Holocaust

Deborah E. Lipstadt

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813573694
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del Holocausto

Immediately after World War II, there was little discussion of the Holocaust, but today the word has grown into a potent political and moral symbol, recognized by all.  In Holocaust: An American Understanding, renowned historian Deborah E. Lipstadt explores this striking evolution in Holocaust consciousness, revealing how a broad array of Americans—from students in middle schools to presidents of the United States—tried to make sense of this inexplicable disaster, and how they came to use the Holocaust as a lens to interpret their own history.   Lipstadt weaves a powerful narrative that touches on events as varied as the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Stonewall, and the women’s movement, as well as controversies over Bitburg, the Rwandan genocide, and the bombing of Kosovo. Drawing upon extensive research on politics, popular culture, student protests, religious debates and various strains of Zionist ideologies, Lipstadt traces how the Holocaust became integral to the fabric of American life. Even popular culture, including such films as Dr. Strangelove and such books as John Hershey’s The Wall, was influenced by and in turn influenced thinking about the Holocaust. Equally important, the book shows how Americans used the Holocaust to make sense of what was happening in the United States. Many Americans saw the civil rights movement in light of Nazi oppression, for example, while others feared that American soldiers in Vietnam were destroying a people identified by the government as the enemy.      Lipstadt demonstrates that the Holocaust became not just a tragedy to be understood but also a tool for interpreting America and its place in the world. Ultimately Holocaust: An American Understanding tells us as much about America in the years since the end of World War II as it does about the Holocaust itself.  

1

Terms of Debate

Finding a Name to Define a Horror

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the search was not for a name but simply for language to describe what had happened. Those who had survived the annihilations perpetrated by the Third Reich struggled to find a vocabulary to describe what had been done to them. The memoirs and articles survivors penned and the interviews they gave during the first years after the war suggest that what they primarily wanted was not a name for this tragedy, but a means to make it comprehensible to those who had not been there. Even as they tried to comprehend what had happened to them, they also sought somehow to get the world—both the Jewish and larger world—to care about it. Many survivors were convinced that “no one who has not had any personal experience of a German concentration camp can possibly have the remotest conception of concentration camp life.”¹ Even the newsreels, taken in the days immediately after “liberation,” did not, some survivors observed, fulfill the task. In December 1945 Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprun complained that the newsreel images of the liberated camps failed to give viewers the tools “to decipher them [and] to situate them not only in a historical context but within a continuity of emotions.” Consequently, “they delivered only confused scraps of meaning.” Ultimately, survivors worried not about epistemology or etymology. They had little concern about the implications of one term or another. The challenge, as a young man observed in 1946, was that “one can never tell enough and present things how they really were.”² Of course, those who suffered the ultimate fate—death—could not share their experiences. David Boder, one of the first American social scientists to interview survivors systematically and record their experiences, made this point explicitly when he entitled his book I Did Not Interview the Dead.³

Even “survivors”—a term that did not yet exist in relation to those who emerged from the camps—were not sure how or what to call themselves or what had happened to them. One survivor, Nellie Bandy, who wanted to secure refuge with the U.S. Army after the war ended, went to a checkpoint where she asked an American soldier to be allowed into the camp. He asked, “Well who are you?” She did not say, “A Holocaust survivor” or even “A Jewish survivor of the death camps,” both of which might have helped her get what she wanted. None of those names existed for her—or any other survivor—at that time. They lacked the nomenclature to describe what had been done to them. Instead, she concocted a category: “I’m a French political prisoner.” The guard checked with his superiors and returned to inform her that he had no instructions for political prisoners.⁴

Even those who had access to the broadest array of evidence found it hard to fully comprehend the extent of the tragedy. Telford Taylor, a reserve colonel in army intelligence, was privy during the war to the most secret German communiqués and other forms of information, many of which contained details about the annihilation of European Jewry. Yet he insisted that he was not really aware of the Holocaust until after the war, when he began to review documents in preparation for his service as chief counsel for the Nuremberg tribunals.⁵ Nonetheless, the prosecutorial team subsumed this German attempt to wipe out the Jewish people on the European continent and beyond under the general category of “crimes against humanity” because they did not grasp, or did not want to grasp, that it was something different in scale and scope. When the camps were opened, American journalists, who accompanied the troops, and the publishers and editors who visited at the insistence of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, tended to describe the inmates they encountered as members of an array of ethnic, religious, and political groups—Jews just one among them. Today, an action that was hardly noticed or understood in the immediate aftermath of the war has been transformed and “redefined” as a traumatic event—both symbolic and real—for a broad array of humankind.⁶

Even some intellectuals, many of whom had lost much of their immediate family in the Final Solution, found themselves at a loss as how to describe this event they believed was a singular evil, something separate and apart from the general devastation wrought by the Germans during World War II. Columbia professor of Jewish history Salo Baron mused in the aftermath of the war that the generation which endured this trauma could not “divorce itself from its own painful recollections.” For them, writing the history of this “turbulent” episode was very difficult in the extreme.⁷ Around the same time Gershom Scholem, a distinguished professor at Hebrew University, someone who left Germany before the Nazi period but whose brother was murdered by the Nazis, made a similar observation: “We are still incapable—due to short distance in time between us and those events—to understand its significance . . . [and] to grasp it in the intellectual and scientific sense. . . . I don’t believe that we, the generation who lived through this experience . . . are already capable today of drawing conclusions.”⁸ That does not mean, as is often assumed, that the topic was ignored. In 1945, in their first issue, the editors of Commentary magazine wrote, “Jews . . . live with this fact: 4,750,000 of 6,000,000 Jews of Europe have been murdered. Not killed in battle, not massacred in hot blood, but slaughtered like cattle, subjected to every physical indignity—processed. Yes, cruel tyrants did this; they have been hurled down; they will be punished, perhaps.”⁹

Even though no one was looking for a name, it was inevitable that, given the scope of the tragedy, one would emerge. It did so in an organic fashion, that is, no person, leader, or organization decided that “Holocaust” was the name to be used. There were no votes, no board meetings, no campaigns, and no discussions of which word conveyed a particular meaning. It took close to two decades for the Holocaust to become “the Holocaust.” Initially, there was an array of other names that were in use. Yiddish speakers tended to speak of the khurbn, utter destruction. Deeply rooted in Jewish history, literature, and culture, this word entered the Jewish lexicon as the name for the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.¹⁰ To denote the extraordinary scope of the tragedy, many Yiddish speakers took to calling it der lester khurbn, the last or ultimate destruction, or der dritter khurbn, the third destruction.¹¹ Though khurbn comes from the Hebrew “to destroy,” it had been “Yiddishized” in its pronunciation.¹² For both religious and secular Ashkenazi Jews, particularly those with roots in Eastern Europe, where so much of the killing took place, this was both a natural and appropriate name for this tragedy. Khurbn situated it within the context of Jewish history and left no doubt, for those conversant with Jewish tradition, as to its significance. From the victims’ perspective it was a deadly accurate term. Their world had been destroyed and those who managed to return home in its wake recognized that it could never be resurrected. The scope of their loss was graphically demonstrated by the recollections of Baron, the first person to hold a chair in Jewish history at an American university. When he testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 he recalled two trips he made to Tarnów, his Polish hometown, after having immigrated to the United States. In 1937, he found a population of twenty thousand Jews, “outstanding institutions, a synagogue that had existed there for about 600 years, and so on.” When he returned in 1958, there were twenty Jews of whom “only a few . . . were natives of Tarnów.”¹³

Zionists, particularly those already living in Palestine, were committed to the revival of Hebrew as a modern, everyday language, and had a troubled relationship with Yiddish, which they eschewed as the language of the diaspora. It epitomized for them the world of the medieval European “ghetto Jew,” a world that they were anxious to escape and which, in their eyes, represented all that they, as “new” Jews, were not. They worked the soil. They had freed themselves from the shackles of their Gentile persecutors. They saw themselves as the diametric opposite of diaspora or “ghetto” Jewry. When attacked, they, the “new” Jews, fought back. (This rather skewed perception of history was rooted more in ideology than historical fact.) The Zionists’ contempt for Yiddish and its culture began in the late nineteenth century and was still extant well after the establishment of Israel. At the Eichmann trial (1961), when the representatives of Yiddish newspapers from throughout the diaspora asked that a daily trial summary be prepared in Yiddish, as it was in numerous other languages, a representative of the Israeli Press Office berated them and told them to go learn Hebrew. (A compromise was eventually reached.)¹⁴

Hebrew-speaking Jews gravitated to a purely Hebrew term. They used Shoah, a biblical word meaning complete destruction or devastation.¹⁵ While secular Zionists ardently rejected anything that smacked of religion, they considered the Bible a direct link between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. Therefore the word Shoah could appeal to both religious and nonreligious Jews. Even before the killings began, Hebrew speakers used Shoah to describe the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In 1937 Moshe Sharett, then head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, the unofficial equivalent of the Palestinian Jewish community’s foreign office, described what was happening in Germany as a Shoah. In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion predicted that a war would “visit upon us a Shoah.”¹⁶ In 1940 the Jerusalem-based United Aid Committee for the Jews of Poland published a booklet, Shoat Yehudei Polin (the Shoah of the Jews of Poland), which detailed the terrible treatment meted out by Germans to Jews during the first years of the war. Those who used this term were neither speaking in a theological register nor predicting the far more terrible treatment that would ensue. What they knew about the fate of their families and coreligionists was bad enough for them to describe it as a Shoah. Not surprisingly, the reliance on Shoah increased in late 1942 when the Allies confirmed news of annihilation and not just persecution.¹⁷ English speakers, including those in America, used an array of other words, among them “catastrophe,” “destruction,” “mass murder,” “the six million,” and “Hitler times.”¹⁸ Sometimes, in those very early years, they used “holocaust,” but in lowercase and with a modifier attached. As Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization, wrote to an American rabbi in December 1942, shortly after the Allies confirmed that the Germans were murdering the Jews of Europe and that two million Jews were already dead: “You are meeting at a time of great tragedy for our people. In our . . . deep sense of mourning for those who have fallen . . . we must steel our hearts to go on with our work . . . that perhaps a better day will come for those who will survive this holocaust” (emphasis added).¹⁹

A few months after the war, a Jewish commentator expressed his contempt for those who might try to rebuild Jewish life in Europe: “What sheer folly to attempt to rebuild any kind of Jewish life [in Europe] after the holocaust of the last twelve years!” (emphasis added). This practice continued after the war. The official English translation of the Israeli Declaration of Independence (1948) referred to both the “catastrophe which befell the Jewish people” and the “the Nazi holocaust.”²⁰ By 1949 the word had come into usage among English speakers working in postwar Europe. Forty years after the war, Franklin Littell, one of the earliest Christian theologians to write and teach about the Holocaust, was surprised when he learned from a scholar who was reviewing Littell’s papers that in an August 1949 newsletter that he had circulated while an officer in American Military Government in Germany, he was “using the word freely.” Littell speculated that he had “picked up” the term from various organizations and Jewish chaplains who were working with displaced persons, as the survivors were increasingly called.²¹

But at this point it was hardly the universal choice of all English speakers. In his opening remarks at a 1949 conference in New York dedicated to the annihilation of the Jews, Salo Baron, who convened the meeting, possibly translating the term khurbn, made frequent referral to the “great Catastrophe.”²² In 1955 the fledgling Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, chose “Disaster” and announced that the study of the annihilation of the Jews would be divided up: “The Approach of the Disaster, 1920–1933,” “The Beginnings of the Disaster, 1933–1939,” and so forth. Two years later, in 1957, when it published the first edition of its research journal, Yad Vashem had migrated to using the word favored by Baron: “Catastrophe.” The editors, reflecting the Israeli tendency at the time to balance the killings with resistance, entitled the journal Yad Vashem Studies: On the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance. Toward the end of the 1950s some scholars started capitalizing “Holocaust.” A number of the papers presented at the 1957 World Jewish Congress included it in their titles. The first mention of the word in conjunction with murder of the Jews in the New York Times seems to have been in 1959.²³ By this point Yad Vashem was regularly using “Holocaust.” This was probably not the result of any deliberation or discussion. In all likelihood it reflected the choice of translators who may well have been inclined to use a word that was increasingly becoming the synonym for this tragedy. Perhaps, some observers have posited, that it was the translators or editors who chose “Holocaust” because Yad Vashem’s official name, the Study Center of Shoah u’Gevurah, sounded better in translation as the alliterated “Holocaust and Heroism” rather than as “Catastrophe and Heroism.”²⁴

In light of the ubiquitous nature of this word in our time, and given the inexorable link between it and the murder of one-third of world Jewry, it is noteworthy that “Holocaust” has Greek—rather than Jewish—linguistic roots. There are Jewish languages from which a name could have been chosen. Hebrew, the language in which Jews have prayed, studied, and communicated for millennia, would certainly have been an appropriate source. So, too, Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), the languages spoken by a major portion of the victims. Moreover, Jewish history has had its marked share of tragedies. Consequently, these Jewish languages already have an array of synonyms available, some of which possess deep-seated roots in Jewish history and tradition. Nonetheless, a Greek word has come to describe the event that virtually destroyed European Jewry. But its ori...