Creating Collective Memory

by Arnold Schwartzman for Voices & Visions

In remembrance lies the secret of redemption, while forgetfulness prolongs the exile.
-Baal Shem Tov

We talk about the Holocaust today as a distinctive event. The few remaining survivors are in great demand to tell their story. At a recent workshop at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, director Alejandro Baer reminded us that this was not always the case.

In The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg writes " In the beginning there was no Holocaust. When it took place in the middle of the 20th century it's nature was not fully grasped."

There are many layers of memory about the Holocaust, many lens through which it can be viewed. There is Jewish memory and Israeli memory. There are the memories of German society and the memory of Nazi crimes. Ultimately there is a more global Holocaust memory which has taken shape.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, no one wanted to hear about the experience of survivors. They had not yet been termed survivors, rather they were thought of as DPs (displaced persons) and immigrants. There was discomfort that more had not been done to save them and suspicions as to how survivors had survived. The Cold War had emerged and with a new alliance with Germany it was not so politically desirable to mention German involvement. All of these factors contributed to silence.

The attitude in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s was best exemplified by Konrad Adenauer when he spoke of "unspeakable crimes committed in the name of the German people", a framing that distances the Germans from responsibility.

Attitudes began to change in the 1970s when Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt at the Warsaw ghetto uprising monument. In 1978 the Holocaust television mini-series came out and for many West Germans was the first time they learned of the scope of the Holocaust. The word "Holocaust" entered the German vocabulary.

In 1994 the US Holocaust Memorial Museum was created following a dialogue that began in 1978, a rather lengthy planning cycle. Its mission was to encourage its visitors to reflect on the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as one's personal responsibility as a citizen in a democracy. This universal message was framed by questions of ethics. They sought to make the Holocaust meaningful for non-Jews by examining it as a unique event with universal implications.

Remembrance has always been an important part of Jewish culture beginning with the destruction of the temples. The Holocaust was viewed as an event in Jewish history alongside a lengthy history of pogroms and anti-Semitism. The holiday Tisha B'av commemorates destruction of the temples and all other catastrophes, but in 1953 the Israeli Knesset set aside a separate day for Holocaust remembrance. Holocaust Martyrs and Heroism Remembrance Day commemorates the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Jews who fought back dying a martyr's death rather than a victim's, a vantage point consistent with the new nation's philosophy.

Those in the midst of the Holocaust made efforts to preserve their experience for posterity. The Ringelblum Archive was preserved in milk cans and holds a trove of information on life in the Warsaw ghetto.

There are two distinct themes to memory. For Israel and Jews it is "never again victims", for Germany, "never again perpetrators". Have we in fact learned? David Rieff wryly notes that since 1945, “never again” has meant, essentially, “Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s."

Dr Joachim Savelsberg shared with us his experience in growing up in Germany in the 1950s when there was no mention of the Holocaust. The war was discussed, uncles were missing, topics were raised and then shifted. He noted that silence is communication also and tells stories or as stated by Susan Sontag, "silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech".  Studies of that time found that the concept of genocide and the Holocaust was more rare in German media than elsewhere. He posited that the Holocaust crowded out other genocides. Germans couldn't draw parallels for fear of being accused of relativizing the Holocaust.

After the war Stalin wanted mass executions of perpetrators. America argued for trials to counter revisionists and isolationism. Roosevelt had recognized the need to construct a memory and did not want Hitler's guilt left in question. Robert Jackson, chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials noted that " We must establish incredible events by credible evidence."

Savelsberg reminded us that the lens of a criminal trial is different than that of politics or art. While the law has the potential to tell history, it is limited by its structure. Adversarial in nature with responses limited by the questions asked, only certain content will be unveiled. Nonetheless, trials began to establish collective memory, knowledge of the past that is shared, mutually acknowledged and reinforced by a collective body of people. It was from these early trials that a collective memory of the Holocaust was first shaped.

A History Lesson

I spent the past week in an interdisciplinary workshop on the Holocaust. I have found that is a bit of a conversation stopper for many people who imagine a week of being bombarded with horrific images from death camps. As one who used to not be able to watch a Holocaust movie without leaving the room, part of me understands that reaction. For me it felt personal. It could have been me. Later I learned it was many of my family members. But as I've gingerly delved into this area, I've found subjects of great interest, especially in the realm of memory which was the focus of this workshop.

Most attendees were high school history teachers, but a friend and I decided to attend because of the multi-disciplinary aspect. The theme was how memory and history are shaped. Professors from different disciplines addressed such topics as how post-war trials and the law shaped memory as well as the impact of art, film, memoir and fiction. Because I've been doing more talks with high school and college kids on the stories behind my artwork, many of which relate to the Holocaust, I thought this might provide useful background. While I have read widely on the Holocaust and explored its history in my travels, as a self-taught person on this subject, there are gaps in my knowledge that I hoped to fill. Memory is a subject I deal with in my work so I found the vantage point of the course particularly intriguing.

The workshop was put on by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) at the University of Minnesota. CHGS is one of the repositories for the Shoah interviews done by Steven Spielberg and a resource for education about both the Holocaust and other genocides. While I thought I knew its scope, I was to learn of the many educational resources that it offered to educators.

The first day began with a review of the history of the Holocaust by Dr Ofer Ashkenazi. He gave a very succinct summary which I've outlined here. To say "never again" we need to understand how we got there. Our knowledge of the Holocaust is seldom neatly organized by its evolution as for most of us it comes from film or literature and maybe a chance mention in a history class on WWII.

The objective of the Nazis was to depopulate Eastern Europe and then populate it with Germans.The plan was to eliminate 20 million people or make them slave workers. While they started with Jews, Poles were next in line.

1. The process began long before the war. In 1933-39 Nazi Germany experimented with exclusion, persecution and violence.

Hitler became chancellor through a negotiation even though he didn't have a majority. Much to the surprise of some he became Fuhrer just two years later.

* In 1934 there were the first boycotts against Jewish businesses.

* 1933-38 saw the beginning of segregation, racial laws and definitions of who is Jewish

* 1938. Kristallnacht

* After Kristallnacht 75,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps as Jews (not as political prisoners) with many allowed back after a few months. This was consistent with the story as told by two German survivors who I had interviewed. Germany was still "encouraging" Jews to leave Germany, their version of self deportation.

* September 1, 1939 saw the outbreak of war, the invasion of Poland and the Ribbentrop agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union.

* By 1941 all of Europe except the Soviet Union was under German control or allies. While I knew of the individual countries involved, it was this sweeping statement that gave me pause.

2. 1939-42 was the beginning of the creation of ghettos and mass murder

Three weeks after the invasion of Poland there were the first orders restricting the movements and rights of Jews.

Germany had 500,000 Jews out of a population of 67 million, less than 1%. After 1939 many left and there were 200,000.

Poland had 3 million. The perceived "problem" of the Jews was largely resolved for Germany and Austria, but suddenly the "problem" grew when Germany invaded Poland. There was no escape for most Eastern European Jews. Anti-immigration policies of countries such as the US effectively barred the door even as they sent Hitler the message that no one cared about the Jews and he could proceed unchecked.

There were an estimated 10,000 ghettos. Life in ghettos varied, all had a Judenrat, a Jewish council, to govern everyday life. Many worked efficiently for their community facilitating the creation of schools and theaters. Ultimately the Judenrat was given the impossible choice of supplying names of those to be deported.

In the Fall of 1941 the Einsatzgruppe began killing Jewish populations in the Baltic territories and the Soviet Union. They worked independently from the military, but the military often cooperated in killings.

Initially the focus was on killing political officers, then Jewish men age 15-60 and then it was expanded to all Jews.

We forget about the many people who died in the forests near their own communities. Between 1 million and 1.5 million Jews were killed by a shot to the head. These were local initiatives and there was not a formal policy at this time. Many of the actions arose first on the local level. For example in Belzec the regional police chief initiated a local killing area for Jews who could not work. The regional police chief initiated a gas-van site in Chelmno to kill those from the overcrowded Lodz ghetto. Jews were sent from Germany to be killed on arrival in the Baltic states. These were at killing fields such as the Ninth Fort and Ponar as reflected in my artwork on Lithuania.

Meanwhile decisions were also being made from above. In Sept 1941 it was decided that deportation of Jews would start before the end of the war. Originally it was thought this would be a post-war activity. The approach was somewhat experimental. People conjectured what Hitler wanted done based on clues from his speeches and interpretation by his staff. I pictured a nation with wristbands bearing the legend WWHD (What Would Hitler Do).

In January 1942 there was a conference at Wansee, a Berlin suburb, with all the important people in Reich gathering to figure out how to implement the final solution.

3. 1942-44 saw the beginning of systematic mass murder through 2000 camps

There were centers of killing at places such as Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Chelmno and Belzec.

There was a shift from shootings due to logistics. They needed bullets for the front and shootings took more manpower. Most importantly was the response of troops to killing, especially the killing of women and children. According to Hoss, the former camp commandant of Auschwitz, it was causing suicides and alcoholism. A less direct method was felt to ease this distress. Also by limiting the number of people involved there were fewer who could talk about what was happening.

In a year and a half, 3 million Jews were killed in camps.

Most survivors are from Auschwitz or Majdanek which were both concentration camps and death camps. Both camps had a selection for life or death. Auschwitz had 500,000 prisoners, a number that stunned me. The population was as large as the city I live in.

One of the students asked why the camps were in Poland. The response reminded me of the old Willie Sutton quote on why people rob banks (that is where the money is). In this case, that is where the Jews were. It was essentially an operations problem, how to get the Jews to the camps most efficiently. Originally there were 3.3 million Jews in Poland of which 2.8 million were murdered. In Poland and the Baltics 90% of the Jews were murdered while less than 1% were killed in Bulgaria and Denmark which resisted the murder of the Jews within their population.

4. Death Marches were the final stage. Jews were marched west as the Soviets approached. Some Jews were kept alive at the end as a bargaining chip, some as labor. Part of the reason for death marches was to hide the evidence.

Most death camps were liberated by the Red Army, not the US. Those that the US saw were the better off camps, yet still horrified the soldiers.

One of the questions that has puzzled me were the efforts of the Nazis to hide their tracks. That would seem to indicate an awareness of at least the world's moral sense. I learned that they began to hide their tracks after 1943 when traces of Poles murdered by the Soviets were found at Katyn and the world responded with horror. That heightened the awareness of world perception and it occurred to them that they could be judged likewise.

This step by step progression begins to highlight points where actions could have altered the course of events. More open immigration policies, less isolationism, resistance by countries and the weight of public opinion all could have made a difference. How much we will never know.

Fully Engaging

I recently returned from New York where I attended the conference of the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM). As an artist, I am not the typical attendee, but my work is very much in keeping with many of the themes that are addressed. One of those themes is how we will tell the story of the Holocaust when there are no longer survivors to tell it. My work on Lithuania and Poland addresses the Holocaust and I often speak jointly with my friend Dora, a survivor from my ancestral town. Dora and her family started the Holocaust Resource Center in our community which once was quite actively used by area schools. At one time, schools would bus children to the center and Dora’s late husband would speak to them. As school budgets tighten and there are fewer survivors, the center has been less actively used. Dora and I often debate the right vehicle to carry her effort forward in light of these changes. With that in mind, I attended a session titled Assessing Authenticity: Sources and Uses of Holocaust Narrative.

The session covered the gamut of low tech to high tech approaches. For most students The Diary of Ann Frank is their primary exposure to the Holocaust. Alexandra Zapruder sought to expand on that with publication of the book Salvaged Pages , a compilation of diaries by young people trapped in the Holocaust. Alexandra read a very eloquent passage from one of the diaries and talked about how she would work with a class of students in more deeply understanding the text. She felt that it was important to have a teacher mediate discussion, but weighed the benefits and detriments of using technology to explode topics and add enhancements. She raised the question of what point visuals begin to stifle the imagination and become overwhelming and distracting. When she teaches she slows it down from the pace to which most students have become accustom. They focus on specific words and she felt it important that process be preserved.

Linda Mills of NYU shared yet another approach through her film Auf Wiedersehen: ‘Til We Meet Again , an often comic view of her journey back to Vienna with her mother and ten year old son to retrace her mother’s life prior to her 1939 escape.

The session concluded with Stephen Smith of the USC Shoah Foundation who presented the most high tech approach in which they spent five intensive days filming a survivor named Pinchus.
They interviewed him on a variety of topics and connected the video of him with classrooms where through voice recognition they were able to have the students ask questions on a variety of topics and create a seemingly live dialogue as if he were actually present in real time. Stephen noted that in 18 months they expect to have a holographic projector which would create an even more real sense of the speaker’s presence. The result is extremely powerful, but because the filming is so intensive it is a process that would not work for many survivors.

Stephen also shared a learning approach where they had students take survivor testimony from their vast collection and cut words away, distilling it to poetry. The objective is to get students to engage with survivors’ stories and understand the essence.

I came away from this session greatly encouraged at the creativity that is going into assuring a level of personal engagement that I had not thought possible. The ability to leverage new technology presents options that just a short time ago were unavailable.