 33; Institute 136 Friedländer, Henry 128, 138n1 Friedländer, Saul 18, 134 Friedman, Tuvia 168 Fritzsche, Peter 148 Fukuyama, Francis 93 Fulbrook, Mary 104 Gabbai, Dario 102 genocide 2–4, 17–22, 27–28, 36, 37n7, 40–41, 47, 53, 55, 66–70, 74, 77, 79, 88–97, 104, 106, 115–17, 129, 132–35, 137, 144, 147, 162–63, 179, 183–84, 186n14, 188, 190 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 155–57, 161 Gerz, Jochen 66–67 ghetto 2, 31, 40, 44, 52, 61, 85, 106, 123; Lodz 76, 130–31, 131, 158–59, 167; Vilna 44, 106; Warsaw 11, 49, 58, 167 Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla 51 Goebbels, Joseph 54, 83, 107 Gore, Al 77 Göring, Hermann 73, 105 Graber, David 58 Grabowski, Jan 92 Granovetter, Mark S. 160 Green, Gerald 15 Greenspan, Henry (Hank) 189–90 Gross, Jan 92 Grossman, Mendel 131, 131 Gruner, Wolf 7, 187

Index 195

Hayes, Peter 21, 136 Hegel, G. W. F. 5 Heine, Heinrich 106 Heschel, Susannah 145 Hett, Benjamin Carter 49 Heydrich, Reinhard 73 Hilberg, Raul 2–4, 13, 32–34, 38n7, 73–74, 128, 130, 134 Himmler, Heinrich 54, 83, 115, 135, 183 Hirsch, Emanuel 149–52 Hitler, Adolf 69, 54, 83, 106–7, 115, 120, 122, 128, 134, 136, 143, 145–46, 148–52, 162–63, 179–80, 182–84; Eagle’s Nest 88 Hochhuth, Rolf 13 Holocaust Educational Foundation 15, 17, 145 Holocaust: education 2–4, 15–17, 19, 27, 77–78, 89, 91–92, 94–96, 164; scholars 1, 4, 7, 16, 19, 30, 56, 74, 76, 109, 123, 129, 133, 137, 141–42, 174; studies and education 1–2, 4–5, 30, 109, 142, 164, 188, 190; survivor 15–16, 28–29, 31, 41, 46, 74, 102, 129, 134, 160, 190; see also Shoah Honecker, Erich 157 Horkheimer, Max 170 Horowitz, Sara R. 7, 188 Horthy, Miklós 115 human rights 27, 77–78, 130, 136–37, 152, 163, 173–74; abuses 1, 77, 91, 187, 189 Humboldt University 156–57 Hyman, Paula 43 immigration 1, 83–84, 95, 144, 187, 189 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 84 Institute for the Documentation of Nazi Crimes (Haifa) 168 International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) 18, 21 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) 18 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 17 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) 4, 19, 23, 185n3 International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (IIGHRS) 20 International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS) 20 Isaac, Jules 13, 180 Israel 12–15, 20, 41–42, 64–66, 81, 137, 142n3, 158, 161, 169, 180 Israel Prize for literature 42

Jarecka, Gustawa 167–69 Jefferson, Thomas 49, 147 Jeserich, Kurt 159 Jesus 14, 117, 147, 151–52, 180–81, 183, 185n5 Jewish Agency 12 Jewish Documentation Center (Austria) 168 Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw) 65, 168 Jewish Museum Berlin 20, 66 Jewish Museum in New York City 66 Jewish: -Catholic relations 16, 114, 116, 120, 122; children 25, 76, 79, 81, 119–20, 131; community 15, 69, 80– 81, 114, 118–19, 159, 185n3; concept of God 14; forced labor 157–58; history 117, 158, 168–72; men 39, 161, 164; Orthodox 46; property 105–6; question 150–51; resistance 161; School 80; state 12; studies 76, 169, 173; survivor 2; women 45, 159, 161, 164 Jews: British 22; European 2–3, 11, 30, 40, 43, 46, 64, 66–69, 76, 115–19, 122, 134, 155, 162–64, 168, 179, 183; Italian 79; loyalty 81–82; murder of 2, 20–21, 34, 37n7, 39, 51, 64, 67–70, 115–18, 121, 135, 145, 167, 177, 183–84, 188; persecution of 2, 12, 92, 105, 115, 121–22, 156–59, 177, 182; refugee 96; victims 75, 146 Johnson, Lyndon 144 Joll, James 144 Judaism 80, 122, 179–81, 183–84, 186n15; anti- 179–82, 185n5 Kaiser Wilhelm II 147 Kassow, Samuel D. 49 Kennedy, John F. 178 Kershaw, Ian 104 Khan, Sadiq 93 Kierkegaard, Søren 149 killing centers 2, 25, 34, 50, 183 Kittel, Gerhard 145, 150–52 Klenicki, Leon 117–18 Kluger, Ruth 133 Kohl, Helmut 153 Kosovar Albanians 68, 70 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) 146 Kurds 70 Langer, Lawrence 56, 59n15 Lanzmann, Claude 16, 50 Leff, Lisa M. 7, 188 Lemkin, Raphael 133

196 Index

Lenz, Ludwig 159 Lessons and Legacies 17, 32, 138n1, 145 Levi, Primo 12–13, 47, 74, 141–42, 142n3 Limerick, Patricia 53 Linenthal, Edward T. 7, 188 Lipstadt, Deborah 19, 185n3 Littell, Franklin H. 14, 183 Locke, Hubert G. 14 Lodz 76, 131, 138n1; see also ghetto Lohse, Bruno 105 Lower, Wendy 7, 22, 33, 136, 187 Luther, Martin 147 Lutheran 144, 147–48 Maier, Charles 103 Majdanek 50 Marcuse, Herbert 170 mass atrocity crimes 1, 3, 5, 31–32, 96, 187, 189–90 Mauthausen 54 Mengele, Josef 134 Milano-Piperno, Mariella 79–80 Milgram, Stanley 170, 175n8 Moses, Claire 172 Mounk, Yascha 93 Mussolini, Benito 115 National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education (NCCHE) 16 National Higher Education Consortium of Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Centers 23 National September 11 Memorial 69–70 National Socialism 49, 101, 148 nationalism 28, 91–93, 97, 152, 188 NATO 68, 70 Naumann, Michael 68 Nazi: art looting 103, 105–6, 109; atrocities 62; crimes 11, 89, 91, 167–68; doctors 31; documentation 129, 134–35; era 49, 73, 89, 96, 134, 145, 148–49, 164, 182–84; Europe 75, 80, 163–64, 179; Germany 2–3, 11, 14, 19, 67, 89, 93, 104, 108, 121, 139n20, 146–47, 150, 157–58, 162, 169, 177, 179, 183; ideas 30, 95, 143, 145, 151; leaders 103–4; Party 101, 148, 150, 158–59; state 103, 146, 148, 152 Neuengamme 63, 65 Never Again Education Act 23 Niemöller, Martin 145 Nipperdey, Thomas 106 Norway 28, 53, 62, 70, 144 nuclear war 1, 28, 187, 189 Nuremberg 11, 17, 44, 101, 104

O’Rourke, Beto 83, 86n16 Oberhauser, Joseph 50–51 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria 84–85 Oklahoma City 53, 55–57; Memorial 56 Operation Allied Force 68–69 Orsi, Robert 53 Ottoman Empire 70, 162 Oyneg Shabes 58, 167; archive 11, 167 Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) 144–45 pandemics 2, 6, 23, 27–28, 49, 187, 189 Pätzold, Kurt 156–57 Pavelić, Ante 115 Peri, Alexis 52 perpetrators 2, 29, 33, 47, 54–55, 61, 73, 75, 83, 95–96, 104–5, 129–31, 133, 135, 155, 158–59, 161, 163, 167 Perrone, Lorenzo 141, 142n3 Persson, Göran 19 Pétain, Philippe 115 Petri, Erna 131 Petropoulos, Jonathan 7, 33, 188 Poe, Jack 56 Poland 16, 22, 28, 34, 40–42, 50, 57, 63, 66, 88, 91–93, 96, 138n1, 158–59, 168 Pope Benedict XVI 122 Pope Francis 22, 118, 122 Pope John Paul II 15, 19–20, 117 Pope John XXIII 13, 178–79 Pope Paul VI 14 Pope Pius XII 13, 22–23, 114–16, 118–23, 125n19, 177–78, 180, 188 propaganda 32, 107, 157, 161, 163–64 Protestants 18, 145–48, 162, 177–78, 180–81, 183–84 Quay, Jim 35, 191 racism 7, 22, 28, 31, 37, 77–79, 108, 120, 143, 148, 156, 162–63, 171, 173, 180–82, 184, 185n3, 187–88 Rather, Dan 79 Rebhun, Joseph 31, 37n4 refugee 43, 47, 75, 82–83, 90, 96, 169; crisis 1, 28, 187, 189 Remembering for the Future 17 Resolution A/RES/60/7 on Holocaust Remembrance 20–21, 23 Richardson, Judith 53 Ringelblum, Emanuel 11, 106, 167–68 Rittner, Carol 7, 17, 124n2, 188 Rosbottom, Ronald 52

Index 197

Roth, John K. 7, 17, 21, 35, 95, 124n2, 182, 185n5, 188–89, 191 Roxlau, Travis 29–30 Rubenstein, Richard L. 14, 28 Rwanda 18, 28, 96, 125n15, 183 Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church with NonChristian Religions 14, 116, 178, 180, 184, 186n15 Semprún, Jorge 133 Serwer, Adam 84 Shalev-Gerz, Esther 66–67 Shanksville, Pennsylvania 53, 57 Shoah 12, 15, 19, 40–47, 158, 177, 182, 184 Shofani, Father Emil 20 Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Leonore 181 Sierakowiak, David 131 Sisyphus 35 Smith, Mark M. 52 Snyder, Timothy 21, 95, 107–8 Sontag, Frederick 28 Spielberg, Steven 18 Srebrenica 18, 68 St. Augustine 181 St. John Chrysostom 181 State Jewish Museum in Prague 65 Staub, Ervin 135 Steiner, George 106–7 Straw, Jack 77 stupidity 30–32, 49 Suchomel, Franz 50 Suhrbier family 61–64 Suleiman, Susan 46–47 Supple, Carrie 181 Sutzkever, Abraham 44 Szajkowski, Zosa 168, 172 Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research 19 terrorism 14, 28, 53, 55–57, 79, 91, 93 Third Reich 2, 73, 83, 101, 104, 106–7, 115, 120, 135, 146, 157–59, 162–64, 169 Thompson, Hugh 189–90 Thucydides 132 Tichauer, Helen (Zippi) 134 Tillich, Paul 149 Treblinka 1, 34, 50, 54, 58, 115, 167, 188 Tree of Life Synagogue 69–70, 82, 123 Trump, Donald 49, 81–83, 93, 184 Turkey 70, 92 Twain, Mark 46, 108

UN High Commissioner of Human Rights 130 United States 13, 15–16, 18, 20–23, 31–32, 35, 54, 57, 62, 64, 66, 77, 80–84, 93–94, 96, 102, 108, 123, 144, 146, 148, 158, 162, 169, 173, 178, 189; military 88, 108 United States Holocaust Memorial Council (USHMC) 16, 18 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) 4, 7, 15–19, 22, 23, 29–30, 33–34, 46, 50–51, 53–55, 57–58, 66, 77, 106, 109, 130, 132, 137 US National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) 130 USC Shoah Foundation 18, 78, 109, 160 USSR 34, 66–67, 88, 93, 130, 163 Vatican 114–15, 118–22 Vatican Secret Archives 22–23, 118–20 Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations 19 Ventresca, Robert A. 7, 188 victims 12, 15, 21, 39, 43, 45, 52–56, 61, 63–64, 69–70, 75, 78–79, 83, 89, 90, 92, 95–96, 105–6, 115–16, 119, 122–23, 129, 132–35, 142n3, 146, 152, 155, 157–58, 160, 167, 169–70 Vietnam War 79, 144, 146, 156, 189–90 violence 53, 55–56, 77, 83, 89–91, 93–94, 107, 117, 120, 123, 148, 160, 163, 185n3; genocidal 89–90, 94, 97, 188; gun 70; mass 162–64; sexual 6 von Bismarck, Otto 147 von Humboldt, Wilhelm 128, 132 Waldheim, Kurt 129 Waller, James 135 Weimar Republic 49, 147 Weinberg, Gerhard 128 Weinberg, Shaike 54 Whicher, Pam 57 Wiesel, Elie 12, 15–16, 25, 28–29, 33, 37n7, 67–68, 74, 105–6, 115, 117, 130, 133, 136, 182, 184, 187, 190 Wiesel, Marion 16 Wiesenthal, Simon 168 World Holocaust Forum 23 World War I 33, 49, 70, 116, 124n13, 147 World War II 2, 28, 31, 34, 37n7, 42, 57, 61–62, 64, 69–70, 84, 88, 93, 102, 105, 109, 130, 169, 177, 179–80, 182–83, 189; post- 11, 21 Wroxton Holocaust Symposium 18 Wulf, Joseph 168

198 Index

xenophobia 28, 97, 173, 188 Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) 65, 168, 172 Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut see Yiddish Scientific Institute

YIVO Institute of Jewish Research 168 Yom HaShoah 13 Young, James E. 7, 12, 189 Yugoslavia 17–18, 28, 67, 183 Zimbardo, Philip 170, 175n8