The Holocaust:Literary Considerations

Adapted from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Curriculum

Prior Knowledge

• What prior knowledge do you have?

• Which texts have you read?

• Which movies have you seen?

• What have you already studied?

Disclaimer

• Please note that this is not a history lesson; merely a short overview followed by literary considerations.

I <3 Ms. Pino’s

class

1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

Hitler in powerBoycottAntisemitic laws

Nuremberg Laws

KristallnachtEvian Conference

Germany invades PolandWarsaw ghetto establishedVoyage of the St. Louis

Invasion of USSREinsatzgruppen massacres

Deportations to killing centers

Warsaw ghettouprising

Deportations fromHungary

Death marchesGermany surrendersLiberation ofCamps

1941-43 1944-451925-42

German Jewsmust wear the yellow star

Holocaust Literature in Context

German Jews expelled from public schools

1937 - 45

1942-44

How does this pertain to English?• Survivors, as primary

sources, are eye-witnesses of this period in time. As they pass on, their written works become their voice.

• Consider the motive behind the diaries and letters that were carefully hidden.– The victims wanted their

stories to be known.• In History you learn the

facts; in English the stories. Through reading, you experience the world.

This milk can, filled to the brim with diaries and letters, was carefully buried so that the truth could eventually be heard.

Book Burning: The First Step to Public Persuasion and Ignorance

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."

Heinrich Heine

Basic Overview: The Holocaust

• The Holocaust refers to a specific genocidal event in twentieth-century history: the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945.– Be careful with terms like “The Germans”; they did not act alone.

The time period known as “The Holocaust” is offensive to some people because he word holocaust refers to a sacrifice by fire- sometimes offensive to people because it implies the Jews were sacrificed for the greater good. What do you think?

Basic Overview: continued

Jews were the primary victims— 6 million were murdered; Gypsies, the handicapped, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons.

Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.

Photo montage of victimsUSHMM Washington D.C.

Systematic• Ghettos: Sections of the city to segregate

prior to transition

• Concentration Camps: holding camps

• Labor camps: prisoners were put to work

• Death camps: only one purpose for these

• Trains transported “purposefully”

The Ghettos

Sections of cities were first gated off to segregate Jews. These became ghettos. Some people were transported into ghettos.

These were very condensed living quarters. Basic living necessitates such as food and running water were limited. This quickly led to the spread of diseases such as Typhoid.

Concentration Camps• These holding camps served two main

purposes: to demoralize and dehumanize.

• Prisoners were immediately separated from their families and then stripped of their belongings, clothing, and hair.

• There is great value in having a sense of self and a purpose. What happens when those two things are stripped from you?– Eliminates the desire to escape and rebel.

• Where do you go if you are convinced you have nowhere to go?

• Freedom is only desirable if you have a will and purpose to be free.

Belongings were sorted and recycled.

Piles of shoes that belonged to prisoners who were murdered upon arrival, were recycled. Auschwitz 1945

Hair was used to make bomb fuses, felt, thread, rope and mattress stuffing.

Labor Camps

• Prisoners were forced to engage in strenuous penal labor and production to aid the war.

Death Camps

• Purpose: to complete the final step in The Final Solution

The Centrality of Auschwitz• Auschwitz was a death

camp. It is also the only camp that tattooed ID #’s on the arms of victims.

• The amount of planning it took to simply transport people- never mind murder them and recycle their belongings- required a system.

– Many people claim they didn’t do anything to stop the killing because they “didn’t know”. Historian Raul Hilberg points out that over 1 million Germans must have known about the death camps, just by virtue of their association with the railroads.

Avoid simple assumptions to complex history.

“I would have left!”“I would have killed

someone!”

The power of propaganda and bandwagon persuasion…

Resistance Occurred

Portrait of Jewish partisans (Bedzin ghetto, Poland 1942). Jewish resistance occurred in many forms and many places, including armed revolts in the death camps.

• The Evian Conference sent a message to the Jews that even if they could get out of Germany, most countries didn’t want to take on massive immigration during lean economic times.

• How has the cartoonist labeled the man in the middle? What does this imply about the tenor of the times?

Why didn’t they just leave?

The Evian Conference. Political cartoon entitled, "Will the Evian Conference guide him to freedom?“, published in July 1938, The New York Times

Some people immigrated successfully

The voyage of the St. Louis, May – June 1939

•Just because it happened does not mean it was inevitable–Conscious choices were made

A teacher points out the salient features of a student's profile during a lesson in racial instruction. Teaching this subject became mandatory in 1934.

Consider this: A greater percentage of teachers joined the Nazi party than did any other profession.

Job security?

French police round up foreign Jews, 1941

• The Nazis found willing collaborators in many occupied territories. They couldn’t have pulled it off by themselves. – A member of the Lithuanian

auxiliary police, who has just returned from taking part in the mass execution of the local Jewish population in the Rase Forest, auctions off their personal property in the central

market of Utena.

Lithuanians, July 1941

Denmark, October 1943: The Danish did many things to help the Jews escape and survive. In this picture, a crowd gathers around a Danish Nazi and a Jew he has apprehended. Danish police later helped the Jewish man to escape.

Avoid comparisons of pain

•Don’t jump to conclusions about other people’s pain, i.e. “The Holocaust was the most difficult period of time.”

•Pain is an abstract and relative concept. It is by no means a contest: our goal is simply to widen our knowledge and experience through literature.

Levels of suffering? Injustice causes

suffering, period.

Rwanda

American slavery Armenia

Trail of Tears

Roma, 1939 - 1942

A group of Gypsy prisoners congregate in the Rivesaltes internment camp.

The Roma experience came closest to that of the Jews. Persecuted as an inferior race, between 25 – 50 % of their prewar population murdered by the Nazis, by members of the Einsatzgruppen and in concentration and death camps.

Don’t be fooled by stereotypical descriptions

Which students do you think are Jewish?(all of them)

Important Terms

• Genocide- the systematic and planned extermination of an entire nation, race, or ethnic group

• Annihilation- total destruction

• Holocaust- the state-sponsored systematic persecution of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945

• Commemoration- honoring the memory of or serving as a memorial

• Totalitarianism- total control of the country by the government

• Fascism- a system of government that is marked by stringent social and economic control, a strong centralized government usually headed by a dictator

• Pogrom- government-organized attacks on Jewish neighborhoods

• Anti-Semitism- ill-feeling or hatred toward Jews

• Stereotype- commonly held popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals

• Racism- hatred of a person or group because of race or ethnic background

• Bigotry- obstinately or intolerantly devoted to opinions, prejudices, and animosity about a group of peoplePrejudice- a preconceived opinion or judgment

What do these terms have in common?

• Kristallnacht • The Final Solution• Aryan • The Jewish Question• Resettlement• Euthanasia• Treated appropriately

Kristallnacht Final Solution

Aryan Jewish question

ResettlementEuthanasia

• These are all the perpetrators’ terms. We have to qualify them when we use them --- with “finger quotes” or with a disclaimer --- “What the Nazis called “resettlement in the East.” Even though Kristallnacht has become widely accepted, it is the Nazi term that focuses on the broken shop windows of the Jewish merchants, and so it implies that the violence of November 9, 1938, simply set the economy right. Even when we use the term “Jew,” we have to remember that the Nazis did the defining based upon the grandparents’ religion.