The Holocaust was an inconceivable historical event, which forever robbed Western culture of its innocence. As civilized human beings, we fail to understand how events of such horror could have taken place, and how an idea so inhumanly warped could have spread like wildfire through an entire continent, instigating the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews. This free online course was produced jointly by Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem – the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. This course is the second of the two courses and covers three themes in its three weeks: Week 1: The Final Solution We’ll look at the cultural and mental processes that paved the way to the comprehensive and systematic mass murder of Jews in Europe – that is, the Final Solution. As part of this hard lesson we will discuss the various characteristics of the murder sites and death camps, and reveal selected aspects of the horror that occurred in them. Week 2: Jewish and Non-Jewish Responses to the Holocaust We will try to explore questions regarding knowledge about the application of the Final Solution, as well as a variety of responses and annihilation of victims, local populations and perpetrators. Week 3: The End of the War We will dedicate this lesson to the events that occurred in the last years of the Holocaust, as well as questions of memory, commemoration and future research. We strongly recommend that you register for "The Holocaust - An Introduction (I): Nazi Germany: Ideology, The Jews and the World" as well. Taking both parts of the course would enable you to obtain a fuller and more comprehensive knowledge about The Holocaust. This online course is offered in an innovative, multi-level format, comprising: Comprehensive lectures by leading researchers from Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem. A wealth of voices and viewpoints presented by guest lecturers Numerous documents, photos, testimonies and works of art from the time of the Holocaust. Novel learning experience: Crowdsourcing – involving the learners themselves in the act of collecting and shaping information, via unique, exciting online assignments.
Memory, commemoration and long term effects
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From the course by Tel Aviv University
The Holocaust - An Introduction (II): The Final Solution
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From the lesson
The Free World, the last months, the Aftermath and the Implications
This lesson will describe the steps taken by Nazi Germany, with the Allied advance across Europe, to increase efforts to exterminate the Jews and to destroy all evidence of their crimes. We will deal with questions of memory and commemoration, examine the significance of the Holocaust for different audiences, and present the latest research in the field of Holocaust studies.
Meet the Instructors
Professor Havi Dreifuss, PhDProfessor
Havi Dreifuss is a historian of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe; senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at TAU; heads the Center for Research of Holocaust History in Poland, Yad Vashem.
Dr Na'ama Bela Shik, PhDDirector, Educational Technology Department, The International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem
The International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem
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Welcome back.
Hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors continue
to live in Europe after the war under the Iron Curtain or in western countries.
Despite the most difficult experience of the war and
maybe even because of the many questions it raised, many of them became
very much involved in new Jewish or non Jewish communal activities.
A few hundreds of thousands immigrated to the U.S.A., Canada,
South Africa or Australia forming their lively communities which on one
hand treasured the memory of the lost world and
on the other tried to create a new local community obligated to it's new homeland.
More than 400,000 Holocaust survivors made their way in the land of Israel and
took an active part in the establishment of the state of Israel.
Despite their most difficult experiences and regardless the many concern expressed
by Jewish intellectuals during the war, the vast majority of Holocaust survivors
were functional citizens in societies worldwide and were active in many fields.
Often, even in those new lives, ties and connections with other Jews from the same
pre-war locations who shared the terrible war experience were most apparent.
They, and only they could understand what others
could never comprehend as expressed by Eli Wiesel.
We tried to talk about our experience.
It was not easy at first, because of the language.
Language failed us.
We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate, anemic.
And then too, the people around us refused to listen.
And even those listened refused to believe, and
even those who believed could not comprehend.
Of course they could not.
Nobody could.
The experience of the camps defies comprehension.
In the private sphere, some tried to tell their families and friends about the past.
Others kept silence and didn't reveal even to those closest to them,
their Jewishness, especially the soviet block, or,
even the existence of families, husbands, wife, children they once had.
For them, the Holocaust was constantly present even if unspeakable for
many different reasons.
Can I justify myself to you for having survived, for
having seen burning ovens, red flames in the sky.
For having seen thousands of people brought daily to the gas chamber.
By surviving, I betrayed everyone else, and there is no forgiveness for that.
True, survivors testified before historical or aid committees,
composed initial research or memorial books and expressed themselves in art.
But, yet, in the public's sphere of western world, the Holocaust,
as a topic, as an unprecedented event, was somehow not discussed.
It was an absent present entity.
An event nobody wanted to deal with, but that could not really be overlooked.
In the newly born state of Israel, 1948, much of the state commemoration
activities in the 50's, were concentrated on Jewish fighters.
Actually this was part of a wider phenomenon, also apparent in Europe,
where emphasis on the resistance to Nazism,
became central element in the rebuilding process of nations.
As part of Israel a young state confrontation of the Jewish people passed
and as a product of the reality which was safety to the country struggling for
its own survival.
Even the National Day of Remembrance was established in relation to the famous
Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance day.
This was a very limited part of the story, which not only failed to include all
survivors, but also did not emphasize the essence of the Holocaust, the mass murder.
An important development in the process of dealing with the past, and in this
neutrality of the individual Holocaust story in it, was the Eichmann trial.
Adolf Eichmann an SS officer very much involved in many anti-Jewish measures and
an especially active participant in the implementation of the systematic murder,
fled after the war with some assistance of church organizations to Argentina.
In May 1960, he was captured and smuggled to Israel in a bold action,
and was brought to trial facing a not only Jewish judge, but some,
a handful of his former victims.
Much can be said about this trial and the many Holocaust survivor testimonies which,
unlike in Nuremberg, consisted the heart of the Eichmann trial.
Yet for our purpose, what is important to stress is its great impact in opening
first the Israel Republic, and later on the whole world,
to the voices of the survivors.
In many ways, even establishment of research,
which placed the Jewish perspective in the center was an outcome of this trial.
And Israeli scholars established a school of thought that shaped worldwide
Holocaust research as it is known today.
Some other international events in the late 60's also contributed to
the growing interest in the survivor's stories, and
to an extensive public interest in the Holocaust.
As the opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States and the May 1968 strikes
in France which emphasized the important role of the individual voice and
experience or important popular representations of the Holocaust
as a TV miniseria Holocaust 1978 Claude Lanzmann nine hour long
documentary film Shoah 1985 and the much later historical drama,
Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg, 1993.
As an interest in the Holocaust expanded, some western European
societies began analyzing their behavior during the Holocaust,
though much was still to be questioned.
With the collapse of the Iron Curtain,
many limitations were gone archives were opened and new questions arose
including a much more balanced european research regarding corporation and
resistance throughout the continent, especially in Poland.
Local researchers brought new perspective and
notions to many of the questioned as before.
Political reality, social and civil unrest, the media,
as well as academic research contributed to what the French Holocaust
researcher Annette Wieviorka termed The Era of the Witness.
Holocaust survivors were no longer those who had just witnessed something,
but voices which were now part of a wider demand from the world to bear witness.
As a result, many different patterns of commemoration emerged.
Monuments, museums and memorial days.
The commemoration of the Holocaust was not limited to former death sites to countries
whose Jewish citizens were killed or to Jewish communities, but
existed all over the globe.
In El Salvador, Brazil or in Johannesburg, South Africa look up in your own
local newspaper, preferred website or countries calendar.
We are opening a forum in which you can share the various appearance of
the holocaust almost on a daily basis in your personal and public squares.
So why is the Holocaust so evident?
Why is it that as years pass, the discussion about it, and
world wide interest only increase.
Or using a phrase of the great Holocaust scholar and
Holocaust survivor Israel Gutman, why does the Holocaust refuse to become history.
I think the answer, or at least part of it lies not only in the way the Holocaust
challenged humanity or modernity or the fact it exposed in a way no one can
deny the deep abyss of human cruelty in the collapse of moral values.
The Holocaust had and still has a practical impact on our world and
shaped it in many ways.
It contributed to the emerging of post modernism, inspired new philosophical and
theological defined patrons of commemoration which are adapted in
many societies, and literally changed Jewish, European and human history.
Even more, the expectation and demands to maintain moral norms and protect human
rights, even during political struggles or war times as well as international law,
stem directly from the terrible world experience of the Holocaust.
But maybe the most significant meaning the Holocaust had was that it simply happened.
The mere understanding that horrific acts can be done in the name of this or
that ideology undermined what was seen as the foundation of civilization.
Humanity's obligation to the ultimate commandment thou shalt not kill.
You see, the very fact that today if, God forbid, you will hear and
we do hear that this or that genocidal regime mass murdered men and
women, old people and young, you will believe it.
You and I, unlike people who lived in pre-war Europe,
know in one way or another that this is possible.
Humanity lost its innocence, and we are forever denied it.
And what about societies that were part of those events?
The very fact that a nation or a society was a driving force of mass murder of
millions of innocents, or that they deserted all its basic precedent
principles of liberty, equality and human rights, or that they deserted and
even handed some of it's citizens to murderous forces, or that it witnesses and
even enjoyed, economically or in other ways, so many deaths is part of each and
every European country's history, which could not be ignored.
For the Jews in Europe or in other places, the Holocaust resulted
in an unbearable insight that being a Jew could serve as a sufficient
reason in eyes of many for total annihilation, which nothing,
no advanced ideas, or personal connections, could really prevent.
All of those are very weighty insights which shape and
constantly burden, very rightly so, the world as we know it.
Thus, raising heavy questions of civic responsibility for every individual.
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