First Writing Assignment HIS 393/SSC 599
The Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive is located at UM-Dearborn and has been put together over a generation by Professor Sidney Bolkosky, a national leader in developing Holocaust testimonies. You can access the interviews at http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/interviews.php
I would like you to read two of the following four survivors’ accounts, and write a brief two page paper exploring how the experiences detailed in these testimonies or in at least one of them fits with, contradicts, or is in tension with the generalizations you are reading in Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Nazi Concentration Camp. The testimonies you should choose from are by:
Paul Molnar
Abraham Pasternak
Agi Rubin
Shari Weiss
Due in class Tues., Jan. 17, typed, either single or double spaced….

In writing your brief paper, you should give the reader a sense of the survivors’ experiences, where and when, you should test their experiences and observations against what Wolfgang Sofsky claims in The Order of Terror, and you should then offer a judgment, on balance, about whether this testimony/these testimonies fit with and support Sofsky or not. Why or why not?

Because of the availability of new sources — testimonies provided by former prisoners and survivors of the Nazi camps and their liberators, and documents derived from the operations of the camps and recently opened — we can now enter into these man-made social worlds which, until recently, were black boxes and where historians and others feared to look into the abyss. We can ask questions about human experience, work, residence, transport, punishment, survival, human relations, and more.

I have spent part of this winter break at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum armed with a question. What happened to other boys of similar age to Elie Wiesel, who were in Auschwitz-Buna with Wiesel, traveled on the same transport from Buna to Buchenwald, arriving January 26, 1945, and were placed there initially in barracks in the little camp. We (my sophomore undergrad assistant who accompanied me and I) have discovered that there were 305 boys on Wiesel’s transport that were the same age, 16 and under. Wiesel doesn’t write about other boys. Who were these boys and what happened to them? What is the story that surrounds or takes place at the same time as Elie Wiesel’s in Night?

Of the 305 boys, a preliminary count shows, 142 were placed with Wiesel in block 66, a children’s barrack which was the site of an underground rescue operation to protect youths and children. Most, but not all, of these 142 boys survived in this protected block until liberation April 11, 1945, and did not work. But 156 others from the same age group were not placed in block 66, and about one third were not kept in the main camp Buchenwald at all but sent out on additional transports to camps where there was devastating slave work and that we are now researching.

These camps included BII, or Langenstein-Zwieberge, near Halberstadt in the Harz Mountains, where prisoners were forced to dig tunnels for the Junkers Aircraft Company, which was preparing to make engines and missiles; Hecht, or Holzen near Eschershausen, where prisoners were forced to dig tunnels for the Firma Stein, also known as Volkswagen near Wolfsburg, and SIII, or Ohrdruf, neara Gotha, where prisoners were forced to dig tunnels for yet another underground complex, which included the S/III Nazi headquarters where the Nazis planned to make a final stand after retreat from Berlin (this didn’t happen). Other theories say this or a nearby site were intended for production of the intercontinental “Amerika” rocket, or even the testing and production of a Nazi atomic bomb.

The University of Michigan-Flint with the Flint Jewish Federation invite you to the Kristallnacht Lecture by Kenneth Waltzer, the Winegarden Visiting Professor at UM-Flint, 2011-12.

When the U.S. Third Army under General Patton liberated Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp near Weimar, on April 11, 1945, American soldiers were astonished to find nearly 1000 boys alive among 21,000 camp prisoners. Most were adolescents 14-16, but a minority were under 12 — and the two youngest were only 4. Who were these boys, what had been their experiences, and how were they still alive to be liberated?

Among these youths and children were Eliezer Weisel, a teenage boy from Sighet, in northern Transylvania under Hungarian occupation, who later became a famous writer and chronicler of Holocaust experience and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Among them, too, was little Israel Meir Lau (Lulek), an 8-year old boy from Piotrkow, in northwestern Poland, who later became the chief rabbi of Israel and winner of the Israel Prize.

Utilizing survivor memoirs, testimonies, and interviews, and also camp documents recently opened to scholars in the former Red Cross International Tracing Service archives, it is now possible to tell the story of rescue inside a concentration camp….

I see in what the University of Michigan Flint is seeking to do in the current period an updated version of the constellation of ideas that animated me long ago and shaped my choice to come to Michigan. The significant emphasis here on faculty-student interaction, the idea of undergraduate learning as a collaborative process, the honoring by the institution of good, committed teaching and teacher-scholars, the emphases on writing and on civic engagement and democracy, and the effort to build a more residentially based community of learning are familiar and make me feel at home. The opportunity to participate and pitch in, to interact with good teacher-scholars and eager students, and – in a new era, to harness new things, like the new technology — to undertake new exciting initiatives makes me feel younger again. I am truly thankful about and look forward to participating in this wonderful opportunity.

When I came to Michigan the subject of the Holocaust was not yet a major preoccupation of scholarship and did not yet have a significant imprint on the broader culture. I went to graduate school to study immigration and urban immigrants from Europe (my grandparents); I did not go with the thought in mind to study the subsequent catastrophe of 20th century Europe. Survivors of those events we dub the Holocaust who came to America were mostly silent about their experiences, they were busy making new lives, and the world in all its complexity and insensitivity had simply moved on from World War II to the Cold War, and then to the Vietnam War and then to other nasty engagements in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans, and Darfur. Concern with what many today have come to understand as one of the central sets of events in the 20th century — a moral tremendum – was only just building. My own training as a social historian, focused on urban, immigrant, and minority social and political life, led me to teach and research at the outset mainly about American society and politics, but over time I was personally deeply affected by the new scholarship that began appearing about what happened in Europe and also about how nations and peoples had responded or not. As one historian has written, Europe was the dark continent, not Africa, and human behaviors and actions had eruptedthere in what was supposedly an advanced civilization that belied all the pride in place about Europe as a center of Enlightenment, progress, and democracy.

Gradually, but only in retrospect, and only slowly and belatedly, people began to recognize that Auschwitz stands as the absolute negation of the promise of our civilization, the polar opposite of Enlightenment; it is the thing that gives the lie to simple formulas linking the modern with progress. Moreover, all too many Europeans had been willing during the Holocaust to go along with radical anti-democracy and to live with or alongside mass murder. Gradually, as Europe returned to democracy only at the very end of the 20th century, accountings started to be made involving an undigested and unmastered past, and such confrontations and accountings continue to this day.

Also only years after I came to Michigan, there developed a remarkable social movement of memory among Holocaust survivors who after 1945 had spread all over the world. Having remained silent for a long time, protecting their new families and their children from their experiences, they now began to speak out publicly, write memoirs, and ultimately give their testimonies about human experience beyond extremity. Risking the return of old wounds that never disappeared, and embracing their own past stories from those dark times, these courageous men and women joined in an effort to make us all take notice and confront the undigested past. The scores of museums that have been established in Washington DC and in many North American cities as well as in European, Canadian, Israeli, and Australian cities, the films and stories that have entered our culture – Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and so many more — are the distinctive products of this belated social movement of memory. And now — we stand at a critical juncture, at the close of a period during which we have started attending to that past, and at a moment when the survivors are now passing, and it is clear that their voices will be silent again and their memories will now turn to history. Are we at the end of an era? Are we at a close in the absorption of this set of events into our understanding of the human condition and our world?

As a scholar and teacher, I am deeply involved in thinking about “so what now?” “Where are we in all this and what might be the next steps?” What are new directions we might embrace in teaching about and writing about the Holocaust and using it as a social laboratory to study human behavior? Are we at a crossroads that marks the end of the Holocaust, as scholar Alvin Rosenfeld has recently worriedly observed, writing that the more the Holocaust is absorbed into the broader culture, written about, put onto film, or represented in museums, the less we understand and know about it or comprehend it in its specificity and with the appropriate moral gravitas. Confronting the unmastered past means confronting difficult knowledge. Why then do so many of our stories and cultural representations turn upward at the end, marking happy closings? Can difficult knowledge be obtained from redemptive stories?

Despite the spread of knowledge, the growth of museums, and the explosion of cultural representations about the Holocaust, it might be said we have fallen into a morass when Holocaust memoirs continue regularly appearing that are fraudulent, misleading or fictively embellished, and the culture makers and arbiters and many others nonetheless find them authentic and praise-worthy and interesting. What breadth of knowledge has been shared and absorbed in our culture when something like “Angel at the Fence,” a fraudulent memoir about furtive meetings daily at a concentration camp fence between a young boy and a young girl, the blossoming of young love, and an apple a day keeps the Nazis away, could be published by a major publisher, Penguin, prepared for global production and distribution, with a massive multimillion dollar mega block buster movie soon to follow? Those furtive meetings, as we know, never happened. The youths were hundreds of miles apart and met only in the late 1950s. The story was concocted in the mid-1990s. People did not throw apples over concentration camp fences. They did not meet and become friends at such fences.

How shall we view comparative work that has begun taking place in the study of genocide, which has grown in recent decades against the backdrops of the more recent terrible events in Rwanda, Darfur, and other places? Does such comparative work throw added light onto understanding of the Holocaust or does it diminish the sense of distinctiveness and moral trespass that once struck us hard in our first encounters with the Nazi destruction?

And what shall become of the thousands of testimonies that the survivors have left during recent decades stored in numerous archives around the country – at Yale in New England, at the UM-Dearborn in Michigan, in the huge Spielberg Shoah Visual History Foundation archive at USC in California, over 50,000 testimonies – can they be used and will they be used to write history and other works and to deepen our understanding? Or are survivor testimonies too subjective, recalled too long after the events, too contaminated by intervening years and influences, and too imprecise for us to rely on to write and study history, social relations, psychology, and other aspects of behavior under conditions of extremity?

These are big questions, and one of the things I hope to do amidst the fellowship of community here is to convene an interdisciplinary faculty seminar on “New Directions in Study of the Holocaust.” With tremendous support from UM-Flint, this seminar will meet nine times in the evenings (Tuesday evenings) mid-January to March, 2012, each time preceded by dinner, and with the required books provided to faculty participants gratis and with long advance, in order to enter creatively together as a learning community into the rich conversations and debates that are now going on and to add our own insights and views to the mix about study of the Holocaust and its future. It is possible to sign up on line for this seminar – first come first serve, to obtain the books, and to peruse on a UM Flint blog that I have already created all the best reviews of the books we’ll be reading. We hope faculty in the humanities, including history and literature, and in the social sciences, in particular, will be especially interested to participate and will bring with them the rich insights of their own disciplines and own teaching.

The other thing I want to do while I am here is to create a state-of-the-art undergraduate research seminar (with graduate participation) — a community of inquiring scholars, old and young — to create new knowledge utilizing survivor memory, testimony, and interviews. I want UM-Flint to be at the cutting edge here offering a local demonstration project to a national audience about what is doable in terms of new directions in the study and teaching of the Holocaust. Survivor experience – human experience beyond extremity – as told in narrative form in memoirs, testimonies, and life interviews – permit us to go where the documents do not, offering rich insights about human behavior under the most difficult conditions and amidst the worst challenges. Survivor memory, while imprecise and sometimes flawed, as traumatic memory, we’re finding, is in some respects remarkably resilient and enduring. If used carefully and critically, survivor memory can be used to create good history. I also believe undergraduate students can do this – I believe not only teaching with testimonies but researching in testimonies will be a wave of the future – and I look forward to working with committed students who want to get a first- hand experience doing and writing original work.

As a beginning, I invite you to attend my opening lecture, the Kristallnacht lecture, planned jointly with the Flint Jewish Federation, to take place Thurs., Nov. 10, at 7:00 pm in the University Kiva in the Harding Mott University Center. I will speak on “The Rescue of Children and Youths at Buchenwald,” the book I’m currently writing, which involves the kinds of research I will be directing in the undergraduate research seminar.

Thank you for this terrific invitation and opportunity and this wonderful welcome.