The world is at home. Or at least a large part of the world is staying home to "flatten the curve" of Covid-19. We are living in unprecedented times. Most retail stores are closed, Amazon deliveries can take weeks, there are no crowds at movie theaters, professional sports leagues have postponed their seasons, and we can't get our hair cut. It is a different world from the one we inhabited just two months ago.
Those unable to leave Germany were often women and the elderly. Thousands of men had already been rounded up in the years prior. Those who could not escape Germany went into hiding, the rest would be sent to concentration camps and murdered.
Among those who did get out of Germany were Otto Frank and his family. Frank moved his family to Amsterdam in 1933 to escape the Nazis. In 1938 and 1941 he tried desperately to obtain a visa to the United States to get his family to safety, but his paperwork was never processed. Whether it was irregularities in ration cards or a tip, in August of 1944 the Nazis found the annex where the Franks, Van Pelses , and Fritz Pfeffer were in hiding. They were arrested and by September 3, 1944 they were deported on what was to be the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz.
We have all been left with this youthful image of Anne as a young girl. She is a part of our human collective memory now. And perhaps it is good to remember her as full of life and fun. But on some level it is a untenable image because we know what happened to the Jews, Gypsies, gay men, and others who were sent to the camps. Men and women were stripped naked, "disinfected", tattooed, and had their heads shaved. They were starved, worked to death, packed into overcrowded barracks, and were murdered. We know this happened to Anne.
Melissa Raphael in her work, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz noted that, "While the cinema commonly represents women in Auschwitz as grimy but interestingly pale and gaunt, the memoirs record that the surface of the body was partially concealed by mud and filth and opened by suppurating sores, boils, insect bites, sunburn, frostbite and beatings. The body was also internally polluted by contaminated food and the putrid water from ditches and puddles that women were compelled to drink in their desperate thirst." (p. 66) There was no way for women to get and keep clean as they suffered from diarrhea and other illnesses. Hollywood films cannot reproduce for us the horror of Holocaust because it is unimaginable.
We know from survivors like Nanette Blitz that Anne suffered from scabies, a rash brought on by mites that burrow into the skin. In October 1944, while my grandparents were getting married in England, Blitz recalled that Anne was "bald, emaciated, and shivering." By January/February of 1945 Anne and Margot had been sent to Bergen Belsen and Anne was suffering from Typhus, an infections disease that ravaged the camps. In the end she was "delirious" and "burning up" according to survivor accounts. Anne Frank died a few days after her sister Margot in early 1945. She died believing her entire family was dead.
It is uncomfortable to think of Anne Frank this way. We don't like the image of an emaciated, bald, filthy, and frightened 15 year old. Is it gratuitous or obscene to describe her in these terms? I don't know. It is what happened. And it is perhaps true that the sanitization of Anne enables us to forget what is meant by "The Holocaust." It is too easy for us to play political games with an event from the last century that killed upwards of 11 million people and traumatized millions more.
And so I am back where I started. I'm at home, watching protesters cry about their liberties and demanding to be freed from their living rooms to go bowling. I am back in the midst of a pandemic where Rep. Heather Scott from Idaho claimed that forcing people to socially distance themselves and stay home is like Nazi Germany: "I mean, that's no different than Nazi German, where you had a government telling people, 'You are an essential worker or a nonessential worker' and the nonessential workers got put on a train." Except it is not the same. Posting a meme saying that people seeking safety are like Jews "willingly" climbing into cattle carts is appalling. What's more, it shows that people who post them, and leaders who traffic in these false comparisons only demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of what actually happened.
Today is Yom HaShoah. It is our obligation to remember. Part of that obligation is educate not only ourselves but others. Never Forget. Never Again.
But as many of us believe in the need for these temporary restrictions on our freedom of movement, others decry the measures as authoritarian, Nazi-like, and some even suggest that it's like the Holocaust. They view the rest of us as sheepishly boarding cattle cars - an image which simultaneously makes light of the Shoah and blames the victims for their own suffering and death. It describes them as willingly and passively following directives, as if there were other options they should have and could have exercised. But to paint that picture is to re-victimize them again. Something we should never do.
What seems most obvious to me during this time, and as we commemorate Yom HaShoah, is that there are large swaths of this country and the world where education systems have failed to teach about the Holocaust in a meaningful way. People know about Anne Frank, maybe the Warsaw Ghetto uprising ... they have heard of "Schindler's List" (because it was a film), but somehow they have never been forced to confront the horror that was the Holocaust. The black and white images of emaciated men and women seem too otherworldly - as if this was something that happened in the 19th century, not within the last 80 years. And even as their numbers begin dwindle, many have no idea that some survivors of the camps are still with us.
Marion Kaplan, in her book Between Dignity and Despair notes that "Jews were careful, if flawed observers of an unprecedented situation. They had voted predominantly for liberal parties and the left during the Weimar Republic, political groups that included the Jews and opposed antisemitic fanaticism. After 1933, they were neither obtuse nor stubbornly German... Hindsight that condemns them for not having left in time fails to acknowledge how unimaginable Nazism was to most contemporary observers or how earnestly Jews tried to emigrate once the danger was apparent. Jewish behavior has to be understood within the context of their political understanding, their hopes, and their abandonment by potential countries of immigration." (p. 16) While Germany did not become a unified country until 1871, The Jews had done everything that German society had demanded to gain their emancipation within the various German kingdoms starting in 1808. They became Germans. And even as certain elements within society complained that Jews still did not possess the proper sense of volkgeist, and never could, Jews enrolled in universities, flourished in the arts, science, medicine, and the judiciary. They were German. When the Nazis came to power Jews across Europe were already familiar with cycles of peace and pogrom that ravaged Europe, and many believed the Nazi threat would work itself out over time. They were living in enlightened Germany, after all.
But the Nazis did not fade away, and slowly they managed to completely "de-assimilate" the Jewish community by shutting them out of civil society. They were barred from serving as doctors, teachers, and civil servants. They were purged from the judiciary. They were banned from the arts and journalism. They were strangled economically by the closure and boycotts of Jewish owned businesses. Many Jews were forced to sell their businesses to Aryans and ridiculously low prices. According to Kaplan "By April 1938, over 60 percent of all businesses Jews owned before 1933 no longer existed, and Jewish social workers were trying to help 60,000 unemployed Jews." (p 28). The Jews were disappearing from the cultural, civic, and social life of the Reich and few seemed to notice. Hannah Arendt noted that, "Our friends Nazified themselves!The problem ... after all, was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did."
By November 1938 when Kristallnacht pogrom began, Jews across Germany knew that they had to leave. Some 78,000 Jews did leave. For those who remained their options were narrowing. They had been fleeced by the Nazi government, deprived of the ability even to make a living. In February of 1939 the Nazis issued a decree that expropriated all valuable stones and metals from the Jews. For those who still had the means to leave the difficulty became "where?" Countries around the world, including the United States refused to increase their immigration quotas to allow more European Jews entrance. Complicating matters was the fact that they could not purchase tickets for a ship without a visa. If they could get a visa they still had to go through the German bureaucracy in order to get their permit in order to leave, and it often took months to gather the necessary paperwork.
In Berlin, the Gestapo set up a special 'one-step' emigration bureau where 'the emigrating Jew was fleeced, totally and completely in the manner of an assembly line.' When they entered they were 'still ... the owner(s) of an apartment perhaps a business, a bank account and some savings. As they were pushed from section to section 'one possession after the next was taken.' By the time they left, they had been 'reduced to ... stateless beggar(s),' grasping one precious possession, an exit visa.: (Kaplan, 131)
Those unable to leave Germany were often women and the elderly. Thousands of men had already been rounded up in the years prior. Those who could not escape Germany went into hiding, the rest would be sent to concentration camps and murdered.
Among those who did get out of Germany were Otto Frank and his family. Frank moved his family to Amsterdam in 1933 to escape the Nazis. In 1938 and 1941 he tried desperately to obtain a visa to the United States to get his family to safety, but his paperwork was never processed. Whether it was irregularities in ration cards or a tip, in August of 1944 the Nazis found the annex where the Franks, Van Pelses , and Fritz Pfeffer were in hiding. They were arrested and by September 3, 1944 they were deported on what was to be the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz.
Melissa Raphael in her work, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz noted that, "While the cinema commonly represents women in Auschwitz as grimy but interestingly pale and gaunt, the memoirs record that the surface of the body was partially concealed by mud and filth and opened by suppurating sores, boils, insect bites, sunburn, frostbite and beatings. The body was also internally polluted by contaminated food and the putrid water from ditches and puddles that women were compelled to drink in their desperate thirst." (p. 66) There was no way for women to get and keep clean as they suffered from diarrhea and other illnesses. Hollywood films cannot reproduce for us the horror of Holocaust because it is unimaginable.
We know from survivors like Nanette Blitz that Anne suffered from scabies, a rash brought on by mites that burrow into the skin. In October 1944, while my grandparents were getting married in England, Blitz recalled that Anne was "bald, emaciated, and shivering." By January/February of 1945 Anne and Margot had been sent to Bergen Belsen and Anne was suffering from Typhus, an infections disease that ravaged the camps. In the end she was "delirious" and "burning up" according to survivor accounts. Anne Frank died a few days after her sister Margot in early 1945. She died believing her entire family was dead.
It is uncomfortable to think of Anne Frank this way. We don't like the image of an emaciated, bald, filthy, and frightened 15 year old. Is it gratuitous or obscene to describe her in these terms? I don't know. It is what happened. And it is perhaps true that the sanitization of Anne enables us to forget what is meant by "The Holocaust." It is too easy for us to play political games with an event from the last century that killed upwards of 11 million people and traumatized millions more.
And so I am back where I started. I'm at home, watching protesters cry about their liberties and demanding to be freed from their living rooms to go bowling. I am back in the midst of a pandemic where Rep. Heather Scott from Idaho claimed that forcing people to socially distance themselves and stay home is like Nazi Germany: "I mean, that's no different than Nazi German, where you had a government telling people, 'You are an essential worker or a nonessential worker' and the nonessential workers got put on a train." Except it is not the same. Posting a meme saying that people seeking safety are like Jews "willingly" climbing into cattle carts is appalling. What's more, it shows that people who post them, and leaders who traffic in these false comparisons only demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of what actually happened.
Today is Yom HaShoah. It is our obligation to remember. Part of that obligation is educate not only ourselves but others. Never Forget. Never Again.
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| Paalso Paal Sørensen 2009 |
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