International Holocaust Remembrance Day

January 27 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the last few years, I've published a number of pieces about Holocaust commemoration and memory.

Looking back, a couple things stand out to me:

1. The importance of being able to identify the perspective of whatever text you’re using: Who is telling the story? Whose documents/archives are being used to construct a narrative?
2. The urgency of elevating victim-centered narratives: How did victims themselves understand what was happening? What were their strategies of resistance and resilience?  
3. The continued expansion of access to contemporaneous testimony via diverse texts. This includes wonderful new film and musical adaptations of archival materials. These new archive-based projects not only present new materials for Holocaust education, but they are also models for future generations to produce new understandings of historical events. ...

In January 2019, I wrote about the film adaptation of Samuel Kassow's history of the Warsaw Ghetto's Oyneg Shabes project, Who Will Write Our History. I argued that the film provides an important new perspective on Holocaust education: 

Survivors are worried that they will be forgotten and their individual stories blurred together. Leaders and educators are worried that with the passing of the survivor generation, a powerful weapon against forgetting and Holocaust denial will be lost.

 

But if ignorance of the Holocaust is rising in general, along with bolder attempts at normalizing Holocaust denial, we cannot lay the burden of education on the shoulders of survivors. General ignorance about the Holocaust is a problem of education and the thinness of historical consciousness in the United States. And the rise of neofascism is a problem that demands a political analysis and solution...

 

...the release of Who Will Write Our History has the potential to effect a sea change in the way we think about Holocaust education. Indeed, I would go so far as to call it the most important Holocaust movie in decades. Who Will Write Our History is the first Holocaust documentary that centers victim stories along with the written and visual materials they created to document their lives. It presents a multifaceted picture of spiritual and cultural resistance within the Ghetto. It sympathetically portrays the everyday dilemmas inherent in survival. Most importantly, it figures the events of World War II as a continuation of Jewish history, not an interruption.

In January 2021, I wrote about how partnerships between Holocaust archives and musicians are creating new ways into Holocaust memory.

The notes for Cry, My Heart, Cry! run to some 30 digital pages, a dazzling work of musical, linguistic, and historical contextualization. [Producer Zisl] Slepovitch brings his command of many languages and his training in ethnomusicology. At times, the story behind the song is just as gripping as its performance.

 

In his archive testimony, Henri G. recalls how his family moved to Paris in 1932 to escape the anti-Semitism in Poland. But when war broke out in France, Henri and his brother had to escape again. He put on a uniform with the insignia of Marshal Petain and went to the train station with his brother, where they had to fool the patrolling Germans. Henri instructed his brother to sing “Une Fleur au Chapeau”(A Flower on the Hat), a jaunty French scouting song. The song itself became an essential part of their survival. As Slepovitch writes in the notes, the arrangement “attempts to convey the feigned carelessness of the two teenagers running for their lives from occupied Paris.” As sung by Sasha Lurje, this version of “Une Fleur au Chapeau” does exactly that, bringing the listener to a moment of breathless daring and bravery with just a few snaps of the finger.

 

Each song on Cry, My Heart, Cry! contains a hundred threads leading in every direction, inviting contemplation, as well as further research on the part of the listeners. 

September 2019 was the 80th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland. I took the opportunity to write about a then-new documentary called Warsaw: A City Divided. "Featuring 10 minutes of newly found amateur footage shot inside the ghetto, A City Divided does something quite extraordinary: It takes us to a place that no longer exists." 

Holocaust commemoration in the 21st century is haunted by the disappearance of elderly survivors, as well as the physical deterioration of historic killing sites. Each gives us access to irrefutable evidence of crimes that the world would love nothing more than to forget. 

“[T]he destruction of humans is often symbolized by ruins,” writes Jerzy Elzanowski, a Polish historian of architecture and conservation. Warsaw’s lack of ghetto “ruins” confounds a satisfying encounter with the past, while the ghosts of the Muranow apartment block speak to the unquiet nature of memory.

This January, I explored the role the Holocaust plays in American Jewish identity formation

 

Who am I and what is my relationship to the past? For the modern Jew, there are perhaps few questions greater than this.

 

American Jews have never stopped struggling with their relationship to the past. Consider the 76% of American Jews (per the 2020 Pew survey) who view “Remembering the Holocaust” as essential to being Jewish. (This is in contrast with the mere 45% for whom “Caring about Israel” is essential, not to mention the 15% who claimed the same about “Observing Jewish Law.”) In fact, for almost every single demographic slice across the data categories listed, “Remembering the Holocaust” was deemed the most essential to being Jewish.

 

While there are certainly myriad factors working to put the Holocaust at the center of modern Jewish life, it makes sense to me that at a time of diminishing historical consciousness, the Holocaust would be so crucial to American Jewish identity. Understanding one’s own place in history is key to identity formation. For many, the Holocaust is the sole entry point to a thousand years of European Jewish existence. It provides their geographic orientation to Eastern Europe and maybe even their primary contact with Yiddish language and song. And while American Jews as a whole are not terribly interested in going to synagogue, the various days of Holocaust commemoration provide their own structure to the American Jewish calendar...