Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History Abstracts

Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of articles in Issue 13.2/3

Konrad Kwiet, ‘I boxed my way through life’: The Incredible Story of Bully Salem Schott
- This article narrates the incredible story of Bully and Gerda Schott. Bully was one of few Jews to escape Auschwitz, which he did with the help of his future wife Gerda. After escape Bully and Gerda survived the rest of the war, independently of one another, in Berlin. After the war Bully co-operated with the Soviet forces in the tracking down of ex-Nazis. In 1950 he emigrated to Australia. It is individual narratives like these that demonstrate that, despite geographical distance, the Holocaust became part of the history of Australia too. Gerda and Bully became Australian citizens in 1959.
Suzanne Rutland, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Development of Moriah College, Sydney
- This paper analyses the legacy of the Holocaust in the development of Moriah College, today the largest Jewish school in Australia, and explains why this tragedy led to a determined effort to achieve Jewish renewal as well as academic success. The growth of the College was facilitated first by restitution and later by the generosity of survivors. As a result of survivors’ reluctance to talk about their experiences, there was no formal study of the Holocaust until the late 1970s when Holocaust education and memorialisation became part of the College’s programme. An analysis of this adds to our understanding of the ‘silence’, an issue of significant debate in recent scholarship.
David Ritter, Distant Reverberations: Australian Responses to the Trial of Adolf Eichmann
- The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 is widely regarded as one of the principal events in the rise to prominence of a distinct event known as ‘the Holocaust’ in Western European and American cultural consciousness. This article considers the impact of the Eichmann trial in Australia.
John Docker, An Early Holocaust Novel:Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot, a Critique
- Patrick White’s novel Riders in the Chariot (1961) can be regarded as a contribution to Holocaust literature, broadly defined. The novel features as one of its main characters Mordecai Himmelfarb, a Holocaust survivor, who makes his way from Germany, via Palestine, to Australia. In a comparison with Joyce’s Ulysses, with its anti-essentialising construction of the complex consciousness of Bloom, Riders in the Chariot is revealed to be essentialising in its notions of Jewishness. It assimilates Jewish identity to a romantic discourse of attachment to land, highly problematic in a continent where the Indigenous people have been largely dispossessed of that land. The essay also discusses the novel’s interest in Kabbalah. Overall, the essay convicts the novel of aesthetic crudity, which has troubling implications for how it perceives its characters, including Jewish characters.
Sharon Kangisser Cohen, ‘Remembering for us’: The Transgenerational Transmission of Holocaust Memory and Commemoration
- Commemoration has moved from the periphery to the centre of Australian Jewish consciousness, a trend that is also discernable amongst Jewish communities. Over the past six decades the voice of the Holocaust survivor has become increasingly audible, and has been instrumental in establishing a public memory of the Holocaust in Australia. Today, survivors are at the forefront of the commemorative activities and their individual stories, representing a myriad of different experiences, are central to Holocaust education. At present the issue that confronts the Sydney Jewish community is no different from the questions facing other communities. How is memory of the Holocaust to be kept alive and vibrant as survivors’ voices begin to recede and as the past passes from ‘living memory to history’? This article is based on group interviews conducted with Holocaust survivors living in Sydney, Australia and explores how these Holocaust survivors would like the Holocaust to be remembered in the future. From the discussion groups it was clear that most of these survivors are unsure if the next generation possesses the inclination and ability not only to remember the Holocaust, but to remember it well. There was a clear sentiment amongst all the groups that one of the only ways the memory of the Holocaust can survive is by being cast as a religious act, duty and obligation, to be codified in the Jewish religious calendar.
Amelia Klein, Memory-Work: Video Testimony, Holocaust Remembrance and the Third Generation
- This article investigates the responses of grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to Holocaust video testimonies archived at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre, Melbourne, Australia. Interviews with the grandchildren show that many have begun to question the existing communal obligations surrounding Holocaust remembrance. As significant sources for Holocaust remembrance, video testimonies have important roles to play in facilitating ‘memory-work’ for the third generation. Watching video testimony allows viewers to move beyond existing formulaic approaches towards Holocaust remembrance and form their own personal responses. The voices of the third generation emphasise that Holocaust memory in Australia will be shaped by each generation in ways that are meaningful for them.
Avril Alba, Displaying the Sacred: Australian Holocaust Memorials in Public Life
- Focusing on the Sydney Jewish Museum’s (SJM) Sanctum of Remembrance, this article explores the relationship between Holocaust memorials, the Jewish commemorative tradition and the sacralisation of Holocaust memory in the Australian context. I argue that the building, design and function of the Sanctum reflects a deeply felt need within the Australian Jewish survivor community to develop alternative commemorative forms as a response to perceived ‘inadequate’ theology. Subsequently, the sacred Holocaust memory housed in this space departs significantly from traditional Jewish responses to destruction. Further, the public nature of the Sanctum has the dual effect of transforming the Jewish commemorative tradition and conveying that tradition to a largely non-Jewish public, explicitly linking Jewish tragedy to broader public concerns. In this progression, a sacred Holocaust memory is created that is at once particular and universal, providing Australian Holocaust memorials with unprecedented opportunities for empathy and identification with other victims of genocide. Yet this powerful dialectic remains, at present, under-utilised. Whether the SJM and other Australian Holocaust museums choose to engage in these opportunities will ultimately depend on the ability of these institutions to grapple with the complexity of Australia’s colonial past and contemporary multicultural society. To contend with these issues requires the ability to understand and ‘display’ the nation as perpetrator and resistor of genocidal acts, a complex narrative difficult to assimilate into largely ‘static’ museum and memorial space. To not do so, however, risks rendering Holocaust memory in Australian museums a solely ‘internal’, Jewish concern.