Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of articles in Issue 9.1
- The Holocaust Museum as an Educational Resource: A View from New
York City by Geoffrey Short
- This article deals with the role of the Holocaust museum as an
educational resource. It presents a case study of the Museum of Jewish Heritage
in New York City and considers its strengths and weaknesses in the light of
research into how the Holocaust is taught in British and North American high
schools. Among other things, that research shows that Jewish history tends to
be equated with persecution and that antisemitism and the role of the church in
sustaining it are often ignored. It further shows superficial treatment of a
range of topics including Jewish resistance, rescue and the fate of non-Jewish
minorities under the Nazis. The article pays particular attention to the way
the museum deals with these issues and with the question of Jewish renewal in
the post-Holocaust period.
‘Don’t Touch My Holocaust’: Responding
to Life is Beautiful by Melanie J Wright
- This article uses a study of Life is Beautiful (dir.
Benigni, 1998) to interrogate the intimate relation between the
Holocaust and film. It discusses the appropriateness of the cinematic
medium for handling the
Holocaust, and the use of humour to negotiate atrocity. It is
suggested that many criticisms of Benigni’s film are inappropriate. However, the article
closes by proposing an alternative, further-reaching basis for criticism.
Drawing on Rose’s suggestion that fascism and representation are
inseparable, the resonances between film and the Nazi project are explored,
raising profound questions not just for Benigni’s work but for all
cinematic treatments of the topic.
Post-communist Holocaust Commemoration in Poland and Germany
by William F S Miles
- Reunification has entailed a radical realignment of the museums
at former concentration camps sites in the former German Democratic Republic
towards the Western interpretation of the Shoah. In Poland, ideological
ambivalence and financial insecurity have stymied attempts at
restoring sites of Jewish culture and suffering. Post-communist Holocaust
commemoration in
Poland – itself victimized by Nazism – is still permeated with
ambivalence and tension. Paradoxically, in reunited Germany – land of the
erstwhile perpetrators – where it is intertwined with broader difficulties
associated with reunification, Holocaust education is more advanced.
Survivor Account: Nowy Sacz, September 1939
by Charles Stevens
- The testimony that follows is one chapter of a
wider unpublished autobiography by Charles Stevens. The author was born
Chaim Solomon Sieradzki
(his pet name was ‘Chamulek’) in Nowy Sacz, southern Poland, in 1922,
the ninth child in a Jewish family of ten. Nowy Sacz is a market town southeast
of Krakow with a population then of around 36,000, a third of them Jewish.
Charles’s father, Kalman Sieradzki, was a manufacturer of sweets, pastries
and cakes, and Charles describes the family as upper middle class, observant
but not Orthodox. The chapter reproduced covers just one month – September
1939 – in Charles’s wartime experience as he remembers it as a
young 17 year old. It is included here because of its unusual focus, compared
with
other survivor accounts; readers may find it of particular interest
for four reasons. Firstly, for the historical record, it provides a vivid
picture of the
very first days of the German occupation of a south Polish town,
a period that is often omitted or glossed over in testimonies that have as
their main focus
experiences later in the war. Secondly, it details crimes committed
by soldiers of the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, as well as
those of the SS. Thirdly, read critically, it is an unmistakably gendered
account written in a
distinctive, one might even say sensationalist, narrative style
which challenges our notions of the witness genre. Although situated as a
post-war
memoir – it is a text clearly written with hindsight – nevertheless,
it attempts to convey some of the exhilaration and anticipation that the newly
declared war brought for a young man with no expectations of the horror that
was to come. Finally, and shockingly, it describes a rape witnessed by the
author. The inclusion of this episode, keeping the account intact, is
recognised as problematic given the ‘unspeakability’ attached to the
issue of rape in wartime and, specifically, given the silence from the
women’s perspective on this issue that surrounds memory of the Second
World War. Yet those scholars exploring the role of gender and
the Holocaust may find this account significant. The text is reproduced here
with minimal
editing, though names have been changed. Charles's memoir describes
his wartime experience in detail; he spent time in Polish and Siberian labour
camps before
reaching Palestine at the end of the war. There he joined British
Army intelligence and changed his name. He arrived in Britain hoping to study
medicine but without sufficient funds he turned to tailoring,
pursuing a career
as an award-winning tailor on Saville Row, London. He and his
wife live in London and are parents and grandparents.
Student Section: Representing Rescue: The National
Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror, the British and the Rescue of Jews from
Nazism by Aimée Bunting
- From December 1942 to May 1943, the question of
an Allied effort to rescue the Jews of Europe would momentarily command
the attention of the
British Government and the general public. At the centre of attempts
to place the issue of rescue on the national agenda were a small group
of MPs and Jewish
representatives who formed themselves into ‘The National Committee for
Rescue from Nazi Terror’. The relationship between a British Government
committed to its policy that relief for all victims lay only with
an Allied victory and the endeavours of the Committee illustrates the extent
to
which the question of ‘rescue’ would lie at the centre of the complex
circumstances regarding Britain’s response to the Holocaust.
Book Reviews
- Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939–1945.
Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen edited by Ulrich Herbert
- The Deutsche Bank and its Gold Transactions During the
Second World War by Jonathon Steinberg
- Geschichtswissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit.
Der Streit um Daniel J. Goldhagen edited by Johannes Heil and Rainer Erb
- Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism and the Holocaust by
Vivian Petraka