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On Holocaust Memorial Day, 2023: Ordinary People

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A visitor looks at a wall full of portraits of Holocaust survivors in the Imperial War Museum London, 2021. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.
A visitor to the Imperial War Museum London looks at portraits of Holocaust survivors, November 2021. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.

The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is a vast one, going to the core of what is important about what happened in the Holocaust, and offering a sharp analytical tool to cut through what can sometimes be inaccurate, inappropriate, or simply inauthentic in Holocaust memorialisation. It also, if we choose, could be a rallying cry of hope for the world, but for the moment let me stick to what I know.

Like any historical event, the Holocaust has to be understood from the specifics up, and “lessons” must be drawn advisedly. If, in the solemn words of a 1968 anthology of Holocaust literature, we claim that “A whirlwind cannot be taught; it must be experienced” we cut ourselves off from what is important. Because if it cannot be taught, nor can it be learned from. For the learning to be done from a storm is limited, and we know there will be others: at some point, all we can do is take shelter and pray to be spared. But the Holocaust was not a natural disaster. It was the product of human actions on the basis of human decisions. We do violence to history if we paint its victims automatically as saints or its perpetrators as monsters.

Adam Czerniaków was an engineer and a Senator in the interwar Polish parliament. After occupation of the city, he was appointed Chairman of the Jewish council, responsible for the second-largest community of Jews in the world. The 300,000 Jews of Warsaw were outnumbered only by the Jews of New York, and during the twenty months Czerniaków was Chairman, Warsaw Jewry swelled to 450,000. In his endless attempts to square the demands of the Germans with the meagre resources the community had to help itself he won few friends, though his diaries show little of either the ego or subservience his critics accused him of. In July 1942, confronted with the request to organise the deportation of children from the ghetto, he committed suicide. Was this a final act of cowardice (as the great Polish-Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum claimed) or just the exhausted response of a man who had on more than one occasion gone from being beaten to a meeting to discuss how the ghetto managed its affairs? And who had endured both the hatred of those he tried to protect and the contempt of those he tried to placate. While the order sealing the ghetto came from the German governor of Warsaw, the final orders for the destruction of the ghetto were delivered by a junior officer. The final notice required no more explanation or debate; nothing more than a delivery man.

In Łódź, the Chairman of the Council – the self-styled “Elder of the Jews” – was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. A not very successful and not very well known businessman, he was appointed at around the same time as Czerniakow. When confronted in 1942 with the order to deport the children and the elderly, he complied, haranguing the ghetto that he would cut off the limbs to save the body, and making clear that only those who worked would survive. His ego, love of the limelight, and disturbing claims about his behaviour with the ghetto’s children, all fit him for the villain’s costume. And yet, as Yehuda Bauer has pointed out, the Łódź ghetto was finally liquidated in August 1944: had the Russian army advanced just a little quicker, we might now be talking of him as a pragmatic survivor.

The survivors knew – and, in their ever-smaller numbers, know – how frail and difficult such judgments are. Primo Levi, in his most heartfelt (and final) book, The Drowned and the Saved, acknowledged that “We, the survivors, are an anomalous minority. Those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are […] the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose depositions would have general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.”

There comes a moment in every testimony, however professionally delivered, where the survivor once again encounters the slimness of the margin that brought them through their experiences safely but not others. Considerable scholarly energy has been directed at this. Initially survivors were thought to be racked by guilt. But guilt implies a charge which can be reversed or appealed in light of evidence. If we believe ourselves to be guilty, we usually have a basis for this, rightly or wrongly. We are ashamed, however, if we feel ourselves helpless in the face of wrongdoing. As Levi wrote of his liberators, arriving out of the mist 78 years ago today:

“They did not greet us, nor smile; they seemed oppressed, not only by pity but also by a confused restraint which sealed their mouths, and kept their eyes fastened on the funereal scene. It was the same shame which we knew so well, which submerged us after the selections, and every time we had to undergo or witness an outrage: the shame the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse by its existence, because of its having been introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defence.”

Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz whose narrative persona in his Auschwitz stories was at odds with the generous and kind man his contemporaries remembered, observed that the key to the Nazi system was in reducing everyone and everything to its level.

“The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is…but let them not forget that the reader will unfalteringly ask: But how did it happen that you survived? […] Tell, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved [them] into the oven, how you bought women, men, what you did in the barracks, unloading the transports, at the gypsy camp; tell about the daily life of the camp, about the hierarchy of fear, about the loneliness of every man. But write that you, you were the ones that did this. That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well.“

You could not survive without being implicated in the death of another. Another survivor, Jean Amery, argued that “a man, once tortured, remains tortured” – perhaps chiefly by Amery’s own awareness that the only way to fully communicate pain is to inflict it. Levi’s first book was called “If this is a man”: I suspect the key to understanding all of these men, and other survivors besides, is to see that title as a question: directed firstly and most uncompromisingly at themselves. In undermining their core belief in their personhood – that they were and remained ordinary people – we see the evil of the totalitarian mindset which divides us all: into important or not, deserving or not, ordinary or not, and ultimately alive or not.

It is those categories which drove the killers. Demanding first that the individual be quantified, held to some fantastic genetic account was the first step. In the first years of the Nazi regime, the individual became required – by custom rather than laws in most cases – to give an account of their family history. A thriving industry sprang up, with genealogical researchers advertising their services, and different companies offering easy-to-carry versions of the Ahnenpass (ancestors’ record) detailing ancestry as far back as a given institution or organisation wished. It was partly to help resolve the myriad complications thrown up by this process that the Nuremberg Laws were introduced in 1935. First came the elimination of doubt and then came the elimination of the people who embodied those doubts.

It is comforting at this point to imagine that the killers believed their victims to be something other than ordinary people. There were certainly efforts to portray Jews as vermin, and the degraded communities of the ghettos seemed to confirm the propaganda. For some, by the time they encountered actual Jews, they saw only the phantasm of “The Jew”. Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologue of the Third Reich, commented after visiting Warsaw: “If there are any people left who still somehow have sympathy with the Jews then they ought to be recommended to have a look at such a ghetto. Seeing this race en masse, which is decaying, decomposing, and rotten to the core will banish any sentimental humanitarianism.” A Polish government report in May 1942 described how “Every day large coaches come to the ghetto; they take soldiers through as if it was a zoo. It is the thing to do to provoke the wild animals.”

For others, however, there is a more disturbing picture. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were not impressionable youths whose views had been moulded by Nazi propaganda since childhood. They were middle-aged, and stolid. Nor, from Protestant North Germany, were they entirely typical Nazi voters in 1933. And yet, when offered the chance in July 1942 to be excused the actual killing if they wished, just one man stepped out of line. The battalion went on to be prolific and proficient – but only in a relatively few cases enthusiastic – killers. They were neither the supernatural horror of a B-movie special effects department nor the rigid-armed automata of early textbooks. They were, far more terrifyingly, ordinary people too. And they killed just like the others, whose extremity makes them more accommodating fixtures in the mental landscape. Once, while teaching a session, I asked the very wise man Steven Frank, whose childhood in Terezin I have heard him describe many times, how many monsters he met. He hesitated and I could see his genial nature strip back for a moment, before conceding, “Not many, actually.”

Of course there were monsters. Josef Mengele and Carl Clauberg, in their blank disregard for those on whom they performed medical “experiments” in Auschwitz. Heinrich Himmler, with his prim insistence that carrying out the extermination had made the SS hard but at no moral cost as long as they did not enrich themselves. The men around the table at Wannsee, calmly discussing the progress, scope, and implementation of mass murder before proceeding to lunch. There were sadists, sociopaths, and others. But even here we cannot know for sure that they were born wanting to do these things.

These challenges are the tests of the efforts this week to memorialise the Holocaust. Do they ask you to find complex and challenging answers to uncomfortable questions? Or do they you offer you reassurance that no, it could not happen here, not now, not by us.

Because it could. The full complexity of the debate on trans rights is not my field of expertise, nor is the plight of refugees. As ever, find a voice of experience, and listen, taking as your starting-point the idea that the person you encounter is ordinary, like you. But when a small minority becomes enlarged into an omnipresent and omnipotent threat out of all proportion to its size? That is my field. What happens when the self-identification of individuals becomes the business of everyone with half an opinion, that is my field. And what happens when the demand to police an illusory certainty acquires lethal momentum, that is very much my field. The elimination of doubt about what people are will always end in the elimination of people themselves if it is not checked by rigour, by empathy, and by compassion. Otherwise, the only way to eliminate the doubt is to eliminate the people. And that happens symbolically first, as we move them from those we deem “ordinary” and entitled to consideration and rights, and into another category, where maybe the rules of humanity do not fully apply. Every other step is a commentary on that first one.

Primo Levi died shortly after completing The Drowned and the Saved. He fell down a lift shaft in his Turin apartment building. Some have argued that it was not suicide since there was no note. But a cursory reading of his work reveals a man only desperately kept from the final discharge of his life by the writing of its explanation. In his essay ‘The Gray Zone’ in which he discussed Rumkowski among others, he concluded 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 train is waiting.”

On one level, it is a tragic measure of how far this good, wise, brave man felt trapped by his experience. On another, it is a warning: of how far we may fall when we are not prepared to face the consequences of knowing the Holocaust was perpetrated by and on ordinary people. Before you call for the walls to be higher, for the lords of death to be more particular in their judgment, ask for whom the train is waiting. It could be you, it could be me: we are, after all, ordinary people.

Languages of the Holocaust

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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).

An Argument that Must Not Abate

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Anti-lockdown sticker, Camden, 2021. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.

The debate over Dirk Moses’s German Catechism has led to a vigorous and interesting debate online in the last few weeks. The New Fascism Syllabus website has hosted a range of perspectives and responses, and scholars such as Neil Gregor have posted responses on their own blog sites. Doubtless someone, somewhere, is securing a book contract for the edited volume. And of course Twitter has lent itself to pithy and witty interventions, whether or not anyone was listening.

In which spirit, this is, as billed, the intervention in the German Catechism debate for which nobody has been waiting – but that in itself perhaps undermines the argument that the “gatekeepers” which Moses talks about are as effective as he suggests. The problem with which all of the world grapples, after all, is that the right to free speech creates neither a duty to publish nor an obligation to listen. Though as Jennifer Evans and Tiffany Florvil have pointed out, the debate has been conducted largely between and among white men of a certain age and socioeconomic status, ignoring the work of women and people of colour (and often both) in establishing, maintaining and hosting the debates themselves, while also employing arguments that have been currency outside that bubble for some time. The work of Anna Hajkova and Zoe Waxman, for example, in addressing challenging areas of research to do with sexual identities and sexual violence in the Holocaust, illustrates the difficulty of overcoming (in Waxman’s words) “opposition to feminist scholarship and thus to the very study of gender and the Holocaust itself rather than on any meaningful dialogue with the content of the research.” One might perhaps suggest that the debate at least began as a scrap among the gatekeepers themselves rather than those trying to get in.

(Disclaimer: I am hardly a break from the norm in several of the personal respects listed above, though as an independent scholar I do not have the status of many interlocutors. I will however, rigorously and professionally conduct meaningful Holocaust Education for your synagogue, community centre, youth movement, wedding or bar mitzvah.)

My own position is fairly straightforward. Moses is right to call out and protest unreflexive and inauthentic commemoration and research which does not take seriously the continuities and intersectionalities in the Holocaust. The fact that the Holocaust constituted the implementation of colonial warfare and ethnic cleansing against Europeans is an important and vital part of understanding the events. David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen (in The Kaiser’s Holocaust) used the figure of Heinrich Goering (father of the more famous Hermann) to illustrate this, noting that “While the father, whose prospective victims were black Africans, fits our view of a colonialist, the son does not. Yet the Nazis’ war in the East was one of imperial expansion, settler colonialism and racial genocide.”

Hitler himself in Mein Kampf set his purpose as “[drawing] a line under the foreign policy of pre-war Germany” and “putting a stop to the colonial and trade policy of the pre-war period and passing over to the territorial policy of the future” – by which he meant “the East”. What has been missing is the voices and likeness of the victims from which Hitler turned away. David Olusoga further illustrated – through the figure of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck – in The World’s War (2014) how the First World War in Africa “far from being a meaningless side show in Europe’s war […] became the last phase of the Scramble for Africa.”

Nonetheless, Michael Berkowitz, in his introductions to the recently republished pamphlets by Alfred Wiener, The Fatherland and the Jews, passes over reference to “the Educational Service of the Lettow-Vorbeck Brigade”, noting that they “expressly advocated pogroms and public hangings of Jews” to buttress his claim that Wiener was “completely reasonable in leaving Hitler out of the picture”. Lettow-Vorbeck was (as Olusoga puts it) a “colonial specialist” having participated in the suppression of the ‘Boxer’ rebellion in China and the genocide of the Nama in South West Africa. The existence of a brigade named after him tells us much about the role of colonial mentalities in 1920s ex-soldier communities, yet here it is barely a footnote. The parallel debate about whether the recent “apology” for genocide in Namibia is sufficient or even genuine has perhaps been rather drowned out by the disputes about attitudes to memorialising the Holocaust.

At the same time, the fact that this debate is even taking place represents progress. A characteristically trenchant and engaging intervention from Neil Gregor is also right to remind readers that progress has been made, a point reinforced by Bill Niven. Historical understanding, by its nature, has to proceed at its own pace. There was, after all, a time in which Raul Hilberg was marginalised for pursuing research into the “machinery of destruction” which was set up to annihilate European Jewry. That European scholars have preferred to research topics in which they could retain some clear moral standing is understandable, though the work of scholars to recover and link this to the repression of colonial peoples and patriarchal attitudes to the history of gender and sexual identity should of course be encouraged. There is in some quarters possibly a desire to keep the debate on territory which the interlocutors are comfortable – though both Gregor and Niven have clear track records in both conducting and encouraging research “against the grain”.

The core problem here is the acceptance that time moves in one direction and that historical understanding is highly contingent. The literary scholar Lawrence Langer has recently published a collection of articles under the title The Afterdeath of the Holocaust. As well as commenting on core texts in Holocaust Studies, the articles also explore Langer’s own engagement with the subject of the Holocaust since the 1950s. He returns frequently – one might say almost obsessively – to his desire to avoid “redemptive” memory of the Holocaust. He insists that the Holocaust must be “a landscape of the imagination we never inhabited where solace perished along with the victims whose remnants lie scattered beneath its surface” and reiterates his opposition to “misguided” attempts “to find ways of coping with such desolation by striving to wrest some minimal meaning from the atrocity of mass murder.”

I am set to review Langer in more detail elsewhere, and I will use that space to detail the contradictions he entangles himself in there. But what comes through his writing is twofold: firstly, a profound sense of the lasting shock he experienced in his first encounters with the Holocaust; and secondly his clear frustration that the Holocaust has become normalised, in some important regards through his own work. The influence of his work on Holocaust testimony has been profound, as described by Noah Shenker in Reframing Holocaust Testimony (2015). Shenker notes that the Fortunoff Archive (informed in large part by Langer) has an “aversion to redemptive closure in testimonies” which means it can “miss those moments when a witness actually expresses some semblance of redemption.” It feels a lot like Langer is opposed to any kind of recovery or coping. Which is a heavy burden to live with, if true, for both survivors and subsequent generations.

Art Spiegelman, MAUS.

In Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, “Artie” asks his survivor therapist to explain how Auschwitz was. “BOO!” he replies “It felt a little like that. But ALWAYS.” For the individual encountering the Holocaust for the first time, it is still a lot like that, but it is also part of a “Holocaust metanarrative”. As Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner put it, “the bundle of ideas and preconceptions handed down under the label ‘Holocaust’ that shapes the contours and parameters of our understanding of the subject.” There is no going back – and as Robert Jan van Pelt realised when starting his expert report in defence of Deborah Lipstadt against David Irving, that is a good thing. Deniers have to work against the Holocaust as historical and social fact: nobody really comes to it with an open mind in the sense of doubting it happened. As can be seen from the COVID conspiracy theory sticker which illustrates this post, the premise of the Holocaust has been very widely accepted. But this must not be allowed to solidify completely into slogans and parrot-like repetitions of formulaic ideas. As Moses reminds us, there is a duty on us to ensure that the contours and parameters of the subject mentioned by Bloxham and Kushner are debated, expanded and made more complex by the arrival of new and challenging research, and in a complex and diverse social milieu.

Ultimately, however, the tendency will always be to simplicity. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost have described how in the aftermath of World War 1, there was a conviction that the experience of combat could not be communicated, and could only be understood by those who were there. Yet a century later, the memory of the conflict is conducted largely through symbols which are easily recognised and understood: the poppy, some key photographs, pieces of poetry and other writing. If we tried to remember every crime committed by Europe in the modern age, we would have no space for any other activity, so we create ways of accessing the appropriate feeling when it is appropriate. Following Barthes, events become languages in which we speak of other things as well as themselves. Yet, as the work of David Olusoga, Santanu Das and many others illustrates, these moments of accessing the symbols of memory can also be occasions on which fresh thinking and energy can invest them with new meaning. In 2014-15 I was teaching an A-level class about India in the First World War and was able to use Olusoga and Das to talk about the conflict in a way which empowered students as agents of memory and change. The challenge of doing so for the Holocaust is the next stage: arguments such as these will recur, cynics may wonder (as Ian Kershaw noted of the 1980s Historikerstreit) whether they generate more heat than light. But as long as we strive to include as many voices as we can, and incorporate as many conflicting and challenging histories as possible, they will not abate – thank goodness.

We Know Now

27 Thursday Aug 2020

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Auschwitz-II Birkenau, July 2015. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.

Among the most compelling of the exhibits at the Auschwitz Museum are the aerial photographs of the Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz Camps taken by Allied reconnaissance in 1944 and early 1945. The images show the camps during some of their busiest – and bloodiest – periods of operation. If sufficiently magnified, it is possible to see groups of people walking from the trains to the crematoria and gas chambers. We can count the openings in the ceilings of the gas chambers of Crematoria II and III through which pellets of Zyklon-B were introduced. Visitors often leave, encouraged by their guides, with the sense that the world knew what was happening and remained silent.

A detail from an aerial photograph taken in August 1944. The red circle highlights the opening in the roof of the gas chamber of Crematorium II. The blue circle shows a group of deportees approaching the crematorium compound.

In fact, the truth is more complex. The images were taken using film cameras set to take constant exposures over many miles. The “target” of the surveillance was the chemical factory at Monowitz: built by prisoners in the adjoining Auschwitz III camp, the factory was built by the chemical combine IG Farben to produce synthetic rubber. At the confluence of the Vistula and Sola rivers, and located in a coal-mining region, the site was tailor-made for such a plant. The availability of cheap labour – the SS charged a fee to use prisoner labour – meant that the project could be completed relatively quickly and on a short budget. Although the Bunawerke factory never produced any Buna (synthetic rubber) it was a strategic target. In fact, it was bombed four times: twice in August 1944, once in September, and once in December.

The bombing of Monowitz is one of the most contentious episodes in the history of WW2. Why, critics ask, could the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps not have been bombed as well? In fact, stray bombs from one of the raids did fall on Birkenau, as recorded by survivor testimonies. A conference was organised at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in the late 1990s, with a volume of proceedings published in 2000. A short summary of a complex debate breaks down as follows:

Firstly, knowledge of Auschwitz was both plentiful and of questionable accuracy. Reports by escaped prisoners such as Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler made clear that mass murder was being carried out. But rumours of death by electrocution or burning were not accurate, and their estimates of numbers were (understandably) excessive. To prisoners caught up in hell, the constant stream of arrivals and the smoking chimneys must have made it impossible to say for certain more than that a very large number of people were being killed. Even perpetrators were unsure of the numbers. At Nuremberg, Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, estimated that the dead in the camp totalled around 3,000,000. Research conducted in Poland in the early 1990s, however, demonstrated conclusively that approximately 1,500,000 people were deported to the camp, and of those around 1,100,000 were killed. But in 1944, at the closing stages of the war, the facts were unclear and resources at a premium. Auschwitz was at the very edge of operational range, and required a dangerous mission back and forth across Germany.

Secondly, there is the question of technological capability. The key idea here is Circular Error Probable: the likelihood of a given bomb hitting within a reasonable range of its target. Accustomed to footage of munitions that can virtually turn corners to match traffic lights, we forget that in 1944 a bomb was simply explosives set to blow up when it completed its vertical drop. To hit the crematoria, or the railway lines, or any other target, was difficult. The controversial Allied strategy of bombing German cities was employed because the technology made precision difficult unless flying by day – which increased the risk to aircrew. And this is before any thought is given to the likely cost in prisoner lives of any full-scale raids on the camp. Survivors may say that they would have welcomed it – but I am glad they are here to tell the story, rather than blown to smithereens by Allied bombs.

Thirdly, the intellectual framework did not exist to really comprehend what was in the images, even if someone had looked. It had not, as Primo Levi wrote, yet “been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist”. There was plentiful information about the Holocaust in both the popular press and the corridors of power, but it was not acted upon in the most basic way. It was not accepted as fact that the German intention was to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Assertions that it was, in the minds of decision-makers, belonged in newspaper headlines and lurid magazine articles, not the formulation of policy. A significant measure of antisemitism also contributed. Surely, some argued, this was just Jewish imagination at work, a persecution complex caught up in the war? In August 1942, Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress sent a telegram to Sidney Silverman MP, the WJC representative in London:

The Riegner Telegram (UK National Archives FO371/30917)

The ensuing five-day correspondence among officials acknowledged “numerous reports of large scale massacres of Jews” but focused on attempting to verify Riegner’s identity (“Eastern Dept. have no knowledge of Mr Riegner”) and ended with the following remark:

I do not see how we can hold up this message much longer, although I fear it may provoke embarrassing repercussions. Naturally we have no information bearing on this story.

Later in 1942, the activist Rev. James Parkes despaired that “The continued silence of the government in relation to the massacres is evidence of the strength in places of power of reactionary forces – from whom we have nothing to hope.”

But how then can we explain the pictures? Surely these images show that we knew exactly what was happening? There it is, in black and white, neatly labelled.

In fact, this is misleading. As I said above, the photographs were taken on huge rolls of film, covering many miles. The images of Auschwitz and Birkenau were at the end of these reels, after the “target” images of Monowitz. During the war, they were overlooked because analysts were not detailed to look. The images we are familiar with were only produced in the 1970s, when two CIA analysts named Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier examined the images and conducted a retrospective analysis, uncovering many of the details that strike the visitor or viewer today. As they said in their report:

Extract from Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier, “The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex” (CIA, 1979)

In a variety of ways therefore, both technical and historical, not only were the images not looked at until the 1970s, they could not have been looked at earlier. The report also served another purpose than historical reconstruction. The pointed reference to the CIA’s photo-reconnaissance capability was meant to be understood most directly in Moscow: the clear message being that Russian military installations could be spotted, analysed and potentially destroyed.

Why is this important today? A BuzzFeed article prompted these reflections: an article about the treatment of the Uighurs in China. BuzzFeed used commercial technology to identify 268 sites, and was able to confirm that 92 of these are detention centres using documents, eyewitness testimony and academic research. Authorities in the region termed the claims of persecution as “a groundless lie”: “the issue concerning Xinjiang is by no means about human rights, religion or ethnicity, but about combating violent terrorism and separatism”. Some of these sites are sufficient to hold 10,000 people. The testimonies of those who have emerged from the camps to tell the tale are horrendous.

One of the detention sites identified by BuzzFeed.

This month, an open letter was sent to the government by more than 70 faith leaders, calling on the UK government “to investigate these crimes, hold those responsible to account and establish a path towards the restoration of human dignity.” The letter invoked the Holocaust, once more demanding that “Never Again” finally – this time – have some meaning.

In 1945, Primo Levi wrote that his liberators were oppressed by the evidence of the crime, “the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man feels at another man’s crime.” But this crime in many ways had only just been introduced into the “world of things that exist”. The legal measures of the late 1940s, the Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were landmarks, acknowledging for the first time that rights are human and transnational, that mass death is wrong, and that leaders cannot hide behind the state to evade responsibility. James Fawcett, one of the British contributors to these laws (and grandfather of our current Prime Minister), said in 1961 that their purpose was to ensure that “Sharpeville, Angola, Tibet, are all matters of international concern, though they happen within the jurisdiction of a particular state.” That these lessons were learnt while mired in the hypocrisy and crime of Empire does not detract from the imaginative, moral, ethical and philosophical leap they were.

But that leap was made for us. Now we know. Now, it is other words from Primo Levi that we must remember, before we once more say “Never Again”: “It happened, therefore it can happen again.” It is happening again: once more, as Levi wrote, the lords of death are waiting by the trains. It is our job to try and stop them leaving the station. Knowing is not enough: now we must act.

Meme Fever

22 Wednesday Jul 2020

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

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Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2020.

The era of COVID-19 has seen two processes of contagion. The first is, of course, the disease itself, with its terrible toll on individuals, communities and nations. The second, however, is what the WHO and others have termed an infodemic: defined very precisely a couple of weeks ago by a working group.

An infodemic is an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that occurs during an epidemic. In a similar manner to an epidemic, it spreads between humans via digital and physical information systems. It makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. (Tangcharoensathien et al., 2020)

I’m working on a more detailed piece about the infodemic, to go alongside a collection of my photos from this year. In the meantime, however, I’ve been looking at the memes shared in my social media echo chambers. Sometimes they make me laugh but as a class of discourse they make me profoundly uneasy.

Memes are directly compared to viruses by the epidemiologist Adam Kucharski in his book, The Rules of Contagion (2020). He notes the problems posed by “simplistic anecdotes and ineffective solutions” for disease control and begins the book with an account of how he (accidentally) caused “a small outbreak of misinformation.”

The irony is that memes are simplistic anecdotes masquerading as panaceas. Like viruses, memes have no function but their own reproduction with no regard for the health of the host. Matters are further complicated by the fact that social media offer a perfect environment for them to thrive. Back in the day, “Frankie Says” was a meme, but it’s harder to edit a t-shirt than it is to share something online. One meme in particular recently caught my eye.

This meme is part of longer and bigger debates about education, race and identity. I do not claim any priority for this meme’s importance other than the fact I’ve spent my adult life teaching and learning about the Holocaust and for that reason find it deeply problematic, educationally and philosophically. My experience allows me to locate the sources of my ire because I have expertise: itself a suggestion that the reduction of history to lessons without content is not very practical. But I digress.

Firstly, the idea that the second and third parts of the statement can be accomplished without the first is problematic. Without the murder of six million Jews being remembered, the second statement makes no sense: what is the “it” that was required? And in the third statement, the “history repeating itself” is the murder of six million Jews that apparently the author thinks is optional to remember.

Second, and much more problematic, is the weasel formulation of the first statement. If the word “only” or “just” were added, the sentiment might make more sense (though as I’ve just explained I don’t think it really does). But as written it comes very close not to suggesting that education cannot be reduced to simply memorising (which of course is true and something that all good teachers work hard to ensure) but that education equals not remembering the murder of six million Jews.

This ambiguity is difficult because with a negative reading of an oddly formed sentence, the meme seems to be suggesting that instead of anchoring our understanding of the world to historical facts and debates, it should instead come from belief in an unstated mechanism that led “ordinary Germans” to be “convinced that it was required”. Setting aside the complex historical debate about degrees of knowledge, cooperation, acceptance and resistance this dismisses (the author of the meme can’t be bothered so why should I?), the implication is that children should be “educated” in some unstated monocausal view. Another word for this is indoctrination.

One of the key aspects of indoctrination is ignoring facts in the interests of clarity: such as, for example, downplaying the importance of the victim group of “what happened”. The sleight-of-hand with which this example severs meaning from content (thus rendering it meaningless) is the primary source of my anger.

Ironically, the indoctrinated have historically been very bad at spotting the writing on the wall because, well, they were indoctrinated to believe it wasn’t important. Such a process seems to have taken place very imperfectly in Nazi Germany, chiefly because the Third Reich only lasted twelve years. The debate about why and how this happened, which the author of this meme either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about, is ongoing. But the desire to present children with “lessons” without evidence is certainly among the phenomena involved: along with ensuring that the benefits of oppression and murder were widely shared, and that perpetrators were placed in stressful, confusing situations with alcohol to dull the senses when reality could no longer be explained but simply avoided. But reiterating the nature of that reality is crucial, educationally, because without it, the question “Why is this important?” is hard to really answer.

Because, finally, let’s not forget that forgetting victims is only in the interests of the perpetrators. Himmler termed the murder of European Jewry “a glorious page in our history that can never be written”. Hitler asked “Who now remembers the Armenians?” This meme asks us to forget the Jews and replace them with an amorphous “victim” group that makes the “lessons” meaningless. The Nazis oppressed and murdered a whole range of groups and individuals, but to try and remove their primary victim group is an assault on memory and an abuse of education. Subject (the Nazis) verb (murdered) and object (six million Jews) are all required for any conclusions to have any relevance. This is true, by the way, in teaching anybody about anything. The nature of the offence is a fundamental part of teaching to understand the past and (hopefully) avoid its repetition.

This is just one meme in an ocean of memes. As in Hamlet’s soliloquy, it is tempting to think we can “take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.” But this is a metaphor for futility. We are adrift and lost: what we can do (all we can do, perhaps) is sound out the ideas beneath the surface of individual examples in the hope we will find solid ground underneath.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, 2018: The Power of Words

26 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by in The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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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.