The Challenge of Memory - Video Testimonies and Holocaust Education by Jan Darsa

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1 1 THURSDAY OCTOBER 14, 1999 AFTERNOON SESSION B 16:30-18:00 The Challenge of Memory - Video Testimonies and Holocaust Education by Jan Darsa At the heart of the Holocaust experience lie the voices the voices of the victims who survived the nightmare, and beyond that the voices of those who did not survive. It is through the testimonies that one can be led closer to the center of that experience. A combination of the video testimonies together with the history and literature blend well to create a synthesis that can take those of us who were never there nearer to those who were. Video testimonies provide a valuable teaching tool for educators of the Holocaust who are struggling to make the fundamental truths of this painful event accessible to the mind and emotions of the student. Just as testimonies should be placed in historical context, the reverse should also be true. History needs a human dimension, and there is the advantage now of having these testimonies on tape to bring out that dimension and the dilemmas that are encompassed in it in order to raise questions around this complex history. A group of students were recently shown a clip from a video testimony in which a man from a small town in Germany describes a brutal beating he received from his teacher for the crime of being Jewish. After decades, the pain and humiliation is clearly still with him as he fights back the tears to describe the unfairness and injustice of that incident, A student commented in her journal: "The videotape of the man who related the story of his Nazi teacher who hit him had a strong impact on me. While it was beyond horrible to imagine millions of Jews being killed in concentration camps, I think it is equally horrible to see a man relate his personal trauma of Nazi persecution. When one hears statistics, it is difficult to imagine six million Jews and six million individuals instead, the figures tend to remain impersonal numbers. When one sees one man, however, tell about an awful childhood encounter with extreme antisemitism, it is absolutely heart breaking." What a testimony can do is make the numbers imaginatively available to the student. Testimony provides a way to assess the implications of this event and give us a glimmer of what was lost and the irreversibility of that loss. The video testimonies afford students a chance to hear a variety of voices, speaking on different topics and themes. Students can see short segments of different people discussing their experience with ghetto life, life in the concentration camps, pre-war antisemitism in different regions, hiding, resistance, and the post-war psychological aftermath. By listening to the different voices discussing various aspects of this history, the students are encouraged to think about the complexity of the event. Pre-war

2 2 antisemitism in Weimar was not exactly the same as antisemitism in pre-war Poland. Even within the same town, people had different experiences and perceptions of what was happening. In two different testimonies by men, both from Breslau, one man describes being stood in front of the class of 53 students as an example of the "inferior race," as compared with a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan. This man said he was mocked and humiliated, and later he was ostracized by his Jewish classmates. The second man said he never experienced antisemitism in his school in Breslau. Only once, he explains, was he excluded from an activity by his teacher. He maintains that he had very good relations with his non-jewish classmates, What conclusions can be drawn from these two contrasting experiences? Only that everyone experienced the event differently and no generalizations can he made. This is an important point in general, and in this specific case it raises the issue of why some people may have left Europe while others remained. If they have the opportunity to hear more than one voice describing camp life, students can begin to make distinctions between labor camps, concentration camps, and extermination camps. They can begin to understand that survival was often a matter of luck, and no one action or circumstance could guarantee survival. What saved one may have been another's doom. They can hear more clearly about the progression of the event, the stages of the final solution, and how geography played a role in the fate of victims. Often when students hear the facts on the process of extermination, they begin to distance themselves. They learn dates and numbers and cope with all the information on an intellectual level, but they fail to confront the fact that this actually happened to people and that it was implemented by human beings while others, who were neither victims nor victimizers, stood by and allowed it to continue without protest. Recently I was teaching the last stage of the "final solution" in a class, and rattled off statistics of which extermination camps were built when, the architectural design of the camps, the methods of killing and the numbers exterminated. I began to wonder if I too was becoming detached from the history. I stopped and put on a videotape of a woman describing her transport in a boxcar from Auschwitz to a labor camp. It is dark and the other women in the boxcar with her tell her to look out of the wooden slats at the top of the boxcar. She is too weak to climb up, but they suggest that she climb up on someone else's shoulders. She does and, as she looks out, she sees life normal life going on, and she stares in disbelief. Paradise must look like this, she tells the other women in the boxcar. We saw the sun in Auschwitz, she says, but it was never beautiful. We saw the sun come up because we had to get up at four in the morning, but it was never beautiful. It was just the beginning of another terrible day. She describes to these women as she looks out of the car, Girls, it is so beautiful, and there is a woman kissing her baby is there such a thing as love? she asks. One of my students commented after seeing this clip, I think it is important to see these tapes because they personalize the experience. We can see that this horrible story happened to real people, who are human beings functioning today, but deeply scarred by

3 3 their experiences. It becomes far more difficult to remove the human dimension from the history when one witnesses a testimony by someone who was there. Video testimonies can accompany the literature of the Holocaust as well. There is a temptation for students to place all literature of this period into the realm of fiction, because the truth is so terrible. Bookstores place Elie Wiesel's Night in the fiction section, and students and teachers often refer to the book as a novel. A videotape could be used to corroborate the voice of the author in a way that reduces the possibility of placing these painful accounts into the category of fiction. One woman who was videotaped tells a story of a man whom her father brought home from the synagogue one night in Hungary during The man was a Polish Jew who had escaped from a concentration camp. He began telling them what was happening to the Jews in the concentration camps in Poland. She said it was the first time she had heard of Mein Kampf and a plan to eliminate the Jews. She listened to his stories, as did her father and his friends. She said no one could believe it. The Germans are such a cultured people. It is impossible to believe. One is reminded of the scene in Night when Moshe the Beatle returns to Sighet and warns the Jews of what awaits them. People refuse to believe him, too. He is dismissed as a madman. One can see from the woman on the tape how she and those who heard the news with her had to struggle with the information information that at first seemed so preposterous that it defied both experience and imagination. So the tape not only serves to collaborate with the author in this particular incident in Night, but it also enables the student to better understand in general the reluctance of people to recognize the impending danger. Because there was no historical precedent for this event even in the horrors of earlier pogroms when many died but still many were spared and the danger passed, Jews were often unable to recognize the potential deadliness of the Nazi regime, With all of the rich and varied possibilities that the video testimonies lend to the teaching of the Holocaust, there are some problems educators face as well. Students most often are hearing the voice of the victims and not those of the perpetrators and bystanders. If not placed in proper historical context this could allow students to leap to judgment on the wrong person. In one testimony, a man describes how he convinced fellow prisoners in a labor camp to sabotage missiles that they were working on for the German war effort. They were caught and hanged, all except the man who had organized the resistance. He, for some reason, was not caught and he convinced those who were about to be killed not to reveal his role. He assured them his death would not save them; they were going to die Anyway. If he lived, he could continue the acts of defiance against the Nazis. They never implicated him, and later he convinced another group to again sabotage the missiles. Again, they were caught and again he remained undetected. At this point he said to himself Max, it is enough. Let's put a stop to it. I don't want to take any more chances.

4 4 Teachers might find an account like this useful in discussing the issue of resistance. However, there is a danger here of accusing Max of being responsible for the deaths of his fellow prisoners. Unless students understand how desperate people became in an attempt to survive and defy those murderers who were responsible for creating such conditions, they could easily blame the victim. Thus students need to see the complete picture before they are plunged into the depth of hell from which the survivors have emerged. A proper context must be provided before students view these testimonies. Memory is selective, and survivors tell what they can remember. They consciously talk about what they can handle, and often much of the story is missing. One woman talks about a dance with her father in Plashov while a boy plays a harmonica. Does this mean people played instruments and danced in all the concentration camps? Obviously not, but it did happen to her and she has chosen that incident to discuss. A student who hears only that videotape could conclude that life in the camps was not so bad after all. Not only are the students hearing a piece of a story, but unless they hear a number of different accounts, they may misinterpret the history and draw generalizations about those who survived. There is always the temptation to conclude that someone survived because of a particular act or set of circumstances. It is human nature to want to believe that we are in control of our lives and somehow, if we had been there, we could have saved ourselves. The truth is, there was no formula for survival, and any Jew in occupied Europe was a potential victim. So, when one hears the story of Ralph, who at thirteen years of age, while digging his grave with 160 other members of his community, throws dirt in a Nazi face, runs, and gets away by sheer luck because another person took off after him and acted as a decoy, students may wonder why more people did not do that. The reality is that more did, but they did not live to tell the tale. Many did not because it would have meant not only their own immediate death, but that others would perhaps be tortured first before they were all killed. Collective punishment was commonly used by the Nazis to deter this kind of resistance or escape. People also fell victim to their faith in humankind. After all, who could believe the Nazis intended to kill them all in 1939 or 1941 when this incident took place. Finally, as Terrence DesPres said in The Survivor, language fails. This not only applies to the history texts and literature, but also to the oral testimonies.when we hear someone say, I was hungry, our frame of reference for hunger is so different that we cannot really imagine what hunger meant for a prisoner of Bergen-Belson. One student, after watching a woman describe a day in Auschwitz said, The subject matter is so frightfully tragic that any type or length of exposure to it will still fail to bring us to what it was actually like in Auschwitz or the other camps. What the Nazis did defies the imagination, and this defiance is precisely the obstacle with which we are faced. In spite of some of the limitations of the use of the videotaped testimonies, they are a powerful and important teaching tool in the study of this history. One student

5 commented, "I think firsthand experiences convey the lessons (of this history) far better than recounts by historians. No one can deny the importance of the historian, without whom these tapes would have no context. On the other hand, we grapple with the reality that we will never completely understand what it was like to be a victim of this tragedy. We observe it from a distance, but oral testimonies help bring us closer to me experience. Many who were there have chosen to re-enter their painful pasts to leave their voices and their stories with us. and we have an obligation to listen and a responsibility to bring these tales to our students. 5

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