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Rochelle Wilner |
Frank Dimant |
Prof. Stephen Scheinberg |
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Rochelle Wilner |
Frank Dimant |
Prof. Stephen Scheinberg |
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Within this section there are 10 numbered photographs whiuch describe a situation or location as a catalyst for discussion. Following each photo are observation questions and issues for further research, as well as key words with which the student should become familiar.
*Adapted from The Holocaust—Social Responsibility and Global Citizenship—A Resource Guide for Social Studies 6 Teachers, British Columbia, Ministry of Education, 2000.
**Adapted from the Holocaust memorial Day, Remembering Genocides, Lessons for the Future education pack of the United Kingdom, The Holocaust Educational Trust, 2000.
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Jewish mother and child in the Warsaw Ghetto, summer 1941. |
OBSERVATION QUESTIONS
1. Can you tell the nationality of the woman and child in the picture?
2. Who would have been able to take such a picture in the Warsaw Ghetto?
3. Does this image look familiar or remind you of other images?
After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis had a further 1,500,000 Jews under their control. The Nazis began to persecute them almost immediately. In spring 1940, they established ghettos in the large towns and cities of occupied Poland. Jews from outside the cities were sent to live there. A ghetto was a resthcted area where Jewish people were forced to live, usually after being made to leave their own homes. Generally the ghetto was established in the poorest part of the town and the conditions were cramped and unsanitary. The Jews were permitted to take only some of their possessions. Most ghettos were surrounded by fences and barbed wire, or a wall. The city of Warsaw had the largest ghetto, which contained 450,000 Jews in an area of only 1.3 square miles. Within the ghetto, food rationing was implemented and trade was controlled. In November 1940, the Warsaw ghetto was ‘sealed’ and Jews could no longer move freely outside.
Thousands of people died of disease and malnutrition; others were regularly transported to death camps and labour camps. Despite the horrific conditions, covert social and cultural orgamzations were established, including schools and religious study groups, as an attempt to keep up dignity and morale. This is an example of spiritual resistance.
In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto who had not been deported rose up in armed resistance against the Nazi troops who were attempting to liquidate the ghetto. With only a few weapons, the majority of which were home made, the Jews held off the well-equipped Nazi military machine for four weeks. Although finally defeated, the act of rebellion was an important beacon of defiance that inspired further resistance. The date chosen for Yom ha-Shoah commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
1. Why do you think the Nazis wanted all the Jews in one place? What did it achieve?
2. The photograph of the mother and child above was taken by a German soldier. Why would he want to take such a picture? Should we still use photographs or images taken by the perpetrators?
1. Can you find out where the word ‘ghetto’ originated from? People still refer to groups living in ghettos today. What is a modern ghetto? Are there any similarities with the ghettos described above?
2. Many children were forced to live in the Nazi ghetto. Research what life was like for them. A useful resource is the testimony of Janina Bauman, Winter in the Morning.
Hungarian jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, June 1944. On the left of the picture is Taube (née) Jacob (wearing a headscarf) with her children. |
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OBSERVATION QUESTIONS
1. Look closely at the photograph. What does the photograph suggest about the conditions in which people were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau?
2. Are there any clues in the photograph that these people are Jewish?
After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Nazis decided to step up their policy against the Jews in the occupied territories, that is, to implement mass murder. They began to experiment with ways of killing large numbers of people ‘efficiently’ and with as much secrecy as possible. By December 1941, over one and a half million Jews had been killed by beating, starvation and shootings in Eastern Europe. At this time, the Nazis began to develop gas vans and gas chambers as a method of killing people more quickly. They created six ‘extermination’ camps in rural areas close to railway junctions: Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The largest death camp was built as a sub-camp of Auschwitz in 1942 and was known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Jews from all over Europe were taken to Birkenau by train between 1942 and 1944. One and a half million Jewish men, women and children were killed there. When trains arrived at the ‘ramp’ (or platform) in Birkenau, the SS would select some of the fittest prisoners for forced labour. This allowed these prisoners to live for a while longer, though in terrible conditions with little food. The majority of people on each transport, and especially the elderly and women with children, were sent straight to the gas chambers in Birkenau. The Nazis ordered that their bodies be stripped of anything valuable (including even tooth fillings and hair) before they were burned and the ashes dumped.
The last transports to arrive in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in summer 1944, were Jewish people from Hungary and those areas annexed by Hungary such as Transyivania and Carpatho-Ruthenia.
Lili Jacob was born in 1926 in a town called Bilky in Carpatho-Ruthenia. She was eighteen when the Nazis took over Hungary. Along with over twenty members of her family and many friends and neighbours, she was sent to a Jewish ghetto in Berehov. In June 1944, Lili and her family were deported from the ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Like all Jews, they were told before the journey that they were being sent for ‘resettlement in the East’.
The photograph shows her father’s sister, Lili’s Aunt Taube, and four of her cousins arriving at Birkenau. Lili was the only member of her family to survive Birkenau. The rest were killed either in the gas chambers or as a result of forced labour. Lili was separated from her mother at the selection. When she tried to rejoin her she was attacked by an SS man with a knife, and made to return to the forced labour group. After the selection, Lili’s own clothes were taken away, her head was shaved, a number was tattooed on her arm and she was allocated a bunk in a women’s barrack.
Lili was kept in Auschwitz-Birkenau until December 1944, and then transferred to three different slave labour factories making textiles and weapons. She was liberated in Dora camp in Germany in 1945, where she contracted typhus. After the war she met and married a fellow survivor, Max Zelmanovic, and in 1948 they moved to the United States where they raised their two daughters.
1. What factors were important to the Nazis in building their death camps where they did? Why were they not built in Germany?
2. Think about geographical factors, including centres of Jewish population. ‘Resettlement in the East’ was a Nazi euphemism for deportation to an ‘extermination’ camp. What is a euphemism? Why did the Nazis use them so often about the killing process? Why did they use the word ‘extermination’? Discuss other euphemisms they used.
3. Lili was selected for slave labour but her Aunt Taube was not. What do you think the reasons might have been?
4. What were the reasons for Lili’s treatment immediately after ‘selection’?
5. What was the significance of textiles and weapons for the German economy in the winter of 1944/45?
6. What factors do you think might have led to Lili and Max deciding to leave Europe and settle in the US after the war?
1. The journey from Berehov to Auschwitz-Birkenau took two whole days. Describe what conditions were like for people in the cattle cars.
2. Using video, taped testimonies or memoirs written by women who survived the camp, describe the living conditions that Lili might have endured as a prisoner for six months in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
3. Choose one of the death camps, other than Auschwitz, listed above. Write an account of the history of the camp. How long did it exist? Who was in charge? Who was sent there? Are there any recorded instances of resistance in the camp?
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A Jewish fighting group in Vilna, 1944. |
OBSERVATION QUESTIONS
1. What clues are there in the photograph that these people were not members of a regular army?
2. This is obviously a posed photograph, taken with consent. What do you think might have been the motivation of either the photographer or the subjects in capturing this moment?
When studying the Holocaust, one of the questions asked by students is ‘Why did the Jews not resist?’ in answering this question, we must think carefully about the terrible situation Jewish people faced and the often limited knowledge and resources that were available to them. Historians have produced evidence that there was resistance — in the forests of Eastern Europe, in the ghettos and even in the death camps — but not all historians agree on a definition of resistance. For some it means only armed opposition to the Nazis.
This was the response advocated by Abba Kovner in the Vilna ghetto, once he realized that it was the Nazi plan to murder the Jewish population. He called for the ghetto inhabitants to rise up against the Nazis when the deportations began. With the few weapons smuggled into the ghetto and lack of military training, he knew that they could not hope to defeat the German forces; but he felt it was better to die ‘honourably’ fighting in the ghetto than in a mass execution. His group, the United Partisan Organization, took much encouragement from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. The majority of people in the Vilna ghetto did not agree with Kovner‘s view. The spokesman for the Jews in Vilna from July 1942, Jacob Gens, argued that if the Jews resisted, the Nazis would carry out reprisals and more lives would be lost. Gens believed that by following Nazi orders and continuing to work, the ghetto inhabitants would be useful to the Nazis and some would survive. In fact, when the Nazis closed the ghetto in September 1943, many women, children and elderly people were sent to a death camp. The rest were sent to work camps where they too eventually perished. This example, from just one ghetto, indicates some of the difficulties and dilemmas faced all over Europe by the Jewish communities in contemplating resistance.
Some historians believe that resistance should be defined more broadly than armed fighting. The Nazis banned Jewish people from participating in educational and cultural activities; but the Jews in the ghettos, for example, set up secret schools, theatres and libraries, organized religious ceremonies and smuggled in food, in defiance of the Nazis. This kind of activity can also be called resistance, because it sustained the human spirit and perpetuated Jewish cultural practices in the most difficult circumstances.
After the war, Abba Kovner emigrated to Israel and became a writer and poet. in 1970 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Literature. He married a fellow resistance fighter, Vitka Kempner, photographed above (back row, far right), and founded the Museum of the Diaspora at Tel Aviv University.
1. The Nazis tried to keep the death camps a secret. When people were rounded up in the ghettos to be sent to the death camps, they were told that they were to be ‘resettled’ in work camps ‘in the East’. The Nazis forced some camp inmates to write reassuring postcards to relatives left behind. What was the purpose of this?
2. What other sources of information were available to people in the ghettos about the world outside?
3. How do you think resistance should be defined? Describe several forms of resistance to the Nazis.
1. Think about the difficulties of making a stand against the Nazis. What difficulties would the following categories of people have faced in thinking about resistance:
2. You may need to do some background research. In compiling your answers think about the followin question:
3. Research the poetry of Abba Kovner. Many other survivors have written poetry about their Holocaust experience, including those who were children at the time. Look out for the work of Nelly Sachs, Paul Celen and Primo Levi, for example.
Bosnian refugees of all ages under the shelter of a United Nations High Commissioner for the Refugees (UNHCR) tent, 1995. |
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OBSERVATION QUESTIONS
1. Describe what you can see in this photograph.
2. What is the symbol you can see over these people’s heads?
Throughout the 1990s the country formerly known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the site of terrible conflict. Yugoslavia broke into several smaller states and in the process there was widespread fighting, many people were displaced and atrocities were committed on all sides. The first territories to break away in the early 1990s were Slovenia and Croatia. They declared themselves independent countries and were recognized as such by the international community. In April 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina, another of the six republics that formed Yugoslavia, became independent. Within a matter of weeks, however, the new state was carved into ethnically exclusive regions by Croatian and Serbian paramilitary organizations operating with the support of Croatia and what remained of the Yugoslav republic. Most recently, in 1998, war broke out in the Serbian region of Kosovo, forcing over a million people to flee their homes.
The population of Yugoslavia was always ethnically mixed. In the 1992 war, the smallest of the ethnic groups, the Bosnian Muslims, became the victims of racial prejudice. The human rights abuses which occurred throughout the conflict, directed at Croats and Serbs, where they were also minorities, and the genocidal action directed towards the Bosnian Muslims, were some of the most terrible events to occur on European soil since the Holocaust. The historic and ancient town of Sarajevo was reduced to rubble. More than one million people lost their homes all over Bosnia. Many of the victims of the atrocities are still unaccounted for. From the hundreds of thousands of people killed or wounded, approximately 51,000 were children. Of those children who survived, the UNHCR states that “the majority have lost relatives and experienced indiscriminate shelling and shooting.”
A lack of knowledge about the region meant that for many Western observers the wars in the former Yugoslavia were confusing. This led to inaction and often a lack of understanding towards the victims. However, many aid organizations and refugee associations did work in the region to assist the victims. The main organization co-ordinating relief was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). it is this organization’s symbol that can be seen in the background of the photograph.
The UNHCR was created by the United Nations General Assembly and began work in 1951. Since its formation, wars, natural disasters and famines around the world have created a great deal of work for the organization: “The total number of people of concern to the UNHCR rose from 17 million in 1991 to a record 27 million in 1995. The number dropped to just under 21.5 million as of January 1999. Despite the overall fall, this figure still represents one out of every 280 people on earth. They include refugees, returnees and persons displaced within their own countries”. (UNHCR web site:) www.unhcr.ch
1. How do children become the victims of war?
2. What is the meaning of the term ‘asylum’? Why is the concept of asylum an important one?
1. On a map of Europe locate the former Yugoslavia and then find Bosnia. Refugees from the Yogoslav wars found temporary and permanent homes in many other countries including Italy, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Ireland and the UK. Draw arrows from Bosnia to each of those countries. How did the people of Bosnia become refugees?
2. Read the following short clippings from British newspapers. What do they tell us about:
“A Bosnian nurse working at Derbyshire hospital has been officially recognized by the UK Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting. Dzana Jahic left Bosnia, where she was a nurse, in 1994 and has finally been recognized as a qualified staff nurse.” (Derby Evening Telegraph, 23 February 2000)
“Two Kosovan men have been attacked by a group of youths in Luton. A police spokesman said, ‘Two people were arrested for violent disorder following an incident in Ycovil Road, Luton. We are treating the incident as a racially motivated attack.’ ” (Luton on Sunday, 18 June 2000)
“Members of the Red Leicester Choir are hoping people will contribute to an appeal to give asylum seekers unwanted musical instruments. The choir gave a concert at the International Hotel in Leicester for around 400 asylum seekers. Members are now hoping people who have unused and unwanted instruments will contribute to the appeal. Sheehans Music in London Road, Leicester, has agreed to help by taking musical and percussion instruments.” (Leicester Mercury, 20 July 2000)
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Tutsi refugees trying to go back home — but there is little to go back to, 1994. |
OBSERVATION QUESTION
1. What can you assess about the situation of these people from the photograph?
In Rwanda, between April and June 1994, approximately 800,000 Tutsi civilians were wiped out in a brutal, political campaign of genocide by Hutu hardliners. The aggressors were soldiers, trained youth groups (the Interahamwe) and ordinary people, encouraged by the Hutu administration. Men, women and children, mainly Tutsi but also some Hutu who did not support the ruling regime, were hunted down and killed, sometimes with guns but often with (more readily available, less expensive) machetes, distributed by government officials.
Over hundreds of years, the people who came to be known as the Hutu and Tutsi had lived side by side and joined in creating the nation of Rwanda. They shared a language, cultural tradition and religious beliefs. Scholars believe that the Hutu and Tutsi belong to the same group of people who lived in an area of Africa extending from Cameroon to Uganda. Hutu, an agricultural people, first settled in the region of the Great Lakes of Africa between 1000 and 500 BC. Tutsi nomadic cattle herders migrated from Ethiopia into the area some 400 years ago.
Over time, those Tutsi who owned large herds of cattle became wealthy and began to dominate the Hutu economically. During the era of European colonialism, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Belgian rulers promoted Tutsi wealth and power at the expense of the Hutus. The Tutsi were given greater access to higher education and appointed to posts of responsibility.
In the course of the second half of the twentieth century however, the balance of power changed. In 1962, Ruanda-Urundi (as the country was then known) achieved independence and was divided into two states, Rwanda and Burundi. In Rwanda the majority Hutu attacked the minority Tutsi, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee to Uganda for refuge. In Burundi, the minority Tutsis maintained control of the government and military forces.
In 1973 in Rwanda, General Habyanamana, the highest ranking army officer, took power, declared himself President and promised national unity to the country. He set up a one party state. The National Revolutionary Movement for Development (NRMD) was strongly organized at a local level and exerted great control over the population.
Hutu rule was seriously threatened in the 1990s by violent attacks by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF — an opposition force formed by mainly Tutsi Rwandans in exile in Uganda and elsewhere), the assassination of Habyariamana and increased calls for greater democracy. It was under these conditions that the genocide was planned — to rid the RPF of its support base at the same time as uniting Rwanda in a common cause against the socalled enemies of the state.
The genocide provoked a full scale PRF invasion which drove out the genocidal regime and triggered a new crisis as hundreds of thousands of Rwandans abandoned their homes and headed for Tanzania. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) established a refugee camp at a site called Benaco. According to a European Union report, within one day Benaco became the second largest town in Tanzania. Two months later, over a million more people fled Rwanda, this time to Zaire where a major refugee camp was set up in Goma. Here, cholera and dysentery epidemics wiped out thousands more people. Officials from the displaced NRMD regime imposed a strict control on the camps and subjected refugees to intimidation to prevent them from returning home.
During the crisis in Rwanda, there was criticism of the response of the international community. Before the genocide, United Nations (UN) civilian officials and peace-keeping troops were based in and around Rwanda. As the crisis developed, these troops were withdrawn. Observers have speculated that the genocide might have been prevented had the UN been better informed by representatives on the ground and willing to intervene to save lives. In fact, foreign governments did not want to risk the lives of their own nationals and evacuated them as Rwanda plunged into a blood bath. For many weeks the only relief organization working in Rwanda was the International Committee of the Red Cross.
There have been a number of refugee crises in the past ten years. Many people in Britain have been moved to try to ease the situation of the refugees in some way, even though they may be on the other side of the world. Can you think of any ways your community has responded to the plight of refugees at home or abroad? How effective do you think this aid was?
What combination of factors contributed towards genocide in Rwanda?
What do you think was behind the decision of several western governments to withdraw their peace-keeping forces from Rwanda?
1. Think about the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. Are there any similarities in the origin or nature of the persecution? What are the differences?
2. After some research on the UN Security Council and the International Committee of the Red Cross, write down five statements about each that would explain their work to someone who was ignorant about their role. Has anyone been punished for the crimes that occurred in Rwanda in 1994? How does the international community deal with ‘crimes against humanity’ today?
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in a time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
In the present Convention, genocide means that any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
The following acts shall be punishable:
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention and, in particular, to provide the effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or of any of the other acts enumerated on Article III.
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