The Holocaust
A Holocaust Victim on Facebook: Crude or Compelling?
Published November 19, 2009 @ 11:44AM PT
Holocaust education is important. Adolf Hitler famously quipped, "After all, who remembers the Armenians?" - education and remembrance are critical for moving the world closer to the still-hollow concept of "Never Again."
Devotees of the anti-genocide cause, both educators and advocates alike, constantly search for new ways to engage and expand their audience. But is a Facebook alter-ego of a child victim of the Holocaust going to far?
A 22-year-old Polish man created a Facebook page for Henio Zytomirski, a seven year old Jewish boy who perished in a Nazi concentration camp. The page is updated regularly with brief posts from the child's point of view, as if he is reliving the horrific experience:
"Winter has arrived. Every Jew must wear the Star of David with his last name. A lot has changed. German troops walk the streets. Mama says that I shouldn't be frightened, and always that everything is just fine. Always?"
I've written in the past about my unease with victim identification methods of education and advocacy. (The tactic has been widely discredited as a pedagogical tool.) While I recognize the need for creative approaches to grabbing and holding people's attention on such a depressing subject, putting words into the mouths of child ghosts seems rather tasteless.
Adolf Hitler, Soccer Coach?
Published November 18, 2009 @ 08:00AM PT
If I told you that one in 20 British schoolchildren think Adolf Hitler was a German soccer coach, would you be a.) appalled, or b.) skeptical?
The results of a survey of 2,000 children in the UK revealed that while most students aged 9-15 recognized Hitler's rightful role as one of history's most nefarious mass-murdering war-mongers, 13.5% of them thought he discovered gravity and 7% thought he was Germany's national soccer coach. It gets better: 15% said that Auschwitz was a WWII-era theme park, and 6% though the Holocaust was a celebration of the end of the war.
The survey, however, was multiple choice, which really begs the question: Are the pre-teens a.) really that dense, or b.) smart-asses?
GOP Failure of Leadership on Tea Partier Abuse of the Holocaust
Published November 12, 2009 @ 02:52PM PT
The use of Holocaust imagery and rhetoric by the GOP's so-called Tea Party Patriots has progressed from annoying to downright disgusting.
Last week, several House Republicans joined right-wing ideologue (er, Representative) Michelle Bachmann for a 5,000-person strong protest of Obama's health care reform in front of the US Capitol. Directly in front of the speakers, which included House Minority Leader John Boehner, was a 5-by-8 foot sign with a famous image of a pile of dead bodies from a Nazi concentration camp and the words, "National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945." No one condemned the horribly disrespectful use of the tragic image, and many even denied seeing it when confronted after, despite numerous eye witness and photographic accounts that place the rather large sign in plain sight of the podium.
The Anti-Defamation League, National Jewish Democratic Council, and others are calling on Republicans to put an end to the vile abuse of Holocaust imagery by their constituents. ADL sent a letter to Boehner and several others condemning the failure of Republican leadership on the "inappropriate and profoundly offensive" use of Nazi symbolism athealth care protests. Bachmann issued a belated statement essentially agreeing that the incident was distasteful, calling the incident "regrettable" but failing to apologize for neglecting deal with -- and thus implicitly supporting -- the issue when it arose at the rally she organized last week. And as Rep. Steve Israel commented, "It shouldn't have taken peer pressure, media inquiries or national outrage to get Rep. Bachmann to take a stand in defense of Holocaust victims."
Goldhagen Solves Genocide in Twelve Pages
Published October 13, 2009 @ 04:54AM PT
In the world of academic smack-downs, the backlash against the positions of Holocaust scholar Daniel Goldhagen is one for the books. Goldhagen became widely-discredited in many circles for the monocausal thesis of his book on German participation in Nazi crimes.
The King of Over-Simplification is back, with an article in The New Republic written with the same arrogance of tomes-past, as if bringing the shining beacon of enlightenment to the ignorant masses. Which might be nice, if Goldhagen had offered anything other than a regurgitation of basic genocide scholarship.
His premise that genocide is "poorly understood" blatantly disregards an entire economy of academic and policy-oriented research on the subject; modern genocides from Armenia to Darfur have been repeatedly scrutinized by a diverse field that grew out of Holocaust studies after World War II. What Goldhagen offers for our education -- genocide is not an unusual event but political tool of modern states, that it seeks to eliminate groups of people as a means to consolidate power, etc etc -- is nothing that wasn't covered in my Genocide 101 class in junior high school.
His solutions -- "prevention, intervention, and punishment" -- follow in the same suit, and, frankly, seem stolen straight from the Enough Project, though with a few trades in jargon to feign the appearance of originality. Not only are his recommendations for "creating conditions" that make genocidal policies unattractive to potential mass murder nothing new, they fail to dig deeper than the level of broad platitudes to the complicated challenges of implementing an international anti-genocide regime -- challenges which Goldhagen's fellow scholars and policy wonks have been debating for years, but with far greater nuance.
The failure of genocide prevention is not due to any lack of problem identification, but to a combination of weak political will and the fact that any sort international intervention does not occur in isolation. Military intervention in Darfur, for instance, could have ripple effects that would damage any number of sensitive political concerns in Africa and the Arab World, including Israel and Palestine. Lives are at stake there, too. The United States cannot simply lead the Western powers in an international force for good, as Goldhagen suggests, as if there would be no other consequences besides triumph over mass murder.
And, good luck getting the US to "guarantee" to bomb anyone who commits or threatens to commit genocide. It might be a nice thought, but it's not always a realistic one. Assuming that putting bounties on the heads of indicted war criminals and threatening military intervention against violent regimes will solve the world's nastiest problem undercuts Goldhagen's own presumption that he understands the nature of genocide better than anyone else. Nothing is that uncomplicated.
The Power of One Girl's Story
Published October 05, 2009 @ 04:54AM PT
The Diary of Anne Frank is, without a doubt, among the most widely-read and influential books in contemporary history. The book ushered in a new wave of Holocaust awareness, and serves as the first exposure to the Holocaust for many, especially young students. As Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal once commented, "People cannot identify with mountains of bodies, but they can with the plight of one 14-year-old child."
The Anne Frank House launched the Official Anne Frank Channel on YouTube last week, expanding its already-impressive online educational resources with new visual resources. The feature video on the channel shows the only-known film footage of Anne, shot in the summer of 1941, just under a year before the Frank family went into hiding. In the short clip, Anne is seen leaning out her window to watch a neighbor's wedding party -- a scene eerily happy and commonplace, given the dramatic turn of events that would come shortly thereafter.
As a testament to the power of her posthumously-published account of her life in hiding, at the time of this writing, the video has been viewed over 1.5 million times since being posted online.
Other videos on the channel include interviews with Anne's father Otto, the only member of the Frank family to survive the Holocaust, Miep Gies, who helped hide the family, and former South African President Nelson Mandela, who read the diary while in prison.
Warsaw's Last Nazi Resister Dies at 90
Published October 04, 2009 @ 03:44PM PT
The last surviving commander of one of the Holocaust's greatest struggles passed away on Friday. Marek Edelman was among the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, beginning in April 1943, during which a poorly-armed force of 220 Jewish men and women stalled the Nazi's plans to liquidate the ghetto for almost a month.
After the war, Edelman spoke of the excruciating moral quandaries faced by ghetto residents and other Holocaust victims, and he defended the Holocaust's many victims against post-war critics who questioned their submissiveness:
"These people went quietly and with dignity," he told [Polish author Hanna Krall in 1976]. "It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one's death. It is definitely more difficult than to go out shooting."
Edelman's thoughts on the uprising reveal a sense of intervention in divine plans -- of human action interrupting the course of God's will, even if only briefly:
"God is trying to blow out the candle, and I'm quickly trying to shield the flame, taking advantage of his brief inattention. To keep the flame flickering, even if only for a little while longer than he would wish."
For more information on Edelman and the Warsaw Ghetto, see the article he wrote to mark the 45th anniversary of the Uprising, a photo gallery from the Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust, and a list of other resources from the Jewish Virtual Library.
[Photo of Edelman at a Warsaw Ghetto memorial on April 19, 1009, submitted to WikiCommons by Mariusz Kubik.]
The First Anti-Genocide Postcard Campaigner?
Published September 26, 2009 @ 07:12PM PT
Can activist postcard campaigns be effective? The tactic is often used by advocacy organizations, often mocked by critics, and often sidelined by skeptics as pointless.
Postcards certainly aren't a magic bullet -- nothing is -- but at least one example shows that they can have an impact. Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who turned Nazi hunting into a profession, used postcards in several successful campaigns:
To convince Germany to rescind its statute of limitations of the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, he used postcards featuring a well-known photograph of a Nazi SS officer torturing Jewish prisoners (shown below). 
To convince Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to extradite Nazi fugitive Walter Rauff, he used postcards depicting the gas vans -- mobile gas chambers responsible for the death of an estimated 100,000 people -- that Rauff pioneered.
Wiesenthal's tactics were not without criticism, but they were effective. (And, as far as I know, Wiesenthal might have been the first to use postcard campaigns in a genocide-related campaign.)
[Photo of Simon Wiesenthal holding photos of Walter Rauff and a gas van used during the Holocaust.]
