Esther Goldberg (www.holocaustmemoirdigest.org) holds a B.A. English Literature from Boston University. She is a founding member of The Generation After Committee of Edmonton Jewish Federation (Canada) and creator and editor of the three volume Holocaust Memoir Digest. In this article, she emphasizes the value of personal memoirs in Shoah education.
What do we, the generations after the Shoah, take away from it? How do we approach such a vast and vital topic? What are our responsibilities to its memory? How can we make it part of our own lives, and still enjoy life? What responsibilities do we have in light of it?
Two aspects become apparent in discussing the focus of Holocaust education: first, how do we approach it: what is our responsibility to its memory; and second, what do we take away from it: how can we apply it to our lives? The primary focus of Holocaust education must be to learn what happened to the Jews of Europe under Nazi rule in the twelve years between the Nazi rise to power and the German surrender. This entails studying the history of what happened through the chronology and development of events throughout the wide geographic area of German-occupied or controlled Europe. Learning this history can teach us what happens when civilization falls apart, and why we must be sensitive to the needs and distresses of our fellow human beings.
In any discussion of what happened during the Shoah, the descriptions left to us by survivors enable teachers and educators, in their classrooms, to present the scale and implications of mass murder to children in a way that they can grasp it and put it into the context of their own lives. Within the range of the chronological and geographic development of the Shoah, survivor testimony illustrates both the history and the perspectives of the survivors – what we can learn from them. Survivor testimony – from published memoirs that are available for children to read on their own – brings these stories of the vast range of experiences to the personal, individual level. The focus of Holocaust education is learning the history; the purpose of Holocaust education is learning sensitivity to others. Survivor memoirs are important for both aspects.
Survivors have taken the time and thought to record and publish their experiences. It is their eyewitness reports that breathe life into the bureaucratic and fanatic documentation of the Nazi perpetrators. The wide range of experiences is distilled through the voices of individuals, and illustrated through the four stages of the Shoah.
The first “Solution” to what the Germans called “the Jewish Question,” as carried out by the Nazi regime in Germany between 1933 when the Nazi Party came to power and the outbreak of war in 1939, was Emigration. Jews lost all rights of citizenship, along with their livelihoods. More than half of the 650 000 German and Austrian Jews emigrated before the outbreak of the war, and survived. Ingrid Kisliuk was eight years old in 1938 when her family decided to flee Vienna for the safety of Belgium:
My mother was bagging objects that she planned to give away when I noticed her including a small doll, one of my favorites. When I protested bitterly and asked for an explanation, her only answer was a very severe look. …I should understand that we were going to leave and could not bring toys along. (Kisliuk 1998, 82)
Ingrid’s doll epitomizes the array of household goods abandoned, and the jobs, homes, businesses and Jewish properties that were confiscated, often to secure the loyalty of those non-Jews who became the beneficiaries of the widespread looting and confiscation.
The second “Solution” to the “Jewish Question”, Ghettoization, began with the German conquest of Poland in September 1939, when more than two million Polish Jews came under German rule. The Germans removed Jews from their homes and forced them into ghettos where they were strictly confined, with severe restrictions on the amount of food and medicines allowed in. Bertha Ferderber-Salz, a young wife and mother, described the establishment of the ghetto in Cracow:
Before the war, 3 000 people had lived there, and now they wanted to crowd in four times as many. Everyone knew what this decree meant: epidemics, hunger, poverty, and in addition, a high wall all round, like the walls around old Jewish cemeteries, symbolizing the situation of the Jews who were being buried alive. (Ferderber-Salz 1980)
By the end of 1940, more than forty ghettos had been established. By the end of 1941, 4 000 Jews were dying every monthof starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the ghettos, and several hundred a month in the Lodz Ghetto.
The third “Solution” to the “Jewish Question” came with the June 1941 German invasion of Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, the Baltic States, and western Russia, where more than a million Jews were living. SS killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, who had been specially trained in Germany, fanned out eastward in four groups covering the entire area between the Baltic Sea in the north, and the Black Sea in the south. Their job was to round-up Jews, force them into nearby ditches, ravines, and forests, and machine-gun them.
Fanya Heller, in the Galician town of Skala, was almost eighteen when the Germans began their killing. She and her family managed to hide in a cellar for two days. She described what they witnessed upon emerging:
Dead and dying people were strewn all over the street. Children were running around looking for their parents, and parents were looking for their children. Houses stood empty as if a cosmic cyclone had sucked their occupants to another planet. There were dead bodies lying on the beds and floors. The doors and windows were smashed open, and everything was gone – clothes, furniture, all the occupants had possessed had been taken either by the Germans or the Ukrainian militia or by Polish and Ukrainian looters. (Heller 1993)
The four groups of Einsatz killers together consisted of 3 005 German SS soldiers who organized and carried out the killings. But as Fanya Heller described, they were assisted by the local population – Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian, and Lithuanian volunteer battalions.
By April 1941, Germany had conquered nine independent States: Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, and Greece. In addition to refugees from pre-war Greater Germany, each of these countries had substantial and established Jewish communities. The Nazi authorities feared that the local populations in Western European countries would not tolerate the Einsatzgruppen method of killings that were being carried out in the East. Western European populations would also be less likely to collaborate with the killings.
In January 1942, the leaders of the German government ministries involved met with senior Nazi officials near Berlin at a villa on the Wannsee to finalize a deportation plan. Their fourth “solution” became known as the “Final Solution”. Jews from all countries under German occupation, and from the many independent countries allied to Germany – including Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria – would be deported to German-occupied Poland, to what we now call Death Camps: Chelmno, near Lodz; Belzec and Sobibor, near Lublin; Treblinka, near Warsaw, and Maly Trostenets, near Minsk. Other than a few Jewish slave laborers forced to burn the bodies, everyone who was brought to the Death Camps was killed upon arrival. Also put into operation against Jews in 1942, were the three camps that became known collectively as “Auschwitz”: the Main Camp, Auschwitz I; Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II; and Auschwitz III, the Buna Slave Labor Camp located in the nearby town of Monowice, known as Buna Monowitz.
Ingrid Kisliuk, whose family had fled Vienna and found refuge in Brussels, described the routine for those caught up in the daily round-ups, which began in German-occupied Belgium in August 1942:
At the spur of the moment busy intersections in the city were cordoned off as the Germans went in search of Jews. They demanded identification, and those unlucky individuals caught in their trap were carted off to the Gestapo headquarters and from there to the assembly camp of Malines to be deported on the next convoy. (Kisliuk 1998)
Transit camps were established in Western Europe to collect masses of Jews from their homes, or from the streets. The main Transit Camps were Westerbork in Holland, Malines, in Belgium, Drancy in France, and Fossoli in Italy. The Jews were then deported to Auschwitz or to the Death Camps.
Slovak-born Rudolf Vrba was seventeen when he was deported. He described the eighty people in his railcar who were deported from Slovakia to their “unknown destination”, in their case, to Majdanek, just outside Lublin:
They were all imprisoned mentally by unanswerable questions. How had it happened? Why had it happened? What was going to happen to them and to those they had left behind? And, of course, where were they going? Snatched from civilization, yet still attached to it by the umbilical cord of domesticity, they worried, too, about trifles. Had they turned off the gas at the mains? Had they locked the back door? Had they remembered to cancel the milk and the newspapers? (Vrba 1997)
Rudolf Vrba described his thoughts on arrival in Auschwitz in June 1942:
What were they guarding in this strange camp, with its clean concrete roads and its uplifting slogans, its dogs and its thugs and its double lethal fences? What treasure was stored here, for surely all this vast anti-escape machinery was not designed to corral a few thousand insignificant Jews? …The security precautions, however, were for us insignificant prisoners. Himmler had ruled that nobody must escape. The world must never know of this place, his most efficient death factory. (Vrba 1997)
In June 1944, two months after Rudolf Vrba and his friend Alfred Weztler escaped from Auschwitz with the first, detailed report that this “Unknown Destination”, which was “Somewhere in the East” was in fact a killing center, British, American, and Canadian armed forces landed in Normandy on D-Day – a landing that had been two years in the planning. This was the beginning of the liberation of Europe, from the West, and – with a renewed Soviet offensive – from the East.
Along with the German documentation of the Holocaust in its four stages of Emigration, Ghettoization, Einsatzgruppen Killing Squads and the “Final Solution” of the Death Camps, the Shoah and its impact on the human mind can be explored through published survivor memoirs. Human beings were manipulated to become murderers, yet some also helped Jews. Fanya Heller and her family were hidden and saved by a Ukrainian friend Jan, who described how power had corrupted his friend Stanislaus, whom Jan had seen murdering a newborn Jewish baby:
Should I say Stanislaus is crazy or that he holds a grudge because a Jew once cheated him? No. He wanted to do it. I went to school with him. He has a good head on his shoulders, he doesn’t beat his wife. He goes to church. He wanted to do it, and there’s no law against it. He’s the law. The law is behind us. Kill. I’m supposed to kill you. And Stanislaus? He’ll do it again, given half a chance. (Heller 1993)
A murderer is someone who feels above the law created by a civilized society. Somehow the law does not apply to him. But Stanislaus is not above the law: he is the law. He has become, in Primo Levi’s description of such people “too powerful”. His ruthlessness knows no boundaries. How do we comprehend such cruelty? Primo Levi described what happens to those who have power and are allowed to pass on what they have received:
When he is given the command of a group of unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them, he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post. Moreover, his capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed; and he will only be satisfied when he has unloaded onto his underlings the injury received from above.
On one hand, a person is cruel in order to protect his own position. On the other, he is venting his own anger and frustration on those over whom he has power.
Every aspect of human nature – the best and the worst of humanity as seen by those who saved and by those who destroyed, can be explored in survivor memoirs. They recount examples of positive aspects of the Shoah – help for one another, family and community bonds, spiritual and physical resistance, the will to live, and the determination that the story be told. Every aspect of the Shoah, including the rich legacy of pre-war Jewish life and culture, and the strength of the human spirit to survive and rebuild life and family, can be explored in survivor memoirs. Every discipline of human society, including artistic, economic, legal, social, psychological, ethical, and religious – along with the historical and geographic – can be explored in survivor memoirs.
As students of the Shoah, our responsibility to its memory is carried out in the act of learning about what happened. Why must we learn about the Shoah? Because it is our history. In using survivor testimony from their published memoirs, we have brought this history to life.
What responsibilities do we have in light of the Shoah? What do we do with this knowledge of our history? What is meant by “Never Again”? On December 10, 1986, in his Nobel Prize Speech, Elie Wiesel described the responsibility he felt as a result of his experiences during the Shoah:
I swore never to be silent wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.
It is in teaching this important value – never to be silent in the face of oppression, whether it involves bullying in the schoolyard or genocide by armies – that must be the purpose of Holocaust education. The lesson to be learned is the imperative to care for and about others. The added advantage, as Gerda Weissmann Klein writes, is personal:
I have learned that when we bring comfort to others, we reassure ourselves, and when we dispel fear, we assuage our own fears as well.
The focus of Holocaust education must be the history of what happened, in a chronological stage by stage and geographic region by region approach. Survivor memoirs bring this history to an individual, human level. The value of studying the Holocaust, in addition to viewing the best and the worst of humanity under situations of extreme trauma, is to understand that each person must take responsibility for other human beings. In changing the way we react to others, we can change the course of history so that “Never Again” will be not merely a slogan but a fact.
References
Ferderber-Salz, Bertha (1980) And the Sun Kept Shining…, Holocaust Library
Goldberg, Esther (2004) Holocaust Memoir Digest, Volume 1, Vallentine Mitchell
Goldberg, Esther (2005) Holocaust Memoir Digest, Volume 2, Vallentine Mitchell
Goldberg, Esther (2006) Holocaust Memoir Digest, Volume 3, Vallentine Mitchell
Heller, Fanya Gottesfeld (1993) Strange and Unexpected Love, A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs, KTAV
Kisliuk, Ingrid (1998) Unveiled Shadows, The Witness of a Child, Nanomir Press
Klein, Gerda Weismann (1957) All But My Life, Hill and Wang
Levi, Primo (1961) Survival in Auschwitz, the Nazi Assault on Humanity, Macmillan
Vrba, Rudolf (1997) I Cannot Forgive, Regent College Publishing
Weisel, Elie http://eliewieselfoundation.org/nobelprizespeech.aspx