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 70^th 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 15^th 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