New Book will Ignite a Debate About Roosevelt

See today's article in the New York Times for some recent research which is likely to ignite a debate about FDR's response in the 1930s to the persecution of the Jews. I believe it could be "consensus changing" about his response to the persection.

Fanny Winkler z"l, Cremated in Terezin March 17 1944 [22 Adar]

22 Adar 5769

I am currently in residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. A friend of mine, Monica Katz, gave me the names of her grandparents and great grandparents to see if there were any records on them. Since they were from Austria the documentation is pretty complete. [It's much harder -- though not impossible -- to find information on family members from Poland or Russia.]

Yesterday I went into the Survivors Registry division of the Museum to find out if they had found anything. Megan, the researcher working on this project, showed me what she had, which includes deportation lists, emigration files, and a cremation card from Terezin for Monica's great grandmother, Fanny Winkler.

She printed out a copy of the card for me and, as I was walking back to my office, I noticed that the cremation date was March 17, 1944. Yesterday.

I looked up the equivalent date on the Hebrew calendar and it was the 22 of Adar, which began last night and continues through today until night. And, it turns out, her great great granddaughter Caroline's birthday is Adar 22.

So last night and today Fanny Winkler's great grandchildren in Atlanta and Montreal and great great grandchildren in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Montreal and many other places were able to mark her death. This morning her great great granddaughter, Meira, was in synagogue saying kaddish for her.

All for the first time in 65 years.

May her memory be for a blessing.

Revelations About the Toll Raoul Wallenberg's Disappearance Took on His Family and Sweden's Failure to Pursue It's Most Honored Citizen

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy article exposing the terrible toll the attempt to find out what happened to Raoul Wallenberg took on his family. It is a horrifying tale and reminiscent of the brutality of the Soviet regime [and post-Soviet as well... after all Putin could clear up the mystery in a nano-second].

In addition to the Soviets, who were the main culprits, Sweden failed to do much to pursue Wallenberg's fate. This constitutes an enduring blot on Sweden's reputation.

Wallenberg demonstrated how different the story of the Holocaust would have been had there been more people such as him.

News Flash: France Accepts Responsibility for Its Participation in Holocaust Deportations

I should have posted this earlier. However, since it took France's highest court 67 years to come to the conclusion that it bears responsibility for having organized and carried out the deportations during the war, I guess a few days delay is not a horrendous thing.

If you look at pictures of the famous Paris round up in 1942 you will search in vain for German soldiers or SS men. You will see only French police. [At the trains where Jews are being loaded in the cattle cars you do see Germans but the round ups were conducted by French.]

At the same as acknowledging that the deportations were in French hands the court also ruled that the deportations had been "compensated for" since 1945, apparently ruling out reparations for deportees or their families.

The Reader: A Pernicious Book and Movie

Let's get this out of the way at the outset: Kate Winslet gives a great performance in The Reader and the book is a decent but airy read [if you ignore the premise].

Now let's get on to substance. The basic premise of the book and the movie are deeply troubling. Note that the Nazi camp guard is portrayed as the poor, simple, caring woman.

Are we supposed to feel sorry for her because she could not read and had "no choice" but to be a guard? She could have been a street sweeper. She did not have "no choice."

Furthermore, the book and movie suggests that the perpetrators were poor ignorant people. This is such a misstatement of fact and the author, Bernard Schlink, as a German knows better.

Many of the leading perpetrators had Ph.D.s or were clergy and lawyers. They were well educated and quite literate. [In fact, certain section of the party specifically sought out well educated people.]

Finally, note the sharp contrast drawn by the survivor -- very rich [note the maid, the stretch limo, and the art work] and adament in her refusal to offer forgiveness or absolution -- and the poor guard who has nothing. Who is the victim, according to Schlink, here???*

This is a rewriting of history. It is, simply put, soft core denial. It does not deny the reality or the horror of the Holocaust. Not at all. But it does deny who was responsible.

Because it is so slippery I consider it a pernicious book and movie.

[Thanks to Dr. Leah Wolfson, my -- I am proud to say -- former student and now at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for thinking this through with me. She pointed out that the book/movie seem to want to suggest that literature is redemptive which we know is not necessarily the case.]

* Case in point: a friend who saw the movie said he did felt really sorry Hannah and was sort of rooting for her.... [granted that this friend is at all well versed in the history of the Holocaust].

Saul Friedlander: A Weaver of History and Memory

Last night Professor Saul Friedlander spoke at Emory. I had the privilege of introducing him. Some of the people present asked me to post my remarks. Here they are:

When I first encountered Saul Friedlander in 1978 he broke my heart. Over the course of the next many years, as I came to know him as a colleague and a friend, I quickly recognized that there was so much he had to teach us about the history and historiography of the Holocaust. Then in 2007, he did it again. He broke my heart.

In 1978 it was my reading of his small, but critically acclaimed When Memory Comes, which left me so shattered. In the still small voice of a young boy, Friedlander tells his own story. This simple-yet- complex, mature-yet-childlike story is rightfully considered one of the great memoirs of the period.

In addition he has added to our storehouse of knowledge with, among others, Probing the Limits of Representation, Reflections of Nazism, History and Psychoanalysis, Kurt Gerstein, and Pius XII and the Third Reich. He spent 16 years writing his most recent two volumes, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1941 and The Years of Extermination, 1941-1944. They provide a sweeping – yet in-depth – analysis of the entire period. The latter won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. As someone who teaches courses on the history of the Holocaust, I was delighted to learn that Orna Kenan has just completed an abridged version – 450 pages – of these two books.

Born in Prague, Friedlander and his family came to France in 1940. When the Nazi vise grew tighter, his parents placed him a Catholic boarding school and attempted to escape to Switzerland. They were turned back, arrested, and ultimately murdered at Auschwitz. Friedlander, not fully aware of his own identity, seriously considered converting to Catholicism. When he discovered his own past, he became a Zionist and eventually immigrated to Israel on the Irgun ship "Altalena".

His contribution to our field is so vast and multi-faceted that it is hard to summarize it. Yet in the interests of brevity, because you have come to hear from Saul Friedlander and not about Saul Friedlander, let me focus on two aspects of his work.

In The Years of Extermination, -- with its all-encompassing analysis of the broad swatch of events that comprised the Shoah, he synthesizes the research of a myriad of scholars. In so doing, Professor Friedlander demonstrates that synthesis in the hands of a master historian is an art. After weaving together their research, he then, in his own voice, not only adds to it, but enhances and deepens what they have taught us. It is this book which so devastated me.

He can do in a single paragraph or even a sentence, what others cannot do in entire books. Let me illustrate with one selection from the book:

Not one social group, not one religious community; not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews (some of the Christian churches declared that converted Jews were part of the flock up to a point), to the contrary many social constituencies, many power groups were directly involved in the expropriation of Jews and anxious, be it out of greed, for their wholesale disappearance. Thus Nazi and anti-Jewish policies could unfold to their most extreme levels without the interference of any major countervailing influences..

The other aspect of his work and the topic upon which he will focus tonight is his insistence that to tell the history of the Holocaust one must include the voice of the victim. There are historians who have, not only ignored that voice, but argued that it is unreliable and must, therefore, be eschewed. Saul Friedlander says, au contraire: the documents and printed record may be crucial, but without the personal perspective the story is incomplete.

We are exceptionally grateful that with all the demands on his time he has agreed to include us on his schedule. We are grateful for that but we – both those of us in this field and all of us who treasure great scholarship – are even more grateful that when memory came, it came to a man who tells the story of this event with the rigor and unparalleled excellence of a master historian and the sensitivity of a person whose life has been marked by it.

Many historians have grappled with telling this story but about Saul Friedlander we can say, paraphrasing the Book of Proverbs, ata alita al kulam, you have surpassed them all.

Samuel Kassow's Who Will Write Our History

I have blogged about Samuel Kassow's Who Will Write Our History?, his book on Emanuel Ringelblum's work to preserve the history of the Warsaw Ghetto. It is a powerful book.

Kassow was on the Leonard Lopate show yesterday. The interview can be heard here.

There was also a laudatory review of the book in the New Republic.

The Mormons are at it Again: Posthumous conversions of Holocaust victims

Years ago I went with Ernie Michel, an Auschwitz survivor, to meet with Sen. Orrin Hatch. Hatch had stepped in to tell Michel that the Mormon church would not continue converting Holocaust victims who had died in camps.

[The reason I was there was because Hatch had said that he wanted to pass a Congressional resolution affirming that the Holocaust happened as a response to deniers. I had told Michel, when I learned of this, that I did not think it was a good idea. "We don't have resolutions affirming that World War II happened."

Michel agreed and asked me to come with him to Hatch to explain why there should not be such a resolution. He was convinced and then decided to enter a new resoluiton commemorating the Holocaust. A signed copy of that resolution hangs in my office today.]

At the meeting, Hatch again told Michel that there would not be more conversions.

Well now, twelver years later, it seems that they are going on anyway. [Read Jerusalem Post article on this here.] Michel has given up the fight. He has been waging it far long than is necessary.

One could say: "Who cares what the Mormons do? What difference does it make?" In normal circumstances that might make sense but if it were my relatives who were killed because they were Jews I would be livid to learn that someone had ex post facto converted them to antoher religion.

When is someone in the Mormon chruch going to figure out how religiously insensitive this is. It is a blackeye for the church. Have they no shame? Haven't these people suffered enough already?

Dutch Megaship Named after Nazi: Someone was asleep at the Helm

How did the Dutch government let this happen? Haaretz reports that a mega ship will be named after the prominent Nazi industrialist and Waffen-SS officer Pieter Schelte.

It's offensive to the Dutch, much less to lots of other people, particularly to those who were persecuted and murdered by the Third Reich.

Seems that his son Edward Heerema, who is the president of the offshore giant which is building the mega ship, Allseas made the decision.

Shouldn't someone have caught on sooner.

And has the son no sense of decency?

Ironically all he has done is call lots of attention to his father's misdeeds.

The investigative journalist Ton Biesemaat, who exposed the affair, said he found this "characteristic of the passivity and moral decline in Dutch society," and of a "desire to forget" inconvenient truths about Dutch collaboration with the Nazis in WWII.

As I have often said, while the deniers are very dangerous, those who simply want to ignore inconvenient history are far more dangerous.....

Obama's Auschwitz Mistake [2]

Here's some background on what the American soldiers who came upon [I generally avoided the word "liberation"] Ohrdruf camp.

Gen. Eisenhower was one of them and his comments upon seeing the camp are well known. "We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against."

For a short film of what the Americans, Obama's uncle among them, saw see here

The camp wasn't an Auschwitz but remember, American soldiers had nothing to compare it to, i.e. they couldn't say, "Oh this isn't nice but we know Auschwitz was worse."

I went to some of the Republican blogs and some of the comments are really vicious. [Adam Holland links to them.]

Obama's Auschwitz Mistake

The comments and emails have been coming in. They all want to know what did I make of Obama's statement that his "uncle" [great uncle] helped liberate Auschwitz.

The fact is that Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets.

This is typical family lore where one camp is substituted for another. Had Obama thought about it he probably would have known the story has a historical mistake.

Turns out he meant Ohrdruf, one of the Buchenwald sub-camps. [He apologized for his mistake.]

The RNC has pounced. You can almost hear it licking its chops. It should save its energy. This is a matter of historical ignorance not anything diabolical.

Fact is that most Jews -- including those who are strongly identified -- would get it wrong. Witness the number of people who fell -- and continue to fall -- for the apples over the fence story. [Which I hear is being made into a movie.... fiction I hope.] That is a far more dangerous distortion.

I would say to them, before you beat up on Obama, make sure all the stories you tell are true.

Boston's Musuem of Fine Arts [2]: Rewriting History to Save a Painting

Oskar Kokoschka's painting "Two Nudes (Lovers)"


In an earlier post I criticized Boston's Museum of Fine Art's contention that Jews in Vienna were acting in free will when they disposed of their possessions in 1939.

The debate centered on a painting by Kokoschka which a Jewish family had sold in Vienna in 1939. The MFA, which currently has possession of the painting, argues that the family was not forced to sell the painting but did so voluntarily.

Let's remember the historical context: Eichmann was on the scene and was doing everything possible to get Jews to emigrate without any of their possessions. To argue that they were selling possessions because they "wanted" to is ludicrous.

Well it turns out that -- not surprisingly -- other historians feel similarly. See the most recent article by Geoff Edgers on the topic.

It is striking that the MFA refuses to release its own art historians report on the painting. I can't help but wonder why.

Thoughts on Irena Sendler and on Not Knowing What I Would Have Done

In my post on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising [notes from the speech I gave at the Sami Rohr Prize presentation in Jerusalem] I have been having an exchange with Roman Werpachowski, a Polish reader who believes the Warsaw Ghetto fighters were wrong to have fought to the end.

He believes that, since they knew they were going to die fighting, it would have been better for them to escape and lived. He makes a legitimate point but I am not sure if he is right.

But that is not the issue between us.

When I quoted Irena Sendler in the previous post on the bravery of Jewish mothers, those who were willing to give up their children to a stranger with no guarantee of the child's safety, I knew that I did not know what I would have done.

And I thought back to my exchange with this reader in which he delcares that he would have escaped. My issue with him has been that I simply don't know what I would have done in that situation:

Fought to the death?

Stayed with my family who might have needed my help?

Escaped to the other side knowing that it would result in my family's immediate deportation to a death camp?

Sat paralyzed with fright?

I don't know and I don't believe anyone else can know precisely what they would have done -- until they are in that position.

Funny thing, when I was younger I knew exactly what I would have done.....

May we never find out.

Irena Sendler, Oskar Schindler of Warsaw Ghetto, Dies

[edited 10:15 a.m. EDT]

Irena Sendler who saved approximately 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto died at age 98. [According to Deborah Dwork she was personally responsible for saving about 400 children herself and being the "prime mover" for the saving of the rest.]

It has been said of her that, had Poland had better public relations, Oskar Schindler would have been known as the "Irena Sendler of Germany."

There is a nice obit for her in the New York Times. In it she praises the bravery of Jewish mothers in the ghetto:

"Here I am, a stranger, asking them to place their child in my care. They ask if I can guarantee their safety. I have to answer no. Somethimes they wold give me their child. Other times they would say come back. I would come back a few days later and the family had already been deported."

May her memory and their bravery be for a blessing.

Murdering History: The Holocaust was the Allies' Fault

Former New Statesman editor, Peter Wilby, has come up with an absurdly stupid self-serving argument in the name of attacking the Iraq war.

In an article in The Guardian he argues that, now that all the other reasons for the Iraq war have proved to be a bust, war supporters fall back on the claim that it was worth it because it got rid of a terrible dictator, just like World War II.

He then goes on to passionately argue that the only reason the Allies went to war against Hitler was for self-interest not for moral reasons.

This is, of course, is a complete straw man. No historian worth his or her salt argues anything but that. Wilby seems to believe that because they entered the war for self-interested reasons nothing they accomplished has any moral value.

But where he goes way over the top is when he argues that the Jews would have been better off if the Allies had not gone to war against Germany.

Would the Holocaust have happened if there had been no war or if the western democracies had acted against Nazi Germany earlier? We can never know - though it is likely that, if Britain had made peace in 1940 after the fall of France, the Jews would have been sent to Madagascar. What is certain is that the war prevented any concerted attempt at rescue.

Wilby ignores the fact that Madagascar would have meant a slow death for the Jews. It was uninhabitable particularly for millions of urban people. it was meant to be a place where Jews would die not thrive.

Furthermore, as blogger Marko Attila Hoare points out, Britain controlled the naval routes to Madagascar so it would have had to cooperate with Nazi Germany to get the Jews there.

He then goes on to take his argument to even more absurd heights, that by going to war resources that the Allies would have used to help the Jews were diverted to fight the war.

Resources used to help Jews would be diverted from the war. . Any mass movement of refugees ran the risk of the Germans planting agents among them. Oil supplies were too vital to Britain to risk upsetting Arabs by evacuating them to Palestine. Any of the suggested swaps - Jews for German POWs, for example - might suggest allied weakness. Besides, why should the allies assist Hitler to rid Europe of Jewry? The best we could do, as Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, observed in 1944, was to "hope that the German government will refrain from exterminating these unfortunate people".

What makes him think that the Allies, who in Evian in 1938 would not open their doors to Jewish refugees, would have run to help the Jews?

Moreover, he seems to have convinced himself that Hitler would not have gone to war with the USSR and, in the course of so doing, would not have murdered millions of Jews. With an assurance that the West would not fight him, Hitler would have wasted no time in declaring war on the USSR. He wanted their lebensraum and he wanted their resources to allow the German people to live in luxury.

He might well have won and, if so, millions of more people -- among them many more Jews -- would have been murdered.

Wilby can be against war in general and the war in Iraq all he wants [who precisely is for war? And who, with the exception of John McCain and George Bush, still believe in the rectitude of this war?] But he should not murder history in the process.

The Holocaust and Contemporary Antisemitism in Lithuania

The Jerusalem Post reports that historian and former partisan fighter, Dov Levin, has returned an award her received in 1993 from the then president of Lithuania recognizing his heroic struggle during World War II.

The reason he returned it is that the Lithuanian government has brought proceedings against Dr. Yitzchak Arad, former head of Yad Vashem, for his actions against a Ukrainian village which engaged in rape, pillage, and murder of Jews.

The story provides an interesting confluence between the Holocaust, contemporary history, and enduring antisemitism.

Reading it against the backdrop of our trip this past week gives the story a particular resonance.

Reading it today when the commemoration of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto is being held in Poland, it has even more resonance. It serves as a reminder that there were Jews in many places who fought back.

Warsaw [4]

Just learned that Saul Friedlander has won the Pulitzer Prize for his magnificent work, The Years of Extermination, Nazi Germany and the Jews 1941-45.

A few hours ago I told the Wexner group that it was a magisterial work. I am delighted that the Pulitzer committee recognized the greatness of this work.

It's also nice to learn of this when one is at the site of this tragedy.

It's an overwhelming book, rich in information, beautifully written, and a synthesis of the research of others which is woven together with Friedlander's own insights.

Shabbat in Warsaw: "Mir Zeinen Da" [We are still here]

I spent this past Shabbat in Warsaw. Later today [Sunday] I shall meet up with a group of Americans and Israelis who are arriving in Poland under the auspices of the Wexner Foundation.

Yesterday I attended services on Saturday morning at Beit Warszawa, the Jewish Cultural Association. It was a Reform/non-traditional service. [Though, in fact, the liturgy etc. were pretty traditional.] There were about 20 people in attendance. Afterwards Rabbi Burt Shuman, an American born rabbi who has been here a number of years, asked me to lead the group in a conversation about Holocaust denial. That was followed by lunch and Torah study.

One of the rabbis is an Israeli. She spoke about participating in an Israeli television show done recently in Poland. She lamented the fact that it began with Yiddish songs and was all about the past. There was no sense of a contemporary Jewish life.

The striking thing was the age of those there. I would say that the majority were in their 30s and 40s. There are many other people -- of all ages and stages -- involved in Beit Warshava's many other activities.

Later in the afternoon I spent a couple of hours with Jerzy Halberstat, the Director of the soon to be built Museum of Polish Jewish History. It is an amazing project with a dynamite group of people involved in the planning and conception of it, among them Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, one of the most creative people around.

Tomorrow a.m. I shall go to a retreat center outside of Warsaw to meet with a group of Polish students who will be working this summer as counselors in the JDC [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee] sponsored summer camp. They are having an orientation session this weekend and I shall be having a discussion with them this morning.

The reason I write all this is that so many Jews who come to visit Poland think of it as a Jewish cemetery. They treat it as a place where Jews once lived and were destroyed. That's true. However, in the words of the Jewish Partisan anthem from the Holocaust, Zog Nit Keynmol, mir zeinen da, we [they] are still here.

[Many visitors come confused about who did the destroying, i.e. it was the GERMANs not the Poles. They come with the historically daft idea that the Poles were worse than the Germans.... but more on that in another post. For my previous thoughts on that see the my comments here.]

I am also reading Poland and the Jews: Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew by Stanislaw [Stashek] Krajewski who is on the Philosophy faculty at the University of Warsaw and who is helping design the portion of the aforementioned museum dedicated to post-Holocaust Jewish life in Poalnd. In addition, Stashek consults to the American Jewish Committee about Polish Jewish matters.

Stashek has become a traditional Jew. [Had a fantastic Shabbat dinner at his home.] He grew up knowing nothing about tradition or Jewish practices. He is also a Polish Jew. During the very bleak days in the 1980s -- which turned out to be the death throes of communist rule -- Stashek wrote for the underground press. Some of those essays are included in the book.

When I was here in October I met with members of the Czulent [pronounced chulent] society, the Jewish "student" [many in the group are not students] organization in Cracow. I shall do so again later this week.

Visitors -- young and old -- often find it emotionally and intellectually simpler to treat this place as one with a past but with no future. The community may be small. There are many Jews still in the woodwork. There are many who are still hesitant about emerging. It is a complicated situation. But it is not just a place about the past. For visitors to come and see only that is to shortchange both themselves and a small but fascinating Jewish community.

More later. I am off for an early morning walk in the "Old City" of Warsaw.

Dachau: A grim anniversay

75 years ago today Germany established Dachau as a camp for political prisoners. Eventually it was not just political prisoners who were held and died there.

Boston's Musuem of Fine Arts: A Horrible Comparison

[Link added 10:21 a.m.; repaired 12:16 p.m.]

Geoff Edgers, writing in The Boston Globe, reports that Boston's Museum of Fine Arts [MFA] and an Australian woman are in court fighting over a painting which belonged to her family. The painting was sold by the woman's uncle in Vienna in 1939 and eventually was acquired by the museum.

The woman claims it was sold under duress. The MFA, which apparently has done extensive research on this, disputes that and says it was a normal transaction.

But here's what caught my attention in The Boston Globe article. The Deputy Director of the Museum, Katherine Getchell, made the following absurd statement when she claimed that the sale of the picture was a matter of business as usual:

"Would you also say that people who sold things [during] the Depression, yes, they sold them under duress?" she said. "Yes, if somebody sells their house now because they can't meet their high mortgage payment, is that a forced sale of a house? I think it's very dangerous to make the supposition that everything that happened during a period of time was forced." [The Boston Globe ]

I have no idea of the details of the sale, but let's reflect on the situation in Vienna in 1939. The Nazis had arrived the previous year. The Austrians had greeted them enthusiastically. Jews were treated with greater brutality than in Germany.

Jews were forced to use toothbrushes to clean anti-Nazi slogans that had been painted on the street. There are chilling pictures showing terrified people on their hands and knees doing such cleaning while gleeful Austrians stand and cheer. In some of these pictures is that it is young kids who are forcing the Jews to do this. Hundreds of Jews committed suicide.

Eichmann had been dispatched to Vienna to create a “conveyor belt” [his term] to move Jews out. In a short time 128,000 Jews would leave.

Jews were well aware of the pressure to get out. The situation was working so efficiently that Eichmann forced the leaders of the Berlin Jewish community to come to Vienna to see how efficiently the Jews were being forced to move out of the Reich.

Remember, this was before the Germans had settled on a plan to murder the Jews and were “just” trying to get them to emigrate. Their objective was to have them leave quickly and with no material goods. Their possessions would all fall into German hands. In short they were to be pauperized.

Sometimes the sale of goods was to other Jews. Not everything was openly confiscated by the Germans. Rest assured, it ultimately all fell into the hands of German governmental agencies or well placed Nazis.

Every memoir, history book, and biography talks of the terror under which Austrian Jews lived during those days. They knew get out or eventually end up in concentration camps.

To compare this to someone selling their house during the depression is absurd. It would be akin to saying that "not every young Black slave girl who had sexual relations with her master or a member of his family was forced into it. Some may truly have been in love." This was a relationship of the all powerful to the powerless. To see it as anything else is just plain stupid or, more properly put, obtuse and could only be made by someone who does not understand the nature of slavery.

So too with the situation of Jews in Vienna. Jews were seeking every which way to get out. For Jews nothing that happened in Vienna at the time was “normal.”

I would suggest that MFA Deputy Director Getchell learn a bit more about history before she makes any more such far fetched, if not, absurd analogies.