Holocaust and Human Rights Education

Good Choices and Sociological Perspectives

Michael Polgar

• Editorial: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787560000
• Categoría: Bildung
• Categoría: Multikulturelle Bildung

Educators and students face many questions when exploring the history of the Holocaust. Both the harrowing historical narrative and its wider contemporary implications make the Holocaust an essential part of our education, whilst simultaneously bringing to the fore challenging questions of how best to recount such an event. This book addresses these crucial questions by exploring the way in which we teach and learn about the Holocaust. It demonstrates how we can dignify memories of the Holocaust by joining with resilient survivors, as well as how careful discussion and interpretation of definitions and appropriate representations can link the Holocaust to human rights and international law. It also highlights that understanding the Holocaust serves as a catalyst for the expansion of human rights and for genocide prevention. Throughout, Polgar applies sociological concepts that can help all of us to understand how the Holocaust has become both a particular concern for Jewish and European groups and also a basis for laws and practices that support universal human rights. Advocating for the inclusion of the Holocaust in multicultural education, this text will prove invaluable to students, researchers and educators alike.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Michael Polgar, Penn State Hazleton, USA

During the years 1933–1945, the Holocaust grew from a series of unjust laws and practices within Germany into an unparalleled catastrophe in Europe that shook the world (Bauer & Keren, 2001; Berenbaum & United States Holocaust Memorial, 1993; Cesarani, 2016; Hayes, 2017). Discriminatory laws developed by the Nazi German governmental systems were combined with violent industrial military forces and used to fuel persecution and the mass murder of Jewish and several other populations throughout central Europe (Bazyler, 2016). Never again will our international communities allow such brutality and barbarism. To this end, the term and the crime of genocide were coined in the wake of the Holocaust (Lemkin, 1944, 1947). International law has developed ever since. The abuses of power and national policies that enabled mass violence were profoundly unjust. Nazis came to power through both violence and law; the global community has worked ever since to ensure human rights and to make sure that the Holocaust was a warning, not a precedent (Bazyler, 2016).

As the Holocaust grew in Europe, some in the international community were incredulous or even doubtful about the true extent or nature of this crime. Some were uninformed, and some were resistant to accepting the growing evidence for this evolving atrocity (Feingold, 1995). Prior to German occupation of neighboring nations and subsequent declarations of war, democracy was eliminated, antisemitic and eugenic laws were established, and a Nazi police state created a growing system of concentration camps (Bergen, 2016). The international community nonetheless attended the Berlin Olympics. International public protest was limited, though there was a rabbinical march on Washington by Jewish leaders in the United States designed to spur assistance (Sarna & ebrary, 2004). Military efforts, starting in 1939, were the most powerful and ultimately successful response to escalating Nazi German aggressions and totalitarian state violence. Only after the war, when the scope of the carnage was visible to all, was the Holocaust fully revealed, named, and recognized as a central tragedy of the twentieth century. Once revealed, it became a symbol of human suffering and moral evil, the first internationally recognized case of genocide, the symbol of our need for nations to establish and preserve human rights.

During the Holocaust, atrocity “stories” in the press were at times viewed by some people as a kind of Jewish moral panic. Some who learned of atrocities considered them unbelievable, exaggerated reports similar to discredited stories from the World War I and met with some degree of public doubt (Alexander, 2009). International assistance was initiated and sometimes coordinated but not always successful in slowing the rapid genocide that took place from 1933 to 1945. Immigration policies, including those in the United States, were not open or particularly helpful during wartime attempts to escape the Shoah; Wyman calls this an “abandonment” of Jewish people (Wyman, 1998). In the spring of 1945, with the end of the war in Europe and the public revelation of systematic and genocidal mass murders, the scope and truth of the Holocaust was revealed to all (Gilbert, 2000). Doubts and uncertainties were replaced by shock, horror, and recognition. A collective and corrective public sentiment developed as postwar reconstruction took place; the perpetration of the Holocaust became fully revealed as an absolute evil, and then it became a benchmark for state-sanctioned immorality, a lesson in moral education, and a symbol of a collective trauma that has cast a shadow on modern culture (Alexander, 2009).

After 1945, a “surviving remnant” of beleaguered European and Jewish refugees became known as displaced persons. Some remained in camps for a time, and all traveled, some east or west, to places including Palestine and America (Dwork & Pelt, 2009). Some, little more than stories, filtering out of camps that were hidden by Nazis as “secret operations,” some returning home, and others wandering out into a disbelieving world (Wyman, 1989). Anne Frank’s father Otto was among those seeking refuge and recovery, having lost both his children and his wife. Fortunately, Anne’s diary was returned to him and he helped the diary to become published and performed as an iconic representation of resilience. Otto’s younger sister also survived, living in Bern, Germany, allowing part of his extended family to live on (Jacobson, Colón, and Anne Frank, 2010; Prose, 2009).

The United Nations and the Zionist promise of a Jewish state (Israel) were each established and constructed in the years just after the Holocaust. The Holocaust spurred both of these important developments. And the Holocaust has provided a variety of lessons for the world ever since. In Holocaust education, this history demands that we learn both about and from this catastrophic historical chapter (Cowan & Maitles, 2017). We cannot and will not forget. In doing so, we “face history and ourselves” (Anti-Defamation League, USC Shoah Foundation, & Yad Vashem, 2014). What will we learn?

I write as a son and grandson of Holocaust survivors. Like many descendants of Holocaust survivors, I am privileged in ways that our elder kin were not. Most of us did not experience oppression or suffering in any way comparable to the experiences of our elders (Epstein, 1979). We may have been spared some of our parents’ anguished and traumatic memories, but we have experienced our own challenges as we have sought to learn about our family histories and to promote compassion and Holocaust consciousness (Bukiet, 2002; Stein, 2014). In the United States, we had an immediate family connection to history: our parents (and other elders) were among over 100,000 refugees and immigrants who came to the United States after enduring the Holocaust (Stein, 2014).

Unlike some of our elders and survivor-relatives, most of us in post-Shoah generations have had the benefit of hindsight and freedom, along with memorials and museums in our communities or nations. It was not always so; New York City rejected its first application for a Holocaust museum in the 1960s. We experienced both the rise of Holocaust consciousness and the establishment of Holocaust memory. These resources help reinforce our cultural and personal resilience. Thanks to organizations like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the Olga Lengel Institute (TOLI), I am one of many teachers now educated and trained to teach the subject of the Holocaust. I cannot ignore this privilege and responsibility because I now understand that we descendants of survivors, along with many others, are links in a chain of Holocaust survival and memory (The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Education and Human Rights (TOLI), 2017).

Through Holocaust education, we will remember and not succumb to Holocaust amnesia. Even though we are not now as exposed to the harsh forces of antisemitism, we are among peers and in a society that is learning to respect all cultures and our shared human rights. We appreciate that our very lives, and the lives of our family members, are part of cultural continuity and resilience. Like others in a second generation of Holocaust survivors, we have grown to understand and appreciate many Holocaust-related complexities, including silences and trauma-related difficulties (Monroe, Lampros-Monroe, & Pellecchia, 2015; North & Pfefferbaum, 2013; Stein, 2009). Stein finds that some descendants learned to play up heroic survival (as found in ghetto resistance organizations) while others muted memories of difficulties, keeping past trauma from present family, unless they were also in the Holocaust. We are learning to see and represent our lives and our families as part of history, albeit a difficult and bloody history that is not always so easy to share (Spiegelman, 1997).

Some postwar silences, quieting Holocaust survivors as well as heroic military veterans, have been at times rather difficult to understand and to overcome. Research shows that it is not easy for people to endure, live as, or even live with survivors of trauma (Monroe et al., 2015; North & Pfefferbaum, 2013). Among wounded “storytellers,” memory fragments from the past haunt the present (Frank, 2013). Trauma, both individual and cultural, remains both a major consequence of the Holocaust. “Survivor syndrome” is an early description of a disruption in both humans and cultures that followed the Holocaust, among other episodes of mass violence (Epstein, 1979). Like too many other victims of violence, Holocaust survivors and their families have become “reluctant witnesses” to the Holocaust (Stein, 2014), even as the truth of the Shoah has been more fully recognized and respected.

In the United States and in other nations, throughout our cultures and in our education systems, it has taken decades to come to terms with the Holocaust (Carrier, Fuchs, & Messinger, 2015; Fallace, 2008; Levy & Sznaider, 2006; Stevick & Gross, 2014). International law and justice were first brought to bear after the Holocaust (Bazyler, 2016), but even Nazi war crime trials were only partial justice because they were incomplete and limited by limitations of jurisdiction and by strategic excuses. We are now fortunate to have a more complete picture of the catastrophe, thanks to historians and educators. We can use these lessons as we aspire to prevent further harm to the world, as did Rafael Lemkin, the lawyer and linguist named and criminalized genocide (Lemkin & Jacobs, 2012).

The term “Holocaust,” now fundamental to our historical conceptions and our curricula, was not initially available or used to describe the disastrous Nazi attempt at cultural genocide. Holocaust education was also limited, only gaining foothold within our national education systems in the late 1970s (Fallace, 2006; Fracapane & Hass, 2014; Levy & Sznaider, 2006). In the United Kingdom, more and more secondary students have been introduced to Holocaust education, thanks to recent but still incomplete efforts (Foster et al., 2016; Pearce, 2014). Around the world, Holocaust education is varied; in some nations it still remains limited, partial, or an indirect consequence of education in other topics (Carrier et al., 2015; Fracapane & Hass, 2014).

Acceptance of the Holocaust also required “seeing through” deceptive and Orwellian communications and representations created by Nazi ministries. Antisemitic and other propaganda were used to gain power in 1933, to scapegoat Jewish people and communists, and to expand state power thereafter (Luckert, Bachrach, & United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009). Racialized antisemitism was not only spread by media campaigns but also established by Nazi Germany in the 1930s through a system of discriminatory and ultimately eugenic national laws and enforcement practices (Bazyler, 2016). Jewish people, communists, and other groups were blamed for a myriad of social problems, while systems of autocratic authority facilitated the development of a planned system of discrimination and segregation that was later adapted to carry out genocidal mass murder. False narratives and multiple forms of prejudice also slowed national and international responses, though timely help did arrive for some (Favez, 1999).

Leading scholars seek to explain why the Holocaust happened (Hayes, 2017). The Holocaust was accelerated by fascism, nationalism, antisemitism, colonialism, world wars, and the false science of eugenics. With hindsight, historians and others describe multiple groups of Holocaust protagonists, including Nazi perpetrators, bystanders, rescuers, and multiple groups of people who were persecuted (Dwork, 2002). Perpetrator actions were facilitated by the tacit acceptance of bystanders or onlookers, along with the compliance of national and fascist governments in neighboring occupied territories. Jewish people were primary among many persecuted groups. Persecuted populations (who became known somewhat judgmentally as “victims” of the Holocaust) included multiple cultural, national, and political groups; these groups were subject to systematic mistreatment, discrimination, and harm, and sometimes aligned with allies to resist the powerful and brutal Nazi German government (Hayes & Roth, 2010).

The Holocaust was carried out during what was called a Third Reich in Germany; Nazi leaders worked to expand their rule, occupying adjacent nations to realize the perceived need for “more living space.” This expansion of the German state was designated for and limited to people and groups eugenically defined as Aryans by a false ideology of “racial science.” German aggression and later occupation took place at the immediate and ongoing expense of many oppressed groups, primarily Jewish Europeans, and also Roma, people with disabilities, and any groups designated as political or national enemies (Bauer, 2010; Bergen, 2016). People not privileged by racial heritage were subject to legalized discrimination and persecution, including segregation in employment, education, and housing. Under Nazi rule, Jewish and others targeted groups were segregated and put into ghettos, deprived of human rights. As the Holocaust progressed, billions of people were shot, gassed, and/or incinerated, creating the mass murder that has come to define the Holocaust. Concentration camps across Europe were established to segregate these persecuted populations. Some camps were used for detention, some for work, and ultimately six camp locations were designed for mass murder through gassing and incineration. Imprisoned people who were selected to work or aggregate in labor sites could get a tattooed number on their arm and perhaps survive by working; often prisoners worked for the German war effort (Levi, 1978), and sometimes these forced laborers worked for the camp system itself (Lengyel, 1995).

The Holocaust has been recognized as a series of mass crimes that ultimately were addressed through criminal prosecution. International law flourished in the wake of the Holocaust, despite the fact that few crimes (including few war crimes) were successfully prosecuted (Bazyler, 2016). We are still able to access many primary documents that attest to these crimes, including German administrative documents, along with Jewish diaries and chronicles (“salvaged pages”) and survivor accounts (Hayes & Roth, 2010). The Holocaust and related film, music, art, and literature also continue to develop, raising questions about what constitutes respectful memory and what should be representative of the Holocaust in our curricular content (Cowan & Maitles, 2017).

In the wake of extensive false propaganda and misinformation, many of us struggle to find the correct vocabulary to describe the Holocaust. British and American allies, concurrently with Soviet forces in the east, fought against Nazi axis perpetrators, focusing on winning the war. After victory in the first part of 1945, militaries then discovered the disastrous conditions in concentration camps, creating systems of care for displaced people and refugees. International legal tribunals were set up to prosecute enemy leadership, starting with a core group of perpetrators, who claimed to be following orders simply as “problem-solvers” (Browning, 2000). Many diplomatic and institutional efforts to rescue Jewish and other endangered populations had been attempted and most failed (Bauer & Keren, 2001). Persecution was documented nonetheless; the Holocaust was perpetuated by institutionalizing authoritarian, eugenic, and antisemitic policies. Tragically and importantly, some persecution during the Holocaust was often legally sanctioned under German laws and often outside the jurisdiction of what was at the time the very limited reach of international law (Bazyler, 2016). Jewish and other groups were forced out of their homes and robbed, giving new meaning to “grand larceny.” This is one reason why restitution claims were later brought and why some reparations were later paid by the government of West Germany.

“Solutions” through mass murder required the treatment of Jewish and other groups of people as “problems.” Planning and carrying out mass murders was considered state secrets that were “finalized” at the Wannsee conference in Munich Germany, which authorized chemical gassing centers in newly annexed Reich territories in “the east” (six locations in Poland) (Dwork, 2002). Jews and others were transported to the east by rail in cattle cars (again, nominally to free up more necessary “space” for “folks” or Aryan population expansions). Nazis reduced human populations to corpses and ashes, nightmares based on the industrialization of violence. Perpetrating killers were empowered; onlookers stood by; resisters and rescuers were brave but rarely successful (Yahil, 1990). Antisemitism and violent Nazi actions muted greater support for resistance. Allies, confederates and supporters of persecuted Jewish and other populations in Nazi-occupied nations, risked losing their own freedom, property, families, and lives. In this context, resistance and righteous upstander narratives remain important and notable (Rohrlich, 1998).

After the war and the Holocaust, we can explore the histories of liberation, displacement, and dispersal of refugee populations (Rice, 2017). Plunder was widespread, in the context of chaos and famines. Some refugees returning to European homes found their former residences occupied by others. Many sought new lives in the United States or Israel, though transit and permission to immigrate was often and still limited. In time, diplomats and others established restitution from West Germany (Bazyler & Alford, 2006). Efforts to establish and institute human rights law grew. Education, documentation, and research were initiated in multiple disciplinary contacts. Judeo-Christian interpretations struggled to find meaning in the events that the world witnessed. Jewry helped build Israel. Holocaust denial also found expression (Lipstadt, 1993).

In the United States and elsewhere, we searched for common interpretations of the unimaginable catastrophe (Alexander, 2009). Proud and well-deserved heroic military narratives sometimes overshadowed difficult and sometimes anguished survivor narratives (Stein, 2014). Jewish and Roma cultures had been dehumanized and shamed, not only in the wake of Nazi propaganda and law but also by popular cultural tropes. Jews in the Holocaust were and are sometimes unfairly described as “sheep” (animals, not humans) who “went to slaughter” (without resistance). This stereotype was not applied to other groups who suffered at the hands of the Nazis (Russians, Poles, Roma, etc.), only to Jews (Bauer, 1989). The murderers, only some of whom were found guilty years later, were simultaneously portrayed as butchers, brutal but nonetheless product producers, and not as organized criminals. Such representations did not help survivors recover and integrate. In addition, international work to fully understand and represent the Holocaust was complicated by conflicts and secrecy that characterized the postwar cold war period (Lewy, 2017; Longerich, 2010).

Why did we fail to prevent this genocidal persecution? Why do we now sometimes hesitate to describe these histories? Perhaps education alone is insufficient to prevent injustice. We know that there are challenges to ongoing initiatives for Holocaust education (Cowan & Maitles, 2017). But still, we are not sure if children and youth can or should be exposed to such horrors. We may worry, reasonably, that we will not fairly represent the subject or perhaps we might upset our audiences (Totten, 2002; Totten, Bartrop, & Jacobs, 2004; Totten & Feinberg, 2001). It’s not a simple or easy subject to teach or to learn about. We may confuse people by presenting historical novels or period fiction that misrepresents history; no boys in pajamas could have ever gotten close to a fence with a commander’s child, and commanders were not paid to be sympathetic to the plight of prisoners (Cowan & Maitles, 2017). History, while sometimes dry, is not always fairly represented by fictional or semifictional stories and movies, though historical fiction does inspire many of us to learn more.

In teaching about the Holocaust and genocide, we should not privilege a perpetrator perspective. Instead, we need to find and highlight the many groups of people affected by Holocaust persecution. We can show how, despite cruel perpetrators, individuals and groups were heroic, helpful, and certainly worth learning about. Many showed purpose and resilience in the context of ongoing catastrophe and tragedy. We can be inspired by Historical figures like Janusz Korczak (born Heinrich Goldschmidt), a Warsaw-born educator who devoted his life to children-in-need (Cohen, 1994). We can find dignity in the fact that the “final solution” was neither final for Jews nor a solution to any of the real problems in our shared world. While we learn that the world will never be the same, that people of faith questioned God, we learn that even the darkest experiences and the depths of despair did not cause our people to abandon all faith (Wiesel, 1995). We see that human rights were clearly and universally defined and internationally established after the Shoah. We can respect those who brought genocide into our vocabulary (Power, 2002) and give due respect to all those who made improvements in our international laws (Bazyler, 2016).

While it helps to use respectful terms for social groups, we do not need to get caught in unnecessary debates over who suffered most among those persecuted. There are statistics to summarize the comparative demography of “victim groups” but we are obligated to find humanity in all of these statistics. The Holocaust’s harm to humanity was both particular and universal. We do and will remember and memorialize both Jewish and all other people who have experienced genocidal crimes (Levy & Sznaider, 2002, 2006). Industrialized mass murder by Nazis targeted multiple cultures and the disabled, nationalist civilians, and political dissidents. Large percentage...