Category Archives: Other resources

[from The Guardian]

Diaries and manuscripts turn spotlight on little-known acts of endurance and bravery

From quiet acts of bravery, to overt acts of rebellion, Jewish resistance to the Holocaust took many forms, yet research shows they remain largely unacknowledged in traditional UK teachings about the genocide.

A new exhibition, drawing on thousands of previously unseen documents and manuscripts, is placing some of the little-known personal stories of heroism, active armed resistance, and rescue networks in the extermination camps and ghettos at the forefront.

Opening at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, it highlights the extraordinary endeavours of Tosia Altman, a courier who as a member of the socialist Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, smuggled herself into Poland’s ghettos on false “Aryanised” papers, organising groups, spreading information and moving weapons, before being captured and dying of her injuries, aged 24, after the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943.

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[From The Guardian]

“ I believe my Holocaust memorial in Berlin could no longer be built today,” the architect Peter Eisenman has told Die Zeit. Eisenman says that Europe is now “afraid of strangers”, and he fears that the rise of xenophobia and antisemitism in Europe would make it impossible to build monuments like the vast field of grey sepulchres that he designed as Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, inaugurated in 2005 close to the site of Adolf Hitler’s bunker.

He may well be right – yet surely this is the wrong end of the book to start at. The real question is why Holocaust memorials have done so little to prevent the return of Europe’s far-right demons.

In Vienna, as in Berlin, the victims of the Holocaust are remembered by public art. Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust memorial is a sealed library of closed books, each book suggesting a whole life we cannot recover.

Since its unveiling in 2000, it has become, like Eisenman’s Berlin memorial, a sombre tourist attraction and civic symbol. Yet Austria has just come perilously close to electing a president whose extreme-right Freedom party has Nazi roots and espouses xenophobia. Norbert Hofer was defeated – good – but how can anyone at all be drawn to far-right politics in a Europe that remembers its history? If memorials like those created by Whiteread and Eisenman have any value, it should surely be to make race hate an utterly marginal force, and far-right extremism the smallest of minorities. Instead, in its new guise of “populism”, the anti-liberal right is running rampant.

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[from the Guardian]

Many people argue that it is crucially important for young people to learn about the Holocaust to prevent racism and prejudice in the present day. But in a focus group interview exploring secondary school students’ attitudes to the Holocaust, Ella, a year 12 student from Peterborough turned that idea on its head.

“I didn’t stop being racist because of learning about the Holocaust … I’ve always not been racist,” she said.

Ella is one of more than 9,500 students consulted by University College London (UCL) researchers as part of a three year-long national study looking at secondary school students’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust. This study (launched by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education) drew primarily on survey responses from almost 8,000 young people and interviews of nearly 250 students. It aimed to find out what young people should know about the Holocaust and why.

The Holocaust has been part of the national curriculum since the early 1990s, but many teachers are uncertain about what the educational aims of teaching this subject should be and what content to include or to prioritise, especially when faced with limited time and a packed curriculum. The centre’s earlier study, Teaching About the Holocaust in English Secondary Schools, found that in a variety of subjects teachers’ intentions were most likely to enable students to understand the ramifications of racism, transform society and learn the lesson of the Holocaust to ensure it never happens again. However, as the study went to argue, such universal, trans-disciplinary aims are difficult both to assess and to translate into pedagogical practice.

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[From the Global Post website]

Mexico City, Aug 13 (EFE).- The opera The Emperor of Atlantis, composed in a Nazi concentration camp by Austria’s Viktor Ullmann, brought its satirical indictment of Nazism to Mexico for the first time, singer Jose Adan Perez said Tuesday.

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[from the Washington Post]

The Third Reich wanted to stamp out Judaism in music. The problem, writes the scholar Michael Haas in his new book “Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis,” was figuring out what that meant. Was Jewish music old, reactionary, tradition-bound, unable to be creative? Or was it new, offensive to the senses, avant-garde? The Nazis thought of themselves as forward-looking, but their artistic tastes were anything but progressive. They ended up sanctioning a lot of safe and since-forgotten music by party members, and tarring most of the rest with the brush of “degeneracy.”

Years have passed since the nightmare, but labeling music is still a thorny and controversial topic. Today, there are many and various ongoing efforts to return so-called “degenerate” music to the canon. What’s controversial is how to define this music. The term “Holocaust music” signals the general theme to people who might not know what “degenerate music” is. But in working to revive or remember art under such a sensational and clumsy rubric risks diminishing composers’ artistic achievement in favor of their historical importance: privileging artifact over art.

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[from the Tablet]

A recent wave of performances turns Jewish composers into shadow images defined only by their status as Hitler’s victims.

In the never-ending search for ways to remember the Holocaust, the newest media contrivance to appear is “Holocaust Music.” National Public Radio recently profiled an Italian conductor who has embarked on a quixotic campaign to record every note of music composed inside a Nazi concentration camp. Two months ago, New York’s Lincoln Center played host to the Defiant Requiem, a traveling revue that presents a dramatic reenactment of a performance of Verdi’s Requiem that took place in the Terezin concentration camp during World War II. The concert tour has crisscrossed the globe, with headquarters in a summer institute in the Czech Republic. A related documentary film has aired on PBS. On the face of it, these artistic efforts certainly sound legitimate. Aren’t they merely the musical analogue to the literature depicting the horrors of the Holocaust?

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[from the Denver Post website]

PRAGUE—In a concentration camp designed by the Nazis to eradicate Jewish cultural life, among 120,000 of its inmates who would ultimately be murdered, a rising young musician named Rafael Schachter managed one of the miracles of the Holocaust.

Assembling hundreds of sick and hungry singers, he led them in 16 performances learned by rote from a single smuggled score of one of the most monumental and moving works of religious music—Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass.

“These crazy Jews are singing their own requiem,” Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the genocide, was heard to remark after attending one of the performances at the unique and surreal camp of Terezin, in what was then German-occupied Czechoslovakia.

But for Schachter and his fellow prisoners, this Mass for the dead became not an act of meek submission to their fate, but rather one of defiance of their captors, as well as a therapy against the enveloping terror.

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[from The Guardian website]

At 10 years old Ruth Jacobs took her brother by the hand and, without her parents, boarded a train in Vienna to come to England just before the outbreak of the second world war. “We had to say goodbye out of sight, they didn’t want parents there on the platform,” she recalled. “My parents said we would see them in a few weeks, that they would follow us. They didn’t want us to worry.”

Jacobs, now 84, was one of hundreds of Jewish pensioners who gathered on Sunday to honour those who helped them escape Nazi persecution, on the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the Kindertransport – the rescue mission that saved their lives.

In the final months before the war, the British parliament took the extraordinary step of accepting 10,000 children from across Europe, who traversed the continent by train and arrived by boat in British ports.

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[from the Huffington Post]

In a controversy that has embroiled many of the leading Holocaust remembrance organizations, a man once hailed as the “Italian Schindler” may have actually been a Nazi collaborator who did little to save the lives of imperiled Jews.

For decades, Giovanni Palatucci has been heralded as a hero who died fighting against Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, and who used his status as a police chief to save thousands of Jews in his hometown.

But according to research conducted by historians at the Centro Primo Levi at the Center for Jewish History, very little of this legacy is based in reality. According to the researchers, Palatucci was a relatively low-level officer who worked with the Nazis to help identify Jews who would eventually be shipped to death camps.

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[from the Guardian website]

Writer Denise Grollmus goes on a personal journey of Jewish discovery in Poland, the country where 3 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the second world war.

Denise Grollmus grew up in the US, and was especially close to her grandmother, a Polish Catholic from Warsaw. Or at least, that’s who she said she was.  On her 28th birthday, Denise discovered that her grandmother had been keeping a secret – that she was, in fact, a Jew who had changed her identity during the war and then continued to keep her Jewishness hidden for almost 70 years. That discovery instantly made Denise Jewish, too.

Denise has spent the last year living in Poland, on a quest to understand what exactly it means to be Jewish in a country regarded by many as a byword for deeply rooted antisemitism and still feared by many Jews as little more than an enormous graveyard.

Click here to read more and to listen to the podcast

[from BBC new website]

Muslim leaders from around the world have taken part in an unprecedented trip to Germany and Poland to see and hear for themselves about the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust.

The 11 imams, sheiks and religious teachers from nine countries met a Holocaust survivor and Poles whose families risked execution to save Jews from the Nazis, in the Polish capital’s Nozyk Synagogue as part of the tour.

They have been around museums, including the recently opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews on the site of the former Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw. And they also visited the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.

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[from The Jerusalem Post]

Germany recognizes and will provide compensation to Holocaust survivors who were children during the war, for their “lost childhood,” the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel announced this week.

The move was the result of negotiations recently held in Jerusalem between representatives of the Claims Conference as well as heads of NGOs dedicated to survivors and a senior delegation from the German Finance Ministry.

The survivors concerned include those born between January 1928 and May 1945, for whom the first period of their lives would have been under the Nazis or allies of the Nazi regime.

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[from the Guardian website]

By Robin Pepper

Iby Knill vowed she would tell the world what she had seen at Auschwitz. And now her story will forever be told at museums across Europe thanks to a young filmmaker from Teesside University.

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[BBC News website: April 19th] A major ceremony is under way in the Polish capital Warsaw to honour Jews who fought overwhelming Nazi German forces 70 years ago in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Sirens wailed and church bells tolled in the city, where several hundred Jews battled the Nazis in World War II.

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• See also this article about life in the ghetto by Monica Whitlock of the BBC World Service
• And this about Poland’s Jews by the BBC’s  Adam Easton
• Click here to listen to the BBC documentary about the Oyneg Shabes [עונג שבת] archive, presented by Monica Whitlock produced by Mark Burman and Monica Whitlock