Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University, was recently hosted by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Center for Jewish Studies. He gave a talk entitled: “Survivors: Psychological Trauma and Memory Politics in Hiroshima and Auschwitz.” I sat down with Dr. Zwigenberg for a wide-ranging conversation covering survivor politics, the gendered dimensions of social work, praxis of care, the notion of social trauma, and other topics related to the global politics of memory.*

Nikoleta Sremac: One thing I’m curious about which you mentioned in your talk is the application of the concept of trauma from psychiatry and psychology to sociology, or other fields where it’s used in a collective sense like this idea of cultural trauma. What is your take on that concept?

Ran Zwigenberg: I’m very ambivalent about that concept. I don’t reject it completely. I think there are a lot of good arguments made by very smart people for social trauma. However, I’m ambivalent about using psychological concepts that pertain to particular psychological events and individual bodies and expanding them to the body politic or the social body. This has too much resonance to organic ideas of community which I’m very hostile to. It also for me is a bit of a shortcut that I don’t want to take. There is an example in my book, where one scholar said that there is a lapse between the Holocaust and the 1960s when people start talking about the Holocaust and this corresponds to the lapse in PTSD where you only feel the symptoms later on. I don’t buy this. There are very good reasons for why people start talking or don’t start talking at particular moments. There was actually a particular point in time we can point out. It was a very conscious decision made by the government to make people start talking. They put people as witnesses on trial. I think we should use different kinds of narratives and different kinds of sociological explanations here.

What do you think scholars are not taking into account when transporting these concepts?

First and foremost, historically, it’s an anachronism. People of different eras did not experience trauma the way we experience it today. It doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer or have anxiety and other symptoms that we may now see as PTSD. But we have to be very aware of the fact that we are taking a category we have now and retroactively putting it onto different historical situations. They are also neglecting the cultural ethnocentricity of their concepts. The concept of PTSD was developed in 1980 in the U.S. in relation specifically to the Holocaust, Vietnam, Hiroshima, and other places. It’s essentially an American notion, and it’s still not used as much in other cultural situations. To apply it to various places like Israel in the 1950s, France, Europe, the Soviet Union, Serbia in your case—culturally it doesn’t work. It’s doubly problematic when we talk about Japan and other non-Western contexts. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it has to be done very carefully, and you have to be careful about confusing individual experiences with social experience. The mechanism is different. 

Sure. But I think it’s trying to get at this part that you do mention about constructing a narrative of this experience. People do that collectively.

But why are you calling it a trauma? Why do you want to use this term? It’s easy. I don’t think the originators [of the term] meant for it to become a shortcut, but I think for a lot of people it has become one. A shorthand for a whole array of things that are put into one box and called trauma. Different people and communities have different narratives they construct to explain—let’s call them social wounds. One example is the Harkis who fought for the French during the Algerian War of Independence and were then resettled in internment camps in France. The Harkis talk about how they “keep the wound alive,” and pass it on. This might be again a problematic metaphor, but it’s still recognized as a metaphor. We don’t think about social trauma as a metaphor; we think of it as a real thing. 

Thank you; that’s very helpful. Could you please describe your book that’s coming out and your previous research?

My first book, which built on my dissertation, was about memory culture in Hiroshima and its connection and entanglement with the Holocaust. The main thrust of the book is the rise of the idea of survivorhood, as a trope and as a historical process of creating transnational figures of the survivor, the witness, and the like. What I wanted to do in this new book is to write both the pre-history from the Japanese point of view and also the post-history. What was the historical impact of the globalization of those categories? How does this happen and how do we end up with PTSD? What I’m aiming to do in this book is look, as much as possible, at the terms that survivors used at the time to understand their own experiences, and how they were understood by researchers. The book is meant to historicize PTSD in a trans-cultural context.

Could you talk a bit about the terms that survivors were using in Hiroshima at the time and about the development of PTSD as a concept?

Generally speaking, most people cannot discern, both the survivors themselves and doctors, what is somatic, for example, the physical impacts of radiation or starvation, versus the impact of mental shock, or what we now call mental trauma. For survivors, fatigue is the biggest category of symptoms: muscle issues, headaches, nightmares. They talk about their lack of ability to get up in the morning and continue with life. Sometimes people mention wounds of the heart. A lot of times and this is more from work about veterans, they try to rationalize what happened. They don’t really make the connection between their alcoholism and the war. They focus more on the connection between their alcoholism and their inability to find a job. Further, if you don’t believe your trauma is real, this has a mitigating effect. You think: “I shouldn’t be traumatized.” I mean, they did not even think in those terms because no one thought in those terms. If you don’t have the concept, you don’t interpret your experience that way.

They describe issues that we now might say are symptoms of PTSD, but as I said yesterday, you cannot discern causation. These people were also discriminated against because they were survivors and because a lot of them had physical disabilities. People didn’t want to marry them. How much of their anxiety and other symptoms were due to the fact that a lot of them were from very low socioeconomic backgrounds? Most of the bombs were dropped on the center of town and on low-income neighborhoods. People had less resources and ability to pull back from this, and their health was worse, to begin with. There are so many different things that impact this.

A lot of times, these processes leave the survivors in a situation where the real care is done primarily by social workers and nurses and communities. Mostly, women [and not] at the hospital. And this is my last chapter, which I hope I can write. I really want to give a whole chapter to care and praxis of care, because there is a pattern of denial, up until again there are a couple of male heroes that come in. Once the guys are done playing the research game, all the anxiety and social ills fall on women in society. I’m trying to capture this historically, but it’s very hard. People didn’t leave documents. Social workers didn’t write long treaties about how they did their work. 

Because they didn’t think anyone would care?

Or it was oral. Or it was just that the next worker came around and they were too busy. They were not paid enough to have time to sit down and write. They didn’t think it was important enough; they didn’t see the historical context. It might just be another book, but this is what I’m doing now. 

They probably would have the most accurate or insightful descriptions of what people were facing. 

Yes, because they had to deal with this! They had to deal with the husband who didn’t want to go to work, who couldn’t leave the house, who made them the breadwinner and also took out all his frustration on them. They were also carrying the burden of how society treated the guy. It’s tragically classic in a way. I started doing this because I went and looked. I really, really wanted to see how people dealt with this. I want to understand people’s experiences on the ground, and in those documents, I find social workers again and again. I find that they were the ones who would come and go to people’s houses. They were the ones who would collect the data. They were the ones who talked to people. I’m sure there’s some kind of corpus of knowledge that they developed; I just don’t know how to get there. It’s still a work in progress.

That’s great that you’re trying to document that, though, and trying to find that information to include it. I agree that’s really important.  

I’m interested in women who are picking up after all the mess that we [i.e. men] made. A lot of this is similar to my own experience. I was in the army, and when I went back after combat, who had to deal with my moods? It’s very mild compared to what these people went through, but my mom had to deal with this. My girlfriend had to deal with this. I didn’t go to a psychiatrist. I went to a care worker at City Hall. I know that similar things happen to survivors all over the world. And it’s not even institutionalized. It doesn’t even have to be social workers. It can be women in the household.

Could you talk about how some of this has changed in Japan, in terms of the construction of survivors as something that is more accepted now?

It almost went from something people were ashamed of to something people are proud of. Even though some people still don’t want to talk about it, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are highly regarded in Japan overall as a peace symbol. This is related to the way that the government is pushing the idea of Japan’s unique position as a non-nuclear country. At the same time, if you look at what happened to survivors of Fukushima, they are treated very similarly to how Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors were treated [i.e. discriminated against]. My good friend who works on nuclear production and accidents all over the world has said that radiation makes people invisible. It’s true—once people are contaminated, people don’t care about them. It’s amazing how immediate it is.

Does this sort of stigma continue in Japan even though survivors, in theory, are highly valued?

Yes, because there is a hierarchy of victimhood. Some victims have more status than others. If your event becomes a foundational event for the nation, or institutions, or global memory culture as a whole, you have much more of a voice and status—if you choose to use it. It’s a different situation when people don’t want to talk about it. Then they feel bad because they’re not a “good survivor.” Another example is that people like to talk about civilian victims but no one wants to talk about military victims, because it’s inconvenient. I know a PhD student working on memory maps. There is an app in Hiroshima now, which lets you walk with your phone and see exactly where people were hit by the bomb. It’s an amazing tool, but there are huge gaps. One thing I noticed is there was this enormous military compound in Hiroshima right in the middle of the city, not very far from where the bomb was dropped. And there were 40,000 soldiers there. About half of them became casualties, and the other half, no one really knows. If you walk through this area, there’s not a single memory that was recorded there. It’s totally erased. It’s not on purpose. It’s just a structural idea of whose memory is valid, whose trauma is valid, and whose message will be heard. 

I’m studying Serbia, which is considered a perpetrator country of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Nonetheless, when I talk to people there, they have a lot of pain and difficulty with the violence that was done to them, too.

Japan is a perfect example of this. When I went to the museum about the war there, the thing that really shocked me is that the first thing you hear is that on August 6^th, 1945, the bomb was dropped on Japan. What do you mean it was dropped? The use of passive voice is a strategy that divorces the war and Japan’s role as perpetrator and America’s role as the perpetrator, because it’s very convenient. You don’t have to talk about the past, you can just talk about the bomb. History starts August 6^th. To isolate little areas historically or geographically gives you a much purer idea of victimhood. I don’t know what happened in Serbia, but I guess if you go to a Serbian museum of the wars, you’ll see a very particular notion of Serbian victimhood.

Yes, the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia. That’s what is primarily focused on, which nobody talks about here.

It’s the same everywhere. It’s the nation-state. I’m very suspicious every time nation-states take it upon themselves to commemorate anything, even with the best of intentions like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial or Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Power, national narratives, all those things will come into the individual situation. Memories become the tool of nation-states.

What will your next book be about?

The next book will be on the military history of Hiroshima and what was erased by the whole narrative of Hiroshima as a peace city. It is a place that is supposed to commemorate something, yet they always look forward to healing. It’s supposed to leave a memory behind and keep it alive but it’s sort of a paradox. Institutional memories always have a greater goal: reconciliation, peace, democracy, stability, healing, economic recovery. All of those things need forgiveness and forgetting, yet memory institutions keep wounds alive, and those wounds also have a tendency to forget whatever came before them and to overshadow narratives of nationalism, perpetration, and the like.

Fascinating.

I hope so. It interests me, but, you know, it might just be my obsession. 

*Responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Nikoleta Sremac is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and a Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. She studies gendered power relations and collective memory, primarily in the former Yugoslavia and the United States.  

Before the trophy went to Adolf Hitler, German Emperor and King of Prussia Wilhelm II held the award for Most Hated Man on Earth. And while Hitler’s Third Reich has become the ultimate go-to place for much journalistic handwringing about the horrible times we are living in, in reality it feels like we are still stuck in Wilhelm’s Second Reich — it’s Kaiserzeit in America. Donald Trump and the last German Emperor have a lot in common, the vanity, insecurity, the penchant for bombast and persönliches Regiment (personal rule), to name just a few. In Wilhelm’s case the brakes on his impulsive and egotistical personality came off after he fired Bismarck, the experienced chancellor he inherited from his father, and surrounded himself with sycophantic generals and noble toadies who went along with his imperial fantasies and straight into World War I.

I am reminded of those spineless Wilhelmine characters every time I am watching a White House press briefing. It’s not so much the bumbling fool at the microphone who advertises Clorox for healing the nation. That’s to be expected from someone who has been in sales all his life. What’s truly troubling is the backdrop of supposedly educated advisors and cabinet members who gaze at the president nodding their heads like bobble toys every time he opens his mouth. Not much different from Wilhelm’s bootlicking court jesters. I often hear the argument that when people do that, they don’t mean to kowtow to Trump but are only paying respect to the office of POTUS. As if through some weird Hegelian twist the presidency has a spirit and will of its own, whether the job is filled or not. Or are people afraid that the Founding Fathers will be miffed if their genius isn’t appreciated and hurl lightning bolts from heaven at them?

Let’s face it, the President of the United States and Donald Trump are one and the same ugly thing right now. There is no need to get sentimental about the Founding Fathers’ wisdom. They handed—by today’s standards—a grotesque amount of powers to the presidency and hoped that checks, balances, and judicial review would somehow tame any officeholder with tyrannic ambitions. In hindsight, it is surprising that it took 44 presidents before somebody came along who ruthlessly abused the many constitutional loopholes to his personal advantage. But that Trump is in the White House can only partially be blamed on 18th-century baggage like the Electoral College. Constitutions are just as good as the people who interpret them, which is another way of quoting Joseph de Maistre’s, “Every nation has the government it deserves.” Hitler became Germany’s dictator without ever breaching the democratic Weimar Constitution; the Reichstag voted to give him absolute powers. So, whose fault was that? Wilhelm II wasn’t voted into office, but he still reflected the preference of most Germans at the time for authoritarian leadership. He was deserved as well, I guess. All these nodders and pseudo-patriots that don’t stand up to a mobster like Trump out of some warped respect for his office make me feel that, well, he is deserved too — a gigantic system failure of the people, by the people, and for the people. I can’t wait for a better system reboot in November.

Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.

Nora Krug is a German-American author and illustrator. Her 2018 visual memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home about WWII and her own German family history, has won numerous awards and has been translated into several languages. Krug is an Associate Professor of Illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. She spoke at the University of Minnesota in February 2020.

George Dalbo: You have said that it took leaving Germany for you to get to a place where you could conceive of writing your graphic memoir. Could you expand on this? Additionally, is there something about settling in the United States, your current personal or professional situation, or the present political or social climate that also influenced your decision to write the book?

Nora Krug: Many different factors contributed to my writing this book. One of the strongest was definitely that I left Germany. This is probably an experience that many people have had; when you leave your home, and you find yourself surrounded by people who are not from your cultural context, you suddenly begin to realize how deeply rooted you are in your own culture, and you are simultaneously confronted with your own culture in a much different way than if you had never left. Of course, growing up in Germany in my generation, we learned so much about the Second World War and the atrocities that were committed, but we learned about it collectively. When you remove yourself as an individual from that context, you are suddenly forced to confront the subjects on an individual rather than a collective level because you are approached about them as an individual by the people around you. This, at least, has been my experience. Also, settling in New York City, which traditionally had been the major port of entry for refugees from the war, I was much more aware of the effect that my cultural heritage could have on my neighbors and my friends, many of whom are Jewish. That certainly contributed to my thinking about the book, as well. Had I moved to Seattle or the Midwest, I probably would not have felt the same confrontations.

In the United States, one often hears that Germany has done such a good job confronting their own difficult past with World War Two and the Holocaust, especially. Do you think that this is the case? In your opinion, what have been some of the gaps in the way Germany has approached its difficult past?

I think Germany has done a very good job when it comes to remembering, memorializing, and collectively making public commitments to taking on responsibility so that such things will never happen again. You can see this, despite the recent far-right-wing extremism in Germany,  in everyday German life and in German politics, as well. People go to the barricades very quickly when such developments happen. Just this week, you saw an example of this; the public outcry when the Conservative party [Christian Democratic Union] basically collaborated with Alternative für Deutschland. It was very satisfying to see how quickly people reacted to that in a negative way, a critical way. Where we still have a lot of work to do is on an individual level. I think that a lot of the experiences that we had, as I mentioned before, were collective and institutional. This is tremendously important; if institutions do not recognize and acknowledge the mistakes that a country has made, that is a huge problem for the country. I’m not trying to diminish the collective aspect, but the individual effort is as important because if you only memorialize collectively, you avoid the personal confrontation, and this can lead to a sense of tiredness about having to address the subject as a group, a feeling of being burdened by that task, which, I think, many Germans feel. If you do not approach the subject on an individual level, you can not take agency, individual agency. That is what I tried to do with my book, to think about investigating my own family, because I perceived it as something freeing. It freed me from this paralysis of feeling guilty but not knowing what to do about it. I have not overcome my feelings of guilt, but I have addressed them on an individual level, which made me feel like I had some agency as an artist and as a writer to talk over these things. It made me feel that I had a more constructive way of dealing with the guilt.

For the graphic memoir, you rely on several sources to reconstruct your family history, such as local and national archives, family documents, flea market finds, and personal reflections. In many cases, such as with your grandparents, who had passed away, you were unable to have conversations with family members about their experiences during World War Two. How does this shape the narrative? In what ways does this make your work similar or dissimilar to other works in this genre of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [“working through the past”] memoirs?

I think it was similar for most Germans; the grandparent’s generation did not talk much about these things, and, because of that, our parent’s generation did not know much about their experiences. It was not so much that our parents did not want to talk about these things and deprive us of these stories; they themselves had no information because their parents did not talk about their experiences. Older generations also did not have access to all of the technological tools and the research documents available today. Actually, they could not have gone beyond conversations with their parents or grandparents. In other words, the internet did not exist, and certain documents were not made open to the public at that point, so, even if my parents had wanted to go further with trying to find out about the past, they could not have accessed the same materials that I was able to access. I think my generation has many more entry points into this kind of research, and with my book, I really tried to think of any way in which I could get information. The archival research was just one type of research. I did also have conversations with people who were still alive and who knew my family in person. I conducted interviews with people who took the place of my grandparents. Also, there are the flea market objects and items, which, to me, provided both a collective and personal entry point into that period because they represent objects that were used and collected by many Germans. Such research allowed me to represent a collective German point of view, not necessarily a family member’s point of view from my family. At the same time, it is also a highly individual view; I was able to connect to these objects on an individual level even though they belonged to people I did not know at all.

Who do you see as the audience for the book? Especially as the memoir is released in translation, how do you imagine non-German audiences are connecting with the work?

Every country has its own perspective, experience, and narrative surrounding World War Two. I think that we all construct narratives about traumas retroactively. These narratives say something about our culture, and, for Germans, that narrative is obviously and completely steeped in guilt, as well as neglecting to talk or writing about German loss during the war. The Germans are incapable of really considering what the trauma of the war and the Holocaust did to them; certainly, we brought this trauma on ourselves, but it is still a trauma that we are trying to deal with to this day. I think that it is difficult for some Germans to admit this because it would put us in a position of victimhood. In the United States, there is a very different narrative, which is one of the United States as the liberator, and there is sometimes very little nuance given to different narratives that existed on the American side as well. I have noticed that when I am traveling with the book in the countries where it has come out that the responses I receive and the questions I am asked are informed by these different cultural perspectives. In Germany, the book has probably found its biggest audience, which is because a lot of Germans can identify with this story and this viewpoint, and many Germans have not tried to write about their own personal narrative. They really have not been able to figure out how to do that. Again, maybe this is because talking about one’s own losses is considered inappropriate. To some Germans, my book seems like an entry point for conducting this kind of family research. Indeed, I’m often asked by German audiences how they can begin to do such research. For many people, both German and non-German, there is little consideration that there could be a German viewpoint that is not just the Nazi perspective. I think it is very important to consider these other views because we can learn so much from them. If we try to understand how people came to think this way, we can prevent these things from happening again in the future. I think it is very important to get inside the more intimate, nuanced German war experience. What has been really satisfying when traveling with the book has been that people in all the countries I’ve been to so far have been able to translate the idea of responsibility for a national past to their own country’s history, whether this was a Canadian audience talking about First Nations people and the lack of work that has been done around that or the history of slavery in the United States. In France, journalists talked to me about the importance of actually discussing the French collaboration with Germany which has been underemphasized there because of a focus on the resistance, The memoir has been understood on a universal level, which is the best thing that could have happened, because it is not really about my family or about Germany, but it is about something more universal than that.

In addition to illustration, you use many photographs, both personal and not, in the memoir. Could you speak a little bit about your choice to use photographs and some of the ethical considerations you weighed in using them?

I’m somebody who really believes that it is our responsibility not to look away. Of course, if there is an exploitative aspect to using the photographs, then that is wrong. I think that if you can use images sensitively, you have to show them because we owe it to the people who perished to not look away. I think we owe it to them to confront ourselves with their hardship. That is not only true for World War Two and the Holocaust, but it is also true for things that are going on right now. I Think about how little we know about the conflict in Yemen and how rarely we actually see photographs of injured children, though they are being attacked on a daily basis. I think that once we see these things, we feel much more compassionate. In the course of writing the book, I thought very carefully about how to use images. One of my biggest goals was not to create a sense of false sympathy for the Germans or a sense of sentimentality, which images can very quickly do if they are used in the wrong way. In several images in the book, you see dead bodies in the background, but I decided that I wanted to focus on the German facial expressions and the reactions. On one particular page [see image below], I eliminated the dead bodies entirely because I wanted to show the moment when the German guilt actually set in and what it looked like. I wanted to show how the guilt was visually manifested in their faces and gestures. For me, there was almost something reminiscent of Renaissance paintings about that. Here I really felt that you needed to see what the cause was that led her to look like this.

In the next photo [see below], you have an idyllic landscape that looks very innocent, but the photo shows the contrast of what was actually happening all this time underneath the surface, which we were completely unaware of. In the photo, you can see this; you can experience this ignorance in a way. I think that it is very important to show these images, but it is also equally important to think about how you show them. 

George Dalbo is the Educational Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a Ph.D. student in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education. Previously, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5th-12th in public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years at an international school in Vienna, Austria.

This year’s Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is an especially important anniversary. In January, we marked 75 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Since then, through our programs on and off campus, and in collaboration with the Center for Jewish Studies, we were able to reflect on the scope of the destruction of European Jewry but also on the heroic resistance and the resiliency of the survivors. 

At the University of Minnesota, we strive to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. This year, the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies was honored to support the work of Kathryn Huether (Ph.D. candidate in Musicology) as an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow as she works to curate an audio guide for the Treblinka memorial site. Huether also received the Theresa and Nathan Bearman Graduate Fellowship in Jewish Studies in support of her research. Avraham Shaver, a recent graduate from the Center for Jewish Studies, earned a prestigious internship position with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In addition to the individual achievements of students, the University continues to offer a breadth of courses on Holocaust history, memory, and representation.

As we reflect back on the legacy of the Holocaust today, we encourage you to utilize some of the resources available digitally, including artist Felix de la Concha’s Portraying Memory project and the series of testimonies from the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies’ Survivors, Witnesses and Liberators collection. 

Find a selection of survivor testimonies below from the Portraying Memory project.

In the wake of the COVID19 outbreak, we are confronted with a globally massive threat to our health, where unparalleled measures are being proposed and enacted to counter it. We are chronicling in real-time the heroic actions of those in the field who are putting their lives on the line to make a difference coupled with heartbreaking stories of loss, separation, and suffering.

Medical personnel on the frontlines of this pandemic in my home country Spain are succumbing to illness at an astonishing rate. Currently, Spain is hobbled with the highest COVID19 caseload in all of Europe and reportedly ranks only behind the United States worldwide in terms of sheer numbers of those infected. 

The legendary Nobel laureate Albert Camus had extensively researched the “Black Death” and other diseases that had ravaged nations and empires throughout history. He looked at examples in Europe and China. However, his research was also intimately informed by the typhus outbreaks in his own Algeria. His masterpiece The Plague, in his biographer Alice Kaplan’s words, “was inspired by the 1940s—i.e., by the Nazi Occupation. The Plague used the story of a city beset by disease to express a vision beyond the absurd: the possibility of solidarity in the struggle against evil, the power of friendship and community.”

The text serves as a reminder of what is at stake and how our democracies might be altered when we emerge from this crisis. Camus’ novel was above all a response to how European societies reacted when suddenly faced with such a seemingly unstoppable force at their doorstep. The story has been read as an allegory about the reactions of the French people during WWII, ranging from those who collaborated with the Nazi regime to those that courageously decided to resist.

Camus’ underlying message is always relevant but even more so at a time of a global emergency when populations’ fears and anxieties are exploited by leaders who seize the opportunity to weaken democratic institutions that serve as a check to their power. That liberty violations occur in the face of security threats (whether real or imagined) is not new and the German Reichstag (Parliament) fire of 1933 should serve as an unmistakable lesson drawn from the past. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, is now governing by decree, without a predictable deadline to the state’s declared state of emergency. Orban’s party was also able to get a law approved in the Parliament under the guise of combating misinformation, opening the door to the persecution of dissenting journalists. Over the last few weeks, Vladimir Putin has planted Russian cities with thousands of new surveillance cameras. Will these be removed once the pandemic is defeated?  

It goes without saying that not only fragile and emerging democracies, such as those in Eastern Europe, are destabilized by the added threat of an authoritarian drift in the wake of the COVID19 crisis. A recent survey showed that a sizable number of US citizens are willing to consider truncating core civil liberties if it serves to fight this health emergency. For instance, more than 85% polled would consent to ban noncitizens from entering the country and 78% to conscripting health-care professionals to work despite risks to their health.  

Camus understood that unchecked, unquestioned power would spiral out of control like a vicious plague leaving people with no defenses to fight against it. Reading Camus in the times of the present global pandemic teaches us a precious lesson: to be alert and prepared to stand with and up for scientists looking for a cure, for our medical professionals treating the sick, and for the well-being of every person. We should also not lose sight of our support for democratic principles based on compassion and reason over narrow national divisions, xenophobia, and the temptation of authoritarian solutions.

In Spain, a popular tune from the 80s is being revived by confined residents who sing it from apartment balconies and windows: Resistiré (I will resist). It captures the mood of a nation besieged.

Please stay healthy, informed, and engaged.

Alejandro Baer, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Several years ago, I transitioned my high school Holocaust and genocide studies elective course from an in-person class to a virtual one. At the time, I had many questions and concerns about teaching such difficult subject matter in a virtual environment. While there were certainly challenges, the switch pushed me to examine my teaching praxis more deeply, explore a flipped model of learning, and find new resources and technologies to engage both synchronously and asynchronously. 

While certainly sometimes the technology seems to be more of a barrier and actual physical distance between us seems insurmountable, rich texts, robust discussions, and a common purpose inevitably bridge the gaps and bring us together as a class. In the end, I am always reminded of the resilience of my students and my own resilience as an educator. While April is going to be a difficult month for both students and educators in Minnesota and across the country, I know that we will find a way to adjust and adapt to the new and uncertain times ahead. The outpouring of support I have received from colleagues, families, and friends, gives me tremendous hope and lets me know that I am not alone. 

I’m also reflecting on the fact that April is Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. I know that many educators, myself included, use April as a time to educate students about past and current genocides. Despite the recent uncertainties and challenges for teachers and students, I’m resolved to continue this important work raising awareness of genocide and mass violence with my students. Having recently discussed the Cambodian genocide with my students, their incredulous reaction – “Why haven’t we learned about this before?” – reminds me of the importance of my commitment to educate students about past and current atrocities. 

In addition to my role as a high school teacher, I also serve as the educational outreach coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) at the University of Minnesota. CHGS has a robust collection of online resources to support you and your students this April. 

If you are planning to teach about the Holocaust this spring, we have links to 60 full-length video-recorded Minnesota Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, which were recorded in 1984 and are now housed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We also have videos of several local Holocaust survivor testimonies that were collected in collaboration with Spanish painter Felix de la Concha for CHGS’s Portraying Memories Project, in which Concha painted survivors’ portraits as they shared their stories. These testimonies are typically under 30 minutes in length and would be perfect for middle and high school students. 

If you are planning to teach about the Armenian genocide, we have a robust collection of materials in our digital archive, including Relief Posters and Articles from Minnesota Newspapers (1915-1922). These primary resources shed light on how Minnesotans may have understood the events of the genocide as they were unfolding. Our community partners at St. Sahag Armenian Church have created an online exhibit, Treasures of Memory and Hope, featuring the stories of local survivors and their families. These resources would be ideal for both middle and high school students. 

In addition, we also have many educator resource guides covering a number of different case studies of genocide, including newly published guides on Holodomor and Genocide by the Islamic State/Daesh in Iraq and Syria. We also have sample lesson plans on the Rwandan genocide, Cambodian genocide, and the U.S.-Dakota War. In addition, a recording of a recent educator workshop, “Teaching Students About Nativism and White Supremacy and their Relationship to Racism and Antisemitism,” can also be accessed online. While these resources can support what you are already doing in your virtual classrooms, we’d love to hear about how we can support you and your students within the contexts and constraints in which you teach, 

At CHGS, we do our best work when we are able to connect and engage with educators and students directly. Our Genocide Education Outreach (GEO) program, which connects advanced graduate students studying genocide and related topics with classrooms, has a history of offering virtual lectures, discussions, and activities. We’d love to discuss the possibilities of bringing a virtual guest speaker on a topic related to genocide or mass violence in your classroom. For more information, email George Dalbo at dalbo006@umn.edu. 

At CHGS, we are inspired by the tremendous effort that is being made by educators to support the physical, emotional, and academic needs of their students and communities. Thanks for all you do.

George Dalbo is the Educational Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a Ph.D. student in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education. Previously, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5th-12th in public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years at an international school in Vienna, Austria.

Jillian LaBranche was born and raised in southern New Hampshire. She graduated from Rhodes College with a BA in International Studies and a minor in Religious Studies. During this time, she studied abroad in Rwanda and Uganda studying violent conflict and peacebuilding. She received an MA in International Human Rights from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and an MA in Sociology at Brandeis University. She is now a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Jillian serves as a member of the graduate editorial board for The Society Pages and participates in the Genocide Education Outreach (GEO) program. During the 2020-2021 academic year, Jillian hopes to begin her dissertation research.

Jillian’s research interests broadly include violence, knowledge, collective memory, and comparative methods. Her research seeks to understand how societies that recently experienced large-scale political violence teach about this violence to the next generation. More specifically, her dissertation research will analyze how teachers and parents in Sierra Leone and Rwanda relay their respective countries’ violent histories to the next generation, and how the distinct classification of the violence as civil war versus genocide are reflected in these communications. In addition to her dissertation work, Jillian works as a Research Assistant for Alejandro Baer on a project that seeks to understand how education is a form of reparative justice in Minnesota and Manitoba.

Millions upon millions of people have been killed in concentration camps over the last century, and yet I have found myself distracted and angered about recent political debate over semantics: specifically how and when we use the term “concentration camps.”

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the US government facilities used to hold asylum-seekers as “concentration camps.” Prominent voices publically disagreed with Ocasio-Cortez, saying that only Nazi camps are concentration camps. By using the term for other camps, they said that Ocasio-Cortez dishonored Jewish victims of the Holocaust. 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum jumped into this debate, too. It implicitly shamed Ocasio-Cortez, writing that one should never analogize contemporary events to the Holocaust; that doing so may offend Holocaust survivors and their families.

There are compelling articles, books, and podcasts which address this issue. Many look at the history of concentration camps across cultures, back to the camps used in the Boer Wars in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, to help us understand that “concentration camps” has consistently been a term that referred to more than the Nazi camps, and that the Nazis themselves adapted the camp technique from other societies, including the United States. You can find a shortlist of relevant links at the bottom of this article.

Understanding this issue by looking across cultures and history is crucial, but the USHMM (and others) specifically invoked Holocaust survivors and their families as potential victims of Ocasio-Cortez. 

They’re referring to me.

The USHMM said that I, a son of a Holocaust survivor, may be hurt by describing US detention facilities as “concentration camps.”

So I’m writing from that lens, as the son of a Holocaust survivor: I disagree with the USHMM, and I believe that the opposite is true: that Jews — and Holocaust survivors specifically — have been hurt precisely by understanding the concepts of the Holocaust and concentration camps to be one and the same.

An Incomplete Story

My father, Victor Vital (ז״ל, 1932-2019, obituary), and his nuclear family escaped into mountain forests where they hid through the duration of the Nazi occupation of Greece. Greek farmers and villagers saved my family from starvation, exposure, and capture. My father survived the Holocaust but never entered a camp, though our large extended family all died in camps.

Following WWII, my family stayed in Greece until the political and social circumstances of the Greek civil war compelled them to get out of Europe. In December 1967, HIAS resettled my parents, my brother and sister, and my grandmother, in Minnesota, where they quickly joined the local Jewish community. My father told the story that at first he didn’t consider himself to be a Holocaust survivor — precisely because he hadn’t been in a concentration camp — until he was at a Holocaust commemoration, and other survivors (and the Jewish community) told him he was also, truly, a survivor.

But I didn’t know that story until I was an adult. Within my memory, Victor always described himself as a Holocaust survivor. I was discussing this with my mother, who confided to me that she, like my father, didn’t think of him as the same kind of a survivor as people who were in camps. The Nazi occupation of Greece was devastating, she (and my father) reasoned: “It was bad for all Greeks.”

“Yes,” I said to my mother, “Greek trauma is real. But the Greek Jewish experience was different. It was real, too.”

My mother, Aglaia Vital (ז״ל ,1939-2012), didn’t become a Jew until her adulthood. She remembered being so blonde as a child that Nazi soldiers would come up on the street and give her candy because she presented such an ideal whiteness. That memory was scary for her, and it was one of the least scary wartime stories she told. I’m not weighing traumatic histories against each other — Greeks suffered, starved, rescued, fought fiercely against the Nazi military, and died at their hands — but it’s clear that a Jewish experience was different from hers. My mother didn’t go into hiding; she wasn’t hunted down by an invading army because of her race. My mother’s family did risk their lives, not by themselves hiding, but because my maternal grandparents hid Jews in their home.

I recited research to my mother that survivors in hiding weren’t any less traumatized than survivors of camps. I tried to convince her of this, because it upset me, frankly, to hear even my own mother unintentionally downplay the Holocaust trauma that permeated my father’s life — and my family. It wasn’t research that brought her around on the subject, however; it was a story: “Anne Frank was in hiding,” I said to my mother, “and her story is maybe the most well-known Holocaust story. Had she not been killed, would being in hiding have made her any less of a survivor?”

That question helped my mother understand my father’s experience as not “less-than.”

Implications

This is more than a family issue. There are negative consequences for the Jewish community when “concentration camps” are understood as synonymous with the Shoah. Less than half of Jewish Holocaust victims were killed in camps. The Nazi camp infrastructure is horrifying. And it need not eclipse the many other ways the Shoah was implemented, like the staggering amount of Jews killed point-blank, in forests, by perpetrators who were not Germans themselves.

To focus on any specific aspect of the Holocaust diminishes awareness of the terrifying whole. Genocide is massive, and genocide is local: a social, human phenomenon, a crime committed up close by regular human beings — not just “evil” ones wearing swastikas. We know that genocide happens with or without camps: the Nazis built over 40,000 camps, but those camps were not required for them to commit genocide: nearly as many Jews were killed in mass shootings as in camps, and we cannot forget that. In the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, it took machetes and radios to kill at a faster rate than during the Holocaust.

If we forget this, we mask how easy it is for anyone of us to be complicit in genocide.

My family was, thankfully, given the privilege to come to this country and live safely — there is no shortage of antisemitism in Europe today. When they landed here, my family did not know that it was a federal crime in the US for Native Americans to practice indigenous religion — until after 1978. A white US government gave a Jewish family from Europe a home, on land that was once Dakota territory while continuing to persecute native people and cultures. To conceive of the mechanisms of the Shoah as remote and historical is to ignore them when we participate in the same, different, atrocities.

Never Forget and Never Again

It is imperative that we make comparisons and connections between past, present, and future, in order to strive to prevent genocide and heal our traumas. We must not allow ownership of semantics to eclipse human experience, to deny the suffering that we perpetrate at our borders and prisons and neighborhoods. 

To allow the memory of Auschwitz to degrade this human experience, weaponizes the memory of the Shoah to harm others today. To use Auschwitz in this way is to demean the victims of the Shoah and those who survived.

Some further reading and listening

• NPR podcast Code Switch has an episode examining the use of the term “concentration camps” in the context of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War 2. This episode spurred me to write this piece.
• Timothy Snyder, Yale University history professor and Holocaust scholar, wrote in opposition to the USHMM stance against “Holocaust analogies.” This article summarizes the current debate with many significant references.
• In this episode, NPR podcast Throughline examined the history of concentration camps, stretching back to the Boer War.

Demetrios Vital is part of the teaching team at the IDEAL Center of the Science Museum of Minnesota. The IDEAL Center’s professional development work is grounded in research on diversity and inclusion, transformative learning, and growing equitable relationships, to work towards a positive vision of our world.  In his current work at the IDEAL Center, Demetrios brings this background forward by examining how we teach and learn in a post-Holocaust society, working to heal relationships and build a more equitable world. Previously, Demetrios worked at CHGS as outreach coordinator and museum associate.

While growing up in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, being evangelisch meant above all that you were not katholisch and therefore had to wait five years longer for your Confirmation presents. This was a little annoying, but in hindsight, it may qualify as my first encounter with the inner-worldly asceticism that Max Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. Delayed gratification aside, the German evangelical church at the time came across as benign, even reasonable, open to critical discussion and staffed with laid-back, progressive pastors. It was the seventies after all. Nobody would have spelled evangelical with a capital “E” back then, at least not in Europe. That Protestantism in the US could take on a very different flavor didn’t occur to me until I moved to California in the early 2000s and it was my daughter’s turn for Confirmation class. There was a lot about Satan in the curriculum and all the things you could go to hell for, like not showing up for class at Bethany Lutheran Church.

Satan, really? Back then, the last time I had heard of him was also in the seventies, in a movie theater watching Rosemary’s Baby. Recently, he has been making more headlines, like earlier this year, when the spiritual advisor to the White House and televangelist Paula White prayed for “all Satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now.” And then earlier this month, when Billy Graham’s son Franklin was barred from speaking in the UK about how “Satan managed to pass gay marriage legislation.”

Max Weber traveled through the US in 1904 to study the sociology of religion. Interestingly, Protestants at the time seemed less obsessed with the underworld and more interested in worldly affairs. Weber praised the progressive dynamics of America’s many “voluntaristic sects.” He was impressed by their independence and self-governance and saw them operating as social and economic networks, which, due to their Protestant work ethic, were thriving in a capitalist society. Protestant revival movements like Christian Science, still new at the time and preaching that sickness was a mental error curable by reading the right books, did strike him as odd. However, always the self-assured German professor, Weber predicted that these spiritual aberrations would be swept away by cultural rationalization, secularization and bureaucratization. This, after all, was based on his theory of modern Western society, where scientific understanding replaces belief systems and mythical explanations.

Maybe Weber loved his theory a little bit too much. He would be surprised to find out that instead of becoming rational, disenchanted or versachlicht, almost a third of the US population today identifies as Evangelical and interprets the Bible as a literally true account of the past and unfailing guide to the future. This gets particularly tricky when it comes to the Book of Revelation, which contains all the Evangelicals’ pet themes. Martin Luther found the Apocalypse of John “neither prophetic nor apostolic” and tried to keep it out of the biblical canon. Thomas Jefferson considered the steaming stories about Satan and the Antichrist “ravings of a maniac.” He was particularly disturbed by the promise of a Golden Age on Earth, lasting one thousand years and reserved for faithful Christians who would be spared the preceding “Great Tribulation” by temporarily escaping into Heaven. I find it disturbing too — the last time somebody in Germany promised one thousand years of Paradise, it turned out to be twelve years of hell and Holocaust.

Where does this knack for escapist belief systems in the United States comes from? I guess probably from the very beginning. Sailing to America in 1620 was perfect timing if you wanted to take with you an untainted love for bizarre theological certainties such as the coming 1000-year reign of Jesus Christ. The Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower when the rest of Europe was about to begin a 30-year massacre over whose faith was the right faith. It left half the population dead and the other half with a soberer attitude towards the benefits of religion and rampant self-righteousness. The early Americans missed out on that experience, and unabashed Puritanism survived through the centuries.

Evangelicalism, as we know it today, took off in the 1950s, and Billy Graham played a big role in it. So did TV and later the Internet. In Minnesota, where I live now, one doesn’t need devices to get the gospel, a car will do. When I first moved here twelve years ago, giant billboards on the roadside were merely insisting that Jesus was alive “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Recently, however, the signs have begun to target evolution by showing quotes from the Book of Genesis plastered over photos of planet Earth and by openly discriminating against primates and their developmental potential. I wish animal rights groups would take GospelBillboards.org to court for that! Every time I am commuting on highway 35 between the University of Minnesota Duluth and Twin Cities campuses, I get reminded that Weber’s theory of unstoppable Enlightenment in Western societies is, well, just a theory. What if pastors of any denomination in the US were required, like in other countries, to study theology at a comprehensive university as opposed to stand-alone, obscure seminaries? Teaching that Earth and all creatures on it were created 6,000 years ago becomes more challenging when your colleague next door is a professor of biology. You’d also think twice as a student before believing it when you are surrounded by a diverse group of people and opinions and not just like-minded followers. For now, however, we have to sadly recognize that to a large swath of people in America, the world remains what Max Weber called “an enchanted garden” from which in the not too distant future they will be lifted off into the clouds. Satan, if he existed, would laugh his tail off.

Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota. He’s at schro601@umn.edu. On Twitter: @HenningSchroed1.

In 2019 I attended a summer workshop for teachers held by the CHGS, titled “Teaching About Genocide.” As part of the workshop, we, along with two Native American activists-teachers, toured the Minnesota State Capitol with a docent. Entering the main chamber of the capitol, our guide gestured toward several portraits of white males who colonized Minnesota. She, an employee of the state, noted they were the men “who discovered Minnesota.” Here, in the most prominent institution of Minnesota government, a guide had normalized colonialism, except the normalization was now being heard by a critical audience. The statement seemed bracingly out of step with our appreciation of multiculturalism, the celebration of ethnic and racial diversity, and acknowledgment of the centrality of indigenous peoples to the shared fabric of American history.

Our workshop helped us, as teachers activate new schemas for understanding colonialism in America. In psychology, a schema is a pattern of thinking organizing categories of information. In one workshop presentation, George Dalbo and Joe Eggers discussed “settler colonialism.” They used the concept as a framework for analyzing historical processes, in particular, the colonialization of indigenous people and land in Minnesota. Dalbo and Eggers noted that settler colonialism involves three stages: removing indigenous peoples, replacing them with settlers, and continually renewing and normalizing such colonialization. The workshop helped me develop a new schema. I spent the rest of the summer considering the continual renewal and normalization of colonialization. In particular, I began seeing how settler colonialism is made both visible and invisible in everyday life.

Visiting Duluth later that summer, I went to a prominent city park. There I saw a statue of Leif Erikson, which, an inscription said, was sponsored and erected by the Norwegian American League in 1956. After Erikson’s name was the statement, “discoverer of America.” Although there seemed to be attempts at darkening that phrase to be less legible, I saw both how normalizing such a statement otherwise was, and how transparent it was to anyone knowledgeable of settler colonialism. Yet here, the statue and statement stood in 2019, without any information qualifying or contextualizing it.

As Patrick Wolfe (2006) phrased it, “settler colonialism destroys to replace.” Regarding my focus here on monuments, there have been several recent debates about Civil War monuments as celebrations of slavery and racism, and how some feel those monuments should be either removed or contextualized through other plaques, information, or additional monuments. The monuments I saw over the summer celebrating settler colonialism, though, did not seem to be causing much debate. Instead, they seemed to be evidence of the normalization of colonialism, particularly central in Nebraska. One such bronze statue served to minimize the importance of indigenous histories, instead offering settler replacements and framings.

Returning to my hometown of Kearney, Nebraska, I focused on a prominent bronze statue at the entrance to the Archway Monument, a prominent tourist attraction on Interstate 80. The statue corresponds to a story told on a nearby plaque, titled “the Martin Brothers ‘A Narrow Escape.’” The statue and plaque commemorate an incident—in 1864, two children of white settlers who were riding a horse seven miles from Doniphan, Nebraska, had been “attacked by Indians,” having been “struck with four arrows,” and “left for dead,” but had survived to tell the “true but harrowing tale.” The phrasing on the plaque is noteworthy—besides the use of the term “Indians,” the plaque notes that Sioux and Cheyenne tribes were trying to “secure” their land. The plaque might have a different spin if, say, the word “defend” was to replace “secure.”

Through the schema of settler colonialism, other questions about the statue and plaque might emerge: what peoples here are depicted as being attacked? How does an understanding of colonialists as colonialists seem to grow distorted when a statue emphasizes their children as victims of an unprovoked attack? What is the background of those who created the statue? And what is the background of those donating the statue? The statue was made by Dr. David L. Biehl and commissioned by Fred A. Bosselman, both from farming families in Nebraska. Bronze copies of Biehi’s statue are also prominently displayed in central Nebraska at the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer in Grand Island, and the Hastings Museum in Hastings (Pore 2012). Fred A. Bosselman, whose family donated the statues, is the founder of Bosselman Truck Plaza in Grand Island. Bosselman Enterprises now owns forty-five Pump & Pantry convenience stores across several states (Bosselman Enterprises 2020).

It makes sense that settlers and their descendants want to celebrate their history, endowing museums and public parks with statues depicting legendary stories and heroes. The problem comes when those statues are prominently displayed at state-sponsored institutions at the expense of other accounts and contextualized histories that would allow visitors also to consider settler colonialism. Simple public acknowledgments of settler colonialism alongside such statues, such as those discussed here, would be a seemingly small, but perhaps important, step toward repairing the dominant group’s relations with indigenous Americans. Such public acknowledgments might also help improve and add complexity to the knowledge citizens have of their country. Such acknowledgments might also perhaps address the guilt that surely underlies bald attempts at erasing and replacing the histories of peoples devastated by colonialism.

Kurt Borchard, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska Kearney, where he teaches a course on the Holocaust.  He has written extensively about cultural studies and homelessness.

Biehl, David L.  2013.  The Martin Brothers.  Lincoln, NE: Prairie Muse Books.

Bosselman Enterprises.  2020.  Company History.  Online.  Available:             https://www.bosselman.com/history/

Pore, Robert.  2012.  Hall County History Comes to Life as Statue Dedicated at Stuhr Museum.  The Independent (Grand Island). 6 July.

Wolfe, Patrick.  2006. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.  Journal of Genocide Research 8(4):387-409.