Holocaust Representations in History

An Introduction

Daniel H. Magilow, Lisa Silverman

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350091832
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Holocaust History

How the Holocaust is depicted and memorialized is key to our understanding of the atrocity and its impact. Through 18 case studies dating from the immediate aftermath of the genocide to the present day, Holocaust Representations in History explores this in detail. Daniel H. Magilow and Lisa Silverman examine film, drama, literature, photography, visual art, television, graphic novels, memorials, and video games as they discuss the major themes and issues that underpin the chronicling of the Holocaust. Each chapter is focused on a critical debate or question in Holocaust history; the case studies range from well-known, commercially successful works about the Holocaust to controversial examples which have drawn accusations of profaning the memory of the genocide. This 2nd edition adds to the mosaic of representation, with new chapters analysing poetry in the wake of the Holocaust and video games from the here and now. This unique volume provides an unmatched survey of key and controversial Holocaust representations and is of vital importance to anyone wanting to understand the subject and its complexities.

PART ONE

The 1940s and 1950s

FIGURE 1 This famous photograph from the spring of 1943 of a boy in the Warsaw Ghetto shows Jews captured by German troops being marched off for deportation. The original German caption reads: Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern hervorgeholt (Pulled from bunkers by force). This now-familiar image originally appeared in a secret German bureaucratic report documenting the successful suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. (National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.)

1

The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto (Photograph, 1943): What Do Iconic Photographs Tell Us about the Holocaust?

The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto” is one of the most recognizable photographs ever taken.¹ The image shows a crowd made up largely of women and children being marched away at gunpoint, the first step in a journey that will no doubt end in a Nazi death camp. At the front of this group stands a young boy in dark knee socks, shorts, coat, and hat. Slightly apart from the others, he holds his hands in the air under the watchful gaze of the stone-faced SS soldier behind him. The look on the boy’s face is one of sheer terror and desperation, and it’s hard to imagine what a small child possibly could have done to merit such treatment. As a signature image of the Holocaust, this photograph appears so frequently that it is familiar even to those who know little about the genocide of Europe’s Jews.

“The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto” is emotionally devastating. Its political and visual asymmetry—heavily armed, uniformed German soldiers standing guard over dirty, unarmed, raggedly dressed civilians—invites us to ask how Nazi Germany could ever have been so threatened by Jewish civilians that they felt the need to exterminate all of them, even small children. But it is precisely because of this emotional, political, and visual power that the photograph has come to symbolize the evils of National Socialism and the horror of the Holocaust, as if it conveys the very essence of the murder of millions of Jews. The photograph has influenced photojournalism as well: from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Darfur, few subsequent conflicts have passed without generating at least one shocking photograph of a young child needlessly victimized by adult violence.

Its wide circulation and resounding influence mark “The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto” as an iconic image.² Originally used to refer to religious figures such as Jesus, Mary, and the saints, iconic images symbolize something much larger than themselves (an image of Jesus on the Cross, for instance, symbolizes Christianity). In so doing, they stand in for—or at least appear to stand in for—broader histories and stories that are distilled into a single visual representation. One finds examples of iconic imagery across a wide range of human endeavors: the American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima, the Mona Lisa, the Nike Swoosh, and the six-pointed Jewish star are all iconic images that elicit specific responses with clear political, artistic, commercial, or religious meanings. Yet in spite of their familiarity, or perhaps precisely because of it, it is easy to forget the origins of these iconic images. This is particularly the case with iconic photographs, which become so popular that those origins disappear, and the photographs themselves become significantly less for what they actually depict than for what posterity decides they depicted.³

While “The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto” is often used to symbolize the Holocaust in its entirety, if we examine its specific contexts—where, when, and why it was taken; whom it depicts; to what ends it has been used—we can better understand the problematic effect of investing an image of a single moment of the Holocaust with so much explanatory power about a larger and more complex history. Once we unpack the photograph’s controversial history, it becomes more difficult to let “The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto” simply symbolize pure evil or innocent children in an adult world gone mad.

The history of the photograph

While we know that “The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto” was taken in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in late April or early May 1943 and first appeared in a Nazi report, other basic questions about the image’s origins remain unresolved, including who took the photograph and the identities of many of the people it depicts, even the boy himself. Still, to understand the dangers of relying on an iconic photograph to understand a complex history, it is essential to know as much as possible about both the photograph’s broader historical context and the specific circumstances of its creation. Although those who see a photograph outside of its original context often lack these details, they are nevertheless essential to a thorough and accurate reading of the image.

The Second World War began almost four years before the photograph was taken. Soon after the Germans invaded and occupied Poland on September 1, 1939, they implemented their plans to transform Eastern Europe into a future racial utopia. Under this project, racially pure Aryan Germans would settle the land, and Slavs, notably Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians, would become their slaves. Jews had no place in this new racial order. Although the overwhelming majority of Europe’s Jews were law-abiding and productive members of European societies, Nazi ideology held them responsible for all kinds of economic and social problems, from world financial crises to the spread of Soviet Communism, and the Nazis were determined to remove them from the region. After the quick success of their initial military operations, German occupation authorities turned to the Jews, either murdering them on the spot or removing them from their homes and concentrating them in squalid urban ghettos, from which they were eventually deported to the east, the common euphemism for sending them to the extermination camps where many more were murdered.

In October 1940, the Jews of Warsaw, Poland’s capital, were ordered to move to the Muranów district, just west of the city center. On the night of November 15, 1940, the Germans sealed off the Warsaw Ghetto, cynically claiming that it needed to be quarantined because of disease, when in fact their own policies had made the Ghetto dirty and unhygienic. Jews struggled against starvation and disease in this overcrowded prison, and many died. Some toiled in factories and shops that made goods for the German war effort in return for meager rations.⁴ Others, however, started underground soup kitchens, orphanages, and other forms of communal self-help.⁵

The situation for children like the boy in the photograph was particularly grim. To Nazi Germany, Jewish children represented a future for Judaism and Jews simply by existing. In the racist Nazi worldview, it made no sense to exterminate Jewish parents while allowing their children to replenish the population. Thus children were generally not spared their parents’ fates. Those too young to work faced immediate selection for gas chambers at death camps. Of all Jewish children alive in Europe in 1939, only 11 percent survived the war and in total, one and a half million were murdered.⁶

Within the Warsaw Ghetto, the situation was especially dire. According to one estimate, as many as 80 percent of the approximately one hundred thousand children in the overcrowded ghetto needed some sort of assistance.⁷ Jewish community organizations did what they could to alleviate the misery, organizing schools, day care, and cultural opportunities such as libraries and theater performances, but faced with growing numbers of the needy, their efforts could not go far enough. The depths of the despair are chilling: desperate parents abandoned their children on the streets or starved to death and left them orphans. Freezing children begged for bread crusts and filled the nights with their cries.

In the summer of 1942, the Germans began to liquidate the Ghetto, sending approximately 265, 000 residents to Treblinka to be murdered. But unlike so many other episodes of the Holocaust, where the Germans faced limited or no resistance, the remaining Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, despite their many political and religious differences, were determined not to give up without a fight. Sporadic acts of resistance started in January 1943, and the final battle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the Jews’ release from bondage in ancient Egypt. Warsaw’s Jews used whatever weapons they could muster to resist German attempts to empty the ghetto, but for all of their bravery, they simply lacked the resources and numbers necessary to wage an effective campaign against the overwhelming strength of the better-trained and better-armed Germans. Within the next month, as people like those in the iconic photograph retreated to hidden underground bunkers and sewers, the Germans successfully contained the rebellion. After several weeks of intense fighting, German soldiers under the command of SS-Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS (SS-group leader and lieutenant general of the Waffen-SS) Jürgen Stroop suppressed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. On May 16, 1943, they blew up the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street to symbolize the completion of their gruesome task.

Although Stroop’s troops ultimately succeeded in their mission, the Jews had put up significant resistance, and several hundred German soldiers had lost their lives. As a result, Stroop needed to save face and demonstrate his competence to his own superiors. To this end, he compiled a 125-page, leather-bound report entitled Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr! (The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!). The Stroop Report, as it is now known, contains seventy-eight pages of text, consisting largely of Stroop’s daily communiqués, which were forwarded by his direct supervisor, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, the Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer (higher SS and police leader) in Kraków, to Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS (head of the SS) in Berlin. It also includes a cumulative tally of the number of Jews captured and killed.⁸ The Stroop Report documents the clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto in meticulous detail. A representative communiqué from April 27, 1943, reads: “For today’s operation, I formed 24 raiding parties with the same task as on several days of last week; they had to search the former Ghetto in smaller groups. These search parties pulled 780 Jews out of bunkers and shot 115 Jews who resisted. This operation was terminated about 1500 hrs; some of the parties had to continue to operate because they had found more bunkers.”⁹

After this narrative of extermination appears a 53-page appendix or Bildbericht (report in images) of photographs glued onto thick paper. “The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto” first appeared in this last section of the Stroop Report. To viewers today, the images in the appendix unambiguously symbolize atrocity, but their captions provide a jarringly positive spin. Typical captions of photographs showing German soldiers destroying buildings, extracting hiding Jews from bunkers, searching and interrogating prisoners, and marching them off to the train station, likely to their deaths in the Treblinka extermination camp, read “Jewish traitors,” “Jews are marched away,” and “Destruction of a block of buildings.” The Germans appear confident, powerful, and in charge, while the Jews look haggard, desperate, and defeated. The captions regularly describe Jews as Banditen (bandits) or as biologically degenerate: the caption of a photo that includes a naked man whose posture is contorted by severe scoliosis reads “dregs of humanity.” “The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto” first appeared immediately after this photograph. Its original caption, written in the same neat calligraphic script as all the others, says “Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern hervorgeholt” (forcibly taken from bunkers). To Stroop, these captured Jews were not innocent women and children, but biologically degenerate bandits, fully deserving of their treatment. He presented this photograph, like the others, as evidence of his successful operations against them in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Doubts and certainties

Only three copies of the Stroop Report were produced, and its intended viewership was no more than a few top German officials, yet soon after the Second World War, “The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto” transcended this original context to become an iconic photograph. During the postwar trials of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg, American prosecutors introduced the full Stroop Report as a prosecution exhibit. Journalists reporting on the trials recognized the photograph’s rhetorical power, and The New York Times published it on December 26, 1945, describing it matter-of-factly as being one picture “among several hundred introduced at war crimes trials in Nuremberg” from “a report of an SS commander charged with the destruction of the city’s Ghetto and the removal of Jews to concentration camps.”¹⁰ The next day, however, The Times printed a description of the photograph that implicitly encouraged readers to understand it as a broader metaphor for Nazi cruelty:

The luckier of the ghetto’s inhabitants died in battle, taking some Germans with them. But not all were lucky. There was a little boy, perhaps 10 years old. A woman, glancing back over her shoulder at the supermen with their readied rifles, may have been this boy’s mother. There was a little girl with a pale, sweet face. There was a bareheaded old man. They came out into the streets, the children with their little hands raised in imitation of their elders, for the supermen didn’t mind killing children.¹¹

On the basis of this and similar media reports, the image soon came to symbolize the entirety of the Holocaust. In subsequent decades, books, magazines, educational materials, and, eventually, websites and other media have reproduced the image alongside discussions of events that took place in ghettos, camps, trains, cities, and villages all over Europe over a span of several years. As further evidence of its impact on Holocaust memory worldwide, the Stroop Report was officially registered to the Memory of the World Programme of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2017. This registry preserves significant examples of the world’s documentary heritage, and the inclusion of the Stroop Report and its famous photograph alongside medieval Persian manuscripts, Confucian printing woodblocks from Korea, The Wizard Oz, and other culturally significant documents, archives, and representations testifies to the photograph’s lasting resonance.¹² Yet if one irony of the photograph’s subsequent history is that it has been associated with events that have nothing to do with it, another is that we still do not know some basic information about the picture itself.

To begin, it is not even clear who took the photograph. Several different photographers contributed images to...