Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Remembering, Representing, Reframing presented by ENGL 7239: What is the Holocaust?

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the Holocaust as the “systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators.”

6 million Jews were killed. Millions more were displaced and homeless. 

The atrocities of the Holocaust are routinely intertwined with the global fighting of World War II. However, this relationship should not be interpreted as cause and effect. The systematic extermination of a race cannot be considered akin to the sacrifice of soldiers on a battlefield. 

Therefore, the resources presented have been intentionally curated to foreground the Holocaust as the primary event in its own right. This list is not, of course, exhaustive. The amount of time and space to encompass the whole of the Holocaust is not available here. Moreover, discussions that focus on gender, underrepresented histories, and the various roles in nontraditional ways inevitably add to and increase the conversation and, hopefully, the understanding. 

The foregrounding in necessary to understand the violence. Death and trauma are both unfortunate and decidedly necessary. Without a clear and unfiltered understanding of the violence inflicted on the Jewish people, it is impossible to understand the different perspectives of the historical voices we are attempting to reecho. It is my hope that, with the attention placed on the Jewish people, those voices that have remained quieted will find their place. 

Much of the information throughout this project originates from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. and The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The two installations take different approaches to curating and exploring the Holocaust, its historical beginnings and aftereffects, ancillary populations involved, etc. 

The Wiener Holocaust Library in London “is one of the world’s leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust, the Nazi era and genocide. The Library’s unique collection of over one million items includes published and unpublished works, press cuttings, photographs and eyewitness testimony.” It is a particularly useful site for educators and offers a variety of lessons in the Holocaust study.

As a part of the Wiener Library’s mission to combat antisemitism, they maintain an associated website, The Holocaust Explained. Separated into nine sections, visitors are encouraged to move through each concept beginning with “What was the Holocaust?” to “Survival and Legacy.” 

“The Holocaust Explained is a website which aims to answer common questions about how the Nazis were able to plan and carry out the mass murder of over six million Jews, and millions of non-Jews.

“The truth is that there are no easy answers to these questions, and there is no way to ‘explain’ the Holocaust in a single page of text.

“We encourage learners to move through the website section by section, starting with the concept of genocide itself.

“We hope that when people reach the last section, Survival and Legacy, they will have learned a great deal about what the Holocaust was and why it is essential that we all continue to learn about it.” (“What was the Holocaust”)

War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, 3^rd Edition (2016) by Doris L. Bergen offers a well-structured, well-researched overview of the Holocaust that centers on four claims:

“(1) The Holocaust was an event of global proportions with worldwide repercussions. Any effort to grasp it in its entirety must begin with recognition of that massive scope. (2) The Holocaust happened step by step. It occurred over time, as a process with no easily determined beginning or end. (3) Intertwined with World War II, the Holocaust needs to be understood in the context of that conflict. Without the war, the Holocaust would not – and could not – have happened. (4) Jews were the primary targets of Nazi German destruction, but their fates were linked with those of other victim groups: people with disabilities, Roma and Sinti, Polish elites, Soviet prisoners of war, and homosexual men.” (1)

Other sources consulted give insight into the different voices of the Holocaust, many of which have gone understudied, overlooked, or misrepresented.

Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (1998) by Marion A. Kaplan offers a look at the Jewish experience utilizing first-hand accounts that focus in on the daily lives of the Jewish people. She explains that “Even before the war, Jews had experienced social death in German society. The Nazis had expropriated them, forced them to do hard labor, and almost completely segregated them. The war itself provided the occasion for massive isolation, expulsion, and ultimate annihilation. The government continually expanded its persecution, from subjecting Jews to a profusion of bans, to marking them with the star of David, to deportation and death. Although various government organs passed 229 anti-Jewish decrees from the November Pogram until the outbreak of the war, another 525 decrees tormented Jews between the outbreak of the war and the ‘Final Solution’” (150).

Different Horrors / Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust is a 2013 collection of essays edited by Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro. Organized into two parts, the scholarship discusses first the history and then the practice of feminist theory and gender in the Holocaust. In the forward by Elizabeth Minnich, she urges the reader to “consider again, for instance, how differently war looks when we remember, and fully include women, real women, who serve and oppose and suffer from, and are used daily with, and without their agreement to serve me a warriors, as well as women and symbols, and those gendered prescriptions of masculinity that are so glaringly obvious in the talk of war” (x).

Of the mass shootings and the mass graves, Goldenberg writes, “…rape and other forms of brutality were a routine part of the process of the murder squads or Einsatzgruppen. The reports and photos show women stripped naked and abused in front of their husbands, fathers, and sons before they were shot into open pits or mass graves” (105).

To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Saloman in the Nazi Era is a biography written in 1994 by Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, bringing attention to an artist who was relatively unknown. In 1917, Charlotte Saloman was born a Jew in Berlin. She was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. She produced over 700 pieces of art during the Holocaust. “Because she made a memoir in the very midst of the Nazi Era, her private graphic record serves as an exhibit, so to speak, in court…it becomes easier to see how Jews withstood malice, how women endured exile” (xiii).

“What came out of her memory was a line of ordeals. She’d gone through childhood in a house of suicides. She’d done her schooling in a fascist state. She’d spent her fruitful years in exile. All this pressed so hard on her that these words came out in paint: ‘If I can’t find any joy in my life and in my work, I am going to kill myself’” (ix).