Three Stories: Reflections on Lessons from Auschwitz

29 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by jaimeashworth in The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

Tags

Auschwitz, COVID-19, Holocaust, Holocaust Education

Working as a Freelance Educator on the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz project is probably the most rewarding and important thing I do. When COVID-19 interrupted all our lives, I was part of the way through an exceptionally busy term with two visits completed and two to come. While this letter is addressed to one group in particular (with whom I was hoping to do a follow-up seminar) it is also meant for all the groups I’ve worked with.

The main gate to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, March 2020. Photo: Jaime Ashworth

Dear Group Five,

First, let me say that you were lovely. Bright, curious, open to learning new things, as groups so often are. It’s just one of the reasons I love working as an Educator on the project. But you had something else in addition: an emotional grasp of what the trip meant that I’ve only rarely encountered and a willingness to share that with me and each other that was beautiful and inspiring to work with.

I am, quite simply, gutted that I haven’t been able to complete my sections of your LFA journey. I was looking forward to hearing your reflections and insights and getting a glimpse of your next steps. I don’t think anyone knows when or how that may happen – though I’m sure the logistics team that do everything to manage the seminars and trips are working to answer that question. In advance of that possibility I want to share some ideas about the possibilities and challenges that lie ahead in your next steps.

On a personal level I am wary of the idea of lessons. Michael Marrus, a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust and its history, wrote in his memoir that lessons are problematic, often telling us more about the person drawing the lesson than the past itself. I agree. But if we don’t try to draw lessons all we are left with is horror. So we have to strike a balance.

Certainly the idea that we can easily draw inspirational lessons is to be approached with caution. After hearing the testimony of Steven Frank, you identified that the most important factor in his survival was luck. Yes, he was young and healthy. Yes, he was resilient. Yes, he enjoyed the support of a parent who was also spared. But so did many others. As we are discovering, there is by definition no logic to catastrophe. Kings and beggars, villains and saints – all perished, the remainder saved only by capricious chance. As Primo Levi reminded us in his final book, The Drowned and the Saved:

We, the survivors, are not only a tiny but also an anomalous minority. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.

Shortly after finishing the book, Levi died, falling down the lift shaft of his apartment building in Turin. There is a debate about whether he fell or jumped. I’m not sure it matters: he had spent a lifetime contesting the verdict on himself he had pronounced in the camp, convicted in his own mind by the fact of his survival. He had acted as best he could, but remained concerned that this had still been at the cost of others’ survival. As the Polish writer (and Auschwitz inmate) Tadeusz Borowski described so well, the camp experience involved everyone in the crime. One could not emerge from it without, however inadvertently, being tarnished. Because if you survived, someone else hadn’t. This is why understandings of survivors now focus more on shame than guilt. Guilt might be contested, shame enters the skin, as indelible as a tattoo.

Lessons need to be approached carefully, mindful of the facts and their complexity. Perhaps the only lesson that really matters is to see humanity and potential in everyone. That’s why the emphasis is on rehumanising the victims: because you can’t see the humanity in a statistic. But you might glimpse it in a market square or the site of a synagogue. Or in the objects brought by deportees, proclaiming their faith in the simple belief that life would go on, with prayers to be said, meals to be cooked and teeth to be brushed. And the reassurance of house keys in their pocket.

And what of the perpetrators? Should we see them as human? The Polish epigram Ludzie ludziom zgotowali ten los, coined by the writer Zofia Nałkowska while investigating Nazi crimes, is often translated as “man prepared this fate for man”. Which I suppose has a certain cadence in English. But in fact it is literally “People prepared this fate for people.” The first translation may look better carved in a stone tablet but it detaches the actors from their actions. People did this: people like you, people like me. And as Jonathan Littell notes in his novel The Kindly Ones:

If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person.

So where do we go from here? Primo Levi wrote of the shame of the liberators as they entered the camp, their eyes downcast because this had happened, that such crimes had entered the world of existing things. A sense of shame at humanity is a common response to Auschwitz even today, 75 years later. And it is both correct and just the beginning of the story. You are it’s next step.

I often tell three stories when saying goodbye to groups.

The first is by Elie Wiesel and concerns the trial of God. A trial in the barracks of Birkenau where the inmates found God either guilty or absent. But then it was time for prayers, so they prayed. Sometimes we carry on despite our conviction that things are worthless – because sometimes that’s all there is to do.

Elie Wiesel was liberated in Buchenwald, aged sixteen. He spent a lifetime trying to explain Auschwitz but often resorted to the aphorism that “The truth of Auschwitz lies in silence”. It’s another good phrase that looks very impressive carved in stone. But here’s my question: if the truth of Auschwitz lies in silence, how do we tell it?

The final story is from the late Clive James. On a visit to Munich on assignment for the Observer in 1983, he visited Dachau. His description is characteristically both beautiful and learned.

There is a place in Virgil’s Aeneid called the broken-hearted fields. Standing in that snow-covered space I could think of no better description. Nor was there any point in reproaching oneself for being unable to shed tears: if we could truly imagine what it was like, we would die of grief.

I often think of these words when I talk to students worrying about whether their next steps will be enough or hear educators fret about whether they covered everything, whether they did justice to the facts. Of course they didn’t, because nobody can. We ask you to bear witness to Auschwitz, knowing that it’s really beyond description; because it’s the attempt that matters.

And so I suggest one final lesson from Auschwitz: it is better to speak than to remain silent. And you must trust that whatever you say will be perfect – because the alternative is saying nothing at all. The rest, as Rabbi Hillel said, is commentary: now go study.

Wishing you safe passage and a prosperous voyage in these troubled times.

Jaime

London, March 2020

On Holocaust Memorial Day 2020: Stand Together

24 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by jaimeashworth in Heritage Politics, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings, Uncategorized

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#StandTogether, aboutholocaust.org, Child Refugees, HMD2020, Holocaust, Holocaust Memorial Day, Kindertransport, Leo Baeck, Regina Jonas

The Book of Names in Block 27 at Auschwitz. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2015.

Yesterday, at a ceremony hosted by the Association of Jewish Refugees at Belsize Square Synagogue, I listened to testimony from Frank Bright, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Aged 91 and frail, he began by asking the room “Can you hear me?” The plaintive yet essential nature of his question took me aback for a moment.

The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day asks us to #StandTogether, but what does this mean? Are we listening?

In the last year, I have spent a lot of time working on the aboutholocaust.org project for the World Jewish Congress and UNESCO. The website contains a range of questions and answers which aim to explain key concepts and key events, and which illustrate them through the life stories of individuals.

As part of this, individuals who have been familiar names have also been developed into full personalities: the humanisation of the Holocaust is more than knowing a name, it is becoming aware of who that person was. The American science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card has many views which I profoundly reject, but his description in the novel Speaker for the Dead of how we should understand the people of the past continues to be something I try and live up to:

…to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story – what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story that we never know, the story that we never can know – and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only story truly worth telling.

To fulfil this task for the victims of the Holocaust would take centuries. The Book of Names produced by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, and kept in the Jewish Exhibition at Auschwitz, contains four million names of victims. Speaking to students, I point out that it actually commemorates three groups: those who died and whose names are recorded (Yad Vashem is taken from the Book of Isaiah and means “a monument and a name”); the space at its front where the other two million names we may never know, or even be able to guess at, should go; and the surviving family members whose pages of testimony are condensed into this vast artefact. And these are the barest of details: names, dates, place of birth, place of death (if this is even known). Their hopes, their fears, their aspirations and their regrets all went up, quite literally, in smoke. Telling some of their stories is the only way I can stand with them.

Three of the questions I have answered this year for aboutholocaust have stuck in my mind as I’ve reflected upon the idea of standing together.

Firstly, “Did you know that thousands of Jewish children left Germany without their parents to escape Nazi persecution?” The story of the Kindertransport is well-known and often used to justify a narrative of British moral superiority. The footage of the late Sir Nicholas Winton on That’s Life! in the 1980s, surrounded by the adults he saved as children, is incredibly moving. But for every child who came, many more did not, to say nothing of the parents who were forced to accept separation, usually permanent, as the price of securing their children’s safety. This week, as I sat in a room with some of them in Belsize Square, another of those children, Lord Dubs, was definitively frustrated in his campaign to ensure the safety and security of child refugees separated from their families. We must ask with whom we are standing, and why, and whether the cause of unity for its own sake is worth it. I stand with the children.

Secondly, “Why were there more Jews in Albania in 1945 than before WW2?” in 1938, the Jewish population of Albania was around 200 people. At the end of the war, it was around 1800, as Jews from Germany, Austria, Serbia, Greece and Yugoslavia arrived, in transit to the Americas, Turkey and Mandate Palestine. They had been kept safe by a code of toleration and hospitality called Besa, which means “to keep the promise”. As Lime Balla, one of the rescuers, described it:

We were poor – we didn’t even have a dining table – but we never allowed them to pay for the food or shelter. I went into the forest to chop wood and haul water. We grew vegetables in our garden so we all had plenty to eat. The Jews were sheltered in our village for fifteen months. We dressed them all as farmers, like us. Even the local police knew that the villagers were sheltering Jews.

To stand together is not just a matter of symbolism. It is to act as well, whatever our circumstances, recognising the capacity that each of us has to do something.

Finally, the work on Rabbi Leo Baeck was inspiring. The leader of German Jewry in the 1930s, Baeck chose to stay with his community, as did Rabbi Regina Jonas, a pioneering female rabbi. Both were deported to Theresienstadt, from where Jonas was deported to Auschwitz and murdered in late 1944. I searched in vain for a statement of why they chose to stand together with their community, when in both cases they had options of hiding or escape. The closest I came was the prayer written by Baeck for Yom Kippur in 1935:

Our history is the history of the grandeur of the human soul and the dignity of human life. In this day of sorrow and pain, surrounded by infamy and shame, we will turn our eyes to the days of old. From generation to generation God redeemed our fathers, and he will redeem us in the days to come. We bow our heads before God and remain upright and erect before man. We know our way and we see the road to our goal.

In short, to stand together is sometimes all we can do, recognising that we do so on a road whose ultimate destination is impossible to know. So we must hold hands as we go.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, 2019: Torn from Home

27 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by jaimeashworth in The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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Gunther Demnig, HMD2019, Holocaust Memorial Day, Stolpersteine, Torn from Home

The four Stolpersteine, as we left them. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2018.

Gunther Demnig works fast on the chilly pavement in Germany. His practiced hands prise up four cobbles from the street: a sharp crack precedes their slow easing from the ground to expose the sandy layer beneath. The stones are on the pavement beside him, gleaming in the pale winter light.

The stones are inscribed simply: names, dates, fate, as far as this can be known. The opening statement is baldly “Hier wohnt”: here lived. This is their last known address before being deported, though the building is certainly different: the city was heavily bombed. We do not know much of what happened after three of the family were deported in 1942. A postcard from the transit ghetto in Izbica in Poland, dated July 1942, was found by chance in a Berlin fleamarket in 2016. From Izbica, their destination is uncertain but was probably Sobibor: their stones now read “murdered in occupied Poland”. The exact moment of their death is unknown: there is certainly no marker for them where they perished.

The fourth stone concludes “Flucht nach England”: fled to England. This stone is for the eldest daughter of the family, who arrived in England on a domestic servant visa in August 1939, though she had never made a bed before. It is her descendants that mill around, blocking the pavement on this grey afternoon.

The arrival of the stones made the occasion seem real. Children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren took turns holding the stones, wrapped in their cloths, cradling them as though they were children. Photographs are taken, tears are wiped away, if not quite shed. We have gathered here for this moment from across the world, and the sight of the names has tautened the air in a way that nobody quite expected. Reluctantly giving the stones to the ground, the family stands back as Demnig pushes the stones into place and with a practiced hand embeds them, fills the gaps with mortar and with almost a flourish wipes away the excess from the inscriptions. The stones have taken their place, not only in the city of origin of those they remember, but in a network of similar memorials across Europe.

We stop, a few words are spoken, the breath of the speakers puffing in the cold air. Four of us arrived just in time for the ceremony and our suitcases are pushed neatly against the building, an odd echo of previous journeys. More words are spoken, some prayers are said, and then we load ourselves into taxis, leaving the stones. Some take a final few images. As I get in, I take a last distant shot of the four stones, together at last in the pavement, a spray of gravel marking the place where they have been worked into the landscape.

The historian Michael Burleigh wrote in 1996 that for many, “Nazism is not a matter of academic contemplation; but rather something which explains why they have no relatives or children; why they are chronically ill or have severe psychological problems; or why they live in Britain, Canada, Israel or the USA rather than Central Europe.” This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme, “Torn from Home”, has led me to revisit those words. Burleigh intended the words as a speculation on the state of what was then thought to be a rapidly “historicising” subject, one which might over time become a more “normal” part of history. I wonder whether in fact they have become more relevant than ever. The pictures last week of Holocaust survivors weeping over the burial of victims’ ashes from the collections of the Imperial War Museum suggests that perhaps the past is not yet done with surprises.

Witnessing Gunther Demnig lay Stolpersteine for this family while surrounded by the living proof of the eldest daughter’s survival brought home the sheer randomness of historical fate. Why was this young woman spared? What did she have to give up to do so? In his novel Exit West, Mohsin Hamid wrote that “when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.” For so many refugees, both then and now, this is no mere figure of speech. The only other marker of this family and its fate is on its sole survivor’s grave, far away in England, amid hedgerows and birdsong.

The journey also underlined that trauma dehomes and dispossesses those who suffer it, shunting the future into strange sidings. The sight of three women, red-haired as their grandmother was, contemplating a display in the school she attended until the racial laws forced her to leave, brought home how it could have been their school. Similarly, over lunch in the small town where the family originated, I noticed the red hair of many locals, along with the surreptitious glances, trying to decide how these faces could be both familiar and strange. In my mind, I wondered how they felt. Curious? Guilty? Sad? Anxious for this reminder of how their home had a past that perhaps threatens their sense of being at home? Living amongst the traces of horror requires either constant attention or deliberate avoidance. The memorial at the ruins of the town synagogue is lonely and neglected. One of our party tried to clear some of the grime but, realising that it was not his home to tend, gave up the attempt, his hand lingering on the stone a fraction longer than it might otherwise have done.

At the same time, the trip offered many chances to form new bonds. My partner’s mother has kept in touch with the local historian who initiated contact when the postcard from her grandparents came to light, as well as the present headmistress of her mother’s school. The bright and curious current students asked informed questions about how flight from home had shaped their fellow former student. She was a migrant, so are some of them, even though second or even third generation. Perhaps she offered hope that new beginnings can be restorative, a chance to rehome oneself. Perhaps the visit also confirmed that return and connection was an option, that doors once entered through could remain open, or at least ajar.

In these turbulent days, when it seems as though Britain is hell-bent on casting itself adrift, the visit was also a chance to reflect on the meaning of movement. My partner’s grandmother must have made a journey very like ours, through Belgium and then either France or the Netherlands. But unlike us, who showed our passports once and then tucked them away again, she had to endure the border crossings of an earlier Europe, her passport stamped with a red J, explaining to anyone who demanded her papers why she was making the journey. The philosopher Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Barcelona in 1940, convinced he was to be sent back to France and the German occupation. Free movement was not acquired cheaply, and we have neglected the multiple meanings of that “freeness”. We are so accustomed to the simplicities of the modern world that we have forgotten they are privileges, not rights, and as such incur duties.

The late Elie Wiesel wrote a story of the final Passover in Sighet, the city in Romania where he grew up. His father brought a stranger to their table, “a poor Polish Jewish refugee who had seen too often and too close the victory of death over man and his prayers.” At the point in the Seder where it is traditional to open the door for the prophet Elijah, the stranger said he would perform the task, and promptly vanished. Wiesel writes that a few weeks later he saw the stranger again, on the transport bound for Auschwitz. Wiesel concludes:

Today I know what I didn’t know then: at the end of a long trip that was to last four days and three nights he got out in a small railway station, near a peaceful little town, somewhere in Silesia, where his fiery chariot was waiting to carry him up to the skies. Isn’t that enough proof that he was the Prophet Elijah?

The tearing from home leaves jagged edges in the heart. We must remember this, and that every new arrival comes from somewhere; and ask how can we know who we are turning away?

On Holocaust Memorial Day, 2018: The Power of Words

26 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by jaimeashworth in The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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HMD 2018, Holocaust memory, Shabbat, Stolpersteine, The Power of Words

Oswiecim Jewish Cemetery. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2015.

I am often reminded of the midrash that says that all Jewish souls (neshamot) were present at Sinai. I remember it every Friday as my partner and I light candles for Shabbat: the words of the blessings over candles, wine and bread linking us not just to Jews all over the world but also through time.

Though I still need transliteration, if I am sufficiently centred I can feel the words coming not from my mouth but through me from a source that stretches back to Sinai. Liturgy as a “portable homeland” is a commonplace of Jewish Studies, but it is also a door through which the whispers of generations can be heard. My partner likes to poke gentle fun at my “authentic” Polish-accented pronunciation but for me, like Polish, the brachot come from a place just beyond conscious memory.

This Friday night also – thinking Jewishly – marks the beginning of Holocaust Memorial Day. This is a curious indicator of the symbolic tension between secular and religious understandings of the Holocaust. Mourning is prohibited on Shabbat – the shiva of eight days following a funeral is suspended for the twenty-five hours between candle-lighting and the resumption of “normal” time at Havdalah. To remember the Holocaust at such a moment, therefore, presents a challenge for observant Jews. How to commemorate slaughter at a moment when they are commanded to live most purely?

This year’s theme is particularly well-suited to reconciling the tension. Words are not (quite) actions, and can be uttered in any spirit. In thinking about the theme of HMD this year, I reflected on four things that they can be used for.

Firstly, and most obviously in a Holocaust context, they can be used to curse. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan has recently explored how language became an everyday vehicle for discrimination and hatred. Teaching about the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, I am often struck by how short they are: just a few hundred words to define and separate a people from work, from family, from relationships. Juden sind hier unerwünscht: Jews not wanted here. Signs with this short phrase demarcated new realities for German Jewry in the 1930s, realities which found ultimate expression in the ghettoes and camps of WW2. This was based on the slogan that was repeated in posters and signs, and repeated at rallies: Die Juden sind unser Unglück; The Jews are our misfortune.

This is connected to the second use of words: to lie. The measure of Nazi shame at what they did can be seen in the linguistic contortions and evasions that were employed. Euphemism became the only way in which what was happening could [not] be described. “Resettlement” meant deportation to murder. “Jewish residential district” signified a ghetto where the inhabitants lived from day to day on borrowed time and stolen hopes. The individual lives and stories consigned to the pits were reduced to “Figuren”: pieces, not people. The tension required to keep this linguistic distortion in place can be seen most clearly in Himmler’s October 1944 Posen speech to senior SS officers, when he referred to “the extermination of the Jews […] a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.” Himmler knew that his assertion of the ‘glory’ of the Holocaust would not survive the scrutiny: he could only be proud of his crimes if he kept them secret and far from challenge. Language can cover and conceal the facts, even from their authors.

Survivors have long struggled with the challenge posed by this debasement of language, trying to find truth and value in debased coinage. Primo Levi wrote of the realisation after being stripped, shaved, showered, tattooed and thrust into “the blue and icy snow of dawn, barefoot and naked” that “our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.” Charlotte Delbo, sent to Auschwitz for her work in the French Resistance, questioned whether one could even speak of “after”:

I’m not alive. People believe memories grow vague, are erased by time, since nothing endures against the passage of time. That’s the difference; time does not pass over me, over us. It doesn’t erase anything, doesn’t undo it. I’m not alive. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it.

For many – Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Jean Amery, possibly Levi himself – the sense that something essential of them had died in Auschwitz meant that they could not carry on. In Polish, in German, in French, in Italian, the reality of the Lager eluded description and in doing so meant life, interrupted by Auschwitz, could never really be resumed. Like the matzeva (tombstone) that heads this piece, life was broken and though some details of the life might be glimpsed, the words that might have animated them to live in our minds were lost. We can know she was Rivka, but we cannot know what she meant, to herself or others: though she died before the Holocaust, the deaths of her descendants most likely killed her a second time. Flesh become word, word become trace: the blank flashing of the cursor as we confront what we cannot now know.

For others, however, the struggle to tell the story was its own reason to carry on. The fierce insistence of Elie Wiesel that “A novel about Treblinka is either not a novel or not about Treblinka” did not stand in the way of writing or working and reworking his memoir Night from its Yiddish original to French, and thence from French to English. His wife Marion retranslated it in 2006, returning to the task he began in Paris in the 1940s, trying to “conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries”. But they wouldn’t match the words that took his little sister from him, on the ramp in Birkenau: men to the left, women to the right.

Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment where I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father’s hand press against mine: we were alone. In a fraction of a second I could see my mother, my sisters, move to the right. Tzipora was holding Mother’s hand. I saw them walking farther and farther away; Mother was stroking my sister’s blond hair, as if to protect her. And I walked on with my father, with the men. I didn’t know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever. I kept walking, my father holding my hand.

Working with the Holocaust Educational Trust on their Lessons from Auschwitz project, we stand where the words were spoken and read Wiesel’s account. There is often a biting wind, and the students are tiring from the long day. And yet these words cut through: the students’ eyes lift from the ground out of their coats and scarves. Eyes stream from more than the wind and even above the wind you can hear the silence.

The sheer number of Holocaust testimonies is the best testament to the difficulty of putting into words both the experience itself and its meaning afterwards. Paul Steinberg, in his distinctively reflexive memoir Speak You Also tries to unpick his memories of Auschwitz from his depiction by Primo Levi as “Henri”, the quintessential survivor who “closed himself up, as if in armour [fighting] to live without distraction”. Whether or not he found truth he leaves uncertain: with the penultimate sentence he refers to “reflections and intermittent memories” which provide him with what he calls the alibi he needs. Whether it is truth, he is unsure, but it is a verdict; “Officially cleared from the docket […] A delivery, however long overdue, is still a deliverance.”

But this is far short of the final power of words: to heal and bless. It is rather the attenuation and separation of meaning from context imagined by Andre Schwarz-Bart in his final novel, The Morning Star, imagining how a race of immortals might try to understand the massacre, hearing its “drawn-out echo” twisted by distance from their source. “The star-dwellers would say, for instance, to mark the idea of an epitome, of a peculiar intensity: an Auschwitz of gentleness, a Treblinka of joy.” This carries through the idea of his first novel, The Last of the Just, describing how the Holocaust consumes the last of the Levy family, the final Lamed Vav: the last of the righteous men and women whose goodness justifies the purpose of mankind to God. Without the just, words lose their meaning; and without meaning the just lose their lives.

This loss of the meaning of words is a feature of modern life. Post-modernity, with its recognition that neither the tale nor the teller could be entirely trusted, allowed the questioning of established “truths” of relationships between genders, classes, and individuals, even if this has fallen far short of their dismantling. Many authors have commented on the way in which the Holocaust, as it threw into doubt the assumption of European progress, made that questioning and dismantling possible. If the systems that produced our societies produced the death camps, then how could we not question the systems?

But this assumed a world in which the connection between sign and signified was relatively stable. As we consume more and more information at progressively greater remove, we can be less and less sure of provenance, context and corroboration: the constituent parts of what might be termed truth.

In the 1980s, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard warned of the rise of simulacra: copies for which there was no original. Eight years before the internet, he warned that there was “more and more information, and less and less meaning” and that the confusion of exposure to information with participation in social life carried with it the possibility of a collapse of both. He worried that “meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be reinjected”.

As Matthew D’Ancona has written, the discrediting of authorities or arbiters has collapsed into “unhealthy relativism, in which the epistemological chase is not only better than the catch – but all that matters.” We have become experts at spotting “bias” or privilege but unable in many cases to distinguish them from perspective or principle. In a world where nothing can be relied on, we have attached ourselves, limpet-like, to what “feels right” or can be argued over what can be proved. “Alternative facts” are preferred to inconvenient truths.

And there is no need for the bureaucracy of an Orwellian state along the lines of 1984. The Ministry of Truth can be built in computer programs and the corrections are seamless, almost impervious to checking. Robots compile stories from building blocks, replacing possibility with doubt, substituting meaning with syntax.

So how can we put that meaning back? The answer is, paradoxically, found in Auschwitz. Each Lessons from Auschwitz trip is accompanied by a rabbi and each trip ends, symbolically at least, with a ceremony at the end of the rail lines in Birkenau. Long since the night has drawn in and with temperatures falling, the group of two hundred people listens to poems and prayers. The rabbi says many things but the core of what he has to say is a single word, which he asks the group to repeat: Zakhor. Remember. Hold on to what you have seen, what you have heard, where you have gone. In the vastness of the Polish sky, the words barely echo, even on the stones. But the word comes out and goes up all the same.

Words travel in unpredictable directions. Two years ago, a postcard sent by my partner’s great-grandparents from Izbica, the last stop on their journey to Sobibor, was found in a German flea-market. The finder found my partner’s mother and the postcard has led to a trip next week to where her mother came from in 1939; from where her grandparents and great-uncle were deported in 1942. We will stand outside their former home and watch as an artist installs Stolpersteine – stumbling stones – in the pavement. Their names, their dates of birth, their deportations and their deaths will become part of the landscape: flesh become word, word become trace, trace become memory. And then, inscribed on the stone as well as in memory, perhaps there will be some kind of peace. Words speak of the possibility of going on; but only if we are present to the truth of what happened, to receive the sparks as they fly outward, so that we may bless them.

The Boy Who Cried Nazi

17 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by jaimeashworth in Culture and Politics, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Antisemitism, Charlottesville, Holocaust, Roland Barthes, Trump, Women's March London, World War 2

Footage of Hitler reflected in a glass display, IWM 2016. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.

As a blogger with a background in Holocaust Studies, Godwin’s Law (sometimes the authoritative-sounding reductio ad Hitlerum) presents some problems for me. As originally formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990, it runs:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1.

While I appreciate that as a Holocaust scholar and educator I’m a bit of a niche market, this commonplace of Twitter put-downs raises some problems for me.

First, from my perspective, there’s the problem that since I’ve invested an awful lot of time and effort in trying to understand the Holocaust and the Third Reich, the likelihood of my seeing resemblances that others don’t is slightly higher than average. At a recent session run by Robert Eaglestone of Royal Holloway on the cultural impact of the Holocaust, he asked the group to identify resonances between the Third Reich and the Harry Potter books. He said there were eight. I got to ten at a rate that slightly alarmed my ‘pair’ – though this may have been the fact that a grown man is so familiar with the differences between Purebloods, Half-bloods and Muggle-borns. (I will obviously refrain from repeating what Malfoy calls Hermione in Chamber of Secrets.)

The point here, though, is that neither I nor Eaglestone is suggesting that one has to read Harry Potter either as a neo-Nazi code or a passionate anti fascist parable. We’re suggesting that ideas and images from the Third Reich, World War II and the Holocaust have woven themselves deep into our subconscious, both individual and collective. Eaglestone’s most recent work takes as its starting-point the words of the late Nobel laureate and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertesz, who in his 2002 Nobel Prize speech spoke of the “broken voice that has dominated European art for decades”.

My work, as I have described before, is concerned with the ways the Holocaust has become a mythology – in the sense used by Roland Barthes of “a language in which one speaks” of other things. In this sense, resonances and echoes are what I look for. Sometimes this is educationally effective, as when pointing out the “magical thinking” in the term “brainwashing” which many students use to talk about attitudes to persecution amongst “ordinary” Germans. Some of the problems faced by those who attempted to try and apportion responsibility for the Nazi era can be seen in the comment by Barty Crouch Junior (while disguised as Alastor ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody) in Goblet of Fire:

Scores of witches and wizards have claimed that they only did You-Know-Who’s bidding under the influence of the Imperius Curse. But here’s the rub: how do we sort out the liars?

To be clear: I wouldn’t suggest anyone quoted this in their History exams, or that the world created by J.K. Rowling is simply a vehicle for allegory. There are, however, some obvious ways in which the Harry Potter books are (in Eva Hoffman’s phrase) after such knowledge. Rowling’s magical hierarchy is, consciously or otherwise, very similar to the race laws of the Third Reich. That such pseudo-mathematical pigeonholing of human beings is not confined to that era (look up the word octaroon) also means, though, that we have to ask why these atrocities have caught our imaginations, both cultural and individual, so powerfully.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t draw attention to the resemblances where they occur. Not least because it allows us to critique more problematic examples of Holocaust discourse, such as John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which is most intelligible as a sentimentalised garbling of Holocaust representations rather than a response to the history itself.

In addition to the presence of Holocaust consciousness in fiction, there is a long history of invoking the Holocaust to describe the present in ways that are problematic. Peter Novick, in The Holocaust and American Life (1999), wrote of the ways in which the Holocaust had been instrumentalised by different causes: right, left and centre. Michael Marrus (in his 2016 Lessons of the Holocaust) has also questioned whether “universal lessons” are easily drawn, arguing that “lesson seeking often misshapes what we know about the event itself in order to fit particular causes and objectives [with] frequent unreliable basis in historical evidence and their unmistakable invitation to avoid nuance.”

A quick google of ‘abortion holocaust’ (a target of Novick’s) provides a case in point. Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust attempts to mobilise support to restrict the rights of women through a twisted appeal to high school social studies. Its assertion that “Any person born after January 22, 1973 is a survivor of the abortion holocaust” is as mendacious as any Holocaust denial website but in its cadences and vocabulary mimics the rhetoric of Holocaust remembrance just as its website attempts to mimic graffiti. Their Twitter feed also provides examples of Holocaust discourse, as well as sub-Trumpian attacks on “fake news” and Hillary Clinton: dire warnings of what would happen (in their view) if a woman’s right to choose stretched as far as holding high political office.

In instances like this, Godwin’s Law is not just a useful reminder that comparison can be emotive rather than accurate or helpful. It’s actually an alarm for dishonesty.

But this doesn’t address the real problem of whether a particular group can be termed “Nazi” or “fascist”. It does, though, bring into focus that Holocaust discourse and imagery is employed in many ways that stretch the facts. I became concerned that I had broken Godwin’s Law last week in referring to the events in Charlottesville as a “Neo-Nazi” demonstration. Was I ramping up the rhetoric without sufficient basis?

In the case of Charlottesville it seems that there were a variety of extremists present. Its very title, “Unite the Right”, indicates that it was intended to bring together disparate factions. The cause around which they came together, the statue of Robert E. Lee, was an American one. Images suggest the Confederate flag was as popular as any – though unambiguously Nazi imagery was certainly also present.

This diversity of extremity has made the search for an umbrella term rather difficult, not helped by the White House’s struggle to formulate a response that reaches (let alone goes beyond) equivocation. Not Nazis or fascists or white supremacists, they insist, but the “Alt-Right”.

(Only yesterday, He-who-should-not-be-president has attacked the removal of these monuments as “the history and culture of our great country” being “ripped apart”. Rather appropriately, his stance on this could be a line dance: one step forward and two steps back.)

But what does that mean? Does “Alt-Right” denote something new and different or is it just a marketing exercise; a veneer of respectability over old nastiness?

Part of the problem is that defining what MacGregor Knox termed the “fascist minimum” is not straightforward, since far-right movements are much more locally specific than others. If as Roger Griffin suggests, “palingenetic ultra-nationalism” (the extreme nationalism of national rebirth) is a good working definition, then umbrella terms will always be difficult to find. An Italian Fascist was different from a German Nazi, and both were different from a Spanish Falangist. Insistence on local difference and superiority will mean that “fascist” is likely to be an adjective ascribed by others rather than a name chosen by the group or individual in question. Though I would also point to images from Charlottesville which suggest there were plenty of people apparently flaunting their fascist or Nazi beliefs.

On these grounds, I’m happy to describe “Alt-Right” as an American fascism: insisting on a vision of racial superiority and the restoration of a mythical past (former “greatness”) through violence while positing “degeneracy” (of others, of course) as the root of all that is wrong: thanks to Rebecka Klette for highlighting this element.

That these views find expression amongst those who feel economically dispossessed and disconnected, and/or threatened by progress in social relations, merely lends weight to the comparison. An apparent obsession with a particular version of muscular, military, anti-intellectual masculinity lends more. The first target of Nazi book-burning was the Institute for Sexual Science run by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld: fear of other sexualities was a major part of the Nazi profile. Finally, one should remember that links between these examples go both ways: eugenics and biological racism were essential parts of the American view on race and German “racial science” acknowledged the debt.

But does this still make the label “neo-Nazi” overly reductive and unhelpful? Perhaps, but here’s the rub. If “Alt-Right” is the label these people prefer, then I choose to find something else, something less palatable in Peoria. If “neo-Nazi” causes the biggest shrieks of indignation and the most absurd verbal gymnastics to refute it, then I’ll use that, on the grounds that it clearly touches a nerve. In this instance, I’m with Mike Godwin, who tweeted the other day: “Referencing the Nazis when talking about racist white nationalists does not raise a particularly difficult taxonomic problem.”

Sign at the Womens’ March London, January 2017. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.

Historical comparison is never exact and always requires a light touch: the sign above from the London Women’s March does the job with admirable clarity and a touch of humour. Situations arise in unique combinations and contexts, the actors similarly unique. But as long as we recognise that, we can also do what humans do best: use lessons from the past to guide future action.

To address the title of this piece: it should be remembered that the boy who cried wolf was eventually faced with a wolf. I suspect that we may have come to that point: whether all of those who gathered in Charlottesville last week were programmatic Nazis is beside the point. That their agenda and actions were not immediately and roundly called out by those in power is the problem. Keep shouting “Nazi”: even Mike Godwin is ok with that.

Normalisation and its discontents

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by jaimeashworth in Culture and Politics, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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#MuslimBan, alternative facts, Bowling Green Massacre, Holocaust Education

Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2014.

I like it when my musings on Twitter are acknowledged. The sense that you’re just part of a vast crowd baying at each other subsides and you glimpse the original purpose: to find new ways to connect. Many of my favourite tweeters and I have linked through debate and the recognition that their voice is worth listening to.

I also – I have to be honest – like the micro-massage of my ego that a ‘like’ or a retweet gives. ‘Oh, I might be making some sense is the thought that goes through my mind, though I appreciate that using cyberspace as an arbiter of sense is not a strategy without drawbacks.

But I was nonetheless pleased that a comment I made regarding the Trump presidency and fascism seemed to be picked up, albeit in a small way. To use the rather concerning metaphor of infection that tells us so much about the internet, I was barely communicable, much less viral.

My opinion, by the way is based on the work of Roger Griffin and Roger Eatwell, as well as twenty years of trying to understand the Nazi regime and its murderous policies. I was pleased that the comment was acknowledged and therefore curious when I received a fairly bald refutation in response.

I stopped for a while and considered what he had said. Was I becoming obsessed? One of those people who relies on third-hand summaries of second-hand accounts of made-up comments? Or could something else be going on? I retorted and await a response.

I was struck, though, that already the ‘reasonable’ voice is starting to be heard. We should be practical, it says. We should be realistic. We should be sensible. This isn’t fascism because it doesn’t threaten concentration camps or wear a uniform other than cheap baseball caps with a vacuous slogan.

In the Observer this morning, John Daniel Davidson attempts to argue that this is the hysterical reaction (his misogyny, not mine) of a liberal elite whose grip on power has been shaken by “millions of voters [who] have felt left behind by an economic recovery that largely excluded them, a culture that scoffed at their beliefs and a government that promised change but failed to deliver.” Perhaps if the Republican Congress had passed a better and easier ‘Obamacare’ things would be different. Instead, they shouted ‘Socialism’ very loudly until the cries from the emergency rooms they underfunded were drowned by shots from the guns they wouldn’t control.

In the Sunday Express, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey warns of “hysterical overreaction that poses a danger to the kind of constructive relationship we should have with the President.” The newspaper resorts to its favourite bromide in its headline: ‘Keep calm and Carey on’. For myself, the idea of the world’s only remaining superpower abandoning basic standards of truth and decency makes it impossible to keep calm and hard to carry on.

Meanwhile, a US court has upheld the suspension of the immigration ban introduced into law on Holocaust Memorial Day is unconstitutional. A wave of consumers protesting against strike-breaking by Uber seems to have led to its CEO resigning from an economic council advising President Trump. You could be forgiven for thinking that things are settling down, that perhaps the forces of reason are on the move, marching to their inevitable victory.

As a teacher currently dealing with the Nazi era and the early English Reformation, I’m struck by the way my students struggle with the idea of belief. Looking at the persecution of the Observant Friars by Henry VIII, one of my students looked up and, with the dismissive confidence that only teenagers can summon, asked: “What’s the big deal? Why couldn’t they just change their minds?” The idea that people might have believed in these ideas so passionately that they were prepared to suffer or even die for them was utterly alien, to be greeted with rolled eyes and a complacent assertion of modern (or rather, post-modern) superiority. It is this sense of ideology as a joke and the importance of the subjective over the empirical that has paved the way for ‘fake news’ and the peddling of ‘alternative facts’ by senior members of the Trump administration.

Looking at the Third Reich and its maintenance of a peacetime regime, students’ initial responses have (predictably) focused on the terror state. After absorbing the fact that the Third Reich could not have enforced security without the consent and collaboration of large numbers of its population, I have struggled against the notion of brainwashing, as though pervasive propaganda removes the need for moral choice.

Only as we have started to look in more detail at the crimes committed against Jews, Sinti and Roma, the disabled, homosexuals and people of colour have students really considered whether passive acceptance of propaganda is sufficient to explain silence in these things, let alone the cooperation that was required. Lists do not make themselves; doors do not unlock themselves; cars and trucks and trains do not drive themselves. A bullet can only be fired after a finger pulls the trigger. Claudia Koonz wrote in The Nazi Conscience that “what is frightening about the racist public culture within which the Final Solution was conceived is not its extremism but its ordinariness”.

The widespread lack of awareness (see the result below from a nationwide survey of secondary schools) that there is no recorded instance of any perpetrator being punished following a refusal to kill is an important social fact with implications for educators across and beyond disciplinary boundaries. People have choices: the consequences of the perpetrators’ actions and choices were neither remote nor hard to discern.

Stuart Foster et al., What do students know and understand about the Holocaust? Evidence from English secondary schools, UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, London 2015, p. 163.

In February 1933, the Austrian-Jewish journalist Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig about the Nazi regime:

“You will have realized by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes. Apart from the private — our literary and financial existence is destroyed — it all leads to a new war. I won’t bet a penny on our lives. They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns.”

Roth died in Paris in 1939, an alcoholic émigré unable to find work. As I watch the way the media and others are circling to tell us what to think, how to be sensible, I’m reminded of the shattering end to Primo Levi’s essay ‘The Grey Zone’:

“…we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility: willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the trains are waiting.”

Yesterday, a friend of mine, the granddaughter on both sides of people who survived the Nazi era despite being marked for death as Jews, described how she was depressed by the constant flow of negativity, writing vividly of jogging through a Berlin forest to escape, finally stopping, hyperventilating into the icy fog of the morning. She concluded, though, by reminding us that “This may be bigger than us, but it is not stronger, nor smarter than our energies combined.” We keep shouting, keep focused on the truths that we can see are self-evident: that there were fewer people at the inauguration of 2017 than that of 2009; that there was no Bowling Green Massacre: this is not normal. We are not in the ghetto: though the lords of death may seek to reign they can only do so if we let them.

An earlier draft of this post disappeared without warning from the host server.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, 2017

27 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by jaimeashworth in Culture and Politics, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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#MuslimBan, HMD 2017, Holocaust Memorial Day, Trump, Women's March London

get-used-to-the-sound-of-my-voice

It’s Holocaust Memorial Day today. The theme for this year is ‘How can life go on?’ I suspect many can relate to my growing alarm and sadness at the way the world seems to be twisting itself out of shape: questioning what ‘going on’ means.

For many at this time, ‘Going on’ at this time requires enormous courage – even more than usual – in the face of uncertainty and in some cases open hostility and violence. And I know that as a straight, white, middle-class male my position is privileged: I could largely ignore these threats if I wanted to.

I don’t encourage comparisons with the Nazi era as a rule: but the mendacity, arrogance and total disregard for truth that have characterised the Trump presidency thus far seem to me to justify them more and more.

Teaching my students about the Third Reich, we have reached the point at which we need to look at the question of resistance. Of when those who could pass by needed to stop; when petty advantage could and should have been outweighed by a duty to the other who is also ourselves. The words of Martin Niemoller are famous:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

But we’re also looking at the way the belief that they were alone stayed many hands from opposing what they felt to be wrong. As Emmi Bonhoeffer, the sister of the murdered Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, said: “Resistance: we were like stones in a river as the torrent washed over us.”

We can, however, steer in the torrent, even ride it. The BBC journalist Nick Robinson tells of how his grandfather, a German Jewish doctor, was rung by an ‘Aryan’ patient to ask if they could have an appointment – but come in the back entrance to the surgery. His voice – his polished, professional, BBC voice – cracks with emotion as he tells the story, more than seventy years later. The patient wanted the treatment but not to take the risk that it would entail. Many of us in the next while may be tempted by similar half-measures, similar compromises: by sending private messages of support or shaking our heads as we keep them down, out of sight.

But it won’t be enough. The rhetoric of the Trump campaign and the early moves by the administration indicate a desire to repress, to enslave and to torture that is chillingly complacent in its assertion of white, male, Christian identity. Shaking our heads won’t get the job done. Christabel Bielenberg – an Englishwoman who lived through the Third Reich and whose husband was arrested after the Bomb Plot of 1944 – wrote of how “each small demand for our outward acquiescence could lead to the next, and with the gentle persistence of an incoming tide could lap at the walls of just that integrity we were so anxious to preserve.” It is the characteristic of populism to try and make the private space so small that there is no room for dissent, and to reward inaction.

We have to push back. The photos in this article were taken last Saturday at the London Women’s March: a carnival of peaceful, joyful opposition to the forces of compromise, with every kind of participant and every kind of cause emblazoned. (And yes, I realise a man taking pictures of women raises questions: all I can say is that I’ve tried to present powerful women in charge of themselves rather than passive subjects.)

As I marched, I wondered if this mood of defiant optimism in the face of petulant negativity would be sustained. Whether I could sustain it. And then I looked at the four defiant women I was marching with: all of them have the Holocaust in their family histories and all of them recognise the importance of adding their voice. All of them see the need to keep shouting.
More importantly, though, the march reminded me of the truth in the quote of Martin Luther King that has been over-used this week: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” He said many other things and – as many have pointed out this week – was in some sense speaking of peace in a space created by more forthright techniques. But it’s true, nonetheless.

This week has reminded me of not just how I can do this – by encouraging and modelling the values of compassion, curiosity and exploration of moral complexity – but also why: because someone who is compassionate will feel for others; someone who is curious will ask questions; someone who sees moral complexity is more likely to be sceptical of simplistic explanations. But mostly because, in the words of the late Elie Wiesel:

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

These were the words that drove the Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations last year, when the theme was ‘Don’t stand by.’ Perhaps this was a kind of prophecy, a warning of things to come, a reflexive twitching in response to approaching thunder. Or perhaps the the time is simply out of joint. Whatever our answer, we must put it right. Love trumps hate, and if we doubt if we can change things, well: yes we can.

Instameaning

24 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by jaimeashworth in Culture and Politics, Photography and Visual Culture, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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Tags

Brussels attacks, Holocaust, icon, images of terror, PrayForNidhi, representation, Zaventem

The attacks in Belgium this week have brought with them a fresh set of images showing the immediate effects of the bombs, commemoration on the streets of major cities, of those responsible and of those killed and injured. At the same time, cartoonists and illustrators have responded to the challenge of summarising the day in a single graphic response.

One image singled out in a Guardian article was that of an Indian air stewardess, Nidhi Chaphekar, sitting stunned and bleeding in the departure hall of Zaventem airport in the immediate aftermath of the explosions. Taken by Ketevan Kardava, a Georgian journalist, the image made the front pages of several newspapers the following morning and the hashtag #PrayforNidhi started trending on Twitter. So far, so understandable: I hope she’s alright and wish her a speedy and full recovery.

What has struck me is the tone of some of the stories about the image and its subject. A Guardian article by Nadia Khomami described the image as ‘The photograph that has come to define the horrors of the Brussels attacks’. A piece by Olivier Laurent for TIME said that ‘In just a few hours, her portrait has come to define the March 22 terrorist attacks’: the title of the article described the image as ‘iconic’. Similar sentiments and phrasing ran through the tweets and many of the articles: a Times of India article drew a comparison with other ‘seminal photographs that define historic episodes’, comparing it with ‘the picture of a naked Vietnamese girl running away from a napalm explosion in 1968’ or the picture of Aylan Kurdi drowned on a Turkish beach in 2015 which (reportedly) ‘seared the conscience of the world and moved the West to finally act on Europe’s worst refugee crisis since the World War’.

Images are powerful. Photographs in particular have an immediacy and truth-value which derives from a core belief, unshaken by the ironies and post-ironies of postmodernism that they constitute something ‘stencilled off the real’, as Susan Sontag put it. At the same time, as arrested moments, they solidify into symbols terrifyingly quickly, as the overblown claims of the Times of India demonstrate. Working with Holocaust imagery, I am often struck by the way in which photographic images move between evidence and symbol, often in the same moment. The photograph below of the unloading of a transport of Jews from (what is now) Hungary is a case in point. Here is the original:

USHMM 77241: ‘Jews from Subcarrpathian Rus undergo a selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau’, May 1944.

Just a short walk from where I sit writing this, the Holocaust gallery of the Jewish Museum London is organised principally around the life of Leon Greenman, born in the East End but raised in Rotterdam, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. His wife and son were murdered on arrival but he survived, living in London until his death in 2008, aged 97. The photograph is used here: this time, though, it is captioned as depicting ‘Guards separating new arrivals at Birkenau’. With a different caption the image moves a step away from its particular context into the general. In the moving video testimony by Greenman which is the central feature of the gallery, the image becomes a backdrop to his testimony of arrival and separation from his family. From evidence to symbol, in the blink of an eye: there are no photographs of the Judenrampe between Auschwitz and Birkenau where the Greenmans arrived. The siding the photograph depicts would not be built for another year. Else and Barney Greenman made their way to the gas chamber in a truck along with other women and children: as Leon’s memoir states, ‘Most of them were tired from the journey and a ride was very welcome.’ But this was not pictured, so the transport from 1944 must take its place, allowing us to picture an old man’s pain, narrated in front of us.

The process by which Holocaust imagery has developed and changed is one which has taken seventy years – so far. The possible number of images is huge – browse the collections of the Imperial War Museum in London, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington or Yad Vashem in Jerusalem – but very often we see the same images used again and again. Sometimes because they are powerful images; sometimes because they are the only images we have. Sometimes because, having been shown so often, they signify the event to such an extent that the event might be said to describe them. The gate of Birkenau – one site in the Holocaust, albeit a crucial one – overtakes its context.

But this is a process which happens over time. The coverage of the coverage of the Brussels attacks twenty-four hours later allows no space for reflection, absorption, sifting of the facts, knowledge of the story. Mistakes get made in the rush for an icon: Nick Ut’s photo of Kim Phuc screaming in the distress of her injuries was taken in 1972, not 1968. Did the photograph of Aylan Kurdi really move the West to finally act to end the refugee crisis? Or did it provoke a wave of public sympathy that was bought off by a few quick headlines? Time will tell, but a report by Philippe Fargues for the Migration Policy Centre is laconically titled ‘2015: the year we mistook refugees for invaders’ and suggests the continued ‘wars and conflicts that produce forced migration’ leave ‘little doubt that the refugee movements will continue in Europe’s neighbourhood.’ What is needed, says Fargues, is the political courage to address long-term problems rather than a continued search for a short term fix. There is, he says, little to be found.

At the beginning of researching this piece, I entered ‘Brussels attacks’ into a Google image search to test whether the image of Nidhi Chaphekar was a particularly prominent image. In fact it is one of many, some way down the page.

Sample of Google Images search: ‘Brussels attacks’, 24 March 2016

Other images included the grainy footage from airport security cameras of the three bombers, wheeling trolleys. Or of Pauline Graystone scrambling on the floor of the airport, ‘keeping small’ as advised by a Guardian article the previous day on how to survive a terror attack, as she told The World at One.

Reading the articles about Nidhi, I was reminded of the coverage of the July 2005 attacks in London. In particular, the image of John Tulloch, a Professor of Media Studies, bleeding and dazed after the bombs, anchored to a headline on the front page of the Sun: ‘TERROR LAWS: TELL TONY HE’S RIGHT’. As with Nidhi, his image ‘somehow seemed to capture the particular horror of a very banal everyday life interrupted in the most shocking way imaginable.’

But Tulloch’s opinion on the ‘terror laws’ the Sun made him the poster-boy for was the opposite. His brave and fascinating memoir, One Day in July: Surviving 7/7, makes clear his opposition to the process of othering and his commitment to understanding the attackers.

Perhaps Nidhi, once the shock and pain has passed, will embark on a similar journey and believe similar things. Perhaps she won’t: the question is, will we keep asking, once the initial shock is over and absorbed into memes that mix sentiment with a quick moral fix? For now, we have appropriated her image but not heard her voice.

And what questions will we ask of those who did this? Will we ask why they did this, what agenda they thought they pursued in this carnage? Or will we just add their images to the roll call of similar pictures from London, Paris, and New York?

‘Keeping small’, said Pauline Graystone, was the advice from the Guardian on how to get through an attack. Perhaps: but if we are to survive, we need to look for the biggest possible meaning, the most appropriate symbol as related to the fullest and most complex account of the facts we can find, not the instameaning – the portable and disposable short-term framing based on insufficient time and excess adrenaline. The depiction of events such as the Holocaust or World War 1 illustrates that symbolism does become fixed – I argue that it is an element of recovery to ritualise the trauma, locate it within unfolding meaning, turn it, in fact from endless process to limited event – but it must be allowed to do so at its own pace, not turned from breaking news to icon within a news cycle.

What kind of people will we be? On Gaza, 2014

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by jaimeashworth in Culture and Politics, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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Fella Scheps, Gaza, Israel, Marianne Williamson, Operation Protective Edge

Part of the wall from the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2013.

‘What kind of people will we be?’ This question from the diary of Fella Scheps, a young Polish Jew who died in 1945 shortly after her liberation from the concentration camps, has been running through my head lately as, along with the rest of the world, I’ve watched Operation Protective Edge burn its way through Gaza and into our living rooms, poisoning further any chances of a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict that is short of apocalyptic. My social network feeds have, like yours, been full of the horrendous images and awful facts that are the stuff of life in Gaza. It is clear, as Jeremy Bowen writes in the New Statesman, that ‘from Gaza to Damascus, the Middle East is on fire – and no one knows how to put it out.’

I have no practical solution to the broader political problem, chiefly because there is no real need to present one again. As an article by Bronwen Maddox in July’s issue of Prospect suggests, there is broad understanding that the practical steps are what they have been and always will be until somebody (ideally everybody) steps up: an agreement by both sides to abjure violence; cessation of Israeli settlement building and an easing of the economic blockade of the Palestinian Authority; recognition on the part of the Palestinian leadership that whether or not they think Israel should exist it nevertheless does exist and will continue to do so in the event of any peaceful solution. And then we can get down to the substantive issues of Jerusalem, refugees and everything else. Assuming we’re interested in a peaceful solution, the steps are as well-worn as the streets in the city that both sides have claimed for as long as memory.

But to what extent is anyone interested in a peaceful solution? The government of Israel clearly isn’t, preferring to bring the temple down on their own heads, chipping away at the pillars of the international support it has more or less enjoyed for sixty-five years: one more shell, one more broken ceasefire, one more dead child at a time. As someone who has spent his adult life studying the Holocaust and its aftermath, I understand (I think) something of the case ‘for Israel’: on this occasion, the bloodshed seems so disproportionate, the consequences so predictable, that I cannot find the words to make it. I have just started Shani Boianjiu’s novel The People of Forever are Not Afraid and shudder inwardly at the title. Please, be afraid. Please, don’t bank on the memory of your sufferings to shield you from the realities of what you’re doing. Please, stop banking on forever. Please, ask what kind of people you have become. Please: stop.

To a much lesser degree, this can be applied to the Palestinian side of the equation. A two-state solution will require a recognition of the other state. The fact of being oppressed and threatened and attacked is no guarantee of exemption from the scale of moral values. If there is one thing to be learnt (indirectly) from the Israeli rhetoric of existential threat, it is surely that suffering does not automatically ennoble.

In many ways, the real burden of Fella Scheps’s question may – unfairly – fall on the citizens of Gaza. If there is to be a peace that lasts without even more bloodshed, it will come from you, the current victims, deciding on a magnanimity in defeat and despair that has eluded your oppressors. One aspect of the Israeli insanity is that, in the words of Avraham Burg’s impassioned The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from Its Ashes, ‘All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave.’ If the bombing stops, if somehow a moment comes where you have the choice of what to do with your enemy, what kind of people will you be?

And for those of us watching, heartsick and angry, wondering if there is an end in sight worth seeing, Fella Scheps’s question holds lessons also. In this moment, the brutality with which Israeli forces are prosecuting this campaign deserves our condemnation and the resilience of the people of Gaza deserves our support. I have been struck, however, by the way in which the comment on the crisis on my newsfeed has at times been almost calculated to make the opposing view harden its position, has seemed to be intended to antagonise rather than persuade, has degenerated into personal abuse. Reinforcing the views of those who see themselves as friendless with no recourse but further violence (and they exist on both sides) will not make anything better.

Yes, everyone is entitled to a point of view and, yes, these events are extreme and horrifying. We should be outraged, we should be sad, we should be angry. But we also need to be humble. Because we all know, however impassioned we are, that we are fundamentally sitting on the sidelines. And from that position, any exhortation of either side to violence, any abuse of those who disagree, is irresponsible and simply not helping. If we insist that those who do not agree with us are wrong a priori, we leave them only submission or retaliation as responses. And the cycle continues, spinning around the globe: the swiftness of the digital ‘like’ and the cheapness of the half-formed comment becoming flywheels that lose control, spinning us all into nothing.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling helpless in the face of both the situation itself and the anger it generates. But if hatred and anger can be transmitted instantly across the globe so can anything else. Marianne Williamson recently promoted the idea of a wave of love across the world – all over the world, for a day, people simply saying ‘I love you’ to friends, family and especially to perfect strangers, especially to those whom we mistrust, especially to those whom we hate. This is of course a tall order: what, one might ask, does one do when there is no love to give? I have no answer but paradox. At the front of my copy of Yosl Rakover Talks to God, a classic statement of Jewish post-Holocaust theodicy, there is an inscription from a cellar in Cologne where a group of Jews remained hidden for the duration of the war:

I believe in the sun, even when it doesn’t shine.

I believe in love, even when I don’t feel it.

I believe in God, even when he is silent.

I am tempted to say that ‘even’ should probably read ‘especially’. At moments like these, the only route to long-term survival is crossing the boundary of otherness with nothing but tenderness: precisely because it is hard, precisely because it eludes us. Perhaps we should bring the day Williamson suggests forward: otherwise, what kind of people will we be?

Then he saw her face…now she’s a Belieber?

15 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by jaimeashworth in Culture and Politics, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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Anne Frank, Holocaust Education, Justin Bieber, literature, reputation

Justin Bieber went to the Anne Frank House last week and caused something of a controversy when his comment in the visitors’ book was released via a Tweet from the museum itself. For accuracy’s sake, here’s the text.

As reported in a number of news outlets, the comment caused many of Bieber’s followers (and detractors) to attack the singer for being overly full of himself. In particular, it caused Emma Barnett in the Telegraph to write an indignant article under the intriguing headline ‘Justin Bieber doesn’t get to second-guess Anne Frank. Nobody does.’

Barnett takes Bieber to task for his ‘crass attempt to associate himself with one of the faces of the Holocaust’, recalling her memory of first visiting the Anne Frank House at age 10: ‘I still get chills thinking about my impressions of what I was about to discover, walking through the door into the cramped collection of rooms, tightly holding my mother’s hand.’

The business end of Barnett’s article, though, is in the final four paragraphs, where she outlines what I suspect are a representative set of attitudes under the outrage. To avoid any possibility of misrepresenting Barnett through clumsy paraphrasing, they are reproduced verbatim below.

Of course we don’t know if she would have been a ‘belieber’. The little girl inside of me hopes the wonderfully vibrant Anne Frank wouldn’t have stooped so low to be a cult follower of anything. She was a leader in my mind, not a follower. But I won’t be as crass as Bieber to try and even imagine her tastes or anything beyond those words she shared in her diary, her darling ‘Kitty’.

What she wanted to let ‘Kitty’ know, (and then what Otto Frank deemed acceptable to share with the wider world when he published his daughter’s remarkable diary) is all we can and will ever know about Anne Frank.

As you leave the Anne Frank Museum and write in the guestbook, most people I know almost don’t have any words. They often just share their sorrow, perhaps their own Holocaust story if they have one and express their praise and gratitude to the people who have kept Anne’s story alive.

They certainly don’t write anything which is self-referential, nor attempt to guess what Anne would have been like had she been born to different generation. Justin Bieber needs to take note.

A few points. Firstly, as any visitor to the Anne Frank House would know, Anne was a keen follower of celebrity, as the pictures of film stars on her wall bear witness. As she noted in her diary on 11 July 1942 (just two days after the family moved to the attic: ‘Thanks to Father – who brought my entire postcard and film star collection here beforehand – and to a brush and a pot of glue, I was able to plaster the walls with pictures.’

The same passage, incidentally, is quoted in the downloadable guide to the museum, so one should be wary of the dismissive tone that Barnett adopts to explain Bieber’s comment as due to ‘one of the guides, who pointed out that Anne Frank was a fan of the pop culture of the time and that she might have been a fan of his.’ This seems to be a slight extrapolation of a standard part of the tour rather than the (implied) flattery of a famous visitor: so much, by the way, for ‘praise and gratitude to the people who have kept Anne’s story alive.’

The truth, though, is that we don’t know very much about what Anne thought about many things. As Barnett acknowledges, Anne’s diary was edited after the war by her father, who suppressed references to Anne’s sexuality and to the tensions in her relationship with her mother. Whatever the motivations for these choices, there can be little doubt that the version of the diary sold in the UK for much of the last sixty years has been The Diary of a Young Girl rather than (as it perhaps should be) The Diary of a Young Woman.

But the complexity doesn’t end there. On 29 March 1944, a broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein, the Minister for Education in the Dutch Government-in-Exile, broadcast that ‘after the war a collection would be made of diaries and letters dealing with the war’ led Anne to rewrite and edit what she had written thus far, either for the official collection mentioned by Bolkestein or for a publication of her own. On 11 May, 1944, she wrote:

You’ve known for a long time that my greatest wish is to be a journalist, and later on, a famous writer. We’ll have to wait and see if these grand illusions (or delusions!) will ever come true, but till now I’ve had no lack of topics. In any case, after the war I’d like to publish a book called The Secret Annexe. It remains to be seen whether I’ll succeed, but my diary can serve as the basis.

From then on, not only was Anne writing with at least half an eye to posterity (there is, for example, a broader selection of themes than previously), she also edited and rewrote earlier sections. What we have of the diary for December 1942 to December 1943 is all from this period of rewriting. The authoritative Critical Edition of the Diary published by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in the 1980s puts all the alternative versions of all the entries alongside each other: a much less digestible and straightforward document than the paperback still (rightly) available from most bookshops. But this complexity means that everyone is creating an Anne of their own from the fragments left behind: Barnett is fooling herself if she thinks she isn’t ‘second-guessing’ Anne to some extent. Indeed, the final entry of Anne’s diary explains at length the extent to which she ‘second-guessed’ herself.

As I’ve told you, what I say is not what I feel, which is why I have a reputation for being a boy-chaser, a flirt, a smart aleck and a reader of romances. The happy-go-lucky Anne laughs, gives a flippant reply, shrugs her shoulders and pretends she couldn’t care less. The quiet Anne reacts in just the opposite way. If I’m being completely honest, I’ll have to admit that it does matter to me, that I’m trying very hard to change myself, but that I’m always up against a more powerful enemy.

Perhaps the most memorable quote from Anne’s diary is her comment on 5 April, 1944 (in reference to her literary ambitions, in the immediate wake of the Bolkestein broadcast) that ‘I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!’ She certainly has: almost seventy years later, she is still famous and her diary is still the first introduction for many to the history of the Holocaust, though (as Barnett points out inadvertently) the Holocaust to a large extent happens ‘offstage’.

But this kind of fame comes at a price. Anne Michaels wrote in The Winter Vault that ‘we cling to the paintings from Theresienstadt, to a Dutch girl’s diary, because we need them to speak for every war child’s loss.’ But in making them speak for anything but their own fate and being, we make them into puppets for our own ends. Many of these ends are laudable – the work done by the Anne Frank House and the Anne Frank Trust, for example, in educating about the Holocaust, racism and (in)tolerance. Conversely, it might be argued that to derive an educational programme from the diary of a 13-15 year-old without her consent is to indulge in an editing of the past that is necessarily self-referential. We are all guilty of the same offence as Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer as he tries to persuade himself that a mysterious graduate student is actually Anne, survived and gone into hiding. ‘Alas,’ he writes, ‘I could not lift her out of her sacred book and make her a character in this life.’ Neither can we: we are all left with the blank knowledge that ‘Anne’s Diary Ends Here’.

I wonder whether Barnett would object to a photograph of Anne appearing on a Holocaust textbook? I suspect not, and yet for me the question this raises is to what extent the remarkable, inconsistent and talented young woman that Anne was is obscured by her placement within a view of the past that she could not consent to. Anne died in 1945, just days before the liberation of Belsen. We do not know the extent of her knowledge that she was one of the last victims of a campaign to murder the Jews of Europe. It had certainly not yet solidified into the historical edifice of ‘The Holocaust’. We also – and this is the tragedy when someone so talented dies so young – have no way of knowing how it might have changed her outlook. We all second-guess Anne, all the time. We have to, because we too must go on living after her death.

Quotations from Anne’s Diary are taken from Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, The Definitive Edition edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler, translated by Susan Massoty, published by Penguin in 2001.

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Then he saw her face…now she’s a Belieber?