Strategies for Teaching the Holocaust in the 21st Century by Marvin Swartz

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1 THURSDAY OCTOBER 14, 1999 AFTERNOON SESSION B 16:30 18:00 Strategies for Teaching the Holocaust in the 21st Century by Marvin Swartz In teaching the history of the Holocaust at a state university in America, I have to meet challenges which are similar to those facing teachers at other educational levels in other places and which will become more evident as we advance into the twenty-first century. My course is given under the auspices of the History Department and the Judaic Studies Department. Approximately half the total number of students is Jewish, the other half Christian. Most of them are juniors or seniors. Almost all the students are Americans, many of them from Massachusetts; but there have been foreign exchange students, including some from Britain and Germany. I teach the course as an interactive discussion twice a week for one hour and fifteen minutes per session. I do not lecture, though I sometimes answer questions or give explanations at length. This upperclass course is closed to freshmen and is limited to forty students for various reasons, including the extensive reading list and a heavy reliance on discussion. I want to ensure that I convey not only the facts but also the wrenching emotional impact of the mass murder of the Jews to young people who were born almost four decades after the event. At the beginning of the term, my students know that the Holocaust involved the killing of Jews, and many of them know nothing else about the subject. I introduce them to such topics as antisemitism; the values and lives of Jews before 1939; and of course the final solution, from the perspective of both perpetrators and victims. During the last thirty years, the Holocaust has become a field of study in its own right, and a popular one. As a result we have an abundance of materials to draw on for teaching purposes. Here is a short list of categories: I. Written a. contemporary documents 1. public institutional records government, church, Jewish community, etc. 2. private institutional records businesses, banks, etc. 3. diaries and letters 4. personal or newspaper accounts 5. posters, placards, advertisements, etc. 6. guidebooks, transportation schedules, timetables, etc. b. retrospective evidence 1. trial testimonies by defendants and witnesses 2. memoirs of perpetrators, survivors, liberators, and others 3. interviews 4. publications of museums (including former KL sites) and institutes c. historical accounts

2 2 1. monographs and other book-length studies 2. biographies 3. scholarly or popular articles d. fiction, contemporary or retrospective 1. novels 2. short stories 3. poems 4. plays II. Audio-visual, contemporary or retrospective a. photographs, slides b. films or videos c. paintings, drawings d. gramophone records, disks, tapes of speeches, songs, orchestral music, opera e. maps I have found the integrated use of written and audio-visual sources to be an effective approach to teaching the Holocaust. Our students have a limited knowledge of the topic and are accustomed to receiving much of their information and entertainment from the television, computer, and cinema screen or from the compact disk or audio tape. Students of the twenty-first century will be further removed from the events of and even more habituated to audio-visual images and sounds rather than to the written word. In my course I assign six books, including two documentary collections, and a reader of my own devising. I use videos and slides (mostly taken on a trip to Eastern Europe in 1997) to deepen comprehension of the reading and to intensify its impact. In this paper I shall explain how I deal with two of the topics which are the subject of this conference: Jewish life in Europe before World War II and the role of the perpetrators. Jewish Life in Europe before World War II Many of my Jewish students know little, if anything, about the traditional beliefs and values of Jews and next to nothing about Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust. Christian students know even less. These young people are, in fact, better acquainted with antisemitic stereotypes theological, racial, and Nazi which we dissect in the course. An important task for me, therefore, is to present them with information about the defining beliefs of Judaism. For this purpose, I have them read a portion from Exodus [20-23], that includes the Ten Commandments. I then ask them to compare these central tenets of the Jewish faith to the charges made against Jews by their religious and secular enemies. Christian students especially often find this exercise revealing. Yiddish civilization was destroyed by Nazi Germany, and the few survivors who can remember it are aging and may not be with us for long to testify. For twenty-year-old Americans, the Jews of Eastern Europe are extinct. For a hint of that vanished world I rely on short stories, one of the few places where fiction appears in my course. I hope not only to convey attributes of shtetl life but also to introduce my students to some of the masters of Yiddish literature in English translation and to the marvelous sense of humor that helped the Jews cope with the hardships they suffered. I.L. Peretz s brief tale If Not Higher illustrates the beauty of complementing

3 3 faith with deeds, the sacredness of anonymous charity, and the perceived differences between the emotionalism of Poland and the rationalism of Lithuania. Mordecai Spector s A Meal for the Poor acknowledges the importance of charity, gently parodies its observance as a public ritual, and expresses a preference for traditional practices over assimilation. Abraham Reisen in The Big Succeh tells us about family structures, pride, and poverty all with wry good humor. The first half of Sholem Asch s Kola Street outlines the complexities of the social structure of the shtetl. The author clearly establishes the ascendant prestige of the scholar, but he describes the usefulness of working people and the wisdom to be found among them. His portrait of brawling Jews smashing the heads of hostile goyim contradicts the stereotype of the Jew passively accepting the abuse of tormentors. I complement these stories with slides of the old Jewish quarter of Prague and of Warsaw and other parts of Poland. Students have difficulty in fathoming how European Jews, especially those of Germany, failed to escape to safety in the 1930s before disaster struck. They do not comprehend that Jews, despite social discrimination, believed they were fully German citizens. In slides from the Jewish cemetery in Wroclow (Breslau), I show them memorials to Jewish officers and men who died for Germany at the front in World War I. A short reminiscence by Bertha Badt-Strauss, My World and How it Crashed, describes the immersion of Jews in German culture and the impact on her personally of the events of Kristallnacht. She was a witness to the attack on the Levetzowstrasse Synagogue, and I am able to show my students slides of memorials to that building as well as other sites in Jewish Berlin. A recently published book by Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, may prove to be a suitable longer reading assignment. For Poland, the first of the five notebooks that comprise The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak shows how the ordinary life of a Jewish boy in Lodz is transformed by war and the German occupation into a hellish descent toward death. Written by a teenager of great intelligence, this account seems to resonate with my students. So, too, does the autobiography of Judith Magyar Isaacson, Seed of Sarah Memoirs of a Survivor, the opening chapters of which discuss her growing up in Hungary before the German occupation and her own deportation to Birkenau in After the students read this autobiography, they see a video in which Judith Isaacson provides one of the testimonies. Incidentally, they generally do not accept the argument of Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews, the student edition of which is the textbook for the course, that the Jews displayed unusual passivity during the Holocaust. They discover that Jews resisted the Germans in many ways, including with arms, and that no other people displayed greater fortitude under similar, though less severe, circumstances. They see slides (made from contemporary photographs) of wartime ghettos, where the Jews organization and continued existence were forms of resistance, and of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of The Role of the Perpetrators The Holocaust is unique because a modern state and its citizens used the resources of an industrialized society to attempt to exterminate an entire people. Questions about the physical means can be answered by reference to railways and death camps, starvation and disease, guns and gas. But students have great difficulty in imagining what motivated the Germans to commit their murderous onslaught on the Jews of Europe.

4 4 As an historian, I believe that the Holocaust must be set in a broader context than the twelve years of the Third Reich. The events of can be understood only by considering nearly two millennia of Christian hostility toward the Jews. Students in my course read The Prioress s Tale from The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer. Written about a century after the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, this short story provokes discussion about Jew-hatred without Jews and of the pervasive suspicion of Jews derived from the theology of Christianity. It also demonstrates that antisemitism was not confined to Germany. I use slides of a statue on the Charles Bridge in Prague to illustrate widespread acceptance of Jew-hatred. When, under the influence of the Enlightenment, European rulers emancipated the Jews, they did so with the implicit stricture that the new citizens would soon become, perhaps in all but name, Christians. (See, for example, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews [1781].) Emancipation in the nineteenth century produced few supporters of the right of Jews to become citizens while remaining recognizably Jewish, but it begot many enemies. Antisemitism in the Modern World, edited by Richard S. Levy, describes the revolt against modernity and mass society by Wagner, Treitschke, Marr, Drumont, and others, and finally by Hitler and the Nazis. After these readings, students are perhaps able to accept that the extermination of the Jews was an end in itself for Hitler and other fanatical antisemites, but they are rightly skeptical that all Germans were similarly motivated. I rely on documents in A Holocaust Reader edited by Lucy Dawidowicz to guide them toward their own interpretations. They read anti-jewish laws and decrees relating to the civil service, the legal profession, and schools, civil and property rights, and finally, the imposition of a penalty payment after Kristallnacht. Students begin to comprehend that the long-standing theological and popular hatred of Jews prepared German society to accept the measures proposed by fanatical and politically motivated leaders. Plans for the war against the Jews began with Hitler s coming to power in 1933 and led eventually to the Einsatzgruppen and the death camps. The period of the 1930s was a preparation for this war--legal, social, and psychological. I augment the documentary readings with slides of pertinent sites in Berlin: for example, August Bebel Platz (book burning, 10 May 1933); New Synagogue, Oranienburger Strasse, now a museum (attacked on Kristallnacht); Levetzowstrasse Memorial (Synagogue, deportations); Free University (plaque remembering role of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in inhumane biological and genetic research). The Third Reich was a system of institutionalized robbery as well as mass murder, and the destruction of the Jews involved both processes. So in addition to the psychic need to be assimilated into the Volk, the urge toward conformity obvious in modern mass society, Germans received material advantages from the unfolding of the final solution. In this regard, the elite members of German society civil servants, lawyers, businessmen, industrialists, educators, theologians profited more than the ordinary men who have been the subject of popular Alltagsgeschichte. German businessmen and shopkeepers acquired the customers and often the contents of Jewish stores; German doctors and dentists, the patients of Jewish practitioners; German lawyers and bankers, the clients of their Jewish counterparts; German manufacturers and banks, Jewish enterprises; German families, Jewish homes, apartments and other properties; German industry and the German army, slave labor. German civil servants saw positions open

5 5 up that they gladly filled. German students, teachers, and professors faced fewer competitors for grades, research opportunities, or promotions. German housekeepers found themselves in possession of lamps, beds, chairs, and other furniture and furnishings; German women, coats and dresses; German children, bicycles, games, and toys. If the German men who brought them these things sometimes had bloodstains on their clothes, a washing would take care of that small nuisance, as the moral sanction of the German churches cleansed the sins of the Reich. Students recognize that the Germans of did what they thought was to their advantage and avoided doing what they perceived to be to their disadvantage, and in this regard they resembled other people at other times. The difference was that they lived under a regime that made complicity in mass murder advantageous to a large number of its people. Was there any aspect of German life, any corner of German society untouched by the disappearance of the Jews? Did many Germans care, or even wish to inquire what had happened to the Jews? Did any German believe their fate to be a good one? The Nazi regime, having made all Germans accomplices in its greatest crime, ensured that nothing was to be gained by answering these questions--or even asking them. In this society devoted to the despoliation and destruction of the Jews, few Germans remained untainted. The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 sealed the complicity of the entire governmental bureaucracy. The endorsement by their society and government enabled the actual killers of the Einsatzgruppen and Totenkopfverbaende to carry out their duties. My students scrutinize the Wannsee protocol and see a re-enactment of it on video. They study the debate between the German army, which wanted to employ Jewish labor in the war effort, and the SS, which insisted on complete control over the fate of the Jews and their immediate destruction. They read Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning s study of Police Battalion 101, a description and analysis of how everyday Germans became hardened killers of Jews. They watch a video on the designing of the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz and Birkenau and slides depicting these places as well as Terezin, Treblinka, and Majdanek. By the end of the course, they recognize the Holocaust as both a unique historical event and an expression of the universal irrationality and aggression in man that hatred and greed can unleash. Entering the Twenty-first Century Every year our students, by their birth dates, are further removed from the Holocaust, and this gap will widen as we proceed into the next century. Only by adapting our teaching methods to their receptivity and at the same time maintaining rigorous academic standards, shall we be able to keep its study vital and compelling. Electronic and distance learning, the Internet, and other forms of conveying information are being added to our pedagogical arsenal. Although our techniques may change, the reasons for teaching the Holocaust will remain the same. Keeping them in mind will inspire us to convey its meaning to younger generations. First, the Holocaust is taught because it happened. The deliberate murder of six million Jews and millions of other people by Nazi Germany was a crime of historic proportions. Hitler s obsession with the so-called Jewish question permeated the entire structure of the Third Reich.

6 6 For the Nazis the war on the Jews in many respects took precedence over the war with the Soviet Union. The reaction of the other states of Europe (and America) to the persecution and destruction of the Jews reveals much about their culture, society, and politics. Neither German nor European history between 1933 and 1945 can be understood properly without reference to the Shoah. Second, although the Holocaust was a singular event, specific in time and place, it was also a product of universal human tendencies. Hatred based on religion or ethnic differences, fueled by greed and aggression, has not disappeared. New incidents occur with each passing day. Individuals and groups, mouthing words of self-righteousness or religion, attack, main, and kill people different from them. Demagogic leaders, intent on maintaining or increasing their own power and armed with the slogans of nationalism, use armed force to in expeditions of ethnic cleansing. As educators, we must hope that studying the extreme evil of the Holocaust will lead our students to resist personal temptations or societal pressures pushing them toward hate and violence. Perhaps they will go beyond refusing to succumb to these forces and begin to fight against them. For Jews and all people, knowledge of the Holocaust should translate into two words: Never Again. Third, the victims of the Holocaust must not be forgotten. There are now many memorials for the masses of Jews murdered by the Germans and their lackeys during the Holocaust, but there are few individual matzevoth. Indeed, the murderers frequently destroyed Jewish cemeteries, part of their aim of obliterating all traces of Judaism, except those they chose to preserve in museums dedicated to a vanished civilization. A Polish writer has mourned the threefold death of the graveyard: through death, broken tombstone, forgetfulness. For the murdered Jews without tombstones we can perform a single service: we can fight forgetfulness. Every student who absorbs the lessons we teach is a sign of remembrance of the Holocaust. Our students can be likened to the stones which in Jewish tradition visitors place at grave sites. We and our students may learn about the historical Holocaust and work to overcome hatreds in our own time, but our inspiration must be derived from a remembrance of the humanity of each man, woman, and child whom the Germans murdered. To preserve the memory of their humanity is our greatest challenge as we enter the twenty-first century.

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