Alvin Rosenfeld reflects, in a speech given at U Minnesota, that “many of our campuses have become hospitable to certain political and ideological currents of thought that issue in actions and statements  inimical to many Jewish students and professors. A review of contemporary debates about two issues of particular concern to Jews—the Holocaust and the State of Israel—suggests that we may be witnessing the emergence of some new versions of the “Jewish Question.”

Rosenfeld discourses on currents that would “forget” the Holocaust on American campuses, end the focus on study of the Holocaust (do more comparative genocide instead), and removeemphasis in particular on the specific tribulations of the Jews.  The idea is to end the alleged Jewish monopolization on suffering.  He says the same holds true in terms of complaints about focus on the study of the State of Israel.   We are witnessing new versions of the emergence of the Jewish Question.

Jay Handelman, in Arts Sarasota and in Herald Tribune, April 18, 2012

Perhaps I was setting myself up for my reactions to Rob Cohen’s documentary “Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald.” I watched it just a few hours after returning from a visit to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland, so my emotional state was already raw. It added a more personal exclamation point to the day.

Even without such a backdrop, “Kinderblock 66″ is a moving testament to
the human spirit that survived unimaginable experiences at the German
prison camp and those who went on to live relatively healthy and productive
lives. At the same time, it adds new perspective to a long line of films that
have captured the sadly dwindling voices of survivors of the Holocaust,
revealing how a large group of young men survived their time at Buchenwald
thanks to the efforts of an underground resistance movement operating at
the camp.

The film, which has its American premiere at the Sarasota Film Festival April 20 and 22, is built around four survivors of what came to be known as Kinderblock 66, an area of Buchenwald that was designated for the roughly 2,000 teenage boys and young men who were separated from their families and sent to the camp. The film relates the persuasive stories of Antonin Kalina, a Czech communist prisoner, who pushed for separating the
boys as a way to protect them from the beatings and likely death they would otherwise face by guards at the camp. Though some challenged the wisdom, it turned out to be a smart move. Of the 2,000 that were sent to Buchenwald, more than 900 survived.

The four survivors — Alex Moskovic (father of executive producer Steven Moskovic), Israel Lazar, Naftali-Duro Furst and Pavel Kohn — are shown receiving small video phones to record their initial thoughts as they prepare to return to Buchenwald in April 2010 for ceremonies surrounding the 65th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. And then returning to Germany where they faced uncertain emotions and meeting fellow survivors.

We learn about their lives, their families and their memories of the camp,both through their own video recordings and well-chosen archival footage that gives you a feeling of what they experienced there. It features an impressive array of experts on the Holocaust, including Ken Waltzer, Jewish Studies director at [Michigan State University], and officials from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. It’s a film filled with personal reflections, but it also serves as convincing argument to support the inclusion of
Kalina among the Righteous Among the Nations, a list of non-Jews who have been proven to have selflessly worked to save Jews during the Holocaust at Yad Vashem. It could take years, but the voices heard clearly in this film, point to Kalina as a man worth of being included with Oskar Schindler and far less prominent but no less
noteworthy people.

Holocaust-related films can be difficult to watch for some. “Kinderblock 66″ makes its impact in gentle, if occasionally disturbing, but meaningful ways.

“Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald” will be shown at the Sarasota Film Festival” at 4:45 p.m. April 20 and 12:30 p.m. April 22. Regal Hollywood 20 Cinemas, 1993 Main St., Sarasota.  “Kinderblock 66 will be shown at UM-Flint at 7:00 pm April 25, in the University Kiva…..

Many thanks to all members of the Winegarden UM Flint faculty seminar, which met nine times during January-February-March 2012 to consider new directions in study of the Holocaust.

We discussed anxieties some authors like Alvin Rosenfeld express about a worried “end to the Holocaust,” a sense that the more we talk and write about it, the more we actually get away from it and the less we understand it in its specificity and moral gravity.  We discussed standards and criteria by which to assess Holocaust memoirs and novels, exploring  truth and veracity, authenticity, literary quality, and more, with Ruth Franklin as our guide.

We explored whether it is possible, in terms of new directions in history, as Timothy Snyder does in Bloodlands, to go more macro, more comparative, without at the same time flattening the distinctiveness of the events that we call the Holocaust.  Finally, we explored. in terms of new directions in history, reading Christopher Browning’s Remembering Survival, going more micro, more bottom-up, drawing on survivors’ testimonies and interviews, and studying the Holocaust in particular places and camps.

All of this led to other insights about doing or writing history, confronting genocide, coping with ongoing issues of justice and responsibility, and wrestling with memory. UM Flint faculty and staff explored the many ways confrontation with aspects of the Holocaust is also germane and relevant to studying topics and raising questions beyond the Holocaust on which they work or in which they’re interested and on exploring methods of approaching these. What a great group — the seminar leader learned at least as much as seminar participants!

The hangings took place on the last day of August 1941, on the town square of Wierzbnik, in what had once been central Poland. Two years had passed since the joint German-Soviet invasion that had destroyed the Polish state; ten weeks before, the Germans had betrayed their ally and invaded the Soviet Union. Wierzbnik, home to Poles and Jews, lay within the General Government, a colony that the Germans had made from parts of their Polish conquests. As Poles left church that Sunday morning, they saw before them a gallows. The German police had selected sixteen or seventeen Poles—men, women, and at least one child. Then they ordered a Jewish execution crew, brought from the ghetto that morning, to carry out the hangings. The Poles were forced to stand on stools; then the Jews placed nooses around their necks and kicked the stools away. The bodies were left to dangle.¹

Demonstrative killing of civilians was one of several German methods designed to stifle Polish resistance. The Germans had murdered educated Poles: tens of thousands in late 1939, thousands more in early 1940. Since June 1940, the Germans had been sending suspect Poles to Auschwitz and other camps. Polish society was to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass of passive workers. German policy toward Jews was different, though the nature of the difference was not yet clear. Jewish elites had been preserved; some of them as members of the Judenrat (Jewish council) or as policemen directing the local affairs of Jews in a way that suited Germans.

Although fatality rates in some ghettos were high, Jews in summer 1941 had little idea that they had been gathered into ghettos in preparation for a “Final Solution.” The Germans had first planned to deport the Jews to a reservation in eastern Poland, or to the island of Madagascar, or to Siberian wastelands. As these schemes proved impracticable, the Jews remained in the ghettos. It was in that final week of August 1941 that the German “Final Solution” was taking on its final form: mass murder. Two days before the hangings at Wierzbnik, the Germans had completed their first truly large-scale murder of Jews, shooting some 23,600 people at Kamianets-Podil’s’kyi in occupied Soviet Ukraine.

“I knew I hanged the right people,” one of the Jewish hangmen in Wierzbnik recalled more than fifty years later. He thought that those who were executed belonged to the Polish Home Army, and as such were guilty of murdering Jews. The people in question died, of course, not because Poles were killing Jews, but because Poles were resisting German rule. The hangings at Wierzbnik were a typical German reprisal, aiming to spread terror and deter further opposition. If it were not for the testimonies of the Jews from Wierzbnik, this particular event would have been lost. For most of them, it was a first stark demonstration of German mass murder, if only a small foretaste of what was to come.

In his magnificent and humane microhistory, Christopher Browning has drawn on the “written, transcribed, and/or taped accounts of 292” Jewish survivors, most of them from Wierzbnik, who shared a similar experience of the war. He treats these testimonies as historical sources, believing that according them “a privileged position not subject to the same critical analysis and rules of evidence as other sources will merely discredit and undermine the reputation of Holocaust scholarship itself.”

Here, in recounting how a Jew forced by Germans to kill Poles blamed the Poles for their fate, Browning reaches the problem of Polish–Jewish relations.² While he is quite aware that this particular testimony must be subjected to scrutiny, his analysis consists mainly in the comparison of multiple Jewish testimonial sources. Addressing the evidence of the Jewish hangman, Browning characterizes the Home Army as a “conservative nationalist underground movement” that did indeed kill Jews, but perhaps not at early as 1941. This description may reflect a consensus among surviving Wierzbnik Jews; it does not fit the historical Home Army.

Interestingly, the “Polish underground” makes several appearances in Browning’s book, usually behaving in ways that are remembered positively: shooting Germans, attacking camps, helping Jews. The Home Army, meanwhile, appears in this negative light, as murderous and anti-Semitic. There is a problem here: the Home Army was the Polish underground. Aiming to restore Polish independence from German rule, it united hundreds of resistance groups. It represented a very wide spetrum of opinion, excluding only the communist left and the extreme nationalist right. And it was not just an underground movement: it was an integral part of the Polish armed forces, under the command of the exile government in London, allied with Great Britain and the United States in the war against Nazi Germany.³

Although the Home Army’s enemy was Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism was indeed a problem in its ranks. On Rosh Hashanah, three weeks after the hangings in Wierzbnik, Polish Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski sent his good wishes from London to the Jewish citizens of Poland via the BBC. Stefan Rowecki, the commander of the Home Army in Warsaw, was irritated; such gestures, he thought, made “the worst possible impression” among Poles. This revealed a basic tension, apparent throughout 1941, between the Polish exile government and its underground army. Anti-Semitism, Rowecki seemed to think, was so pervasive that the Jewish issue should be tabled until war’s end. Many Poles had been inclined to support anti-Semitic parties in the 1930s, and the experience of German and Soviet occupation had not helped.⁴

Some Poles claimed to resent the Jews who had taken up positions of authority in the Soviet occupation apparatus in eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941, after the Soviet invasion of that part of the country. Other Poles were corrupted by having taken over Jewish houses or apartments when Jews were forced into ghettos in 1940 and 1941. Throughout 1941, Poles were debating the political and civic status that Jews should have in Poland after the war. The exile government took the view that postwar Poland would be a democracy without racial discrimination. Within the government, however, nationalists questioned this position.

Polish wartime debates about the “Jewish question” ceased only when Adolf Hitler’s answer became clear. The condition of Polish Jews became a pressing question for the exile government and the Home Army when the Germans began to gas Jews in the final weeks of 1941. In early 1942, Polish leaders believed that news of the shocking German campaign would prompt action from Great Britain and the United States. The Home Army thought that the revelation of the existence of gassing facilities would force the Germans to stop. It transmitted to London the documentation about the death factory at Chełmno that had been gathered by the ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum. This led to BBC broadcasts about the mass extermination of Polish Jews. The Polish government in London, though always presenting Jewish suffering as part of a larger story of Polish martyrdom, gave the mass murder of Jews as a reason for the British and the Americans to carry out retributions against German civilians. In vain: the Germans were not shamed by the publicity, and the Western allies took no meaningful action.⁵

In 1942, in Operation Reinhard, the Germans deported some 1.3 million Polish Jews from ghettos in the General Government to death factories at Treblinka, Bełzėc, and Sobibór. The associated mass deportations of the Jews of Warsaw, which began on July 22, forced the local Home Army into action. It supplied false documentation to Jewish survivors, supported Żegota, the Polish government organization that aided Jewish survivors, and assisted Jews within the Warsaw Ghetto who were planning an uprising. Operation Reinhard reached the town of Wierzbnik on October 27. As Browning shows, an unusually high proportion of Wierzbnik Jews, some 1,200 men and four hundred women, were selected for labor. Browning provides a heartrending depiction of the selections that separated those who would work for the Germans from the nearly four thousand who would be gassed at Treblinka.

This scene was repeated thousands of times in occupied Poland, but rarely if ever has it been rendered in such detail from so many perspectives. Some families were forced apart. Others divided themselves, not knowing which group was the better one. Some people left their families behind. Others stayed with their families when they might have saved themselves. Others still contrived to take their families with them into labor duty. Browning gently evokes the kinds of morality that could function in such a situation of extremity. He does not expect his sources to provide an example of ethical behavior: “We must be grateful for the testimonies of those who survived and are willing to speak, but we have no right to expect from them tales of edification and redemption.” But he does draw attention to the loyalties that did function: the bonds among families, lovers, and friends.

The Wierzbnik Jews selected for labor were in an exceptional position. By late October 1942, more than two million Polish Jews were already dead, shot in what had been eastern Poland or gassed at Treblinka, Bełzėc, Sobibór, or Chełmno. In 1943 and 1944, as hundreds of thousands more Polish Jews were gassed at Auschwitz or shot in the East, Wierzbnik Jews continued to live and work. They owed their survival to an accident of geography: their homes were very near the Polish arms factory at Starachowice, now taken over by the Germans. Jewish labor at Starachowice was important to the German war effort. The Starachowice camps were not under the direct authority of the SS, but rather run by a private business, operating within a larger holding company. As in the Wierzbnik ghetto, daily authority over Jews in the Starachowice camps was in the hands of a Jewish council and Jewish police force. These institutions, which drew heavily from families that had been prosperous before the war, distributed labor assignments on the basis of connections and bribes. German personnel were few, and the guards were stationed outside the camps.

There was little need to guard the camps: in 1943 in occupied Poland, Starachowice was a place Jews escaped to, not a place they escaped from. When Jews from Majdanek were transferred to Starachowice, they could hardly believe their eyes. The place was filthy and the work was dangerous, but Jews remained alive in large numbers, sometimes even with their children. Some were able to supplement their minimal food rations by selling belongings that they had left for safekeeping with Wierzbnik Poles. Jews at Starachowice bribed camp guards to accompany them to Wierzbnik, where they would carry out these transactions. Then they returned to the camps with the food. To escape from Starachowice would be to court death. Jews found by Germans would be shot. Although thousands of Poles aided Jews despite the death sentence they faced for doing so, it would be an extraordinary gamble to trust any given Pole. In this part of occupied Poland there was no underground army that Jews knew would accept them, and no Jewish armed force that could protect them.

The major Jewish armed rebellion against German rule in the General Government, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April–May 1943, had aimed not at survival but rather at the choice of the manner of death. It had involved a certain alliance between Poles and Jews, but one that did not endure. The Warsaw branch of the Home Army had given Jews a substantial part of its modest weapons cache. Seven of the first eight armed actions taken by the Home Army in Warsaw were in support of the ghetto. This was symbolic: as everyone knew, the Home Army in Warsaw could not have saved the Jews of the ghetto in April 1943, even had it devoted all of its troops and weapons to this purpose. After the Ghetto Uprising was crushed, Home Army commanders failed to enlist surviving Jewish fighters. Thus even Jews with combat experience found themselves hunted in occupied Poland in 1943. Jews had to fear not only the Germans, but also local units of the Home Army who (on several documented occasions) shot them as bandits or (on a few documented occasions) shot them to steal their belongings.

From the perspective of the Home Army, 1943 was the year of an irresolvable dilemma: the Germans were losing the war, but the Soviets were winning it. In February the Red Army had dealt the Wehrmacht its first major defeat, at Stalingrad. Henceforth, the Home Army had to resist the Germans while preparing for the arrival of the Soviets. German propaganda drove the point home that April, revealing that the Soviets had shot thousands of Polish officers at Katyn. Stalin used the revelation of his own mass murder as a pretext to break diplomatic relations with Poland.⁶ This was an unmistakable sign of imperial ambition. If Stalin would not recognize the legitimate Polish government during a common war against Nazi Germany, why would he endorse Polish independence after a Soviet victory?

Some Home Army commanders feared that arming Polish Jews would ease the spread of Soviet power. Though this sometimes took the form of an anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew as Communist, the concern was not entirely unjustified. The Polish Communist party was part of the Jewish Combat Organization, which the Home Army had supplied with arms. The man who negotiated those arms transfers, Aryeh Wilner, was also negotiating with Communists. The Jewish representative within the Polish government department charged with rescuing Jews, Adolf Berman, was also in touch with the Communists. (His brother Jakub would later preside over the Communist security apparatus that would persecute Home Army veterans—including those who had aided Jews.)⁷ For the Home Army, the Soviet advance meant the arrival of a dubious ally against the Germans as well as an impending threat to Polish independence. For Jews it meant life. This basic difference in perspectives, a result of the Holocaust, was difficult to overcome.

For Jews at Starachowice, only labor counted. As Browning masterfully reconstructs daily life within the factory camps, he reveals what Jews knew about their fate and the limits of their local perspective. When typhus broke out, for example, the Germans at first simply shot the Jews who were infected. So long as Jewish labor was available for rent from the SS, shooting sick Jews was the economically rational thing to do. As the war continued and the number of living Jews plunged, the Germans treated sick Jews rather than killing them. Jews remembered this as a change in the camp regime; Browning recalls the larger causes.

In late 1943, Heinrich Himmler liquidated most of the camps in the General Government where Jews were used as labor, and had tens of thousands of Jewish workers shot. The directors of Starachowice sacrificed some of the women and children to Himmler, but preserved the men. Because their business was making arms, they could evade the policy of murdering all Jews. Only the Red Army’s successful offensive in June 1944 forced the closure of the factory camps at Starachowice. In July the Jewish laborers at Starachowice were sent to Auschwitz. Mortality rates in one of the railcars was high, but not only because of the transport conditions: some of the stronger prisoners took the opportunity to beat the members of the camp council to death.

The Red Army was disarming Home Army units as it entered eastern Poland. The Home Army’s only hope seemed to be an uprising against the Germans in Warsaw, timed to exploit the Soviet advance but precede the actual arrival of Soviet troops. The aim was to liberate Warsaw from German occupation by Polish efforts, and to install a Polish government before the Red Army arrived. In late July 1944, as the Wierzbnik Jews were sent to Auschwitz, the Red Army approached Warsaw. On August 1, 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began. The Home Army fought the Germans there for eight weeks: a longer battle than either the Polish campaign of 1939 or the French campaign of 1940, and with casualties comparable to both. As Dariusz Libionka and Barbara Engelking demonstrate in their pioneering study, Jews took part in the battle, most of them in the Home Army.⁸ Some of these were people of Jewish origin who regarded or presented themselves as Poles and had been in the Home Army all along. Others were veterans of the Ghetto Uprising. More were survivors who left their places of shelter in Warsaw in order to fight, seeing it as self-evident that they would help Poles fight Germans. As Michał Zylberberg put it, “The Poles had risen to fight against the mortal enemy, and it was our obligation, as victims and as fellow citizens, to help them.” The Warsaw Uprising was a major example of armed Jewish resistance to the Germans during World War II. Indeed, it is quite possible that more people of Jewish origin took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 than in the Ghetto Uprising of 1943.

The Warsaw Uprising, like the Ghetto Uprising before it, was defeated. The Home Army, like the Jews the previous year, fought essentially alone. Stalin forbade Allied air drops when they might have helped. The Germans held the line at the Vistula River, and the Red Army halted. Some of the most brutal German SS and police formations defeated the Polish resistance in Warsaw, killing at least 120,000 Polish civilians.

These people perished not only because German forces were ordered to kill them, but also because Joseph Stalin allowed them to die. The Red Army was indeed halted by the stubborn German defense at the Vistula, but its encampment there for five months must be understood as a political act. It doomed the Poles (and the Jews) who were fighting the Germans in Warsaw. The Germans killed people who, as Stalin knew, would also have resisted the imposition of Communist rule.

The Germans were able to empty not only Starachowice, but also the last ghetto in occupied Poland, in Łódz´. In July 1944, Łódz´ Jews knew that the Red Army was nearby, and thought they could be liberated in a matter of days. Some 67,000 Jews were transported from Łódz´ to Auschwitz while the Warsaw Uprising was taking place. Whereas the Wierzbnik Jews were not subjected to a selection at the ramp at Birkenau, most of the Łódz´ Jews were gassed upon arrival.⁹

By the time the Red Army finally reached Warsaw in January 1945, the Wierzbnik Jews, Łódz´ Jews, and other Jews were being marched from Auschwitz to labor camps in Germany, where they would remain until the end of the war. This ordeal was deadlier for the Wierzbnik Jews than Starachowice and Auschwitz; hundreds died in a matter of a few months. After the Red Army took Berlin in May, Polish- Jewish survivors found their way to displaced-persons camps in Germany. A few dozen Wierzbnik Jews were able to return to Poland and their hometown, where they were greeted with ugly threats from the Poles who had stolen their houses. In June a few returning Wierzbnik Jews were murdered by Poles. One Jew was beheaded. In Poland as a whole, hundreds of Jews were murdered by Poles in the months after the war was over.

Browning concludes from this horrible finale that the goal of the Polish underground was the end of Jewish life in Poland. He adds that the Polish nation was defined in opposition to an enemy image of the Jew. As Browning acknowledges, it is not at all clear that members of the Home Army committed the murders and robberies in Wierzbnik; the Jews upon whose testimony Browning relies could not have known this. However that may be, it is misleading to discuss Polish political aims only in the light of these events. If Polish patriotism was simply a matter of hating Jews, why did the Home Army fight the Nazis with such determination?

Officially, the Home Army was fighting for constitutional liberal democracy and equal rights for all citizens; what its victory or indeed what democratic elections would have brought to Poland we will never know. After intimidation campaigns and faked elections, Poland became a Soviet satellite governed by a Communist regime. We owe the description of the Home Army as a reactionary nationalist clique to Soviet and Polish Communists, whose forces defeated its stubborn remnants, tortured its best officers, and hanged its last commander after a show trial….

Like most Holocaust historians, Christopher Browning was wary of survivor testimony. Then, one case made him realize he could ignore it no longer.

Though it has long played a central role in the popular history of the Holocaust, survivor testimony has for decades been seen as marginal by Holocaust historians. The issue has preoccupied scholars since Raul Hilberg’s landmark 1961 book, The Destruction of the European Jews, in which he largely discounted the “usefulness” of survivor accounts.

Hilberg’s pioneering work established a methodological orthodoxy with regard to survivor testimony that was long adhered to by historians looking to establish a credible and unassailable historical record of Nazi crimes.

Christopher Browning was still operating within the boundaries Hilberg had set when he chose to focus on the slow brutalization of a single battalion of German soldiers in his pathbreaking 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

But, more recently, while studying a 1972 German court case that acquitted a Nazi police chief on all charges related to his role in the liquidation of a small Jewish ghetto in central Poland, Browning was outraged.

He was struck by the presiding judge’s chilling dismissal of some 100 eyewitness testimonies by the ghetto’s survivors who attested to the defendant’s memorable savagery. The judge dryly noted, “As a matter of principle … eyewitness testimony was ‘the most unreliable form of evidence’ with which the judicial process had to deal.” Compounding the insult was the fact that virtually no other documentary or evidentiary material existed in this case.

In his latest book, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp, Browning offers a corrective—one that represents a shift away from the field’s long-held eschewal of survivor testimony. “The history of the Holocaust,” Browning has concluded, “cannot be written solely as either perpetrator history or history from above.”

Remember Survival offers an account woven out of 292 testimonies by survivors of the Starachowice slave labor camp, whose principal security officer, not coincidentally, was the same Nazi police chief exonerated in that 1972 decision by the German court.

In reflecting upon the 292, Browning remarks: “Among the survivors of the Starachowice camps, there is no Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel.” For the most part, these are ordinary survivors, some with limited verbal skills or disjointed narratives. But Browning is scrupulous in preserving the dignity and integrity, if not always endorsing the accuracy, of their accounts.

Complicating survivor testimony, Browning believes, are five discrete categories of memory, whose boundaries sometimes shift. The largest obstacle to their usefulness as judicial testimony is the tendency by some survivors to incorporate postwar Holocaust tropes into their personal narratives.

Thus, for example, although the historical record indicates that they were not subject to the usual selection process upon arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1944, many of the Starachowice survivors vividly “recalled” a selection by Dr. Mengele, whose ubiquity and notoriety were largely nurtured in postwar Holocaust literature and film.

But Browning allows for “authenticity” as well as “factual accuracy” in the survivor testimony. He wisely notes that all evidence is problematic but rather than discarding evidentiary testimony wholesale the problems can be managed by a competent historian. In this case, he speculates that the survivors likely fused the memory of subsequent selections by SS officials, including Mengele, with their traumatic arrival at Auschwitz.

When I picked up Remembering Survival, my interest was not strictly academic. My late mother, Anna Perl Freilich, is among the 292 Starachowice testimonies, and I read the book closely, hunting for more pieces to the overwhelming and confusing jigsaw puzzle that had always constituted her wartime experiences. What I gleaned were not only more shards from a fractured story, but a vital context that endowed those fragments with new meaning.

Ironically, it is Hilberg whom Browning quotes in claiming that what he has attempted to do in this micro-history of the Starachowice factory slave labor camp is to “cast a bright light on a small stage,” and he has largely succeeded. Thrown into stark relief, in particular, are the internal dynamics of the camp and the moral matrix within which the survivors operated.

There were other camps that exploited Jewish labor vital to the German war effort, but the Starachowice labor camp was unusual in at least one respect, one that contributed to the relatively high survival rate of its inmates. Following the 1939 nationalization of the munitions factory on its site, the daily operation of Starachowice was conducted not by the SS, but by “bribable” civilian factory managers.

The Jewish slave laborers were the legal property of the SS, and the new German factory owners paid a per capita fee to the SS for their use. This afforded the SS a more limited day-to-day role in Starachowice than it had in other slave labor camps that used Jewish workers, notwithstanding the brutality of individual Nazis, who oversaw the camp’s security.

Starachowice’s atypical survival rate was rooted in another, more complex, circumstance. In its cynical attempt to “divide and control,” the Nazi administration that ran the security apparatus of the camp appointed a Jewish lagerrat, a parallel to the concentration camps’ infamous kapo system, placing “privileged” Jewish prisoners in charge of Starachowice’s internal affairs. The lagerrat was supplemented by a Jewish-administered lagerpolizei.

Starachowice’s corrupt and often cruel lagerrat and lagerpolizei were as morally controversial as the ghetto-based Judenräte, or Jewish councils, but they were also paradoxically instrumental in the relatively high survival rate of the Jewish slave labor force.

Though collectively reviled in the survivors’ testimonies for abetting German policies, some credited their own survival to crucial and inexplicable acts of mercy by individual members of the lagerpolizei.

My mother, for example, fell victim to the typhus epidemic that raged in Starachowice during the winter of 1942-43. Too weak to leave her bed to attend the mandatory prisoner roll call, she had resigned herself to the consequences.

But in a story that I heard over and over during my childhood, and that is recounted in Remembering Survival, it was one of the lagerpolizei, a landsman from her hometown of Szydlowiec, Szmul Szczesliwy, who burst into her barracks, rallied her to her feet, yanked on her clothes, helped her to the roll call, and insisted that other landsleit carry her to work. Those who remained behind were massacred in their beds.

As Browning notes, a member of the lagerrat, Rachmil Wolfowicz, was “detested” by many. But he is recalled by my uncle, the Yiddish journalist Joseph Friedenson—another Starachowice survivor interviewed by Browning—simply as a cousin by marriage whose mother’s privileged job in the camp kitchen enabled Friedenson, his wife Gitele and my mother (Gitele’s cousin) to receive occasional life-saving supplements to their near-starvation diets.

This web of idiosyncratic stories helps to reconstruct the tortured ethical universe that reigned in Starachowice, where the Jewish prisoners were continually presented with what Lawrence Langer referred to as a series of “choiceless choices” in their struggle to stay alive and where they established a makeshift moral code in the face of a heartless and single-minded enemy.

The interdependence of this battered community of slave laborers, many of whom were fortunate to be imprisoned with relatives or townsmen, is vividly portrayed. Tragically, as one survivor notes, “if you helped one person, it was usually at the expense of another.”

But Browning cautions against moralizing; what he emphasizes is that it was almost impossible to stay alive solely through one’s own agency. He credits, among other factors, the Starachowice slave laborers’ desperate commitment to the lives of those closest to them by blood or geography for their unusually high survival rate. It also provided a way for them to unwittingly thwart the Nazi plan for total Jewish annihilation.

In one of the book’s most gripping chapters, Browning describes the 1944 cattle-car ride from Starachowice to Auschwitz-Birkenau. When the doors were opened on arrival, a preponderance of the labor camp’s surviving lagerrat and lagerpolizei—all of whom were concentrated in the first car—were found dead in a heap.

Had they perished from the hardships and privations of the cattle-car ride, or were they the victims of revenge killings by their fellow prisoners? Though it’s impossible to be sure, Browning is convinced that it’s the latter.

If fellow prisoners had killed them, it was likely a group of Lublin survivors who had arrived at Starachowice rather late in the game. Geographic outliers at the bottom of the camp hierarchy, they had systematically been denied the advantages of the veteran Starachowice slave laborers, and they may have decided to settle a score. To his credit, Browning neither flinches in exploring this scenario nor offers facile moral judgments about this tragic possibility.

Now, some 40 years after the scandalous verdict of a German court, not only has Browning proved that survivor testimony is “useful” to Holocaust historiography but that it is vital. It also grants survivors a degree of justice that they have long been denied.

In a measure of the emotional resonance his book has had among Starachowice survivors, my uncle, Joseph Friedenson, remarks of Browning, “For someone who didn’t see the Nazis in action, he manages to capture the tragedy as if he were there; as if he were a witness, just like me.”

In his sensitive and careful use of their testimonies, Browning has not simply made a sentimental concession to these ordinary survivors, he has enriched the historical record. Even as he reinforces the evidence of Nazi crimes, Browning provides a critical window into the daily life and mores of the Jewish prisoners. Like any good historian, he sifts through and weighs conflicting testimonies and carefully contextualizes them. Above all, he listens.

Toby Perl Freilich is a freelance filmmaker in New York and Jerusalem currently completing a documentary about Israel’s kibbutz movement. The picture shows the author’s parents shortly after the war. Her mother, Anna Perl Freilich, provided one of the 292 accounts that are the basis of Christopher Browning’s Remembering Survival.

What makes Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, in your mind, groundbreaking? Original? What are the book’s great strengths?

What new optic or perspective do you obtain by reading Bloodlands?

What makes Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, also, an object of controversy and a target of criticism? What are its weaknesses?

How does what Snyder writes contribute to a different understanding of Europe in the early mid-20th century and to a transformed understanding of mass state murder in the borderlands between Nazi Germany and the USSR?

How, in focusing on the geographic area between Hitler and Stalin, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, and on imperial utopian schemes by rival tyrannies, does Bloodlands also add to our understanding of the Holocaust?

What popular misconceptions about the Nazi Holocaust does Snyder correct?

Can Snyder be accused of de-centering the Holocaust? Diminishing it? What about the Holocaust does Snyder not explain?

What might reasonably said to be omitted from Bloodlands or treated without an even hand?

Can Snyder’s Bloodlands be put to the service of those who would diminish and relativize the Nazi Holocaust, specifically those who speak today of a double genocide, who draw a broad equivalence between Nazism and Communism, and who seek to cover up the role of local participants in the Bloodlands in the mass murder of the Jews? Can it contribute to the aspirational goal of unsavory political elements who wish to replace Holocaust Remembrance Day with Red-Brown Day?

What do you make of Snyder’s efforts to comment on modernity and the Holocaust?

According to the journalist Charles Lewis who wrote in The National Post in January 2011, Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands, a new history of mass murder during the 1930s and 1940s under Nazism and communism, said that, after he finished the book, he wanted to “crawl into a cave and hide.” The only “lesson” he learned was a hopeless one: Anyone can be the victim or the perpetrator of barbarism.

But this it seems is also one of the key problems of Bloodlands, which attributes victimization largely to geographic location, to being caught between competing totalitarian states and to being occupied and reoccupied. It diminishes the Nazi Holocaust even while exploring it specifically in great detail, at one and the same time anchoring the Holocaust and merging it into a sea of killing of other peoples throughout the borderlands. It also omits any serious attention to the ideology and sentiment that drove the mass murders.

“Snyder’s thesis is that it was in the Bloodlands that these forces met and interacted in ways that became mutually self-reinforcing, always at the expense of indigenous populations whose suffering continues to remain under-acknowledged in the historical literature, particularly in the West. Accordingly, Snyder feels that it is important to displace the Holocaust, and especially concentration camps like Auschwitz, as the primary signifiers of twentieth-century genocidal mass murder, since privileging them unhelpfully restricts our awareness of the scale of the damage done to the people and places under Nazi and Soviet occupation. For example, over a million Jews were shot to death in the forests of Eastern Europe, almost forty thousand in two days at Babi Yar in Ukraine alone. Nearly three million more were killed on arrival at extermination centers such as Bełżec, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Treblinka, these death factories not to be confused with concentration camps which actually housed many inmates for varying periods of time, however inadequately. More than this, for Snyder the Holocaust is typically framed by exceptionalist language which serves to disconnect its particulars from larger historical and ideological currents, thus insulating its victims from others experiencing versions of the same horrors, for the same reasons, who remain no less entitled to our moral regard….”

Adan Muller thinks: “Notwithstanding the criticism of historian Richard Evans that he fails to acknowledge the singularity of the Holocaust, and to some extent notwithstanding his stated desire to do precisely this, I find ample evidence in Bloodlands of Snyder acknowledging the exceptional character of the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews. [In interviews and in print, Snyder says the same, he accepts the "singularity" of the Holocaust.]The main achievement of Snyder’s history lies in its explicit demand for recognition of the suffering of those [who were] not directly caught up in the Holocaust but who found themselves nevertheless implicated in, and destroyed by, the same matrix of forces which gave rise to it.”

Richard Evans, on the contrary, thinks differently. Evans castigates Snyder sharply for failing to draw a clear enough distinction between the Holocaust and the concurrent genocides, distracting from what was unique. Snyder writes:

“That uniqueness consisted not only in the scale of its ambition, but also in the depth of the hatred and fear that drove it on. There was something peculiarly sadistic in the Nazis’ desire not just to torture, maim and kill the Jews, but also to humiliate them. SS men and not infrequently ordinary soldiers as well set light to the beards of Orthodox Jews in Poland and forced them to perform gymnastic exercises in public until they dropped; they made Jewish girls clean public latrines with their blouses; they performed many other acts of ritual humiliation that they did not force on their Slav prisoners, however badly they treated them in other ways. The Slavs, in the end, were for the Nazis a regional obstacle to be removed; the Jews were a ‘world enemy’ to be ground into the dust.”

Eric Sundquist in the Wall St. Journal

“Despite the hazards of trying to represent events often said to be “unknowable,” Ms. Franklin insists on the moral authority of the imagination and shows the power of literature to uncover the truths that are latent in documentary material.”

“, the best of Holocaust literature, Ms. Franklin emphasizes, has the advantage of being “self-conscious about its own unreliability.” True enough. But since the events of the Holocaust, not to mention its vast historiography, play very little role in her book, an important dimension of the problem is left out of account. (A more practical drawback is that she provides no endnotes or bibliography.)”

Jerome Chanes in the Forward

“…Franklin makes a misstep, a serious one, in her chapter on “Identity Theft: The Second Generation.” The second generation (the parlance is “2G”) is that of the children of the survivors who came to maturity after the Holocaust. The writers of the second generation are angrily characterized by Franklin, thus, “driven by ambition, guilt, envy, or sheer narcissism, [they] have constructed elaborate literary fictions in which… they assert themselves as witnesses to the Holocaust… [claiming that] the second generation’s ‘memories’ are as valid as those of the survivors.” In a word, they misrepresent themselves as survivors, Franklin asserts. To Franklin, the 2G writers have committed “identity theft.”

There is a basic problem with Franklin’s bald assertion, and that is that she simply does not understand the psychology of the survivors and of their children, nor does she understand the history of the survivor community; her analysis of the literature is therefore entirely lacking in nuance. The 2Gs have lived with people who were persecuted, who were humiliated and who experienced multiple losses. The survivors, for their part, experienced losses that they were not able to mourn. The creative process of their children, the “2G” writers — the Thane Rosenbaums and the Melvin Bukiets (to take two writers chosen by Franklin for special scorn) — therefore came out of the second generation’s own need to mourn those never known.

Psychologists have taught us that the final stage of mourning is the search for meaning; creativity is an integral part of that process, and is not the “grotesque solipsism” that Franklin imputed to the second generation. Rosenbaum and Bukiet are indeed valid witnesses. What they witnessed was not the Final Solution, but the improbable and often impossible lives of those for whom the Nazi death sentence had not proved final. Franklin’s “identity theft” is not a “theft” at all; the identity — the experience taught the 2Gs by the survivors — was not stolen but is theirs, and is embedded.’

Shoah: The Next Generation
What Comes After the Survivors?
By David Biale
Published February 01, 2011, in the Forward.

Once They Had a Country: Two Teenage Jewish Refugees in the Second World War
By Muriel R. Gillick
University of Alabama Press, 240 pages, $19.95

Out on a Ledge: Enduring the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Beyond
By Eva Libitzky and Fred Rosenbaum
Wicker Park Press, 276 pages, $16.95

As the generation of Shoah survivors reaches the end of its natural life span, the question arises of how to preserve the memory of that apocalypse by those who did not directly experience it. A recent work by Ruth Franklin, “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction,” takes some second-generation writers to task for claiming to be survivors themselves. But this negative view of second-generation literature ignores a new genre of Holocaust memoirs — as well as novels such as Ghita Schwarz’s recent “Displaced Persons” — written by writers born since the war. These writers do not claim to be survivors themselves. They stand at a conscious distance from their subjects, even as they honor their stories. They make use of the wealth of historical literature to situate their subjects in a broader context than the subjects themselves could have done had they written their own memoirs, a trend seen in recent fiction, as well.

The two books under review here differ in terms of authorship. Muriel Gillick, a clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, is the child of two survivor parents, the subjects of her story. Fred Rosenbaum is the author of several histories of the Jews of Northern California, as well as two earlier survivor memoirs, co-authored, like this one, by a survivor. Rosenbaum has developed a very successful technique of “ventriloquizing” his co-authors’ voices so that they appear to have a breadth of knowledge normally reserved for historians. Although technically not the child of a survivor (his mother escaped to Cuba from Poland in 1939), he has developed a highly effective method for entering into the minds of his survivor co-authors in order to tell their stories.

Gillick’s story is remarkable, in part because her parents endured virtually the whole Shoah experience together. Hans Garfunkel was 13 and Ilse Wulff 12 when their parents sent them to Belgium on the same Kindertransport shortly after Kristallnacht. For the next year and a half they were in Belgium, but were evacuated to the South of France in railway freight cars after the Germans invaded in May 1940. Of 100 children, some were rounded up and sent to an internment camp, the first stop on the way to Auschwitz, but the intrepid Swiss woman in charge of the group marched into the camp and successfully — if improbably — demanded their release. As it became increasingly clear that the Nazi noose was tightening around them, Hans and Ilse, along with other children, sneaked across the Swiss border, where they took refuge for the rest of the war, but had to endure the harsh Swiss treatment of Jewish refugees. After the war, the Swiss forced them to leave. Both came to the United States, where they married in 1948.
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Gillick has done prodigious research to amplify her parents’ experience and understand it in broader historical context. She gives a rich account of German-Jewish life in the Weimar and early Nazi period to situate the stories of her parents and their respective families. The personal saga of each protagonist in the story becomes the occasion for a deft historical account of the context of that saga. So, for example, in describing how Ilse’s parents fled to Shanghai, where they both died, Gillick sketches a portrait of that often desperate refugee community.

One might expect that a daughter writing her parents’ stories would skirt around difficult personal details or turn her protagonists into unblemished heroes. But Gillick is unflinching. Her father suffered from what she diagnoses as post-traumatic stress disorder (she brings her medical training into play at crucial junctures of the story). Hans’s all-too-human weaknesses — some a result of personality, others the result of his wartime experiences — are frankly acknowledged. Of course, not all children of survivors are able to strike such an objective stance in writing about their parents, but Gillick may well have profited from waiting so long to tell the story of hers.

Rosenbaum’s subject is Eva Libitzky, daughter of a family of Gerer Hasidim from Lodz. Libitzky abandons the faith of her ancestors in the course of ghettoization, in ways that are less theological than practical and existential. Her story is at once familiar and unique. She endured a harrowing four and a half years and the death of her parents in the Lodz ghetto, followed by grueling stints in Auschwitz, a slave labor camp in Germany and, finally, Theresienstadt, where she was liberated

Like Gillick, Rosenbaum has done extraordinary research to contextualize his subject’s story. He found documents in a newly released German archive, as well as in the Lodz municipal archives, that show how Libitzky was admitted to Auschwitz and was given medical tests (not, however, of the sort of notorious experimentation associated with Dr. Josef Mengele). These documents reveal that she had been married in the ghetto, something she had never disclosed after the war.

Rosenbaum also brings to bear the now considerable literature on the Lodz ghetto, probably the best documented of all the communities in Eastern Europe during the war. Because he so successfully ventriloquizes Libitzky’s voice, he is able to put in her mouth a complex description, based on historical research, of the ghetto and its operations, one that she almost certainly could not have written on her own.

A final contribution of both of these works, like “Displaced Persons,” is to take the Holocaust story beyond the war so that we can see how these survivors rebuilt their lives, at times in the face of enormous difficulties (Libitzky’s family struggled for years to survive on a failing chicken farm in Connecticut). That liberation rarely provided “closure” is something we don’t usually learn from the earlier generation of memoirists.

Gillick and Rosenbaum represent the passionate desire of writers born since the Shoah to try to enter into the experience and understand it, although with the awareness that what one has not experienced oneself can never be fully understood (and perhaps even those who did go through the Holocaust can never fully understand it, either). The tools of historical research — objective detachment and use of documentary sources — are what distinguish these second-order memoirs from those written by earlier authors telling their own stories. It is examples like these that make one optimistic about a Holocaust literature beyond the survivors.

David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum professor of Jewish history at the University of California, Davis and author of “Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought” (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/135102/#ixzz1m6eud9DO

The Holocaust memoir has been a difficult subject in recent years. There have been several whopper-sized Holocaust frauds. These have included Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, about a young child in the camps. It won the National Jewish Book Award, before being discovered. They have also included Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust, about a young girl who ran with the wolves, and most recently, Herman Rosenblat, The Angel at the Fence, about a young boy who was aided to survive by a young girl in a concentration camp.

On the other hand, several Holocaust memoirs have received canonical status as nearly documentary works of witness during the same period, including especially Elie Wiesel’s powerful Night, written earlier, but which was recently reissued in a striking new edition, now sponsored by Oprah Winfrey and her book club. Moreover, Wiesel and some others have argued that, concerning the Holocaust, there is and can be no history, only “witness.”

In our 4th meeting, we take up the question of the Holocaust memoir and what is truth in memoir. Ruth Franklin, literary editor of the New Republic, writes in her book A Thousand Dark Nights, that the best memoirs about the Holocaust are inevitably novels as well as memoirs – they partake of both the features of fiction and non-fiction. Every canonical work of Holocaust literature involves some graying of the line between fiction and reality. Every act of memory is also an act of narrative, striving for coherence, omitting much, and employing artifice to tell the story.

Indeed, Franklin argues that such works are powerful precisely because they are literary, because they are art. They draw not merely on their truth value, the observations and memories of someone who was there and experienced the events, but also on their artistic worth and value, the way someone who was there constructs a story afterward to reach an audience…..

We also take up the question of the Holocaust and literature. Is it okay to aestheticize atrocity? Are there rules or ethics about doing so? If so, what are they?

This week we will explore “The Witnesses,” the survivor writers – basically a similar canon as Alvin Rosenfeld identified.. Next week we willexplore “Those Who Came After,” those who were not there but who write of the Holocaust and in ways that raise similar issues or truth and fiction. In all of this, we need to ask what makes a memoir powerful and telling and a key form of Holocaust writing? How are memoirs different from testimonies? What do we look for in Holocaust memoirs? Why?