Tag: holocaust

The Past in the Present

At the risk of turning my blog into all Germany all the time, I wanted to put this up primarily as a teaching reference.  Last semester, when my Modern Europe class had begun to study the Holocaust, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put up a post on how he and his wife had to reassess what they knew of her family’s experience of the Holocaust.  She had thought that her great-grandfather had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen, when in fact he had died in Auschwitz.  This moment occurred just as I was re-reading Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive, in which she describes precisely the same realization that her “mental furniture has to be rearranged” because while she had thought her father had died in Auschwitz, he had in fact had been transported to Lithuania and Estonia and “who knows how they were murdered” (40).  That “these stories have no end,” as Klüger says is aptly demonstrated by Marshall’s update to the story, in which he shows his readers his wife’s great-grandfather’s death certificate:

The reason I’m sharing this with you is that the death certificate itself captures for me one of the paradoxes of the Holocaust. Why even keep death certificates? Auschwitz was after all a network of concentration and extermination camps. I’m not even talking about the fear of possible punishment after the war, though that’s another significant question. Just simply, why? These are people, a whole people, being sent into oblivion, to be erased from the earth and from memory. These were to be much less than ordinary deaths.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Lessons of the Holocaust

Two of my courses are in the midst of World War II, a moment I mostly hate teaching, but will almost certainly find myself doing so for the rest of my life. I hate teaching it not simply because of the morbid fascination it always seems to evoke in people — and certainly not just in undergraduates — but because it’s so often cited as the reason to study history in the first place. Learn from the past, so we never repeat it. The Holocaust has come to stand in for the lessons of the past as a whole.

This conviction, propagated by memorials and memoirs, is one I try to challenge as I lecture and as we talk about the Holocaust. And it’s why I’ve assigned Ruth Kluger’s absolutely brutal Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001), rather than, say, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. Her account refuses to shy away from what the Holocaust actually was: a time of degradation, if in its most modern form. It tore people apart and rarely brought them together. Those who survived often did despite the failures of their neighbors and family, rather than through their righteous support:

When I tell people…that I feel no compunction about citing examples of my mother’s petty cruelties towards me, my hearers act surprised, assume a stance of virtuous indignation, and tell me that, given the hardships we had to endure during the Hitler period, the victims should have come closer together and formed strong bonds. Particularly young people should have done so, say the elderly. But this is sentimental rubbish and depends on a false concept of suffering as a source of moral education (52).

I hate teaching the Holocaust because every time I return to this beautifully, scandalously, brutal book, I can’t help but agree. Primo Levi depicted Auschwitz as a giant laboratory in which one could see how men and women functioned when placed in the most dire of situations. In doing so, he assumes that there is something, however, horrible to learn there. Kluger implies, as Lore Segal’s wonderful introduction notes, that in fact Levi “died of his knowledge” (10). I don’t think that the student of the Holocaust should come away with a newfound appreciation of the resiliency of the human spirit because doing so simply fits the event into a preconceived narrative that allows us to forget what the Holocaust actually was. Instead, the study of the Holocaust is an opportunity to question received ideas and ask whether we’ve been listening effectively to the voices of the past in the first place.