In February, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies welcomed Pedro Correa Martín-Arroyo to discuss his research. Correa presented a lecture titled “The Spanish Paradox”, which examined the Spanish government’s policies towards the Jews, and how these were influenced by actors both within and outside the country.

Pedro Correa Martín-Arroyo is currently the Diane and Howard Wohl fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (US Holocaust Memorial Museum); as well as PhD candidate at the London School of Economics. His doctoral research addresses the international management of the Jewish refugee crisis in the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa during World War II.

You presented a lecture at CHGS titled “The Spanish Paradox”. Why do you consider Spain’s role during the Holocaust paradoxical?

My use of the term paradox was completely deliberate.  I simply could not find a better way to summarize the inconsistent and contradictory policy maintained by General Francisco Franco’s government towards the Jews, both during and after the war.

During the war years, the Franco regime was fearful to accept Jewish refugees into Spain, since these were seen as conspirators and communists, and therefore posed a ‘threat’ to the regime’s stability. This is why the Francoists opposed the repatriation of the Spanish Jews living in Nazi-occupied territories, and only allowed a number of them in transit. As the prospects of an Axis victory decreased, the Francoists started to show great concern for the future of the regime once its natural allies had vanished. Consequently, Franco’s government started to portray an image of a quasi-democratic Spain, one completely foreign to the Nazi’s anti-Semitism. Through this propaganda campaign, Franco’s government claimed to have saved the lives of thousands of European Jews. Surprisingly, at the same time the regime declared itself rescuer of the Jews, Franco ordered the expulsion of all ‘foreign’ Jews from the Spanish territory. Amongst those expelled, many were Spanish Jews stripped of their Spanish nationality. Paradoxically, this was an attempt to free Franco’s Spain from the very same people the regime so proudly boasted to have rescued.

Is it still difficult to assess the role of the Spanish government during the Holocaust?

Indeed, and that is mostly due to the fact that Franco’s inconsistent policies towards the Jews make it difficult to provide with a straightforward answer and allow instead for all sort of interpretations. Most of Franco’s policies responded to the regime’s most immediate needs rather than to long-term ideological commitments. The Spanish government’s position during the Holocaust is a perfect example of such pragmatism.

Although clearly pro-Axis, Franco’s Spain was materially dependent on American and British imports, which the Fascist regimes were unable to provide. The Allies capitalized from this situation, and pressured the Spanish government to dissociate from the Axis and comply with its theoretical neutrality. As a result, the Spanish government became increasingly tolerant of the Jewish refugees in transit through Spain.  In regard to the Spanish Jews living in Nazi-occupied territories, Franco’s ministers were confronted with what they defined as a ‘grave dilemma’. Either they could let the Jews of Spanish nationality, living in France and Greece, die at the hands of the Nazis, or they could organize their repatriation to Spain. Whereas the former option would make Franco accomplice of genocide and weaken his rapport with the Allies, the government unanimously refused to allow these Jews to settle in Spain.

After months of hesitations, a number of them were allowed in transit through Spain only to be expelled from the country shortly after. This ‘repatriation’, however, was shamelessly exaggerated by Francoist propaganda, which ‘multiplied’ the number of those saved, and hid the fact that they were actually Spanish subjects, and therefore the government’s responsibility.

Are there still blind spots in research?

As in many other aspects of Spain’s recent history, there are still some blind spots in this particular story. In fact, some of them will be difficult to solve due to the destruction of sources under Franco rule and the impossibility to access certain archival collections even today.

For instance, our understanding of Franco’s policy towards the Jews in the early years of the war is still very limited. It is during these years that the Spanish fascists of the Falange party had more influence over the government’s home and foreign policy. Not surprisingly, it was during this period that Spanish anti-Semitism reached its peak. Measures such as the creation of a ‘Jewish section’ within the Spanish Police and the registry of all Jews living in Spain, have led some historians to speculate about further plans for Holocaust collaboration. However, based on our current understanding of these obscure years of the dictatorship, there is no evidence that the Spanish government was directly involved in the Nazi genocide.

What do Spaniards know about this history?

In my experience, the Spaniards’ knowledge of this period of our history is still very limited, and heavily mystified.

For example, the legend that Franco kept Spain out of the war despite Hitler’s insistence is still quite widespread even amongst those who do not sympathize at all with Franco’s regime. Similarly, the myth of Franco as a rescuer and benefactor to the Jews is still present in the twenty-first century. In my view, this is due to the fact that Spanish society is still very polarized over our recent past. This deems any sort of historical reconciliation in our country impossible. The fact that debates on the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship can be more heated than those about current politics, illustrates the extent of the historical rupture that still divides present-day Spaniards.

This unfortunate situation is not helped by the lack of historical integrity that still permeates some of the Spanish official institutions’ historical initiatives. In recent years, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has successfully worked to reshape the myth of Franco as rescuer of the Jews, by highlighting the rescue activities of a number of Spanish diplomats who did intervene in favour of the Jews, often against Madrid’s ruling. A handful of them certainly deserve the title of ‘Righteous amongst the Nations’. Some other diplomats, however, have been elevated to the category of heroes even though the Jews they protected had a Spanish passport and were entitled to such protection.

In my opinion, it is irresponsible of our public institutions to promote such a partial and oversimplified interpretation of the facts; in which the good deeds of a few government officials are magnified in an attempt to overshadow a more complex and uncomfortable reality.

Note: Pedro and Dr. Baer collaborated together on a chapter of the recently published Bystanders, Rescuers or Perpetrators? The Neutral Countries and the Shoah. Their work explores the politics of Holocaust rescue myth in Spain. The book is free to access online and is available here.

Natalie Somerson is an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, pursuing degrees in Spanish Studies and Global Studies, with concentrations in Latin America, Human Rights and Justice. Her undergraduate thesis examines the effects of the Spanish conquest on the Mexican woman’s psyche. 

Eurovision Song Contest has served as a platform to strengthen both national and European identities and embrace diversity throughout every nation for over 60 years.  The show’s vast influence expands to an audience of approximately 180 million people all over the world. Its expansive reach has not only sparked the careers of various performers, it has also allowed for the television program to have social, political, and cultural influence.

The televised contest does have strict rules; songs that promote political messages are disqualified from entry.  In 2009, the song “We Don’t Wanna Put In” was the Georgian entry. The song contained negative political references to Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister of Russia, and provided a critical Georgian perspective on the war between Georgia and Russia in 2008. Because of the song’s strong political message and references, the European Broadcasting Union ruled that the song would have to be rewritten or a new song would have to be chosen. Georgia did not comply with this ruling, and therefore withdrew from the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest.

Despite this, many countries have still used songs to indirectly address political tensions and social issues and catalyze activism. In 1998, a transsexual Israeli, Dana International, won the Eurovision Song Content. Her win was seen as a victory for human rights and equality and a huge breakthrough for trans visibility. Dana International’s performance was important not only because of its impact on LGBT issues, but it demonstrated the power the Eurovision competition could have to sway public opinion on social issues in a wider context.

Last year, Armenia’s entry was a power ballad entitled “Don’t Deny.” The 2015 Eurovision Song Contest coincided with the 100-year anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. While the head of Armenia’s Eurovision Delegation, Gohar Gasparyan, said the song was “about love, unity and peace: the family as a symbol of humanity, alternation of generations, the bird as a symbol of peace, the keeper of the national values and tradition,” many speculated that the song was aimed at Turkey, who continues to deny the Armenian Genocide. While the song drew some controversy due to its political interpretation, the Armenian Delegation chose to keep the lyrics to the song and changed only the title to “Face the Shadow.” This decision was a response to Turkish and Azerbaijani claims that Armenia was politicizing the music contest. A petition had been launched by Eurovision’s Turkish fans calling for Armenia’s disqualification. The Armenian performance kickstarted an international conversation about the Genocide and Turkey’s continued denial.

This year, Ukraine’s entry has raised controversy. The song “1944” addresses the deportation of 240,000 Crimean Tatars to Central Asia by Joseph Stalin in 1944. Between 20 and 50 percent of those deported died within the first two years of deportation. On November 11, 2015 the Ukraine parliament adopted a resolution that recognized the mass deportation of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia as genocide and declared May 18 as a Day of Remembrance for victims. The song opens with the lyrics: “When strangers are coming. They come to your house, they kill you all and say ‘We’re not guilty. Not guilty.’” Despite this unequivocal message to Russia, the European Broadcasting Union has decided that the song’ content is historical rather than political and does not break any rules.

While “1944” does not directly address recent tensions between Russia and Ukraine as a result of Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula, the song certainly creates a space to discuss human rights violations on the peninsula and resulting consequences. The song also creates a dialogue to discuss the relationship between pop culture and traumatic memory. How soon is too soon? The withdrawn Georgian entry from 2009 was seen as too political, likely because it addresses an event that happened the previous year and current tensions. Pop culture has been a growing platform to discuss human rights abuses and has made the conversation more accessible to an increasing number of people around the world. Can it be used to discuss recent and ongoing atrocities? Eurovision Song Contest creates a unique platform where it lets contestants paint an entire picture through song. Can and should other pop culture mediums replicate this?

Alexandra Steinkraus is an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, pursuing a degree in Global Studies with concentrations in East Asia and Human Rights and Justice. Her areas of academic interests include media representations of crimes against humanity, global refugee policy, sociology of foreign media in North Korea, and the United Nations. 

On Saturday, February 20th the Italian Cultural Center of Minneapolis & St. Paul presented If Only I Were That Warrior as part of their annual Italian Film Festival followed by a moderated discussion. In the film, director Valerio Ciriaci examines Italy’s brutal attempts to colonize Ethiopia in 1935 through the lens of the 2012 erection of a monument dedicated to Rodolfo Graziani. The monument, located in the Italian town of Affile, reignited the tense politics surrounding Graziani’s involvement in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and its legacy today.

Rather than focusing his film solely on the crimes committed by Graziani, known as the Butcher of Ferran for his massacre of civilians in Libya, and the Italians during the invasion and subsequent occupation, Ciriaci chose instead to highlight the monument as a means to convey the difficult, and largely unexplored, legacy of Italy’s attempted African conquest. The monument itself was initially proposed as a symbol for the Unknown Soldier and used public funds for its construction. When the federal government learned that it was being dedicated to Graziani, the funds were revoked, but Affile’s mayor privately funded some of the project despite the federal government’s condemnation of the memorial. It is not unusual for monuments in Italy to be funded by public-private partnerships, but there was no partnership in Affile’s conscious omission of the monument’s intent. Ciriaci uses this opportunity to showcase the lingering pride in Graziani and the Mussolini-era fascist government that continues to exist today across much of Italy.

The film follows three people– Mulu Ayele, an Ethiopian refugee in Italy who invites viewers into the country’s protests of the Graziani monument, Nicola DeMarco, an Italian-American New Yorker and grandson of an early Italian Ethiopian settler actively organizing the monument protests, and Giuseppe Debac, an Italian coordinator of a UN development project in Ethiopia.

It’s perhaps Debac’s narrative that best exemplifies the complicated relationship Italians have with their past. When he is introduced, Debac seems as if he will be the pragmatic UN worker with insight into the horrific Italian occupation as we job shadow him through Ethiopia. However Debac ends up representing the complexity of the Italian identity and the lack of acceptance of Italy’s role as he shares his fascination with the past, stopping at Italian cemeteries among the countryside, pointing out the Italian infrastructure built during the occupation, all while saying that he feels “the presence of the Italians and never feels alone” on his country assignment.

Graziani is a complex figure in Italian history. After World War II, he was indicted as a war criminal by the UN, in part for his actions in Ethiopia. Despite this, he has several supports across Italy. Ercole Viri, the mayor of Affile, deems Graziani “a proven hero” and local business owners defend the monument as “due recognition to a local historical figure.” The memory of Italy’s fascist past is made even more complicated because of the resettlement of thousands of Ethiopian refugees following the country’s civil war. Ayele conveys this  difficulty as she organizes protests against the fascist monument. She is also campaigning for the monument and park to be rededicated to the victims of Graziani’s occupation of Ethiopia as well as Libya.

After the movie, a moderated discussion was held by Achmed Wassie of KFAI’s Voices of Ethiopia program and Michael Senay, the former  president of the mutual benefit association at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Minneapolis and whose parents were witnesses to the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. Mr. Wassie and Mr. Senay had the difficult task of answering questions from a diverse audience at the film which attracted many from the Ethiopian community. Emotions ran high during the discussion: some commended the Italian Cultural Center for bringing this film to Minneapolis; others criticized the organization for not being stronger advocates of the issue.  One audience member passionately critiqued the film for not showing more of Ethiopia’s struggle since the Italian occupation. These criticisms from the audience demonstrate the strained relations that continue to exist between Ethiopians and Italians even in the Twin Cities.

While I can sympathize with the feedback, I was impressed the Italian Cultural Center featured this film and provided a venue for discussion over a topic that is both rarely focused on and critical of Italian political views and the revisionist history that is being spread. Having spent time as part of a consulting team for a UNESCO project in northern Ethiopia, I could easily see the Italian influence in the area. City centers are still called piazzas, areas subject to the Italian occupation had more paved roads and bridges, and stuccoed buildings stood in contrast to the more traditional Ethiopian construction. I worked on a 17th century castle complex which Italian soldiers made their residence and we could visibly recognize the modifications and intrusive alterations made on the site. Despite these influences, any Ethiopian I worked with would proudly tell you that Ethiopia has never been occupied. It is a proud part of their identity and cultural heritage. Without films like If Only I were that Warrior, this troubling history could easily continue to go unexplored.

Allison Suhan graduated from the University of Minnesota with an MS in Heritage Preservation in 2015. During her graduate studies, she spent several weeks assisting the Ethiopian government restore the Fasilides Castle complex in Gondar. Her primary research focus is funding strategies for Italian heritage sites, where she spent a semester studying as an undergraduate student.

It has been more than 70 years since Japan’s 35-year formal occupation of the Korean peninsula ended, but issues of reparations and memory surrounding the crimes against humanity committed by the Japanese government during this time period are still contested. It is estimated that up to 200,000 women, mostly from Korea, were forced into sexual slavery during WWII. These young “comfort women” were abducted from their villages or persuaded to leave with the false promise of work, only to be imprisoned in comfort stations and sexually exploited by Japanese soldiers.

Last December, the governments of Japan and South Korea reached a landmark agreement on the deep-rooted issue of comfort women. The Japanese government gave 1 billion yen ($8.3 million) to surviving comfort women and issued a formal apology. In exchange, both Japan and Korea agreed to avoid criticizing the other within the international community and also remove all monuments in memory of the victims, such as the statue erected on the pavement opposite the Japanese embassy in Seoul in 2011. The Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe publicly stated, “I think we did our duty for the current generation by reaching this final and irreversible resolution before the end of the 70^th year since the war.” This agreement raises important questions about public memory and justice. Can crimes against humanity ever truly be resolved? To this day, former SS officers are still tried in court for crimes they committed in Nazi Germany, and there is an International Holocaust Remembrance Day. How important is public memory and continued rhetoric to the prevention of future crimes?

Despite both governments deciding the issue had been resolved, the agreement continues to be criticized by those most affected by the situation. Former comfort women were not consulted before the agreement was reached between Japan and South Korea. Their voices had been silenced yet again. The Japanese government refers to the 1 billion yen agreement as a humanitarian gesture rather than reparations in order to avoid legal responsibility. Former comfort woman, Lee Ok-sun has stated, “It is as if the Japanese government is waiting for us to stop speaking out and die.”

Surviving comfort women are currently in their 80’s and 90’s and are still persevering to see justice within their lifetimes. The Japanese government continues to claim the agreement included the removal of all commemorations and memorials for comfort women, including a statue outside of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. What happens when crimes against humanity are erased from public memory? People throughout South Korea and the world continue to advocate for the presence of memorials, days of remembrance for victims, and education about sexual slavery during the Japanese occupation. Will these women’s voices finally be heard?

Alexandra Steinkraus is an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, pursuing a degree in Global Studies with concentrations in East Asia and Human Rights and Justice. Her areas of academic interests include media representations of crimes against humanity, global refugee policy, sociology of foreign media in North Korea, and the United Nations. 

This is the second half of a two part interview with Dr. Adam Muller from the University of Manitoba. CHGS interviewed Dr. Muller after his November presentation on campus in which he highlighted the Embodying Empathy project, a collaborative project at the University of Manitoba that will bring Canada’s residential schools alive with an immersive digital experience.

If you’d like to get caught up, you can find the first half of the interview here.

 What are some of the unique challenges you have experienced using cutting edge technology in a medium that isn’t traditionally associated with it?

It is probably worth pointing out that increasingly museums and commemorative sites of all kinds have been turning to digital technologies in the hope of creating ever-deeper and more rewarding visitor experiences for some time now.  Recently, for example, USC’s Shoah Foundation announced that it had begun work on its “New Dimensions in Testimony” project, which seeks create digital holograms of Holocaust survivors that users of the foundation’s testimonial archive can interact with. The initial rendering of survivor Pinchas Gutter is technically quite impressive, and it gestures towards the more immersive and dynamically interactive computer modeling that we’re undertaking in our project. The thing is, for all the investment that’s being done on representations of this kind, the jury is out on whether or not such digitally mediated interactions actually enhance users’ understanding of or capacity to care about others’ suffering, at least over the medium and longer term. This is something Embodying Empathy is looking closely at: whether or not the “immersive turn” in museum curation actually facilitates increases in empathy, and thus a propensity to engage in transformative social action. We’re working with a team of social psychologists to help evaluate the empathy levels of users of the EE storyworld.  This has required us to take a closer look at what empathy is and how it works, and specifically at how it might be engaged (or not) by certain features of a digital design. Partly because of its location at the intersection of a large number of distinct academic and technological discourses and procedures, this moral-psychological evaluative element of our project is proving especially challenging, particularly for a humanist like myself but also for older non-academic members of our team with a relatively limited understanding of the potential of emerging technologies and the specifics of social-scientific methods and debates.

There are also considerable risks to our undertaking, not the least of them the possible secondary traumatization of users of the storyworld intimately exposed to viscerally horrifying depictions of the application of coercive force. We discussed with our Indigenous partners the need to withhold or avoid representations of certain forms of physical violence for fear of doing damage to those experiencing Embodying Empathy. However, while acknowledging our concerns, both survivors and intergenerational survivors have been very clear that they want us to remain as truthful and direct as possible when representing IRS experiences. For too long, they have told us, these experiences were hidden away or denied, and thereby allowed to prolong the damage done to identities, families, and communities. Acknowledging and (as insiders, not outsiders) making sense of the damage done by the IRS requires the rejection of earlier regimes of secrecy that the TRC and its resulting archive have done so much to challenge. Where exactly we will draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms and subjects of representation, though, remains to be determined.

There’s a perception in the United States that the relationship between the Canadian government and indigenous people is much better than here. What are your thoughts and has your work had impact on your perspective?

It is hard for a Canadian like myself not to be struck by what seems like almost a dead silence on Indigenous issues in American official and popular discourse. This stands in marked contrast to the prominence given to Indigenous issues in Canada, not just with respect to the work done by the IRS Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but in relation to many other aspects of Indigenous history and life more generally. I find the contrast most pronounced politically. We in Canada have just been through a federal election campaign during which the case of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, Indigenous education, northern development and resource rights, treaty rights and land claims, the quality of life of Canada’s Métis people (i.e. those of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry), and the 94 calls to action made by the TRC in its final report were widely discussed and in different forms incorporated into the platforms of all of the political parties vying for power. Justin Trudeau, our new prime minister, has placed Indigenous issues at the forefront of his administration, and just this past December publicly declared that “never again in the future of Canada will students be told that [the historical mistreatment of the country’s Indigenous population] is not an integral part of everything we are as a country and everything we are as Canadians.” There is a prevailing social and intellectual consensus that about this he is correct. By contrast, in the surreal spectacle comprising this year’s American presidential campaign, nothing to my knowledge has been said by any of the candidates from either of the two major parties that suggests Indigenous concerns are or need to be a priority, or indeed that they even exist.  Indigenous people barely seem to register in the lived present of the American cultural imaginary; when they are visible at all (as in the recent film Revenant, for example), they show up nostalgically, as traces of the historical past. Viewed not just in but as the country’s past, Indigenous people in America are denied any political currency. When reflecting on the causes and consequences of this disempowerment, I am often reminded of something that the British historian Peter Burke once presciently observed: “It is often said that history is written by the victors. It might also be said that history is forgotten by the victors. They can afford to forget, while the losers are unable to accept what happened and are condemned to brood over it, relive it, and reflect on how different it might have been.”

The Holocaust is now a part of global memory. The residential school system is little known to even many Canadians. Has your team considered the potential for your project creating a new shared memory among Canadians of the residential schools? If so, what kind of impact has that had?

It is true that the country’s Indian Residential School system is something that Canadians are still learning about, notwithstanding the nearly seven year-long effort by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) to bring the story of the genocidal harms done in the country’s residential schools to light. Even after national events staged and broadcast on Canadian news media from coast to coast, the collection of more than 7000 IRS survivor testimonies most of which are now available through the recently-founded National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), a wide variety of primary, secondary, and post-secondary educational initiatives, and various academic and public commentaries and debates, there continues to be a general lack of awareness of the IRS and their lingering negative effects. Going into Embodying Empathy we knew of course that settler Canadians lacked this awareness. What has been surprising to realize is the extent to which relatives and descendants of IRS survivors also have a great deal to learn. Survivors have often not wanted to share the specifics of their lives in residential schools with family and community members.  Some were so damaged by their experiences that their lives ended violently and prematurely, leaving them no real chance to impart reliable accounts of what they had undergone.

Embodying Empathy seeks to fill in some of these blanks, and is relying on extensive and ongoing consultations with IRS survivors and intergenerational survivors to help determine which gaps matter most, to identify relevant experiences to share, and to determine the design parameters of our IRS “storyworld.” We have created a highly consultative and interactive “participatory design” methodology to realize our virtual IRS in a way that gives our Indigenous partners a real say in what the resulting project looks like and is made to do.  By giving up ownership of key elements of our project, as well of any resulting technology that is created, we hope to make it possible for the storyworld to provide an intimate and richly nuanced account of the experience of being a child exposed to neglect, starvation, corporal punishment, humiliation, and rape.

Any hope of creating a shared memory of Canada’s IRS, and through the experience of that sharing to foster a morally and politically transformative form of empathy (understood as a kind of doing and not just a quality of feeling), depends crucially on this intimacy and trust.  Even when settler Canadians are aware of some of the facts of the country’s Indigenous history, often what they know has been selected and interpreted “from without” by non-Indigenous historians and educators who haven’t taken the time, or lack the wherewithal, to view things from an Indigenous perspective. Along with the NCTR, with which Embodying Empathy has formally partnered, we aim to redress this externality by linking victims of and secondary witnesses to Canada’s IRS in shared experiences of forced assimilation. We hope that via this sharing Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians may together come to a clearer understanding not just of Indigenous suffering but of what constitute appropriate forms of reconciliation and redress.  The resulting “imagined community” will, we hope, end up being more humane, inclusive, and just.

Joe Eggers is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, focusing his research on cultural genocide and indigenous communities. His thesis project explores discrepancies between the legal definition and Lemkin’s concept of genocide through analysis of American government assimilation policies towards Native Nations.

In November, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies welcomed Dr. Adam Muller from the University of Manitoba to discuss his upcoming project, which creates a virtual First Nations residential school.  Dr. Muller is part of the Embodying Empathy project, which seeks to create a digital immersive experience for educate visitors about the settler-colonial interactions at Canada’s residential schools. The project is also exploring whether immersive representations can bridge the empathetic distance separating victims from secondary witnesses to atrocity.

Dr. Muller is Associate Professor of English at the University of Manitoba (Canada). He specializes in the representations of war, genocide and mass violence, human rights, memory studies, critical theory, cultural studies, and analytic philosophy.

CHGS followed up with Dr. Muller to learn more about his innovative project. You can find a recording of the original presentation here.  This is part 1 of our conversation.

Could you tell us about how the concept for the virtual museum was initiated?

In 2011, during the early planning and design stages of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, I was one of three organizers of a lecture series hosted by the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law entitled “The Idea of a Human Rights Museum.” As part of this series I, along with my colleagues Struan Sinclair and Andrew Woolford, decided to present a talk on some of the thinking behind what the CMHR’s plans to become an “ideas museum” might mean for the representation of Indigenous experiences, most especially those associated with Canada’s Indian Residential School system. Ideas museums depend heavily on technology and not artifacts to create enriching experiences for museumgoers. We were wondering what kinds of technology the museum might use to engage its visitors, and whether or not they’d be well-suited to representing Indigenous experiences of human rights abuses and successes stories. In preparing for our lecture we noted the increasing dependence of museums of all kinds, but especially ideas museums, on various virtual and augmented reality technologies. These included VR headsets and digital overlays of otherwise static exhibitions designed to give museum visitors more information, and richer experiences, than would be available through observation alone. These technologies have been increasingly viewed by museum curators as a good way to connect with to younger audiences already cognizant of VR and AR via their use in digital gaming. We wanted to explore how they might be adapted to the demands of representing traumatic experiences, and were also curious about whether or not more immersivity would translate into an increase in museumgoers’ understanding of historical trauma, as well as enhancements in their capacity to care. We noted that to date the secondary literature remains divided on whether or not such technologies can open people up empathetically to others’ suffering, or else instead contribute to what has been termed “empathy fatigue,” or the erosion of our capacity to feel for others. And so with these issues in view, Embodying Empathy was born as creative, critical, commemorative, and educational project seeking to build and assess the empathetic potential of a virtual and immersive museum-quality representation of a Canadian IRS.

In your presentation, you discussed the successful efforts to get support from survivors of the residential schools. What was their initial reaction to the project and has that changed as it has evolved and taken shape?

From the first we were nervous that what we were thinking of doing would be perceived by IRS Survivors as an attempt to hijack and/or distort their school experiences. We worried that what we wanted to do would seem not merely problematically playful to them (in so far as we were turning their suffering into something plausibly understood as a video game) but offensive.  When we began discussing our project publicly, we really didn’t know what to expect in response. We were acutely aware that the core idea for Embodying Empathy was hatched by three non-Indigenous scholars, and we weren’t sure we could explain our belief in the merits of our project in a way that would reassure people all too familiar with the hollow promises and risks more typical of conventionally “extractive” forms of academic research.

We were therefore surprised at (and relieved by) the strong support for Embodying Empathy that we’ve received from a wide range of Indigenous people from the get-go. Survivors have made it clear that they view our work as urgent and necessary, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation views the project as potentially an extremely useful way of making their testimonial archive more accessible, and intergenerational survivors and other members of Indigenous communities have expressed their hope that via our immersive storyworld they may become better informed about the exact nature of the abuses suffered by their relatives. Of course things have been made somewhat easier by our high degree of consultativeness.  We have been very careful to involve Indigenous people in our project not as objects of inquiry (i.e. “things” to be studied) but as full research partners actually determining the directions our design and critical inquiry are heading.  We actually ended up developing new and very explicit language concerning the fullness of this partnership which we included in our research ethics protocols.  In order to maximize the control and oversight of our Indigenous collaborators to our project we have adopted a “participatory design” methodology that requires us to share and modify potentially all of our strategies and results before they are finalized and made public. Thus one of our project’s goals is to empower our Indigenous partners while contributing to contemporary thinking about the appropriate forms and methods of non-extractive Indigenous research.  The sincerity of our commitment to this end seems have to inspired the confidence of those whose stories of IRS life we are working to share, as well as our prospective audiences.

The experiences in the boarding schools were wide ranging. How is your team incorporating survivor accounts that vary so greatly from fairly positive memories to extremely traumatic ones?

We have been aware from the outset of the potentially harmful reductions inherent in conceiving of our storyworld as a single, prolonged, trauma-drama. Even though many of the survivor testimonies presented before the TRC focused on negative experiences such as physical and sexual abuse, they also often included reference to positive aspects of IRS life such as moments of human kindness, extraordinary resilience, and hope. This diverse complex of experiences is something actually acknowledged by the TRC in its final report, though critics of the commission continue to point to its conclusions as deliberately and unproductively one-sided. In consultations with our Survivor advisory council, we have come to understand the experience of being a student at an IRS as not one single thing but rather as an unstable patchwork of positive and negative occurrences resulting from the schools’ wider goal of stripping away from Indigenous people their capacity to remain culturally intact, and so dignified and self-respecting versions of themselves. One of the major challenges for us in our attempt to design our storyworld has therefore been how to acknowledge this complexity while not making IRS life seem more horrific, uplifting, or even banal than it really was.

In an attempt to limit to a manageable number the experiences we will be representing in Embodying Empathy, we chosen to focus primarily on a single school, the Fort Alexander IRS located near Pine Falls, Manitoba, on land that is now part of the Sagkeeng First Nation. For the most part the members of our advisory council attended this school, though our research (and the testimony taken by the TRC) has revealed considerable overlap in experiences undergone at a wide range of schools across the country. We are also concentrating on experiences of the sort likely to have been undergone from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Residential schools functioned and were staffed and regulated differently at different periods of Canadian history, and we are anxious to incorporate the experiences of former IRS students undergone by a generation that is rapidly declining in health and numbers.  Since we are just now entering the design phase of our project, and since our methodology is highly consultative and so dependent on the guidance we’ll receive from various stakeholders and partners, we don’t yet know exactly which experiences will feature prominently in our virtual world.

Stay tuned for the second half of our interview with Dr. Muller, coming next week!

Joe Eggers is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, focusing his research on cultural genocide and indigenous communities. His thesis project explores discrepancies between the legal definition and Lemkin’s concept of genocide through analysis of American government assimilation policies towards Native Nations.

CHGS is proud to maintain collections of art and historical objects that originated with founding director Stephen Feinstein’s work in Holocaust art. These collections include visual artworks, such as the paintings of Fritz Hirschberger, as well as historical objects, including postcards and badges from Nazi Germany.

CHGS has stewardship over these important pieces of history and artistic expression. Our goals are to care for these objects through best museum practices and extend their educational impact through physical and digital exhibition.

We are collaborating with Deborah Boudewyns, UMN Art and Architecture Librarian, and instructor of a UMN course, Workshop in Art, in which students learn the skills of curating and exhibiting, using CHGS collections as the foundation of their work. These students will end the semester with an exhibition featuring CHGS art and objects, to be held in Wilson Library from April 29 – May 12, 2016, with an opening reception on April 29.

In an effort to keep our art collections vital we have migrated the CHGS owned exhibitions to the University of Minnesota Archive.

Our website, which includes resources in the study of Holocaust visual history, is being updated. Our imagery and art research is in the process of being made available online through UMN digital archives, enabling greater functionality, flexibility, and reach. We are working with the University’s physical archives to document CHGS history as we near our 20th anniversary in 2017.

Son of Saul is a film about a member of the Sonderkommando (Jewish prisoners forced to aid in the killing process and clean up) at Auschwitz.  What sets Son of Saul apart from most films that deal with the Holocaust is that it is not presented in a traditional narrative structure. Hungarian director László Nemes upon accepting his Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film said “over the years the Holocaust has become an abstract. It deserves a face.” Certainly he does this immediately as the camera never leaves Saul; we are either looking directly at his face in close-up or over his shoulder. We experience events with Saul as he goes about his work and later his self-imposed mission, the burial of a boy. The movie is a visceral experience — there is very little dialogue, and we only see and hear what Saul sees and hears.  Nemes gives us very little to go on, we know nothing about Saul’s past, who he once was, prior to landing in Auschwitz.  Saul is introduced to us as he emerges from a combination of mist, smoke and sound. We are immersed in a world that is out of focus and filled with a cacophony of sounds, some so sharp and real one turns to look for the offending speaker in the audience.  Nemes and his sound designer Tamas Zanyi, recorded over eight different languages speaking dialogue to create aural chaos, these layers of sound combined with the close-ups and long takes are intended to disorientate, forming a psychological experience with Saul. Nemes does not use any sentiment or melodramatic devices to tell his story. We never form an emotional bond with Saul as one might to other characters in other films on the Holocaust.

How does Son of Saul measure up against Shoah?

 The film does owe a small debt to Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece documentary Shoah (1985), especially as it engages resourcefully with the limits of representation. Nemes has the horror take place at the edge of the frame, mainly in the shadows, out of focus, or through sound. It is relentless, but respectful. The scene involving our first encounter with the gas chamber is only reflected in the litany of expressions upon Saul’s face and the soundtrack of voices. The experience is left to our imagination. It is our knowledge of the Holocaust that creates the visual. In fact what we imagine is certainly far worse than anything he could recreate. Lanzmann in an interview given to French magazine Telerama on May 24, 2015 gave the film a positive endorsement claiming Son of Saul the “anti-Schindler’s List.” Lanzmann, was highly critical of Spielberg’s dramatic choices, especially the scene involving women entering the showers.

 What Source Material was used to write Son of Saul?

Nemes and his writing partner Clara Royer, based their script on Voices from Beneath the Ashes, a collection of testimonies written by the Sonderkommandos that was hidden away in 1944. Nemes’s grandparents also perished in Auschwitz. It was personal, and is one of the reasons why he does not tell a tale of survival. Like Shoah, Son of Saul is a film about death.

Where was it filmed?

The gas chamber and crematorium were all sets built on a sound stage in Hungary by production designer Laszlo Rajk, an architect and political activist who was responsible for the creation of the Hungarian exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum.  That exhibition was one of the most jarring exhibitions I have ever encountered; it was described by a fellow participant at an educational conference as a “blitzkrieg” on the senses.  Like Son of Saul you are immersed and disorientated, by layers of sounds and visuals, reminding the visitor of the swiftness and violence of the murder of 400,000 Hungarian Jews in a few short months in 1944. The small exhibition leaves you completely depleted in the knowledge of those deaths and stays with you long after you exit.

Is this a film an educator can use in the classroom?

It is always imperative that we look at the film as a cinematic experience first. Not every film dealing with the Holocaust should be used in the classroom. Nemes, when questioned about the film, has said he has no interest in providing a manual for the film — the film is ambiguous on purpose, and that it is an artistic choice.  Not everything needs to be explained, it is a choice that leads the audience think about the film long after leaving the theater.

One always has to consider the level of knowledge the students have before showing any film.  Son of Saul relies on a higher level of knowledge to convey its meaning. It is not an easy film to watch, it is a film that asks you to consider the brutality, the victimization and the possibility of retaining ones humanity as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz.

Will it win an Academy Award?

Probably, based on the Academy’s track record and the long running joke that if there is a Holocaust film nominated in any category, it will win an Oscar. It has already won the Grand Prix at Cannes and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film so the odds are good. All that aside, from a cinematic point of view it is a very artful film. The layering of sound, the camera techniques and the acting of Géza Röhrig, certainly make it a legitimate contender.

To learn more about the film or watch the trailer, visit Son of Saul’s official site.

If you’re in the Twin Cities, Son of Saul is playing now through the end of the week at the Uptown Theater and opens Friday, January 29th at the Edina Cinema.

Jodi Elowitz is an adjunct professor of the Humanities at Gateway Community College in Phoenix, Arizona and the Content Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) at the University of Minnesota. Ms. Elowitz’s area of expertise is artistic representation of the Holocaust in the visual arts with an emphasis on work done in the camps and ghettos. Current research is on Holocaust memory in animated film and the Holocaust in Polish Memory, particularly in film and tourism. Her most recent article “Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto: Representing the Unimaginable through Animated Film” was published in Short Film Studies Journal Volume 4, Number 2, 2014.