Never Again?

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The Last Pediatrician in Syria

Hunger Camp at Jaslo
by Wislawa Szymborska
Write it. Write. In ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they were given no food,
they all died of hunger. "All. How many?
It's a big meadow. How much grass
for each one?" Write: I don't know.
History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
A thousand and one remains a thousand,
as though the one had never existed:
an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
an ABC never read, 
air that laughs, cries, grows,
emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
nobody's place in the line.

We stand in the meadow where it became flesh,
and the meadow is silent as a false witness.
Sunny. Green. Nearby, a forest
with wood for chewing and water under the bark-
every day a full ration of the view
until you go blind. Overhead, a bird-
the shadow of its life-giving wings
brushed their lips. Their jaws opened.
Teeth clacked against teeth.
At night, the sickle moon shone in the sky
and reaped wheat for their bread.
Hands came floating from blackened icons,
empty cups in their fingers.
On a spit of barbed wire,
a man was turning.
They sang with their mouths full of earth.
"A lovely song of how war strikes straight
at the heart." Write: how silent.
"Yes." 

Breaking News

Today

"All the people like us are we, and everyone else is they." ~Rudyard Kipling

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than in the name of rebellion." ~C.P. Snow

"The world is too dangerous to live in-- not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen." ~Albert Einstein

"Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building." ~Philip Gourevitch

"I graduated from a special school. Four years I spent there... all my days were nights. Everything that was near and dear to me they took. There is only one thing worse than Auschwitz itself, and that is if the world forgets there was such a place." ~Henry Appel, survivor

"Goodness, like evil, often begins in small steps. Heroes evolve; they aren't born." ~Ervin Staub

Preemptive Love

Week of December 12

We are close to the end now....

Monday, 12/12
Connections

Tuesday, 12/13
NO CLASS

Wednesday, 12/14
Other Genocides

Thursday, 12/15
Now What?

Friday, 12/16
Timeline Activity

Links to audio/video

Only comment on the Silent Discussion for the ones you watch. You don't have to watch every single link. Totally up to you.

Music
http://www.cpr.org/classical/story/voice-silenced-and-terezin-composers-lost-holocaust

Theater
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-03-12/seventy-years-later-holocaust-survivor-remembers-performance-her-lifetime

Personal Histories, USHMM
https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/personal-history/

First Person Testimonies, USHMM
https://www.ushmm.org/information/visit-the-museum/programs-activities/first-person-program/first-person-podcast

Testimonies by topic, Yad Vashem
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/remembrance/multimedia.asp

Victor Frankl TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/viktor_frankl_youth_in_search_of_meaning

Week of December 5

Monday, 12/5
Stuart Visit

Tuesday, 12/6
Long Class:
Stations

Wednesday, 12/7
Personal Responsibility
Notes check for honors
Long class

Thursday, 12/8
Sunflower
America's Response
Nuremberg
Aftermath

Friday, 12/9
Japanese-American Internment Camps
Farewell to Manzanar

Holocaust Poetry

"When It Happened"
by Hilda Schiff


I was playing, I suppose,
when it happened.
No sound reached me.
The skies did not darken,
or if they did, one flicked
away the impression:
a cloud no doubt, a shadow perhaps
from those interminable airplanes
crossing and recrossing
our unbleached beaches, Carbis Bay
or the Battery Rocks, where
all summer long we had dived
and cavorted in and out of
the tossing waters, while
the attention of the adults,
perpetually talking,
seemed focused,
unaccountably,
elsewhere.

No sound reached me
when it happened
over there on that
complicated frontier
near Geneva. (Was the sun
shining there too?)
I did not hear you cry out,
nor feel your heart thump wildly
in shock and terror. 'Go back,'
they shouted, those black-clad figures.
'Go back. You are not permitted to cross.'
Did the color drain from your face?
Did your legs weaken?
'You are under arrest,' they barked.
'Go back and wait.' Back to the
crowd waiting for the train, the train... East?
Did you know what it meant?
Did you believe the rumors?
Were you silent? Stunned? Angry?

Did you signal to them then,
When it happened?
To the welcoming committee
one might say, on the other
side of the border.
To your husband and his friends
just a few yards away,
there, beyond the barbed wire,
beyond the notices saying,
'Illegal refugees will be shot.'
They called across, they said,
'Run, jump, take the risk,'
the frontier is such a thin line,
the distances so short between you and us,
between life and death,
(they said afterwards).
How was it you lacked
the courage (they said
afterwards, drinking tea).

No sound whatsoever disturbed me
when it happened.
I slept well. School
was the same as usual.
As usual I went swimming,
or raced down the hill
on my scooter or on foot
laughing with friends.
Often at night
in the dark of my bed,
I would hear the trains being
shunted down at the station,
their anguished whistling
stirring my imagination
drawing me towards oblivion.
At last, no more embarrassing letters
arriving in a foreign language
witnessing my alienation
from the cricketing scene.

Distracted and displaced
when it happened
I did not hear you ask
which cattle truck to mount,
nor, parched in the darkened
wagon, notice you beg for
a sip of water. On the third day,
perceiving the sound of Polish voices,
I did not catch you whisper to your neighbor,
'It is the East. We have arrived.'
Nor, naked and packed tight
with a hundred others
did I hear you choking
on the contents of those well-known
canisters marked 'Zyklon B Gas'
(It took twelve minutes, they say.)
I was not listening
when it happened.

Now I hear nothing else.


"Holocaust 1944"
Anne Ranaisnghe

To my mother

I do not know
In what strange far off earth
They buried you;
Nor what harsh northern winds
Blow through the stubble,
The dry, hard stubble
Above your grave.

And did you think of me
That frost-blue December morning,
Snow-heavy and bitter,
As you walked naked and shivering
Under the leaden sky,
In that last moment
When you knew it was the end,
The end of nothing
And the beginning of nothing,
Did you think of me?

Oh I remember you, my dearest,
Your pale hands spread
In the ancient blessing
Your eyes bright and shining
Above the candles
Intoning the blessing
Blessed be the Lord...

And therein lies the agony,
The agony and the horror
That after all there was no martyrdom
But only futility-
The futility of dying
The end of nothing
And the beginning of nothing.
I weep red tears of blood.
Your blood.

Holocaust Literature Final Project Guidelines

You will be completing a final creative project (and presenting it) focused on the specific area of study you chose. This is a research-based project. We will be working on it in class today. The guidelines and expectations are outlined below.

1.  Works Cited page: You must provide the sources from which you have borrowed quotations, information, facts, and ideas. It is arranged alphabetically by the first word of the entry. You must reference at least five different sources for your project. You also need to use proper MLA format. Bibme is a great web resource if you are not sure what MLA format looks like. 

2.  Sources:  Of the five sources you use, at least one of them must be a first-hand account. You might have to dig for this one. You are welcome to use the Internet, books, and/or movies/documentaries. Pay close attention to how academic/reputable the site appears to be regarding Internet sources. Stick with reputable sites.

3.  Notes: I would like for you to turn in your notes with your project. This is merely to ensure that you have done actual research on your topic.

4.  Thesis statement: Each project needs to be accompanied by a thesis statement. It is the answer to your topic research question. For example, what were the roles of women in Nazi Germany? To give your project direction, you might word a thesis statement like this: In Nazi Germany, women were not only seen as vital in continuing the “racial” bloodlines, they were expected to maintain peace and comfort within the home.

5.  Creative Project: This can take on any format you wish. There are numerous examples throughout the classroom. It should take at least three-four hours to complete, not counting research time. It is to be a visual representation of your thesis statement... posters, models, sculptures, paintings, videos, photo montages, video montages, etc.

6.  Project Presentation: We will not have time for presentations this year. Instead, you will simply turn in your project, notes, thesis statement, and works cited page.

Topics:

Antisemitism

Perpetrators

Labor Camps (specifically by name)

Pogroms

Propaganda

Particular Events (Le Chambon, SS St. Louis, Kristallnacht, etc)

Particular People (Schindler, Bonhoeffer, Niomuller)

Emigration

Kindertransport

Einsatzgruppen

T-4 Euthanasia Program

Death Camps (by name)

Victim Groups (pick one)

Refugees

Rescue (specific)

Bystanders

Jewish Resistance

Non-Jewish Resistance

Displaced Persons Camps

Holocaust Memorials

There are other topics not listed here because they are already taken. You are welcome to pick something not on the list AS LONG AS IT ISN'T ALREADY TAKEN. Feel free to text me and ask about any topic you are interested in. There are lots of people in this room who have my number if you don't. 

When you have decided on a topic, come to the sub and have him/her write your name next to your chosen topic. That topic is now closed. Only one person is allowed each topic.

Text me with any questions.

Week of 11/28

Monday, 11/28
Rescue

Tuesday, 11/29
SUB
Classroom research

Wednesday, 11/30
Long Class
Stations

Thursday, 12/1
BOB

Friday, 12/2
Liberation

Thursday Plan

My original resistance plan includes excerpts from a documentary called "Partisans of Vilna", a keynote with some of this information and more, and clips from "Defiance". I am still going to do the "Defiance" clips and a few other things on Friday, but we are cutting the "Partisans of Vilna" portions and you all are going to be writing instead of discussing on a lot of this. Sorry, I didn't expect to be out today, and this was the best way I can do in order not to lose any time and still cover what I need to cover. The link is below and my instructions for the link are below that.

http://www.hhrecny.org/clientuploads/curriculum/HHREC_Holocaust_Curriculum_Lesson6.pdf

Don't look at or read anything else. Some of it is going to be covered later...
When you read the documents, I want you to open a word processing document and answer ALL questions on it. Specify them by which document they cover. You are going to email this to me at the end of class today.

Scroll to Document 8 (page 241). Answer the questions on that page.
Read Document 9A and answer the questions at the end of it.
Read Document 9B and answer its question.
Look at Document 10A and 10B.
Read Document 11 and answer its questions.
Read Document 12 and answer its questions.
Skip Document 13 (we already talked about it).
Skip Document 14.
Read Document 15 and answer its questions.
Skip Document 16.
Read Document 17 and answer its questions.

STOP. READING. Don't read anything else.

If there is time left, work on something else or sit quietly. If you don't finish, email me what you have. Email it TODAY.

Opinion Piece

Why I Cannot Forgive Germany

Opinion

By Anita Epstein

 “I cannot and I do not want to forgive the killers of children; I ask God not to forgive.”— Elie Wiesel

It was more than 15 years ago, but I still remember the day clearly. My husband and I hosted a dinner at our home for emerging young German leaders. They were participating in an exchange program with the American Jewish Committee that included a week in Washington, D.C. I viewed the evening as a test of how I would deal with Germans — indeed, of whether I could deal with them at all.

The Germans, after all, had murdered almost all of my family in the Holocaust, to say nothing of their wanton slaughter of millions of other Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others. I escaped that gruesome fate myself only because shortly after my birth in the Krakow ghetto, in November 1942, my parents gave me away to be hidden by a Polish Catholic family. More than a million Jewish children, however, were not so fortunate: They were strangled or starved, shot or gassed, bashed against walls or tossed out windows, burned in ovens or buried in mass graves.

I tried to behave myself that evening. I really did. But I could not help myself: I asked a wispy young German woman with whom I was speaking whether she thought she was capable of throwing a baby off a balcony. She was stunned. “What do you mean?” I told her that Germans routinely had thrown Jewish children off balconies during the Holocaust. Did she think she could do something like that? She protested. She said that she was not even alive during the Holocaust. How could I think such a thing? Wouldn’t I ever be able to forgive the Germans? She began to cry.

I told her that it was not hard for me to think such a thing. I think about such things often. I think about how easily I could have been one of the murdered babies. I think of how the Germans killed all pregnant Jewish women they discovered in the ghetto along with so many others. I think of how my mother avoided their clutches to bring me into this world and, after she suffered terribly in four Nazi camps and returned from the brink of death, found me again after the war. And I think of the father, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and others I will never know, of the postwar anti-Semitism in Germany and Poland, and of the resentment heaped on me by some Holocaust survivors whose own sons and daughters had perished. (When I was older I realized that I was a constant reminder to them of their inability to save their children. I evidently was being punished for living.)

Despite all of this and more, I have managed to have a full life, if a deeply scarred one. After several years spent chiefly in a displaced persons camp in Germany, I came to America on a crammed troop ship, the U.S.S. Taylor, and in New York survived a different kind of ghetto — Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant. I married and raised two wonderful daughters who have given me five marvelous grandchildren. I have done fulfilling work in publishing, in teaching and, for 30 years, as a Washington lobbyist.

None of this, however, has been thanks to the Germans, who are responsible only for the darkest corners of my life, including, among other things, my regular nightmares, my survivor guilt (why was I spared?), and my persistent fear of intruders and attackers. No, I cannot forgive the Germans. That’s God’s job.

Of course, many people would disapprove of this view, and they can draw on an extensive literature about the importance of forgiving, including texts from the world’s religions, pronunciations of literary lions and volumes from modern psychology and psychiatry. For me, though, most of their arguments miss the point. Consider perhaps the most well-worn dictum in favor of letting bygones be bygones: Alexander Pope’s “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” In my case I find it easily dismissible. This is not only because it would be disgraceful to apply a remark about literary criticism — the line is from Pope’s 1711 “An Essay on Criticism,” which is actually a poem — to Germany’s systematic extermination of more than 6 million innocent people. Even more, it would be outrageous to characterize so immense an abomination as “erring.”

I am also unpersuaded by those who favor forgiveness because the act often makes the person doing the forgiving feel better. That’s a favorite of psychiatrists and psychologists, who are of course dedicated to making their patients feel better about themselves. Thus one can find works about how bestowing forgiveness can lift a weight from your shoulders, set you free, bring you peace and improve your physical health in the process. The problem is that I have long felt tolerably well about myself. Indeed, for me, the idea of forgiving those who perpetrated the Holocaust would have the opposite effect: It would make it hard for me to live with myself, to get out of bed and look in the mirror. I could not dishonor the memory of my family members and the millions of other Holocaust victims by giving a free pass to their murderers. That would only signal to other bestial beings that they, too, would be forgiven if they were to commit genocide.

Granted, a good number of people have followed the healing-through-forgiveness advice and benefited. They range from passed-over employees with deep grievances and divorcées seeking revenge to victims of childhood sex abuse and mothers in Northern Ireland who have had to bury their sons. In the Jewish community, one of the most striking examples is Eva Kor, a victim of Dr. Josef Mengele’s vile genetic “experiments” at Auschwitz on Jewish and Gypsy twins, dwarfs and others. The subject of a documentary film called “Forgiving Dr. Mengele,” Kor stood at Auschwitz in the winter of 1995, 50 years after its liberation, and declared that she was granting “amnesty to all Nazis who participated directly or indirectly in the murder of my family and millions of others,” including Mengele.

So dramatic a declaration took the Jewish community aback and infuriated other twins who had been Mengele victims. After all, the “Angel of Death,” as the racial researcher was known, had brutalized and killed thousands. He selected twins for “experiments” on heredity, relationships between racial types and disease, on eye coloration and other questions raised by his mentor, Otmar von Verschuer, a pathologist who was a leading proponent of Nazi racial policies. Mengele put children through excruciating pain, ordering surgeries, spinal taps and other procedures without anesthesia. He had some twins infected with deadly diseases, others castrated, still others injected in their eyes with chemicals and at least one set sewn together. Many twins were killed with injections of phenol or chloroform into their hearts, after which their bodies were dissected and their eyes and other organs sent to Verschuer in Berlin. That is the man Kor wanted to forgive.

Whether she knew it or not, however, Kor had her own Jewish problem: Judaism does not give her the ability to forgive Mengele or others. Judaic paths to forgiveness are, of course, unlike those of other religions. In Judaism, a person cannot obtain forgiveness from God for wrongs done to other people, only for sins committed against God. For sins against others, Jewish law and tradition require offenders to express remorse, genuinely repent, provide recompense to victims if appropriate — and directly ask the victim, three times, for forgiveness. Obviously, Josef Mengele did not repent, and he did not beg Kor or other victims for forgiveness. Kor was thus mistaken when she thought, and said, that she had the power to forgive Mengele. She did not, at least so far as Judaism is concerned, and she certainly could not speak for her family or other victims or forgive all other Nazis, only those who specifically sinned against her.

Like anybody else, Kor naturally could come to terms personally with the atrocities committed by Mengele and other Nazis. While that would not absolve Mengele or anybody else, it could — and evidently did — help Kor. “I felt a burden of pain was lifted from me,” she has said. “I was no longer in the grip of pain and hate; I was finally free. The day I forgave the Nazis, privately I forgave my parents whom I hated all my life for not having saved me from Auschwitz. Children expect their parents to protect them, mine couldn’t. And then I forgave myself for hating my parents. Forgiveness is really nothing more than an act of self-healing and self-empowerment.”

I’m afraid not. Forgiveness is, by definition, much more than a self-centered act. What Kor is describing is closer to catharsis, a purging of pain, a very different process — and one that not all Holocaust survivors wish to experience. Elie Wiesel, for example, has remarked, “I want to keep that pain; that zone of pain must stay inside me.” While I did not suffer from the ineffable horror of the concentration camps as Wiesel, my mother, my murdered family members and so many others did, I know what he means. I, too, want to hold onto my pain. It helps ensure that the past is always present in me. It is an important part of what keeps me close to those I lost and to the world that died with them.

It also helps me deal with questions that keep rattling around in my head. For example, while the overwhelming majority of today’s Germans obviously were born after the Holocaust, do they nonetheless share guilt for the actions (or inactions) of their parents and grandparents? I have family members and friends who think not, who firmly believe that one can never hold children guilty for the sins of their parents. I have even been called some unpleasant names for holding an opposing view. I have noticed, however, that such opinions usually come from people who did not suffer from the Holocaust, who are a generation or two removed, and whose beliefs are rooted in theory, not experience. I think that such people, good-hearted though they may be, may find that the answer is not as simple as they think.

They are often among the first, after all, to insist on collective guilt for atrocious episodes in our own nation’s past — the horrors of slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, the World War II internment of Japanese Americans and other acts committed in our name. Such American guilt has been passed from generation to generation (though our forbears were in many cases not even on these shores when the events occurred), and it has triggered such public responses as affirmative action; Japanese-American reparations payments; compensatory education, jobs and housing policies; and repatriation of tribal graves and cultural property.

Like a number of other nations, today’s Germany also struggles with collective guilt for the sins of parents and grandparents. Germany’s burden is especially heavy, because it stems from what former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder termed “the greatest crime in the history of mankind,” the ultimate sin. Nations cannot easily shed that kind of guilt, and certainly not in a generation or two.

That’s why Germany tries so hard, to this day, to make amends with the Jewish community, a seemingly impossible job. It not only has made restitution payments to a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors for more than 60 years. It also stands behind Israel in the Middle East. It is Israel’s second-largest trading partner. It has encouraged the renewal of a sizable Jewish community in Germany. It has built Holocaust memorials, created Holocaust school curricula, maintained former concentration camps as museums.

This is as it should be. If the pain of the past is always present in me, as it is in many other survivors and their children, it does not trouble me that contemporary Germans live with the hurt from that past as well. After all, just as children inherit wealth and otherwise benefit from what their parents achieve, so do they sometimes inherit their parents’ debts, including this one.

As for forgiveness, the truth is that I could not forgive today’s Germans even if I wanted to. While I never explained this to the young German woman at my home that day, under Judaic law both the perpetrators and the survivors must be alive to have even the possibility of forgiveness. It is because of this, in fact, that some Jewish and Christian scholars have been groping with the question of whether, when all of Hitler’s henchmen and their victims are gone, the Jewish community will have any ability to grant forgiveness for the Holocaust. The answer seems to be that it will not. For me, though, this is not a terribly difficult question to begin with: I believe that the Holocaust is among what Moses Maimonides, in his Mishneh Torah, the 12th-century compilation of Jewish religious law, suggested were sins so hideous as to be beyond the realm of human forgiveness.

Nevertheless, many in the American Jewish community at least want to pursue reconciliation, if not forgiveness, with others. They are understandably eager to respond to Germany’s gestures toward the Jewish community and Israel, as well as to public statements of remorse by Protestant and Catholic leaders for the mistreatment of Jews. I certainly endorse reconciliation with Christian communities in general. I also understand the importance of Jewish and Israeli links to Germany today, just as I understand how U.S. national interests dictated that our main World War II enemies, Germany and Japan, become our postwar allies or that today we have shifting alliances with former foes like Russia and China. Such is the world of realpolitik.

On a personal level, however, I feel quite differently. I have never sought any restitution payments from Germany, and while I am mindful of how many Jews in Germany today are from the former Soviet Union, I still find it hard to comprehend why any Jew would want to live in that country. As for myself, I will never again set foot on German soil. I flinch just hearing someone talking German, the language I spoke myself when I first arrived in the United States at age 7.

In short, then, there are obvious strategic and practical reasons for reconciling and dealing with Germany. None, however, would move me to forgive all Germans today even if I had the ability to do so. In the end Germans will have to ask the Almighty for such absolution (though I sure would like to be there to have my say during those conversations).

Anita Epstein, who is among the world’s youngest Holocaust survivors, is preparing her memoirs with the help of her journalist husband.

Week of 10/24

I am really looking forward to the conference this week!

Monday, 10/24
To the Little Polish Boy
Salvaged Pages chapters

Tuesday, 10/25
Evaluation

Wednesday, 10/26
Conference

Thursday, 10/27
Round Table Discussion

Friday, 10/28
Deportations

Week of October 17

As I mentioned before fall break, we are getting into the really difficult material. Be prepared for emotional responses.

Monday, 10/17
Poetry
Ghetto notes
Lodz Ghetto

Tuesday, 10/18
Rumkowski
Journal Assignment

Wednesday, 10/19
Ghettoes
"To the Little Polish Boy"

Thursday, 10/20
Evaluation

Friday, 10/21
Wannsee Conference

Judaism Seminar Makeup Essay

You have the set of notes I gave you. I also want you to peruse this website. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaism.html Select two aspects of Judaism that you find most interesting and write a 2-3 page paper explaining those two aspects. Conclude by highlighting the things that surprised you the most, or the things you feel have the most misconceptions in regard to the perception of Judaism by outsiders.

Maus Seminar Makeup Essay Questions

1.              Maus portrays the Holocaust or a genocide. A genocide is a deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. Do you know of any recent genocides? How are these genocides similar to the Holocaust? How are they different?

2.              In Maus, Art interviews Vladek about the Holocaust. How reliable do you think Vladek’s memory is? Why?

3.              What happens to people who live under a terror regime for a long period of time? Should people adapt to a terror regime? Explain.