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~ Reflections on memory, history, photography and culture

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Tag Archives: Child Refugees

Languages of the Holocaust

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

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AJR, Child Refugees, Commemoration, Gathering the Voices, Generation2Generation, Holocaust, Holocaust Education, Holocaust memory, Holocaust Second Generation, Intergenerational trauma, Memorialisation, Memory Studies, NHEG, Postmemory, Refugees, representation

Exodus 23:9, ““No sojourner shall you oppress, for you know the sojourner’s heart, since you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” Photo and montage, Jaime Ashworth, 2021.

I’ve spent the last two days at a conference organised by the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), exploring the challenges of generational relationships to the events of the Nazi era. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of years working with Generation2Generation, which trains speakers from the  second and third generations to present their family stories, and the experience has been extremely thought-provoking. I was hoping for a space in which I would be able to think three-dimensionally about the work I do with G2g and how that relates to the broader scope of Holocaust Studies and especially Holocaust Education. In an intriguing hybrid format (Day 1 online and Day 2 both online and in person at Chelsea Football Club), it did not disappoint.

Firstly, it made clear why it is so important to work with subsequent generations. AJR Chief Executive Michael Newman opened Day 2 by noting that the organisation has recently reached the point where the numbers of “first generation” members is matched by second- and third-generations. The conference was a part of a shift in orientation to ensure that the organisation remained relevant to all of its membership. 

A number of organisations are either making that shift or have been established to meet that need. G2g is joined by the Manchester-based Northern Holocaust Education Group (NHEG) and the Scottish organisation Gathering the Voices. The ‘45 Aid Society, established around the postwar child refugees known as ‘The Boys’ has also developed its generational offering with a fascinating website describing these remarkable life stories: as their video emphasised, in many cases produced by their descendants. The presentations by representatives made clear how busy all these bodies are. The post-survivor era is not here yet – though there is broad acceptance that it is nearing – but when it comes they can rest assured that their descendants (and allies) will carry their legacy forward bravely.

Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg addresses the conference. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2021.

What that will look like, however, is very much in flux – and should remain so. Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg spoke movingly of how he realised that his upbringing was an unusual one: “I thought I grew up in North London. I didn’t: I grew up in a German-Jewish enclave in North London.” He spoke of his wife’s hilarity when they first met that he couldn’t name the Beatles, so used was he to the sophisticated, cultured milieu of the family dinner table. But he underlined that this led him to look outward, remembering the Biblical admonition “No sojourner shall you oppress, for you know the sojourner’s heart, since you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23: 9) In a more mundane, but possibly even more powerful moment, Hannah Goldstone of NHEG spoke of taking her daughter shopping to buy sanitary supplies for refugees. Why are we doing this, her daughter asked? “Because we know refugees. Because we’re from refugees” was the answer.

Listening to many different stories of exile and rescue over the two days, I was struck by the way that the legacy is part of British society in unpredictable ways. Many of the Kindertransport passengers, like the mother and uncle of G2g speaker Tim Locke, did not identify as Jews – in fact his mother rejected that label as an imposition of the Nuremberg Laws. The legacy of the Holocaust thus stretches well beyond what is sometimes called “the Jewish world”: to the leafiest parts of the Home Counties, even. It is therefore vital to look to the next challenge, the relationship of the past to our present and future. In conversation with Stephen Smith, Elisha Wiesel noted that his father, Elie Wiesel, viewed the genocide in Rwanda as equal in importance and uniqueness to the Holocaust – or any other genocide. 

Uniqueness is a problematic word in the context of Holocaust Studies. It implies a “preferential” view of the Holocaust that seems to jockey for a spotlight. But there is no necessary contradiction: the Holocaust had its unique elements – its singularity – just as Rwanda did (just as Yugoslavia did, just as…, just as…) but it is in its belonging to a class of events – genocides – which makes it of universal relevance. To look outside and meet the eyes of other groups recovering from (or experiencing) atrocity is a route to healing, and also a way to ensure the continuing relevance of this history to the world. 

Though for many the past will never be exactly history, but who they are. The American storyteller Lisa Lipkin took listeners on an amazing inner journey through her family’s Holocaust legacy. There were a lot of good jokes, but my abiding impression was of the sadness in her eyes, and the catch in her voice as she described encountering her aunt’s blue kerchief from Auschwitz in a USHMM warehouse. I wondered if, in the many sessions she has run, that gaze has been truly held and returned. It’s a look I see at the back of the eyes of many of the second-generation, and why (I suspect) so many of them are driven to talk, and teach, and try to express that pain that is both theirs and not theirs. The search is for language above all: this may be “postmemory”, but it is not post-pain. And pain, as Jean Amery famously wrote, cannot be communicated, only inflicted.

The issue of language dominated a discussion between Bea Lewkowicz of the AJR’s Refugee Voices project and two second-generation. All the voices (some recorded) noted the way that the language of their families was a crucial marker.  The daughter of Valerie Klimt, in a recorded interview, noted that German constituted a “secret code” for the family – which prompted a ripple of knowing giggles from the audience. But equally Ed Skrein, a Game of Thrones actor, was shown saying that the Holocaust was always present in his family (his grandparents came from Vienna), but that “They would never speak of it in personal terms.” I reflected that perhaps the belief that the Holocaust is beyond representation – or Unspeakable, as an Imperial War Museum exhibition once described it – comes partly from the strained silence in many families: unable to speak of it, but unable as a result to speak of little else. 

A session with the sociologist and journalist Anne Karpf crystallised these thoughts. She described the challenges of writing and revisiting her memoir The War After, she spoke of how she resisted the task of writing initially: “Why do I have to do it?” she says she sobbed to her partner. And then she questioned the way writing the book “sort of froze me…into being the child of Holocaust survivors.” But then she spoke of how the idea of intersectionality helped her see the past as one component of a kaleidoscopic range of identities. One definition, perhaps, but not necessarily defining.

Dr Anne Karpf speaks to the conference: “I want to retain the right to contest my previous narrative.” Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2021.

But it was her thoughts on Holocaust memory that really struck home. She raised the idea (following Dominick LaCapra) of “archival fetishism” and the sacralisation of the Holocaust – even her unease at the “second-generation” label. She suggested that there needs to be a clearer distinction between the remembered self and the remembering self, a sharper choice between the overwhelming of memory and the rootlessness of forgetting. “I want,” she said proudly but also slightly plaintively, “to retain the right to contest my previous narrative.”

At this, I remembered the value of in-person conferences: the chance to sit quietly, and listen, and think among the like-minded and curious. How do we balance the demands of remembering for the future while forgetting for the present? The answer, I suggest, lies in language. I often return to the concept of mythology as framed by Roland Barthes (the language in which we speak of other things) as a central part of my academic life and approach. What if we saw “The Holocaust” as a language? As anyone who has learned a language knows, vocabulary and grammar act to both enable and circumscribe expression, and to transmit knowledge and values – the ingredients of what might be termed “usable” remembering. And as the people around me demonstrated, languages can be moved between: we do not always have to “speak Holocaust”, any more than we have to speak French, or German, or Italian, or Polish, however useful or integral to our selves they may be at moments. We always have a choice to rewrite – or re-speak – ourselves. 

The poet Michael Rosen spoke in the morning to AJR’s Alex Maws about his journey to find and attempt to understand his family’s past – to fill in the strange gap where his great-uncles in particular should have been. As someone whose early literacy was heavily influenced by his poems, it was a treat just to be in the room: the chance to have books signed was not one I was going to miss. Looking through his volume of poems about migration, On the Move, I was struck by the importance of language: the Yiddish words his parents use are a recurring theme. “Mum can speak two languages/and sometimes mixes them up” begins one poem. And in the introduction, he notes the power of poetry – the music of language – as “a way of thinking [which gives me a space to talk about things that are personal to me, but it also lets me leave things hanging in the air… To ask questions without giving too-neat answers.” What better mode of remembrance could there be? 

Links to the various organisations mentioned are included in the text: any and all them are appreciative of support. The two-line quotation in the final paragraph is from the poem “Two Languages” in Michael Rosen, On the Move: Poems about Migration (Walker Books, 2020. RRP £9.99). The lines from Exodus are from Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).

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.

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