Address to Syd­ney Jew­ish Muse­um Read­ing of the Names
11 Sep­tem­ber 2016
When the awful truth about the Nazi death camps was first pub­li­cised in news­reels and pho­tographs at the end of World War II, an incred­u­lous world react­ed with pro­found shock and revul­sion. Ghast­ly images of piled-up corpses and ema­ci­at­ed sur­vivors were seared into the con­scious­ness of civilised peo­ple every­where, an inescapable reminder of humanity’s seem­ing­ly lim­it­less capac­i­ty for evil.
The series of tri­als of Nazi war crim­i­nals at Nurem­berg between 1945 and 1949 pro­vid­ed vol­umes of tran­script of eye- wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny and of doc­u­men­tary evi­dence of the details of Nazi atroc­i­ties: the round-ups and ghet­to-iza­tion of entire Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties; the ruth­less expro­pri­a­tion of their assets; the sadis­tic tor­tures; the mass shoot­ings; the depor­ta­tions; the indus­tri­al-scale gassing of Jew­ish men, women and chil­dren; the ghoul­ish med­ical exper­i­ments; and a myr­i­ad oth­er actions of unspeak­able bar­bar­i­ty.
The Nurem­berg Tri­bunals, in pass­ing sen­tence on those respon­si­ble, said that their crimes had shocked the con­science of human­i­ty.
Aware­ness of the hor­rors of the Shoah was renewed and deep­ened by the dra­ma of the tri­al in Israel in 1961 of Adolf Eich­mann. Eich­mann had been the Nazi arch-bureau­crat who facil­i­tat­ed and man­aged the logis­tics of mass depor­ta­tion of Jews to ghet­tos and exter­mi­na­tion camps in Ger­man-occu­pied East­ern Europe dur­ing World War II. Jew­ish depor­tees were com­mon­ly left exposed to the ele­ments with no water and lit­tle food. At times up to one third of them died in tran­sit.
Eich­mann per­formed his duties with such zeal that trains which had been ear-marked to pro­vide des­per­ate­ly need­ed muni­tions and sup­plies to Germany’s front-line forces were at times divert­ed for trans­port­ing help­less Jew­ish civil­ians to the gas cham­bers. Mur­der­ing Jews, it would seem, was at times an even high­er pri­or­i­ty for the Nazis than win­ning the war.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as aging sur­vivors began to look back on their lives, many of them record­ed their oral his­to­ries. I had the per­son­al priv­i­lege of inter­view­ing some of the sur­vivors for the Shoah Foun­da­tion. The sur­vivors’ tes­ti­monies were added to the his­tor­i­cal records and helped to keep alive the instinc­tive pop­u­lar under­stand­ing of the Shoah as the ulti­mate in human evil.
What peo­ple have under­stood until now, with a clar­i­ty that is sad­ly dimin­ish­ing over time, is that although World War II and the Holo­caust were in many ways dis­tinct albeit con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous events, they were linked by the cen­tral destruc­tive role of racial ide­ol­o­gy in Nazi think­ing and prac­tice.
The idea of essen­tial­is­ing human beings as supe­ri­or or infe­ri­or on the basis of their sup­posed “race” was at the heart of the Nazi doc­trine of Leben­sraum, which under­pinned the pur­suit by Nazi Ger­many of ter­ri­to­r­i­al expan­sion by mil­i­tary force, and led direct­ly to the break­down of demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions, the denial of basic free­doms, the mil­i­ta­riza­tion of Ger­man soci­ety and the wag­ing of aggres­sive war against oth­er nations at the cost of tens of mil­lions of lives. The same racial ide­ol­o­gy under­pinned the Nazi pol­i­cy of phys­i­cal­ly elim­i­nat­ing the Jew­ish peo­ple as a peo­ple. The dif­fer­ence for the Nazis was that killing Jews was not the means to achieve ter­ri­to­r­i­al or oth­er goals. It was the goal.
The lessons to be learned about the evil of con­cep­tu­al­is­ing peo­ple in imper­son­al racial cat­e­gories instead of in their human indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, and about the social­ly destruc­tive impact of unchecked racial hos­til­i­ty, remain as rel­e­vant as ever to con­tem­po­rary Aus­tralia, and also to the wider world.
Fur­ther, the study of these events high­lights the per­son­al moral chal­lenge for all peo­ple not to be silent or indif­fer­ent in the face of the oppres­sion of oth­ers – espe­cial­ly oth­ers who have been sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly demonised, not for what they have said or done, but for who they are.
Yet in 2016 we can no longer assume that most peo­ple have the same depth of under­stand­ing of the Shoah as pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions.
With the pass­ing of time, and more par­tic­u­lar­ly with the pass­ing of sur­vivors year by year, the Shoah is no longer uni­ver­sal­ly seen and under­stood as vivid­ly as it was when mem­o­ries of it were still fresh, and there were greater num­bers of sur­vivors to speak and write about their expe­ri­ences.
It is a supreme irony that the gen­er­a­tion that has grown up with the inter­net and social media, with instan­ta­neous access to unprece­dent­ed vol­umes of infor­ma­tion, is the gen­er­a­tion that knows and cares the least about the Holo­caust or even about World War II.
In a sur­vey con­duct­ed in Britain by the Sun­day Tele­graph in 2009 ahead of the 70th anniver­sary of the out­break of World War II, almost half of young Britons did not know in which year World War II broke out, and more than three quar­ters did not know who Britain’s prime min­is­ter was at the time. One in ten believed that Britain had fought against France, not Ger­many. More than one-third of them did not know that the famous words “We shall fight on the beach­es” were uttered by Win­ston Churchill.
Kath­leen Burk, Pro­fes­sor of Mod­ern His­to­ry at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, was report­ed as say­ing she was not sur­prised by the results:
“Even when I get extreme­ly intel­li­gent stu­dents I find I more or less have to tell them their his­to­ry. It is aston­ish­ing that there isn’t more empha­sis on the Sec­ond World War in schools. [The war] has cre­at­ed the polit­i­cal cul­ture of Britain since then. If you don’t know where you come from then you can’t know what is going on now.”
A fur­ther insight was pro­vid­ed by one of the fore­most his­to­ri­ans of World War II and the Holo­caust, Richard Evans, Regius Pro­fes­sor of Mod­ern His­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge:
“We have to remem­ber that for these chil­dren, the war is as remote as the mid­dle ages. For many of them, their grand­par­ents did not even live through it. They will have learned about the war part­ly through the media and part­ly through school, but it is not embed­ded in their gen­er­a­tion.”
One should not imag­ine that these sur­vey results were an aber­ra­tion. Even in the Unit­ed States, where the Holo­caust is a con­stant fix­ture in school cur­ric­u­la, and in pop­u­lar cul­ture, a 2008 study found that more than 30% of Amer­i­cans didn’t know what the Holo­caust was.
Oth­er, more recent tragedies now com­pete for a place in the pub­lic con­scious­ness. Today is the 15th anniver­sary of the mass ter­ror­ist atroc­i­ties in the Unit­ed States, events which car­ry their own mes­sage about the destruc­tive evil of blind hatred.
Yet part of the decline in aware­ness of the Holo­caust is due to a more gen­er­al igno­rance about his­to­ry, pol­i­tics and gov­ern­ment. A famous study by the Mccormick Tri­bune Free­dom Muse­um in 2006 found that twice as many Amer­i­cans were able to name at least two char­ac­ters from ‘the Simp­sons’ car­toon series than could name even one of the five fun­da­men­tal free­doms guar­an­teed to them by the first amend­ment to the US con­sti­tu­tion.
In short, we live in an age that com­bines vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed access to infor­ma­tion with stag­ger­ing shal­low­ness and wide­spread igno­rance.
Even in Aus­tralia, a draft of the Queens­land Mod­ern His­to­ry syl­labus for years 11 and 12 released ear­li­er this year by the Queens­land Cur­ricu­lum and Assess­ment Author­i­ty would have elim­i­nat­ed the scope to study the events of World War II and the Holo­caust in any depth. For­tu­nate­ly, after vig­or­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tions by the Exec­u­tive Coun­cil of Aus­tralian Jew­ry, the Queens­land Jew­ish Board of Deputies, aca­d­e­mics and teach­ers, the syl­labus has now been changed to allow an in- depth study of these sub­jects.
There was anoth­er wel­come devel­op­ment in June 2015 when Aus­tralia became an observ­er of the Inter­na­tion­al Holo­caust Remem­brance Alliance (IHRA). As an observ­er coun­try Aus­tralia shares the com­mit­ment of the IHRA to com­mem­o­rate the vic­tims of the Holo­caust and to pro­mote edu­ca­tion, research and remem­brance both nation­al­ly and inter­na­tion­al­ly. Aus­tralia has appoint­ed experts who have par­tic­i­pat­ed with great dis­tinc­tion in IHRA’s work­ing groups at its bi-annu­al ple­nary meet­ings, includ­ing the work­ing groups cov­er­ing edu­ca­tion and acad­e­mia. The 31 mem­ber states of the IHRA are now encour­ag­ing Aus­tralia to join them as full mem­bers, and the Exec­u­tive Coun­cil of Aus­tralian Jew­ry has urged the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment to do so.
For the major­i­ty of peo­ple now liv­ing, there is no per­son­al or imme­di­ate fam­i­ly point of con­nec­tion to the World War II era. If these peo­ple ever think about the Shoah at all, it is so divorced from their own per­son­al expe­ri­ences that it is utter­ly beyond their range of com­pre­hen­sion.
Here­in lies a dilem­ma. We don’t want peo­ple in our own soci­ety, or any soci­ety, to have expe­ri­ences that are even remote­ly com­pa­ra­ble to the suf­fer­ing our peo­ple endured. Yet we also want the world to remem­ber, under­stand, and to draw the appro­pri­ate lessons so that we can keep alive at least the pos­si­bil­i­ty that human soci­ety can avoid repeat­ing the worst mis­takes of the past, and per­haps even evolve into some­thing bet­ter.
If that is the point of remem­ber­ing, then the process of remem­ber­ing can­not be restrict­ed to an edu­ca­tion of the mind. Yes, the facts are impor­tant, and a rig­or­ous schol­ar­ly study of the facts of the Shoah is indis­pen­si­ble. But mas­tery of the facts is nowhere near enough to ful­fil the oblig­a­tions of edu­ca­tion and mem­o­ry.
In the ear­ly years of World War II, as the hor­rors of the Holo­caust began to unfold, the Jew­ish Agency rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Gene­va, Richard Lichtheim, received a let­ter from a col­league in the Unit­ed States ask­ing him to send a fac­tu­al report on “the posi­tion of the Jews in Europe”.
The ques­tion angered Lichtheim because of its breath-tak­ing igno­rance and insen­si­tiv­i­ty. The Jews of Europe at that time were in the throes of a mas­sive con­vul­sion in their lives that began with their ruth­less dis­place­ment from their homes and bru­tal sep­a­ra­tion from their loved ones and end­ed in their whole­sale slaugh­ter. They were no more in a “posi­tion” in any mean­ing­ful sense than a speck of dust in a cyclone or a droplet of water in a tsuna­mi.
Despite his anger, Lichtheim patient­ly report­ed as best he could on the details of what had befall­en Euro­pean Jew­ry, com­mu­ni­ty by com­mu­ni­ty, coun­try by coun­try. He con­clud­ed his sur­vey with a mem­o­rable rebuke to his Amer­i­can col­league that still res­onates:
“You asked for a sur­vey of the posi­tion of the Jews of Europe. You want­ed facts and fig­ures. Have I stat­ed the facts? Some of them, but very few. Think of the facts behind the facts, of the rivers of tears and the streams of blood, the bro­ken limbs and the naked bod­ies, the bleed­ing feet and the cry­ing chil­dren, the stench and the filth, the bit­ing cold and the gnaw­ing hunger, the black despair in mil­lions of hearts. Try to think the last thoughts of the three Jews who were parad­ed through a Pol­ish town and hanged for hav­ing tried to obtain some food from non- Jews. Feel the feel­ings of the Jew­ish moth­er in Paris who threw her six chil­dren, and then her­self, out of the win­dow when the police came to take her away to a camp and then to Poland. Have I stat­ed the facts? I have writ­ten 4,000 words and I have said noth­ing. Use your imag­i­na­tion, friend”.
To remem­ber the Holo­caust in any­thing like the way need­ed to do it jus­tice, it must be the sub­ject not only of an edu­ca­tion of the mind, in facts and fig­ures, but also of an edu­ca­tion of the heart, in empa­thy and com­pas­sion; an edu­ca­tion of the con­science in reject­ing prej­u­dice and injus­tice; and an edu­ca­tion of the soul in keep­ing our faith even in the face of the dark­est evil.
This is the kind of edu­ca­tion that must be deliv­ered not only in the halls of acad­e­mia but also in visu­al and audio pre­sen­ta­tions, art, lit­er­a­ture, music, and in spir­i­tu­al reflec­tion and prayer.
The Syd­ney Jew­ish Muse­um plays an indis­pens­able role in this broad­er kind of edu­ca­tion. It has become one of our community’s price­less insti­tu­tion­al trea­sures. I thank every­one at the muse­um for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to share these thoughts with you today.
Peter Wertheim, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor
Exec­u­tive Coun­cil of Aus­tralian Jew­ry