Now in its 4th season, Humanities Radio, the University of Utah College of Humanities' podcast, continues to lead conversations exploring various perspectives of today’s topics. Each month, faculty and students from the college explore a new theme, such as National Hispanic-Latino Heritage Month, Halloween and Day of the Dead, National American Indian Heritage Month and others.
January commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day and Humanities Radio examines the historical time period with Julia Ault, assistant professor of history and Maeera Shreiber, associate professor of English and chair of the Jewish Studies Initiative.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, Julia Ault, assistant professor of history, discusses why the global day was established how it is commemorated around the world.
https://soundcloud.com/u-of-u-humanities/49-international-holocaust-remembrance-day
Jana Cunningham:
Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities and today we're discussing International Holocaust Remembrance Day, why we observe it and how it is commemorated throughout the world. Julia Ault, Assistant Professor of History is with me to discuss more. On January 27, many countries around the world observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Can you talk a little bit about when this day of remembrance began and why it was established?
Julia Ault:
Yeah. Well, let's step back even for just a second and, even though it might seem obvious, consider what Holocaust remembrance events are, what the Holocaust was.
Julia Ault:
And Holocaust remembrance days have taken different forms over the years in different places, but at their core, they are supposed to commemorate the victims of the Nazi genocidal policies during World War II, which we refer to as the Holocaust. Specifically, Holocaust remembrance days charge us to remember and learn from the intentional and systematic murder of six million Jews, as well as other victims, Roma/Sinti, which we know more commonly as gypsies in Eastern Europe and these were the part of Nazi racial policies to purify, right, to isolate and other and then get rid of people who were seen as enemies but of course were totally blameless victims in this Nazi system in the context of World War II.
Julia Ault:
Specifically, International Holocaust Remembrance Day was officially declared by the UN General Assembly in 2005, it came out of a push for an international day with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II and the end of the Holocaust and it was officially then celebrated for the first time in January, 2006.
Jana Cunningham:
And so why was it established? I mean, I understand there are multiple purposes obviously of having a remembrance day so what were their specific goals for holding this day?
Julia Ault:
It's at least twofold, if not more than that. On the one hand, rembembrance days are very much about what their name says, remembering survivors, remembering victims, what happened, the horrors of the death camps, of death marches, of the ghettos, all of the different aspects of the genocide. But it's not just to commemorate the past and to never forget, but to move beyond that, to say, what can we learn from the past? How can we avoid policies that lead to violence and ethnic cleansing and genocide, different forms of systematic oppression in our lives today? So I think it was twofold it's to remember, but then also to act on that remembrance in a proactive way.
Jana Cunningham:
And what is the significance of the date of January 27th?
Julia Ault:
Yeah, January 27th is the day that the Red Army or the Soviet Army, which was allied with the US against Nazi Germany during World War II, it was the day that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz in January of 1945. So the German army of the wehrmacht was retreating to the west and the concentration camp was abandoned with prisoners who were too sick, too weak to be forced on death march. So the Red Army actually came upon some 6,000 survivors in Auschwitz. Yeah, and they were ill, many of them actually died after the fact because their bodies couldn't absorb nutrition anymore. So Auschwitz is important because there are actually these living survivors of the camp, but also Auschwitz is significant because it was the largest concentration and death camp within the Nazi system, so it's sort of important on multiple levels.
Jana Cunningham:
Each year, they have a different theme for international remembrance day. What have some of those themes been since 2005 and how have they been commemorated?
Julia Ault:
I think starting in 2010, they started including various themes. And this speaks again to the two part mission of the day to both remember and to educate. So these themes have looked at different ways in which people experienced the Holocaust. So they've had themes such as women and children, journeys of the Holocaust because many people were moved thousands of miles from their home to ghettos and then ultimately to camps in many cases. So there's a large geographic span to this. They've had themes that looked at discrimination, especially racial discrimination and things of that nature. So it helps to illuminate how these policies affected different types of people in different ways, but also again to connect from the specific instance of the Holocaust to broader trends we've seen in the world since and today.
Jana Cunningham:
Right. And what are some of the different ways the various countries observe the day? Because there are so many different countries that observe International Holocaust Day, how do they observe it differently?
Julia Ault:
Yeah, there's something like 39 countries participate in International Holocaust Remembrance Day and then some countries including the US have a separate remembrance day as well. So there are events that happen on different days around the world. A lot of it originated with an emphasis on survivor testimony and witnesses speaking to their own experiences and to their family's stories. Elie Wiesel who wrote Night very famously spoke about these things. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum also in the US did a lot of this stuff. There's a lot of emphasis now, as we have fewer survivors still alive we're just many years since the end of World War II and the Holocaust that it's more of an educational event now. So lectures, presentation, sometimes showing a film or a documentary and then hosting discussions. University of Utah of course does similar things with U Remembers days on campus.
Julia Ault:
Oh, other places, actually at Auschwitz, they do a really interesting memorial where they walk holding candles from Auschwitz to Birkenau, which it's a very large complex and so I think it's actually like over a kilometer, kilometer and a half walk between the two parts of the camp. And it's sort of supposed to symbolize those who lived, that not everyone, the Nazi policies on some level weren't successful, right? And so this is remembrance which commemorates those who lived, who are still alive and still speak to the experience. Yeah.
Jana Cunningham:
So as you've said, many countries also have their own remembrance day, kind of why is that? And is it different than International Day of Remembrance or how does it differ?
Julia Ault:
Yeah, I think in part because an international day, International Holocaust Remembrance Day came so late, a number of countries had started their own national days before that to remember. And in a lot of cases, those national days relate to somehow that country's involvement in World War II, the Holocaust. So US Holocaust Remembrance Day is at the end of April and Jimmy Carter started this in the late 1970s and it is based on the US's liberation of Dachau, which was one of the Nazi concentration camps in 1945. And similarly in the UK, they celebrated their day of remembrance was the anniversary of the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen, which is yet another concentration camp. And interestingly, in Argentina, Holocaust remembrance day, they picked the anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943 as their day to commemorate the Holocaust.
Julia Ault:
Oh, I should say, of course Israel has perhaps the most important Holocaust remembrance day. It is a national holiday there and it actually changed around a bit in the 1950s before they settled on the day, which is now so celebrated one week after the end of Passover or after Passover. And yeah, it changed a couple of times. And coincidentally, then there are a bunch of Holocaust remembrance days that happen to be in April. But one of the really interesting things that they do in Israel is there's a two minute moment of silence at 10:00 AM and sirens go off. And there are actually videos of this on YouTube you can look up, people stop whatever they are doing. If they're on the road, they're driving, they stop on the middle of the highway and get out of their cars and stand for the moment of silence as a sign of respect. It's really powerful to watch.
Jana Cunningham: Oh wow. And the US day of the remembrance is similar, they do kind of the same day as Israel, right? Or they do it kind of just the very end of April.
Julia Ault:
Yeah, so I had actually seen two different origin stories and I checked with a friend of mine who also does Holocaust and German history and yeah, the Holocaust remembrance day in Israel and in the US happen to almost exactly coincide. Yeah, so I've seen that the US's is based on Israel's, I've also seen it that it is based on the US liberation of Dachau. So perhaps fortuitously, these things tend to line up right at the end of April for different reasons, yeah.
Jana Cunningham:
How can we as individuals... Because on campus here at the U when we do U Remembers, there's a lot going on on campus and so I think there's a lot of different ways to get involved in these remembrance activities. However, if you're not a member of campus, how as individuals can we better honor and observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day?
Julia Ault:
We've got really important things here. Of course, remembering the victims, remembering what happened, the horrors that people had to live through or were not able to live through in the camps, in death marches, in various ways. But also I think more broadly to think about the consequences of hatred, of antisemitism, of racism that still exists today, that we should be sympathetic, empathetic people in our lives. What is the pain of isolating a particular group of individuals? What are the potentially dangerous concept consequences of creating this idea of a dangerous other? But beyond that, I think it should inspire us to do better and to try to combat those individual and systemic prejudices that we experience in our own lives, in the US and around the world.
Jana Cunningham:
That was Julia Ault, Assistant Professor of History. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu and don't forget to subscribe.
Jewish Writers of the Holocaust
In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Maeera Shreiber, associate professor of English and chair of the Jewish Studies Initiative, discusses some of the lesser known Jewish writers who survived the Holocaust, such as Art Speigelman, Ida Fink and Ruth Kluger.
https://soundcloud.com/u-of-u-humanities/jewish-writers-of-the-holocaust
Jana Cunningham:
Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities. And today in honor of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we're discussing some of the lesser known Jewish writers who survived the Holocaust. Maeera Schreiber associate professor of English and chair of the Jewish Studies Initiative is with me to talk about some of the writers beyond those who we are most familiar with.
Jana Cunningham:
So most of us have read “The Diary of Anne Frank” and works by Elie Wiesl, the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. Their stories are incredibly important to the understanding of the suffering inflicted by the Holocaust. However, they're lesser known writers whose contributions are just as valuable and impactful and that's what we're going to talk about today. So let start with Art Spiegelman. He's an American cartoonist and author of the graphic novel “Maus,” which is about his relationship with his father who's a Holocaust survivor. I have never have heard of Maus before. So tell us more about this graphic novel and Spiegelman.
Maeera Schreiber:
Okay. Spiegelman. Yes. So, I teach at the University of Utah and I teach a course specifically in Holocaust literature. And I have to say that Spiegelman's work, there's two volumes “Maus” one and two is by far the most impactful and valuable reading that the students do. I have many students who want to write about “Maus.” They come back to me years later, wanting to talk about how the memoir that he lays out in “Maus” has inspired them and helped them think about how to tell stories of their own and stories about their relationships in their families. So it's interesting.
Maeera Schreiber:
I will also tell you that Spiegelman's “Maus”;’ was the first Holocaust nonfiction book I ever read. And the question about whether it's fiction or not is an interesting one, that I sort of stopped in my tracks and said, "I want to teach this material." So it made an impact on me, not just my students. It's as you said, "It's a graphic novel sort of a novel, or certainly a memoir perhaps told and in graphic materials." One of the things that's very interesting about it to start with is, how do you categorize a book like this? When he was first reached the best seller list? When it came out in 1992, the New York Times wanted to put it on the list for a fiction.
Maeera Schreiber:
And he was enormously upset because to put a work about the Holocaust, that's grounded very much in real story about his father's suffering, to say that, that's fiction opens a door to terrible things, specifically Holocaust denial. So it's a controversial text, by now it's become canonical, but it's still a shock because in it, the Jews are represented as if mice and Nazis are represented as if cats. And to some people, readers, they looked at it and said, "This trivializes, the Holocaust, this makes a light of it."
Maeera Schreiber:
And it's taken us a long time to understand that the horrors of the Holocaust are very hard to tell. It's hard to relay them and that it takes multiple strategies and many different kinds of narrative to make the horrors and the long reach of the Holocaust available to really help people understand why we have to keep talking about it and why we have to keep remembering it. So that's just a place to start with Spiegelman.
Jana Cunningham:
So I'm really interested in this aspect of the graphic novel. And so can you talk a little bit about why or how can the graphic novel tell the story in a way that a regular or novel just can't?
Maeera Schreiber:
Well, if you've ever looked at graphic novels and I really hadn't until I started teaching this book, one of the things that you realize is that the whole page makes a difference and the things are happening on the page, not just in the narrative, the words that are happening, but the images that are happening. So there's at least two major ways in which information or the narrative is being told. One page and I feel like that old Bob and Ray comic story about they're on comedy routine about being on the radio and saying, "Wish you could be here." And they're trying to talk about things that you can't see because it's on the radio, that's kind of how I feel right now.
Maeera Schreiber:
But one of the things is, if you look at it and you have to look at it, he's talking about relaying the story of his father and his mother and how they're copped and the way he represents it is by showing them in the middle of the page. And there's a landscape behind them and the landscape is in the shape of a swastika, and it shows how they have no any way they go, any direction. If they turn to the right to the left, they go east, if they go west, it doesn't matter. It's all in hands of the Third Reich.
Maeera Schreiber:
And to teach students who often ask, "Why didn't people escape? Why didn't they just run away?" That picture explains it in just a moment of strong visual recognition, how the gates and the ways out were closed. So that's something that happens on the page. Sometimes pictures are more powerful or differently powerful than words and Spiegelman does both.
Jana Cunningham:
And there's probably not many, I would imagine graphic novels about the Holocaust or any sort of book with pictures.
Maeera Schreiber:
It's interesting. Just about three years ago a graphic novel version, the “The Diary of Anne Frank” came out. Yeah. So perhaps your listeners would be curious pursuing that as well. I think it's worth a look. I don't find it as rewarding and I don't learn as much as I did from “Maus,” but it's certainly an interesting effort. And I think, again, the question about how do you make people understand exactly how small that space was that she... and how that space was hidden behind a door, the visual text speaks volumes.
Jana Cunningham:
Wow. So for the sake of time, I wish we could talk more about all of these writers in depth.
Maeera Schreiber:
Sure.
Jana Cunningham:
Let's move on to Ida Fink. Fink was born in Poland and from what I understand, she and her sister were able to escape the country after the German invasion using forged papers. Unlike we were talking about Spiegelman, she did write in fiction, correct?
Maeera Schreiber:
Yes, she did.
Jana Cunningham:
So she wrote in fiction to describe what life was like under Nazi occupation. So what was her experience like and why did she choose fiction?
Maeera Schreiber:
I think she chose fiction, although I'm careful about even using the word fiction because it's an imaginative inquiry into the question, what happened? Right. And there's always that tension between that enormous question, what happened? How did it happen? And then how we imagine it. So her writing, which is very poetic, I was in anticipation of our conversation, I was looking again at a story that I teach as part of this, it's called “The Tenth Man.” And it's a story about after the war, about what was it like to wait for people to come home and they don't come home, but people wait.
Maeera Schreiber:
And it silences you in very important ways that allow you to imagine what's it like if no one returns. It's interesting, she's kind of late as a writer, she began writing in her 40s and she lived in Israel. And one of the things I think you feel in her writing very much is an effort to find the language to tell the stories, that these are hard stories to tell. And there's almost a searching for words that she does in these stories that are very beautiful.
Jana Cunningham:
So her book, “A Scrap of Time and Other Stories,” a collection of stories from what I understand won the first Anne Frank Prize, what are some of the themes she explores in these stories? You talked about “The Tenth Man,” but what are these other stories?
Maeera Schreiber:
Beyond that, so one of the things, she talks about the world that was lost, the beauty that was lost. It's a place of remembering her stories and grasping at the difficulty of remembering. I think that's another very important thing that comes through in Holocaust fiction is that the memory, the act of remembering is sometimes necessary, but almost always enormously painful. And the pain of remembering really comes through in her writing. I think the other thing that comes through is that one of the reasons I proposed her to you initial was that she's an example of a woman writer and I think we'll get a chance to talk about another one as well.
Maeera Schreiber:
But one of the things that's happening in Holocaust literary studies now is that there were really excavating a space and recognizing that had different experiences in the war and that in during the Holocaust and they had different experiences in the camps and that those stories need to be told. So one of the things also that she really contributes very beautifully to the larger understanding about the Holocaust is how people were sustained by relationships. She had a close relationship with her mother and that relationships informs a lot of the stories as well.
Jana Cunningham:
Lastly, let's talk about Ruth Kluger. She was a Holocaust survivor and wrote about her childhood in Nazi, Germany. Her memoir, “Still Alive,” it doesn't just talk about her time in the concentration camps when she was a child and she was a young child, she also kind of goes much further beyond that and about kind of the difficulties she faced as she just navigated the rest of her life. Can you talk more about this memoir and from what I understand also stirred some controversy.
Maeera Schreiber:
So the question about Kluger, she's a relatively new writer for me. I just started teaching her really just last fall. And I think she's an incredible voice in this whole landscape of Holocaust literature. One of the things that's distinctive about her is that she's very feisty and one, you could even say, flinty cranky. She's not nice, and that's important I think and in that way, it's a little bit like in Art Spiegelman's narrative, her father isn't nice. And I think, especially when we have idealized Anne Frank, for all kinds of legitimate reasons, but we tend to pity and almost turn those who suffered and died in Holocaust or survived, but carried you deep wounds, we tend to be sentimental about them.
Maeera Schreiber:
And we don't realize, first of all, these were incredibly vibrant often in these cases of the writers really smart people who had a lot to say and their lives were really torpedoed by what happened. Right. And there were consequences to that right there. The consequences of these kinds of wounds are not always ones that we want to draw close to quite the opposite. I think Ruth Kluger would probably have been a difficult person to be friends with, frankly. She's difficult. I think though that said, I think one of the things she does is she's very upfront about the privileging of male writers in Holocaust writing. And she's sometimes some of the controversies, I'm not sure this is what you're referring to, but she's almost she errs to a fault when she tries to represent the Third Reich as solely a masculine event. Right.
Maeera Schreiber:
And that she sees an over simplified ways, a gendered war going on as well. It's interesting for purposes of teaching and discussion and for your readers out there, it's certainly worth looking at because it makes you ask, "Okay. What was the experience of women? Where were all of that?" So she's terrific as somebody who really makes a space for it, she's also really different from Ida Fink who's so poetic and has this lovely relationship with her mother where Ruth Kluger does not like her mother at all. And for students, at least it's good for them to see a complicated family relationship. And again, it goes much further than Anne Frank, and such, and really displaying the intricacies. These were real people and they had complicated lives.
Jana Cunningham:
And that's, I think kind of what intrigued me about, I mean, I had never heard of Ruth Kluger, but when I was kind of researching her book made me realize and what I have read about Holocaust survivors, I haven't read much about what happened after the Holocaust and how they went on with their lives and how they immigrated to other countries or in Ruth Kruger's case, I think she came to the US, right?
Maeera Schreiber:
Yes. She did.
Jana Cunningham:
And so I think we don't hear much about how they had this whole rest of their life that they need to deal with all of these horrible years.
Maeera Schreiber:
Right. And the ghosts in Kluger's narrative, she's haunted by her brother's ghost. And she has a really beautiful and heartbreaking narrative of where she talks about being a suburban housewife. And in New Jersey, I think working at Princeton and she writes a poem about Halloween and called Halloween and a Ghost. And she imagines that her brother who had died in the Holocaust and she watched him being snatched, comes to knock at the door too, as part of a Halloween performance. Yeah. And the idea that you can be living a new life and your past is always present.
Jana Cunningham:
Oh, absolutely. And so what class are you teaching these books in?
Maeera Schreiber:
So I teach a class that's called Holocaust Literature and Culture. And yeah, and I teach these books and others as well.
Jana Cunningham:
Okay. And is that an undergraduate course?
Maeera Schreiber:
It's an undergraduate course, but it's open to HB40 people
Jana Cunningham:
Oh, wonderful.
Maeera Schreiber:
So, yeah, and I love having many generations in the room.
Jana Cunningham:
Yeah. I bet that makes for intriguing conversations because these books, they all seem they would target and attract a completely different audience, so to bring everyone together would be very interesting.
Maeera Schreiber:
It is. And I get interesting students. If I may, I had of a student who's a member of a first nation tribe and he will be joining, I hope our graduate program. And he came to the class because he wanted to find language for talking about first generation, first nation genocide. And to have him there and to share his sorting out the consequences of what happened to his tribe and his family and to put it in context of this historical phenomena is exactly the connections that we need to make as we go forward.
Jana Cunningham:
That was Maeera Schreiber, associate professor of English. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu.