The Holocaust Remembrance Industry

Anat Meidan

Why did dozens of Israeli officials spend public money going to Auschwitz when there are sick and starving Holocaust survivors in Israel?

A historic trip" was the definition given to the journey of the biggest delegation in the history of the Knesset, which traveled to Auschwitz on Monday to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Making the trip were about 60 Knesset members, including four ministers and four deputy ministers, a former Knesset speaker, 250 public figures, including the state comptroller, the chief rabbi, a Supreme Court judge and the Yad Vashem chairman, as well as 24 Holocaust survivors and their family members.

It seems like we enjoy breaking records as far as the Holocaust is concerned.

My mother, a Holocaust survivor, watched the reports and couldn't believe it. "In order to remember Auschwitz, the Knesset has to hold a session in Poland? In order to identify with the victims, they must have a luxurious dinner in Krakow? And at whose expense did the MKs travel?" she asked.

At your expense. The MKs announced that the Knesset was funding the trip, I explained to her.

"My heart aches over the fact that these funds are not being transferred to needy Holocaust survivors. I know people who barely survive, and several days ago the government refused to approve free medication for sick survivors. It’s unbelievable insolence. There are 90,000 survivors here who haven’t recovered from the horrors of the Holocaust and deserve to live like human beings. The MKs who traveled to Auschwitz should remember that the Holocaust is also people who survived. It hurts so much to know that the word memory is not translated here into life itself," she said and fell silent.

My mother is not among those in need of the charity of the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims. She is one of those who survived the Holocaust and built an independent and fruitful life afterwards. But the deep disappointment which settled on her face burned my heart.

A thriving travel agency

I quoted the remarks made by MK Isaac Herzog, who explained: "We are traveling to remember, to remind, to learn and to teach a lesson." And MK Yariv Levin, who said: "We will come there to say in a clear voice: The Jewish people is alive."

Her anger grew stronger, but she made an effort to maintain her Polish manners: "Doesn't the world know that the Jewish people is alive? Why mention it all the time on the soil of Auschwitz? Can’t Herzog do the remembering and reminding and learning a lesson from here?"

I felt bad telling my mother that the Holocaust has turned into a thriving travel agency here. High school trips, the Witnesses in Uniform project which sends thousands of soldiers to Polish soil, prime ministers, MKs and ministers who land there on different occasions – they are part of a well-oiled remembrance industry which has existed here for years.

The duty to remember and remind are an open ticket to Auschwitz and its surroundings, but the memory of the Holocaust, the magnificent culture which was annihilated, should be studied thoroughly in schools, in universities, and not in one flight filled with clichés.

But who has the energy for a long and profound journey? It's much easier to enact a law banning the word Nazi.

After the huge delegation which took off from Israel on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I wonder what the duty to remember and remind will look like in three months, when we mark Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. Maybe, for a change, we'll consider the option of modest remembrance.

KILLING CENTERS: AN OVERVIEW

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Hairbrushes of victims, found soon after the liberation of Auschwitz. Poland, after January 27, 1945.

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The Nazis established killing centers for efficient mass murder. Unlike concentration camps, which served primarily as detention and labor centers, killing centers (also referred to as "extermination camps" or "death camps") were almost exclusively "death factories." German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting.

CHELMNO, BELZEC, SOBIBOR, AND TREBLINKA

The first killing center was Chelmno, which opened in the Warthegau (part of Poland annexed to Germany) in December 1941. Mostly Jews, but also Roma(Gypsies), were gassed in mobile gas vans there. In 1942, in the Generalgouvernement (a territory in the interior of occupied Poland), the Nazis opened the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinkakilling centers (known collectively as the Operation Reinhard camps) to systematically murder the Jews of Poland. In the Operation Reinhard killing centers, the SS and their auxiliaries killed approximately 1,526,500 Jews between March 1942 and November 1943.

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

Almost all of the deportees who arrived at the camps were sent immediately to death in the gas chambers (with the exception of very small numbers chosen for special work teams known as Sonderkommandos). The largest killing center was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which by spring 1943 had four gas chambers (using Zyklon B poison gas) in operation. At the height of the deportations, up to 6,000 Jews were gassed each day at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Over a million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war were killed there by November 1944.

MAJDANEK

Though many scholars have traditionally counted the Majdanekcamp as a sixth killing center, recent research had shed more light on the functions and operations at Lublin/Majdanek. Within the framework of Operation Reinhard, Majdanek primarily served to concentrate Jews whom the Germans spared temporarily for forced labor. It occasionally functioned as a killing site to murder victims who could not be killed at the Operation Reinhard killing centers: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka II. It also contained a storage depot for property and valuables taken from the Jewish victims at the killing centers.

The SS considered the killing centers top secret. To obliterate all traces of gassing operations, special prisoner units (the Sonderkommandos) were forced to remove corpses from the gas chambers and cremate them. The grounds of some killing centers were landscaped or camouflaged to disguise the murder of millions.

Resources

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

*****

Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Berenbaum, Michael, and Yisrael Gutman, editors. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998.

Chrostowski, Witold. Extermination Camp Treblinka. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004.

Delin, Grant. Lebensraum: Extermination Camps of the Third Reich. London: Westzone Publishing, 2001.

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Mendelsohn, John, editor. The "Final Solution" in the Extermination Camps and the Aftermath. New York: Garland Publishing, 1982.

Schelvis, Jules, and Bob Moore. Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp. Oxford: Berg, 2007.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Deportations to Killing Centers
• An Overview of the Holocaust: Topics to Teach
• Killing Centers

RELATED LINKS

• New video overview of the Holocaust—The Path to Nazi Genocide

TATTOOS AND NUMBERS: THE SYSTEM OF IDENTIFYING PRISONERS AT AUSCHWITZ

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During the Holocaust, concentration camp prisoners received tattoos only at one location, the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, which consisted of Auschwitz I (Main Camp), Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz and the subcamps). Incoming prisoners were assigned a camp serial number which was sewn to their prison uniforms. Only those prisoners selected for work were issued serial numbers; those prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered and received no tattoos.

Initially, the SS authorities marked prisoners who were in the infirmary or who were to be executed with their camp serial number across the chest with indelible ink. As prisoners were executed or died in other ways, their clothing bearing the camp serial number was removed. Given the mortality rate at the camp and practice of removing clothing, there was no way to identify the bodies after the clothing was removed. Hence, the SS authorities introduced the practice of tattooing in order to identify the bodies of registered prisoners who had died.

Originally, a special metal stamp, holding interchangeable numbers made up of needles approximately one centimeter long was used. This allowed the whole serial number to be punched at one blow onto the prisoner's left upper chest. Ink was then rubbed into the bleeding wound.

When the metal stamp method proved impractical, a single-needle device was introduced, which pierced the outlines of the serial-number digits onto the skin. The site of the tattoo was changed to the outer side of the left forearm. However, prisoners from several transports in 1943 had their numbers tattooed on the inner side of their left upper forearms. Tattooing was generally performed during registration when each prisoner was assigned a camp serial number. Since prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were never issued numbers, they were never tattooed.

Tattooing was introduced at Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941. As thousands of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) arrived at the camp, and thousands rapidly died there, the SS authorities began to tattoo the prisoners for identification purposes. At Auschwitz II (Birkenau), the SS staff introduced the practice of tattooing in March 1942 to keep up with the identification of large numbers of prisoners who arrived, sickened, and died quickly. By this time, the majority of registered prisoners in the Auschwitz complex were Jews. In the spring of 1943, the SS authorities throughout the entire Auschwitz complex adopted the practice of tattooing almost all previously registered and newly arrived prisoners, including female prisoners. Exceptions to this practice were prisoners of German nationality and “reeducation prisoners,” who were held in a separate compound. “Reeducation prisoners,” or “labor-education prisoners,” were non-Jewish persons of virtually all European nationalities (but at Auschwitz primarily Germans, Czechs, Poles, and Soviet civilians) who had run afoul of the harsh labor discipline imposed on civilian laborers in areas under German control.

The first series of prisoner numbers was introduced in May 1940, well before the practice of tattooing began. This first series was given to male prisoners and remained in use until January 1945, ending with the number 202,499. Until mid-May 1944, male Jewish prisoners were given numbers from this series. A new series of registration numbers was introduced in October 1941 and remained in use until 1944. Approximately 12,000 Soviet POWs were given numbers from this series (some of the POWs murdered at Auschwitz were never registered and did not receive numbers). A third series of numbers was introduced in March 1942 with the arrival of the first female prisoners. Approximately 90,000 female prisoners were identified with a series of numbers created for female prisoners in March 1942 until May 1944. Each new series of numbers introduced at Auschwitz began with “1.” Some Jewish prisoners (but not all) had a triangle tattooed beneath their serial number.

In order to avoid the assignment of excessively high numbers from the general series to the large number of Hungarian Jews arriving in 1944, the SS authorities introduced new sequences of numbers in mid-May 1944. This series, prefaced by the letter A, began with “1” and ended at “20,000.” Once the number 20,000 was reached, a new series beginning with “B” series was introduced. Some 15,000 men received “B” series tattoos. For an unknown reason, the “A” series for women did not stop at 20,000 and continued to 30,000.

A separate series of numbers was introduced in January 1942 for “reeducation” prisoners who had not received numbers from the general series. Numbers from this new series were assigned retroactively to “reeducation” prisoners who had died or been released, while their superseded general-series serial numbers were reassigned to new “general” arrivals. This was the only instance in the history of Auschwitz of numbers being “recycled.” Approximately 9,000 prisoners were registered in the “reeducation” series. Beginning in 1943, female “reeducation” prisoners were given serial numbers from their own new series, which also began with “1.” There were approximately 2,000 serial numbers in this series.

Beginning in February 1943, SS authorities issue two separate series' of number to Roma (Gypsy) prisoners registered at Auschwitz: one for the men and one for the women. Through August 1944, 10,094 numbers were assigned from the former series and 10,888 from the latter. Gypsy prisoners were given the letter Z (“Zigeuner” is German for Gypsy) in addition to the serial number.

The camp authorities assigned more than 400,000 prisoner serial numbers (not counting approximately 3,000 numbers given to police prisoners interned at Auschwitz due to overcrowding in jails who were not included in the daily count of prisoners).

What you should know about the Holocaust

The first thing I would like to make clear is this.

• The Holocaust is not the only genocide in history.  As the most history-shaking and most well-documented example, it is worth learning about in order to understand the nature of hatred and intolerance, and apply its lessons in a multicultural setting.
• The Holocaust did not just happen to Jews.  It was the systematic murder of anyone deemed inferior, including: Slavs, Poles, Gypsies, Blacks, gays, communists, dissenters, the handicapped, and the elderly.
• We focus on the case of the Holocaust of the Jews because it is the single most ambitious and well-documented mass-murder in history, and because it makes it easier to understand other genocides and other hate crimes.

Understanding the Nazis

• The Holocaust was not just for hatred.  It was a cold, cynical, and calculated attempt at reshaping Europe to suit Germany's purposes.   Not only would the people of Northern Europe be cleansed, but also Kiev and St. Petersburg would be burned to the ground, Moscow would be flooded, and all the people massacred.  Any mentions of the Russians as anything but "Muscovites" would be erased from the history books, so that never again would Germany have to worry about those Russians to their east.  A "human wall" would separate the rump state of Russia from the new German territory-- Slavs to the east of the Urals; Aryans to the west.
• The Eastern European countryside would be reshaped into a "breadbasket", like the American Midwest, to feed Germany without the need to import food. Agricultural products from the rich black soil of Ukraine, and fish gathered in the Black Sea and shipped in from a fortified island of Crimea. Germans would repopulate the region from Ukraine to Leningrad.
• Hitler was fully responsible for Nazi Germany and its actions.  Someone else could NOT have taken his place and done everything exactly the same.  He and the NSDAP never got more than 35% of the vote.  He came to power by (basically) persuading the democratically-elected leader to quit his job and give it to him. Not just anyone pull off the "give me your job" demand, especially after a failed coup d'état attempt. (4) (5)
• Adolf Hitler was a patriotic war veteran with daddy issues and financial struggles.  He loved his dogs, liked painting and the arts, rocked out to terrible music, and ate mostly vegetables.  Hitler wanted to eradicate poverty, suffering and hunger among his beloved people.  Adolf Hitler was not born a bad person.  He could have been a normal and good person, if he had wanted to. His own decisions turned him into a monster.   Hell, he wasn't even raised an anti-semite-- he chose to be one.  He saw the world as "us" versus "them," and he was willing to do ANYTHING to "them" to help "us".
  At some point in your life, if you feel the cruel sting of being broke, the sore fatigue of seeing needless suffering around you, and hatred's cold claws clenching around your heart, I hope you will understand  the single most frightening fact in history: Hitler was human.  Hitler was once just like you. Once. 

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Pre-Holocaust Antisemitism

Please note Zafar's list of pogroms and raids.  This kind of unnecessary bloodshed is what gave the word "medieval" its negative connotation.  Here's some attempt to grasp the illogic of pre-Holocaust antisemitism, which was EVERYWHERE in Europe, and in much of the rest of the world, too.

Usury

The early Catholic Church banned Christians from Usury, or collecting loans with interest.  Without any competition, Jews became the only bankers in Medieval Europe, and often charged exorbitant rates.  This was before banking regulations.  When giving out a loan, a valuable possession was taken as a security deposit; inability of the debtor to pay back the loan with interest resulted in the lender keeping the deposit.  Naturally, Christians came to resent these people, who made so much money off something banned as immoral in their religion.

Anti-Semitic Myths

Medieval Europeans believed in a lot of crazy things.  They believed in witchcraft and fairies and alchemy.  They had no trouble accepting myths about those weird people in the strange clothes and hats, speaking their own suspicious secret language.  In contrast to the rigid authoritarian society under the church, Jewish culture was decentralized and individualistic, which also raised suspicion.

Before the Holocaust, many Christians believed that Jews:

• were guilty of Deicide, because "his blood be upon us and upon our children" applied at least a thousand generations out or so (even though, as the Vatican got around to admitting fairly recently, it was a Roman execution and Jews were probably innocent)

• on Sabbath and holy days, would drink the blood of Christian children. (projection from Communion discomfort?) (see Blood Libel)
• poisoned wells, spreading the plague
• never took off their hats because they had horns under there.
• worshiped the Devil, explaining their financial prosperity
• were subhuman, heartless criminals (see The Merchant of Venice; Oliver Twist)
• were responsible for the scourge of communism
• were responsible for the evils of capitalism
• had spread to so many countries and were planning World Domination through banking institutions-- a myth which persists today.  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a popular book written in 1903 that had major influence on all 20th century Anti-Semitism, claimed to be the minutes from the meetings of the Jewish World Domination Council of Doom. (See also: Rothschild Family Conspiracy Theories)
  
  
  
  
  
  

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  The Truth

  The most important thing to learn about the Holocaust is that these people were normal.  They were just people.  Take a look at some of these faces.  They're wearing different clothes and have some crazy facial hair, but... don't they look kind of like people you know?  They're smiling, thinking, slouching, spacing out, shuffling, staring, wondering, concentrating...  They're just living their lives.  They're just people.
  
  
  
  
  (Above) my grandmother (left-most) and her family, about a decade before their imprisonment. Only she and her sister (who was in Paris) survived.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  People.  Just ordinary people, each with their stories and their lives and their concerns.
  

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  Tragedy

  Then, they were imprisoned, starved, diseased, shot, poisoned, incinerated, tortured, raped, and humiliated.  My grandmother was one of a couple of survivors from her village.  Could you imagine losing almost everyone you know?  The sheer horror of the story gets lost in the macroscopic scale.  The following is an excerpt from her memoir:
  
  

  I knew <my brother> Butz was dying and I couldn't do anything for him. His breathing was labored and his skin was pallid. His head felt hot. My brother looked out of the little window in the room and said, “The Americans will not let them do this to us.” Then his eyes looked cloudy and the grip he held on my hand loosened. Those were his last words 
  <...On> the 4th of March in 1942, he died with his eyes wide open looking at me-- the same way my father did. He died with his head cradled in my arms. I had seen the entire process of his dying. I watched the lice evacuate his body and coat--the true sign that he was dead. This time my heart was completely frozen.

  And the important thing is to understand just how tragic and unspeakable and needless the loss of any individual life is... and then multiply that tragedy times 14 million.
  
  
  

But that's not where the story ends.
Once you understand everything that was terrible about the Holocaust and embraced and accepted the tragedy-- once you've reached that point of comprehending the hopeless despair, horror, and crippling depression-- you can find the happy ending.  
The story of the Righteous Among the Nations, the individuals who risked their own lives to save others, will surely send chills down your spine and tears of joy down your cheeks. Oskar Schindler, Chiune Sugihara, Irene Sendler, Constantin Karadja, and many others.  Good, selfless human beings are everywhere.

As long as there are Holocaust survivors, I hope that everyone will get the chance to meet one.  Perhaps you might think of Holocaust survivors as joyless; humorless; victims; husks of their former selves.  That would have meant the Nazis succeeded-- but this is not so. I hope you see that they survived and they never lost their humanity.   I hope you take pride in the sheer strength and incredible endurance of the human spirit.  Those who survived continued their lives, they had children, they loved, laughed and lived well.  If living well is the best revenge, well, there is something of a happy ending in all this.

The above and below photos depict survivors' wide range of incredible emotions at the exact moment they realized they were liberated.

(above) A happy couple, much later in life.
(below) My grandfather and my uncle.  Look at that tacky 60's wallpaper!

Links:

20 Photos That Change The Holocaust Narrative
The Holocaust: Photographs
The Righteous Among The Nations

The Part Asian Nations Played in Saving Lives from the Holocaust.

In terms of 'most important' there are many excellent answers already given, so let me share with you some 'lesser known' facts of the Holocaust, such as the part Asian nations played in saving lives from the Holocaust.


Ho Feng-Shan, China's diplomat to Nazi Germany

In the year 1937, Ho Feng-Shan, the Republic of China's diplomat in Vienna, issued over 2,000 family visas for Jews to flee to Shanghai. Unlike western countries such as the US and England, China had no restrictions on accepting Jewish people, as there was no tradition of organized anti-semitism to them. When Ho ran out of official visas to assign, he forged them, his goal was to save as many lives as he could, laws be damned. Ho Feng-Shan was never recognized for this in his lifetime, but Israel honored him as Ho Feng-Shan, posthumously in 2001.

A memorial plaque in Shanghai for Ho Feng-Shan



Chiune Sugihara, Japan's Vice-Consul to Lithuania 

Even when Shanghai fell to the Japanese Empire, it was still a safe haven for Jews. In 1940 the Japanese diplomat in Lithuania Chiune Sugihara began issuing visas for Jews to flee Europe and go to Shanghai, directly breaking proper procedures in his effort to save lives. Even when he was moved from his post, he was still madly producing visas, throwing blank ones out of his train window to crowds of Jews desiring freedom. Estimates on the number of lives he saved range from 6,000 to 10,000. 

45 years after these events, Sugihara was asked why he did what he did, his response:

You want to know about my motivation, don't you? Well. It is the kind of sentiments anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He just cannot help but sympathize with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes, Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes. Also, I felt at that time, that the Japanese government did not have any uniform opinion in Tokyo. Some Japanese military leaders were just scared because of the pressure from the Nazis; while other officials in the Home Ministry were simply ambivalent.

People in Tokyo were not united. I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply. I knew that somebody would surely complain about me in the future. But, I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people's lives....The spirit of humanity, philanthropy...neighborly friendship...with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did, confronting this most difficult situation—and because of this reason, I went ahead with redoubled courage

Over 20,000 Jews found refuge in Shanghai through World War 2. Even though Germany pressured Japan to hand over or kill the Jews, the governor of Shanghai refused.  American journalist Warren Kozak describes the episode when the Japanese military governor of the city sent for the Jewish community leaders as so: 

The Japanese governor asked "Why do the Germans hate you so much?"
Rabbi Shimon Sholom Kalish replied "because we are Orientals."

The governor, whose face had been stern throughout the confrontation, broke into a slight smile. In spite of the military alliance, he did not accede to the German demand and the Shanghai Jews were never handed over."

After the defeat of the Axis, the majority of the Shanghai Jews made their way to newly formed Israel. If you want to learn more about heroes from around the world who stood up for humanity, check the wiki page Righteous Among the Nations.