The Holocaust: Remembering and Becoming Human - Essay Example

November 10, The Holocaust: Remembering and Becoming Humane For the Six Million and More Numerous documentaries and movies have been produced to remember the Holocaust for remembering helps ensure that it never happens again to any minority group and provides victims the opportunity to make sense of what happened, and to, hopefully, move on. The stories of the Holocaust are human stories that intersect issues of survival, apathy, escape, resistance, rescue, and the search for meaning. These human stories show that the Jews and other victims themselves had a hard time believing that they were being systematically destroyed, which impeded their reaction for resistance, and that, due to their atrocious conditions, many concentrated on survival, although thousands were fortunate enough to escape and to get rescued. Resistance, nevertheless, occurred in few concentration camps, while a more spiritual and psychological form of resistance happened for those who searched for meaning during and after the Holocaust. For the great length of the Holocaust, however, several scholars have exposed the apathy of other nations to the plight of the Jews. Despite the lack of immediate international support, these stories depict the incredible power of faith and humaneness for those who remained whole despite being survivors of the Holocaust, and for those who remember it, that they may become more humane because of it. Survival is paramount in these human stories as it has dwarfed other human needs and aspirations for many Holocaust victims. With 6 million or more dying from the Holocaust, it became pertinent to become perniciously aware of surviving during these times. Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman explores the meaning of survival in the Holocaust in “The Holocaust’s Life as a Ghost.” He argues that the ghost of the Holocaust comes from the primordial fear of the Jews of being attacked once more and the perpetual necessity for survival. He states that the “world appears suspect to the core; no worldly event is truly neutral” (Bauman 7). This fear comes from the basic need for survival, sometimes, even when the costs are high, even when it includes one’s humanity. Bauman gives Schindler’s List as an example of the need for survival. He says that the film shows that “the sole stake of that most inhuman among human tragedies was to remain alive- while the humanity of life, and particularly its dignity and ethical value, was at best of secondary importance and above all of no consequence and was never allowed to interfere with the principal goal” (Bauman 8). In other words, the film demonstrates this adage: “Who survives wins” (Bauman 8). Bauman rejects the simplistic view of survival as a form of winning, however. Survival in the Holocaust is not about the winning over others, but a mere desperate attempt to clutch on to the hope of being human again after these horrendous ordeals. Surviving is merely the most basic step toward the highest aspiration of human dignity. The face of survival, however, masks its dark misery. Memory of the Camps, directed by Sidney Bernstein and Baron Bernstein, a documentary on Nazi concentration camps, shows what it means to live in, die from, and survive the Holocaust. The Allied troops had video footages of the concentration camps. The narrator told what they saw, heard, felt, and smelled. They saw the living and what they endured. Next to those who survived were piles of bodies, burnt, shot, mauled, or left to die in hunger and thirst. They could smell them, these bodies who were once their family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. The survivors survived, but barely, for they witnessed what many could not even possibly imagine as the worst horrors of their lifetimes. Memory of the Camps shows close-ups of the dead, their mouths open, as if, even in their last breaths, they were trying to breathe and survive, while at the same time, calling for help and mercy. Their bodies were emaciated to their bones, making them look like caricature skeletons more than humans. The survivors also looked the same way, which the documentary described as “listless” and weak from having no food and water for nearly a week. In addition, the film narrates one of the ways of how the prisoners survived. This included the job of hauling thousands of dead bodies to the pit that was hardly filled with soil for more bodies were piled to it every day. It included the aspect of simply surviving one day at a time, despite hopelessness and mercilessness in their midst. Survival was a difficult ordeal that degraded their humanity. The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation collected interviews from Holocaust survivors. Natan Gipsman narrates what survival means to him. He remembers being forced into ghettos and wearing a Jewish star to quickly identify them from other races. He says that he was not yet brought to Auschwitz unlike others because he had a blue card. He got his blue card through his connections to the Jewish owner of electrical shops who helped him get it. Furthermore, he shows his number, 184828. He endured forced labor and marches. He noted that he also hid many times to escape death. His experience is only one of thousands of survivors who did what they can to survive. Many had to disregard their families and friends, or to choose only one or few of their loved ones to help. They felt guilty for their surviving because they saw how thousands others died. Bauman, however, does not want to reduce the survival of the few through the survival syndrome. He does not seek to blame survivors for being alive by putting a label on their guilt (Bauman 9). Still, some of these survivors go through the pain of remembering what happened and never fully understanding how people can be so cruel or cold to another human being merely because have a different race and religion. Aside from survival, these stories emphasize the apathy of the international community, including the United States. Rafael Medoff, in his book, FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith, reveals that President Franklin D. Roosevelt is far from being the astute redeemer of the Jews for he also did not provide immediate support to the Jews despite their urgent calls for help. Medoff notes that not many would believe that FDR failed to provide the needed support for it was hard to believe that “the man renowned as a humanitarian could be indifferent to the plight of their massacred coreligionists” (qtd. in Shapiro 303). His apathy was alarming for it opposed what the general public believed about him. Medoff ends his book asserting that FDR “led refugee advocates to believe that he would do everything possible to rescue Europe’s Jews. His record of inaction and indifference testifies to his failure to keep his word” (qtd. in Shapiro 303). It was not impossible, nevertheless, when he analyzes Roosevelt as a hidden anti-Semite. Medoff supports this view by stating that: Roosevelt restricted the immigration of Jews to the U.S., even during the Holocaust; he believed that Jews had negative inner characteristics; and he encouraged the dispersion of Jews across the U.S. to ensure that these negative characteristics are dispersed as well. Medoff asserts that Roosevelt has affected his subordinates who also showed apathy for the Jewish cause. He says that Roosevelt’s “disdain” motivated others to be so unsympathetic towards Jews that they did not allow them to immigrate to the U.S. despite humanitarian conditions. The president also did not criticize them for not allowing Jewish refugees to enter America and to become more empathetic for their unusual circumstances during the Holocaust. Medoff cites the statement of Emanuel Celler, a Jewish Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn, who described Roosevelt as “silent, indifferent, and insensitive to the plight of the Jews” and “didn’t raise a finger” to help them (qtd. in Shapiro 303). Because of this harsh statement, Edward Shapiro who reviews FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith, believes that, though Medoff is credible because is the founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., he did not present an objective analysis of Roosevelt’s role in the Holocaust. Instead, he states that Medoff gave a “judicial indictment rather than a dispassionate work of historical scholarship” (303). Shapiro notes that FDR is not a pro-Jewish president, but he made decisions that were strategic to his political career. Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman’s FDR and the Jews tried to explain what motivated Roosevelt to act in a detached manner to the Jews. They stressed that Roosevelt faced bureaucratic and political limitations and that he had political priorities to take care of first before being accommodating of the Jews. Roosevelt confronted Congress, which only indicated the public pulse, who did not want more lenient immigration quotas (qtd. in Shapiro 303). A number of politicians already opposed accepting more immigrants because they took away jobs from Americans (qtd. in Shapiro 303). They were also concerned that the Nazis would use Jewish relatives in Central Europe to force their Jewish family members in the U.S. to spy for the former (qtd. in Shapiro 303). They were genuinely alarmed of this conspiracy theory that infected public American offices in Europe too (qtd. in Shapiro 303). In other words, the U.S. government was apathetic to the Jews because its citizens were similarly indifferent and anxious (Shapiro 303). Perhaps they were not yet aware of the gravity of the situation and that they relied on other nearer countries to save the Jews. Maybe they also did not see their role in saving their fellow human beings as a powerful nation. Whatever their various individual and collective reasons were, they showed what happens when a great nation remains silent and unresponsive to genocide happening overseas. Emily Wang agrees with the analysis of Medoff. In “National Narratives of the Holocaust: The Nature of Remembrance in Boston and Berlin,” Wang describes and analyzes the meaning of the towers of the New England Holocaust Memorial. For her, these towers symbolize the meaning of confusion and fragility in an apathetic society. It was also clear to her that the U.S. did not show immediate mercy towards the Jews during this most critical time in their history. Laurence Jarviks 1982 film, Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?, begins with a letter. It asks: “[A]nd you, our brothers in all free countries, and you, our governments of all free lands, where are you? What are you doing to hinder the carnage that is now going on?” The letter was smuggled into America in 1944 and came from Rabbi Michael Weissmandt and Mrs. Gisi Fleischmann (Wang 21). Wang asserts that this letter is only one of the many signifiers that “unearths a dimension of [the U.S.] that muddies Americas self-identification as the arbiter of freedom and democracy” (21). As a great nation fails to aid the oppressed, America showed how it failed to be a true leader in the twentieth century. Haim Genizi’s book American Apathy: The Plight of Christian Refugees from Nazism (1984) confirms the existence of “American apathy.” Genizi notes that the U.S. was trying to be a neutral country during that time. Aiding more Jewish refugees would embroil it in the ongoing war (Shapiro 304). When Germany declared war on America, however, in December 1941, all sympathy for the Germans had disappeared. Instead of empathy for the Jews, nonetheless, what the U.S. wanted was military victory (Shapiro 304). The next three and a half years focused on strategies and plans that aimed to win the war, not for the sake of the Jews and other victims, but for the greater glory of the U.S. as a superpower nation (Shapiro 304). U.S. participation, subsequently, with more emphasis on winning than saving victims, accelerated more deaths. 28,000 people died each day during the Second World War, nine times more than Americans who died on September 11, 2011 due to terrorist attacks (Shapiro 304). Around one person died for every five seconds for six years during this war (Shapiro 304). It was a bloodbath that affected all, Jews, the British, the French, and the Russians included. Besides apathy, the Jews lived with their attempts for escape and the stories of rescue, as they seek to escape the oppressive conditions of the Holocaust. Stories abounded in the attempts of the Jews for escape and other people in saving Jews from forced labor and deaths. They were part of the few non-Jews who believed in or saw themselves how the Nazis persecuted and killed the Jews. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg is one of these saviors. “Raoul Wallenberg and the Rescue of Jews in Budapest” from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum narrates the heroism of Wallenberg and his allies. The US War Refugee Board (WRB) recruited Wallenberg as a diplomat. His main responsibility was to help and save Hungarian Jews. He came to Budapest on July 9, 1944. He did not even have extensive networks, diplomatic experience, and skills in secret operations, being new to the job, but he spearheaded one of the most far-reaching and victorious rescue acts during the Holocaust. His partnership with the WRB and the World Jewish Congress stopped the transportation of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau where millions were killed. Hungary had been an ally of Germany, but since Germany was losing, Hungary decided to establish an armistice with the western Allies. German forces stopped these peace initiatives by occupying Hungary on March 19, 1944, which induced the Hungarian head of state, Miklos Horthy, to employ a pro-German government through Dome Sztojay (“Raoul Wallenberg”). The Sztojay government was ready to support the war and to deport Hungarian Jews to German-occupied Poland. Right after the German occupation, Hungarian officials started amassing Hungarian Jews and giving them towards German custody (“Raoul Wallenberg”). By July of the same year, the Hungarians and the Germans had deported around 440,000 Jews from Hungary alone, and all of them were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Nazis killed nearly 320,000 upon arrival and used the rest for forced labor in Auschwitz and other concentration camps (“Raoul Wallenberg”). Almost 200,000 Jews stayed in Budapest, but Hungarian officials were ready to deport them too, in coordination with the demands of Germany (“Raoul Wallenberg”). Wallenberg used a mixture of legal and extra-legal means to help these Jews. The Swedish government authorized him to provide certificates of protection for Jews in Budapest. He also tapped the money from the WRB and Swedish to create hospitals, nurseries and a food kitchen, and to create more than thirty secret houses for the safekeeping of Hungarian Jews (“Raoul Wallenberg”). It became the "international ghetto" that allowed Jews who had these certificates to be protected from persecution because Switzerland was acknowledged as a neutral state (“Raoul Wallenberg”). On October 15, 1944, the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross movement grabbed power through the aid of Germans and continued deporting Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. During this time, Soviet troops had stopped rail transport routes to Auschwitz, and so Hungarian authorities had put tens of thousands of Budapest Jews to a forced march to the west to the Hungarian border with Austria. Throughout the autumn of 1944, Wallenberg, frequently with him intervening personally, tried to secure the release of those with certificates or forged papers (“Raoul Wallenberg”). He could not save them all, but he tried to save as many as he could from the marching rows (“Raoul Wallenberg”). Wallenberg was not alone. He had Swedish allies who were lawyers and diplomats from other neutral nations. Carl Lutz, the consul general in the Swiss legation, also provided certificates of immigration for around 50,000 Jews in Budapest. This put them under Swiss protection because they could be emigrants to Palestine (“Raoul Wallenberg”). Italian businessman Giorgio Perlasca also acted as a Spanish diplomat, although he was not really one. Through the help of Laszlo and Eugenia Szamosi, Perlasca gave Budapest certificates of protection for many Jews that allegedly came from states that neutral Spain represented (“Raoul Wallenberg”). Like Wallenberg, Perlasca also created safe houses, where one was specifically made for Jewish children (“Raoul Wallenberg”). It was unfortunate though that though Wallenberg had saved so many, he died in a Soviet prison in 1947 (“Raoul Wallenberg”). Not all escape stories were happy ending too. While the Swedish and Spaniards proactively helped the Jews, the U.S. and Cuba were not as helpful. Wang told the story of what happened to 908 refugees on the St. Louis, a German transatlantic liner. They were fleeing from Germany and were supposed to go to Cuba because they had landing certificates and travel visas from the Cuban director-general of immigration. President Federico Ladero Bru had canceled the certificates and visas a week earlier after the public got angry with the director-generals selling of the travel documents for personal gain (Wang 21). When St. Louis got to Cuba, the passengers with these documents were not allowed to go to Cuba. International requests were made but the President remained adamant. International coverage of their plight made sure that the world knew about them, but the U.S. did not allow these refugees to enter the U.S. (Wang 21). Jewish organizations finally negotiated for sanctuary for the passengers in Britain, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands (Wang 22). As Germany invaded Western Europe, the promised asylums did not take fruit. Around 254 passengers died during the Holocaust (Wang 22). What is worse is that apathy continued even after the Holocaust. The national press did not report about the Holocaust atrocities to avoid looking like they were pandering to the Jews. Wang notes: “On May 14,1943—the day after all remaining occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto were deported into concentration camps—the New York Timess coverage of the event was relegated to page seven” (22). Instead of compassion and generosity, the U.S. turned a blind eye to the plight of the Jews. Perhaps because the international community could not be depended upon, several Jews have resisted the Nazis. PBS.org describes these uprisings in “The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19 - May 16, 1943).” While the U.S. could not decide on how much help they could offer to the Jews, the Nazis had decided to kill all Jews in its Warsaw ghetto. The surviving Jews tried to fight the Nazis, but to no avail. It was the first uprising of its kind, although it miserably failed due to lack of outside support. The Nazis had made this ghetto almost three years before they burnt it to the ground. In mid-November of 1940, collecting all Jews in it, they sealed it with a 10-foot high wall (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). An inhabitant of the ghetto illustrated their oppressive conditions: “we are segregated and separated from the world and the fullness thereof, driven out of the society of the human race” (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). Jews were not allowed to go out and the Nazis soon implemented death penalty for all Jews who went out of the walls (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). The Jews were also prevented from getting news from the outside world. They were literally and metaphorically cut off from the rest of society. The Jews lived in squalid, inhumane conditions. More than 400,000 Jews lived inside its crowded houses, with several families bunked into one small apartment (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). The Nazis kept the Jews tightly in control through food also, which meant nearly starving them to death (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). After a few months, starvation, lack of access to medical supplies and other resources, and overcrowding had widespread negative effects. Thousands got sick and died (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). Sewage pipes also became frozen and human wastes were poured to the street, increasing the level of illnesses (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). In 1941, typhus epidemics, starvation, and other diseases killed more than 43,000 people or around 10% of the population (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). In 1941, German industries built workshops in the ghetto that relied on forced labor. Jews who were employed in them did not get deported to death camps (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). The Nazis relocated Jews in 1942, summer time, after issuing orders for “non-productive" elements to be transferred through a "resettlement" program (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). The order created a public panic. A group of Jewish leaders met to talk about resisting the deportation order, but they agreed not to (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). They thought that the deportation would involve 60,000 Jews only. The Nazis deported more than 300,000 Jews and were brought directly to the Treblinka death camp (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). By fall, all factions decide to oppose all deportations and they formed battle groups under the command of Mordecai Anielewicz, a 24-year old Jew (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). The armed resistance prepared for the battle through creating bunks and shelters. In January 1943, the Nazis weakened the forces of Jewish fighters by unexpectedly deporting 6500 Jews (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). A struggle happened that badly injured a German officer, which delayed the mass deportation (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler was so angry that he ordered for the ghetto to be liquidated (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). At 3 in the morning of April 19, the Nazis encircled the ghetto and the battle started. Around 2000 Germans fought with 700 to 750 Jewish resistance fighters. The former had “a tank, two armored cars, three light-anti-aircraft guns, one medium howitzer, heavy and light machine guns, flame throwers, rifles, pistols and grenades,” while the latter had a “few thousand grenades, as well as a few hundred rifles, revolvers and pistols. But they possessed only two or three light machine guns” (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). The Germans wanted to kill all 60,000 Jews in 3 days, while the Jews wanted to stay fighting as long as they can (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). On April 22, the Jews faced fires burning several areas of the ghetto and many leapt from burning buildings. In the course of a few days, the Germans captured and killed more fighters. Many of these Jews died from heat and smoke too (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). Some Jews tried to escape through the sewerage system, but the Germans blew up the manholes and poisoned them with toxic gases (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). On May 8, the Germans killed Anielewicz, and by May 15, the fighters were nearly all dead. The Nazis bombed the Tlomacki Synagogue (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). Several thousands of Jews died in the debris and more than 56,000 were captured. Around 30,000 were shot to death or sent to death camps, while the rest were deported to labor camps (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). Their resistance may not have been successful but they attained one important goal. Anielewicz expressed this success in his letter to a friend before his death: “My lifes dream has been realized…I have lived to see Jewish defense in the ghetto rally its greatness and glory” (“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”). These resistances were few, but they showed the fighting spirit of people who maintained their stand as human beings. The last issue is making meaning of the Holocaust, which is harder with Hollywood reducing the meaningfulness of the Holocaust as an event and as a traumatic experience with widespread implications. Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, directed by Daniel Anker, shows how Hollywood pandered to the lucrative German market. The impact is the Hollywood rendition of the Holocaust that did not fully and accurately depict the inhumanity it showed to the Jews and other minorities. In Chapter 3 “Remembering to Forget: Schindler’s List, Critical Pedagogy, and the Popular Holocaust” of the book Teaching the Rhetoric of Resistance: The Popular Holocaust and Social Change in a Post 9/11 World, Robert Samuels argues that popular culture is a “non-threatening” method that promotes inaccurate representations of the Holocaust. He asserts that Schindler’s List is more for the glory of Steven Spielberg as a director as it uses idealization, universalization, assimilation, and identification as a means of winning an Oscar award. He believes that the best way to use these popular resources is to divide them and to deconstruct their meanings. The emphasis is for the plight of the victims and their causes, and not the cinematic value alone of the film. To make meaning is to listen to these interviews of Holocaust survivors too. These primary resources allow audiences to be the judge of their conditions. They can hear these stories firsthand and understand the psychological and spiritual resilience needed to survive such destitute conditions. “Nuremberg Trials,” the History Channel documentary, underscores that one of the ways of finding meaning in such meaningless atrocities against the Jews and other minority groups is through finding humanity once more through compassion. The video notes that, as Germany surrendered May 9, 1945 and asked for “generosity” from the victors, “the despised peoples…rose to a shining hour of reason, justice, and civilization.” It seems that the Jews found meaning in remaining humane despite being treated inhumanely. Paper Clips, a 2004 documentary directed by Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab, is about the efforts of a middle school class in collecting 6 million paper clips that represented the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. This project is an amazing attempt of understanding how difficult it must for the Jews to lose so much loved ones and properties, indeed, even their integrity, because of the Holocaust. These stories cannot fully capture the immense faith it takes to survive and to have the will to continue living. The humaneness that remains must also be acknowledged for it proves that even when treated as animals, human beings are still human beings. The Holocaust is painful to remember, but it will be more painful to not remember it. To remember what happened is to ensure respect for those who died and survived and to protect the occurrence of future genocides. To remember is to help present-day audiences to also make sense of inhumanity, so that their faith in humanity can be restored and that they also preserve their humanity even more. The Holocaust is history with a mark on the future. It is about human stories that promote the strength and endurance of human faith and compassion that survive the worst appalling experiences. It is about remaining humane and human in the face of all challenges, until, as a people, humanity can move on from brutality and secure a future of humaneness. Read More