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 (https://www.coursera.org/learn/holocaust-introduction-1/home/welcome). 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
Hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors
continued 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 emigrated to the USA, Canada,
South Africa or Australia, forming
there lively communities, which, on one hand,
treasured the memory of the lost world,
and the other, tried to create a new local community,
obligated to its new homeland.
More than 400,000 Holocaust survivors
made their way to the land of Israel,
and took an active part in the establishment
of the state of Israel.
Despite the most difficult experiences, and regardless,
of the many concerns 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, anaemic.
And then too, the people around us refused to listen;
and even those who 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
in the Soviet bloc, or even the existence of families,
husbands, wives, children, they once had.
For them, the Holocaust was constantly present,
even if unspeakable, for many different reasons.
"How 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 chambers--
by surviving I'd betrayed everyone else.
And there is no forgiveness for that."
True, survivors testified before historical or aide committees,
composing initial research or memorial books,
and expressed themselves in art.
But yet, in the public 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 it could not really be overlooked.
In the newly born state of Israel,
1948, much of the state commemoration
activities in the '50s 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 a central element
in the rebuilding process of nations.
As part of Israel, a young state's confrontation
with the Jewish peoples' past, and as a product
of the reality, which was shaped in 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 emphasise the essence of the Holocaust,
the mass murder.
An important development in the process
of dealing with the past, and the centrality
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
organisations to Argentina.
In May 1960, he was captured and smuggled to Israel,
in a bold action, and was brought to trial,
facing not only a Jewish judge, but some, a handful,
of his former victims.
Much can be said about this trial, and the many Holocaust
survivors' testimonies, which unlike in Nuremberg,
consisted the heart of the Eichmann trial.
Yet, for our purpose, what is important to stress,
is it's great impact in opening, first the Israeli public,
and later on the whole world, to the voices of the survivors.
In many ways, even establishment of research,
which place the Jewish perspective in the center,
was an outcome of this trial.
Israeli scholars established a school of thought
that shaped worldwide Holocaust research as it is known today.
Some other international events in the late '60s, also
contributed to the growing interest in the survivor
stories, and to an extensive public interest
in the Holocaust.
The opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States,
and the May 1968 strikes in France,
which emphasised the important role of the individual voice
and experience.
Or important popular representations
of the Holocaust as the TV miniseries, Holocaust 1978.
Claude Lanzmann's nine hour long documentary film, Shoah, 1985,
and the much later historical drama, Schindler's List,
by Steven Spielberg, 1993.
As interest in the Holocaust expanded,
some Western European societies began analysing their behaviour
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 collaboration and resistance
throughout the continent.
Especially in Poland, local researchers
brought new perspective and notions
to many of the questions asked 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, where Jewish citizens were killed,
or to Jewish communities, but existed all over the globe--
in El Salvador, Brazil, or Johannesburg, South Africa.
Look up in your own local newspaper, preferred website,
or country's calendar, we're opening
a forum in which you can share the various appearances
of the Holocaust, almost on a daily basis,
in your personal and public spheres.
So why is the Holocaust so evident?
Why is it that as years pass, the discussion about it,
and worldwide interest, only increase?
Or using the 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
and modernity or the fact that it exposed,
in a way no one can deny, the deep abyss of human cruelty,
and 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 emergence of post-modernism,
inspired new philosophical and theological doctrines, defined
patterns of commemoration, which are adapted in many societies,
and literally changed Jewish, European, and human history.
Even more, the expectation and demand to maintain moral norms,
and protect human rights, even during political struggles,
or war times, as well as international law,
stemmed directly from the terrible world experience
of the Holocaust.
But maybe, the most significant meaning the Holocaust has 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 civilisation.
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 society was a driving
force of mass murder of millions of innocents,
or that it deserted all its basic principles of liberty,
equality, and human rights, or that it deserted and even
handed some of its citizens to murderous forces,
or that it witnessed, and even enjoyed,
economically, and in other ways, so many deaths,
is part of each and every European countries' 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 the 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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