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When Answers are not Enough: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

(All photos are courtesy of the author.)

The only facts we know about Rosalia Wourgaft Schatz are that she was raised by Jewish parents in the city of Tulchin in southwestern Ukraine. In 1919 her family emigrated to France and in 1940 when the Germans occupied Paris and began their anti-Jewish politics, she, like many other Jews, was forced to wear the yellow star. In 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered at age 67.

Rosalia’s brief life story is registered in the Identification Card #1847, found at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, founded in 1983 in Washington, D.C. Her IC is one of thousands that can be find in a shelf near the venue’s second floor elevators, that take you up to the main floors of the permanent exhibit. Before starting the tour, visitors can take an identification card like Rosalia’s, to go through the display with an actual target of the Nazi regime in their hand. The idea is that every person who enters the exhibit will get to know at least one victim. The short biographical information found in these cards are the only data we will ever know of many of the casualties of the Nazis, aside from the fact that they were one of the approximately 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Once on the main exhibit floors, people can see the atrocities of the Nazi regime against Jewish, Roma, Armenian, and other minority populations. One of the main purposes of the curators of the United States Holocaust Museum is to encourage and promote the audience to keep asking “Why?” There is plenty of evidence of the torture and brutality committed by the Germans against their target populations but the basic question, why? still remains unanswered. The need to elucidate responses, find more explanations, and ignite further discussion fuels the intention of the museum professionals. This is evident at the very entrance to the building where vistors see two big posters that state: “This museum is not an answer but a question” and “What`s your question? #AskWhy”

As basic as these inquiries may seem and despite the myriad answers they have produced, there is something missing for the victims and their families. The basic Why? is still hovering in the back of the minds of those who endured and survived the Holocaust.

It is a question that the curators, employees, and researchers of the museum use to create historical memory narratives that include the victims, remember and honor them, and counteract versions that deny that these violent events did actually happen.

Raising awareness of the past to understand contemporary issues is one of the bridges built by memory museums because they demonstrate with facts, testimonies, documents, and images that atrocities like the Holocaust occur. In this sense, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is considered a pioneer in display and representation of difficult topics. Another of the main objectives of the professional team of the museum is that the world will not allow the repetition of these brutalities. In the current political climate not only in the United States but in Latin America, for instance, where racism, discrimination, and exclusion are acquiring strength, to know that genocide is real and can happen is key. To deny or distort the Holocaust or other violent conflicts invalidates the victims’ voices, and prevents people like Rosalía and many others from finding justice.

This museum, as most memory sites, however, generates polemics. Should the past be relived in a setting like a museum? Do the survivors feel retraumatized by the displays? Is it not better to forget what happened? Apparently not since during the last decades there has been a huge proliferation of memory museums and displays, which demonstrates that diverse communities want to know what happened in order to restore the social fabric of their societies, to decide what to pass on to future generations, and to attempt to prevent atrocities from happening once more.

Three-year-olds on the world stage

When I was very small, I lived six blocks from the Santa Fe Opera. Our home was in the Tesuque Village, which is really just a country road that runs alongside the Tesuque Creek just north of Santa Fe, with twenty tiny cul-de-sacs stretching up into the alluvial crannies of the southern Rockies. There were fruit stands and general stores. The Indians from the Tesuque Reservation would come to trade hides for cigarettes. This was before there were casinos. I remember the taste of the fresh local pears. There will be some in heaven, I assume. Once, I got lost. I was three. An Indian from the reservation took me to every house in the village and asked me, “Is that your house, little boy?”

On the horizon to the east, we had the Sangre de Cristos. They were huge, daunting, legendary and high. Mountain snow accumulated there in the winter to keep the semi-arid New Mexico wasteland inexplicably green all summer. Deep in the heart of the wilderness, at Horsethief Meadow, the early Comanche hid away in the lush green grass of summer with the wild and not-so-wild herds of mustangs that made them the wealthiest traders at the Taos market in the nineteenth century. Savages? Trade in your textbook. They knew more about selective breeding than Her Majesty’s Master of Horses.

To the west, there was the Opera. You might ask why Tesuque had an Opera. All I can say is that it just needed one. It simply couldn’t do without one. It was brand new, when I was three. It went up in 1957. I wasn’t sure where I lived, but I knew it was in the shadow of the Opera, a battleship on our western horizon. Man-made grandeur. And woman-made, of course. A work of art. An open-air theatre, like the Athenians had, long, long ago. A democratic, public forum.

I never went. I was three years old. My brother, one year my senior, and my sister, one year my junior, never went, either. But Momma and Daddy went. (Assuming I got the right house, and they were my real momma and daddy.) Newlyweds, twenty-five years old with three little kids, and walking distance from the Santa Fe Opera. They had season tickets. They were there when an aging Igor Stravinsky conducted his masterpiece, the Rite of Spring. With the New Mexican sunset descending behind the main stage. They were there, in the third row, behind Georgia O’Keeffe, our friend from the Piggly Wiggly in Santa Fe.

We got the LP’s. We just called them records. We played our records one after the other on the old Magnavox Hi-Fi, set into a handcrafted hardwood cabinet, as if that precise technology, the culmination of 1961 electronic genius, was expected to last, unaltered, for two hundred years.

I had to push a stool up to the speaker, so I could reach over to find the switch at the lower right-hand corner of the record changer. Click to the right and click back. Stacked high with Igor’s Rite of Spring, I piled on Sherry Lewis and Lamb Chop, Toscanini’s Beethoven, Belafonte’s Calypso, Walt Disney’s Bambi and the legendary Kingston Trio. I sang with the Kingston Trio one night at a night club in Reynosa. By then, I was four. Walked right across the darkened dance floor all by myself and sat on one of the amplifiers. I knew all the words, and I sang with them, just as I always did. Every day, at home. Of course, they knew who I was. We had sung those songs together hundreds of times. But that is a tale for another day.

Rite of Spring, well, we called it the jungle record, and we hid behind the couch during the rowdy parts. That same year, we got our first Peter, Paul and Mary. The LP. Help me find the way, to the promised land. But, the opera was out of reach. Daddy bought the LP’s for La Traviata, La Bohème, and Madame Butterfly, but he kept them up high and we were down low. It was so we wouldn’t scratch them. And, it was because they were in Italian. And, because they were sad. Too sad for three-year-olds.

Original 1904 poster for Madame Butterfly by Adolfo Hohenstein — Original 1904 poster by Adolfo Hohenstein (via Wikipedia)

I am sixty now. I have been away for a long time. I decided it was time to go back. To go inside the Santa Fe Opera. I bought my ticket online. It was expensive. And I drove two days to get there. I guess, on horseback, it would have been two weeks. Three, by stage coach. Not one to complain.

I wanted Doctor Atomic. It was a contemporary opera sardonically set right there in the New Mexico piñon rattlesnake drylands. The role of Oppenheimer was to be sung by a thermonuclear power tenor. And a healing ceremonial dance by the Navajo and Pueblo nations, on stage, to ward off the bad karma. But it was sold out. Of course, it was. So, I bought Madame Butterfly.

Before you continue, comrade, you should really punch up the famous aria on Spotify or wherever it is you satisfy your musical impulses these days. I don’t know if the María Callas version is on there. She was the diva. It was that good, that night. Sung by Ana María Martínez. Brought the house down. It has been more than a month, and I still cry when I think of it.

It had just rained. A grand New Mexico cloudburst, typical of mid-August. They call it their monsoon. The rain stopped before the curtain opened. Except there is no curtain. Athens, remember? It was cool and damp, though. A Santa Fe night, clouds lifting and the proverbial western sunset, iconic and scented of damp sagebrush, just behind the stage.

You know the melody of the aria. Even if you have never been to the opera. Now, imagine it, there. Cio-Cio San, a.k.a., Madame Butterfly, gazes across the harbor at Nagasaki in 1904. Waiting for her lawfully wedded American imperial husband, Lieutenant Pinkerton, who never took her seriously, to return. Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you got on? Could it be a faded rose from days gone by? Yeah, like that, but, Puccini, comrade. Way cooler. And sadder. The big sad. Still has me choked up.

One day, three years after his departure, a ship does sail into Nagasaki with an American flag on it. Pinkerton has not come to assume his commitment to the delicate Butterfly. He has learned, through the diplomatic gossip network, that he has a Japanese child with blue eyes, that his flesh and blood is descending into poverty and dishonor. Beside the woman he fancied and then, abandoned. Pinkerton has come to take the child away from his mother.

He can’t face her, of course. Too ashamed. Of how he let her down. Of how unremittingly faithful she was, in the face of his own callous indifference.

View of the stage at the Sante Fe Opera House (via Wikipedia)

At the curtain calls, without a curtain, the crowd booed the tenor. Joshua Guerrero. But he was a good sport. He understood. He had portrayed the playboy badass so well that the massive woke Santa Fe audience wouldn’t let him leave the role, not even for the curtain call. Pinkerton had been a world class prick, so his interpreter wasn’t getting a free pass. The listeners’ friendly jeers counted as a standing ovation, for the performer. There was something very wild west, about that. That was rodeo etiquette, comrade, not the Met.

The clincher, that night, was played by a three-year-old. I know this wasn’t in Puccini’s original score. These works are not dead artifacts. They are still alive. After Butterfly commits hara-kiri, Pinkerton arrives to take the boy away to America. The boy, without singing a note (he was really just three years old) wraps himself in the American flag that his mother had used as a curtain in her Japanese-American home in Nagasaki. He picks up the bloodied dagger with which his beautiful mother has just killed herself and, with it, faces down Pinkerton. He is having none of it.

No baby jails. No icy separation from families at borders. No teaching them foreigners a moralistic lesson with heartless biblical puritan cruelty. Cio-Cio San’s boy was only three, but ready to take on the egotistical American imperial madness. If only that gesture could come off the Santa Fe stage, into the real world. Maybe it already has.

Because I am now sixty, and not twenty and not three, I felt that perhaps the central character in the opera was, actually, Suzuki, Butterfly’s servant and companion, the only one who knows her commitment and her suffering, the only one who understands that there cannot possibly be a happy end to this tale. The long night, as Butterfly waits for Pinkerton to arrive, and Suzuki knows that he will most certainly not, was moving. One would hope that she took the boy with her. Somewhere, far away, where his life will be more than the currency of cruel old men and their hateful games.

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Monumental Reinterpretation

On the west side of the Denver Capital building stands a soldier atop a stone monument. The soldier is easily recognizable as a Civil War soldier with his rifle ready, sword at his side, his distinctive hat, and the gaze of a vigilant soldier, saddened to be fighting his brother and countrymen. Ari Kelman dedicates portions of his book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, to a discussion about the history of this Civil War monument. The monument was erected and dedicated in 1909. This date places the monument in a period of United States history that saw the rapid erection of monuments across the landscape. Americans had emerged from the smoke and haze of the Civil War into a brave new world of freed slaves, Indian wars, and reform movements. Memorialization allowed for the reinterpretation of the racially motivated fratricide and cleansing of the west. Instead memorializers could reforge the familial bonds of the Union in stone. Denver memorialized this glory with their Union Soldier statue and a plaque that proudly displays a list of all the battles and engagements of the Civil War that Coloradans participated in. Notably listed in the battles is Sand Creek.

On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington, with 700 men, attacked the Cheyenne and Arapahos camped peacefully along Sand Creek. Within the encampment was Black Kettle, a well known peace negotiator between the white settlers and the Indians. Black Kettle had recently returned to the Sand Creek camp, after concluding peace settlement negotiations at Fort Weld, where Chivington happened to be stationed. Upon realization of Chivington’s betrayal, Black Kettle immediately raised the American Flag and a white flag of surrender above his tipi, desperate to prove how those in the camp were friends of Americans and therefore peaceful. Chivington and his men took no heed of the raised flag, and continued the attack, killing not only men, but women and children who begged for mercy on their knees. Many ran to the sand beds along the creek where they burrowed into the sand, seeking cover from the sea of bullets. As the dust settled, 150 Cheyenne and Arapahos were dead. Chivington suffered the loss of ten men. His remaining 690 men proceeded to mutilate and desecrate the bodies of the deceased, with many keeping various body parts as grisly mementos.

As Kelman shows, immediately following the events of Sand Creek the public memory becomes cloudy and convoluted. For Chivington, the Union soldiers, and the American Nation, Sand Creek was a glorious battle in the story of westward expansion and the expulsion of the rebellious and violent Indians from the landscape. For the Cheyenne and Arapahos, Sand Creek was a brutal slaughter and massacre. One of Chivington’s men saw it the same way. Silas Soule was uneasy as he marched out on the day of the attack. When they arrived at Sand Creek, Soule refused to order his men to fire and he watched from the sidelines as the rain of bullets poured down on Black Kettle’s camp. Soule recorded the event in his letters, agonizing over his memories of that day.

A battle is often defined as an extended struggle between two organized armies. A massacre on the other hand is understood as the brutal and violent killing of multiple victims. The terms battle and massacre both carry heavy and violent meanings, but the picture they evoke are not the same. This difference in how to view the history and memory of Sand Creek coalesced around the Civil War monument in Denver in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The inclusion of Sand Creek in the list of battles and engagements on the monument at the Denver State Capitol projects an authority over the definition of the event and downplays its injustice by suggesting that there was a more even playing field between two opponents equally engaged. This leads the general public to believe that the band of Cheyenne and Arapahos provoked Chivington’s attack.

The Sand Creek Massacre as imagined by Harper’s Weekly in 1868 (via wikimedia)

The debate over the monument was strikingly similar to the many debates we have seen in the past year over the many Confederate monuments across the American landscape. The central question is what do we do with these monuments that valorize highly politicized motivations but also provide a glimpse into the people, culture, and history of those who erected these very monuments? For historical preservationists, this question creates a crucial internal battle. Preservationists recognize the white veil that hides the ugly truth of the monument’s history and purpose. However, their desire to preserve leads them to a fiery inferno. Ultimately, preservationists cannot come to a consensus on what should be done, however. many advocate for at least reinterpretation of the monuments.

Reinterpretation was the path Colorado ultimately decided upon. A small plaque was attached, not to the monument itself, but to the brick knee-high wall around the monument. The plaque provides a small nugget of insight into the controversy over the memory of Sand Creek; and yet it still leaves open just enough ambiguity to allow a visitor to interpret Sand Creek as a battle.

Monuments have authority. They are literally etched in stone. They influence the way the public perceives and remembers history. After all, how do you argue with a giant bronze plaque attached to a monumental piece of stone, holding up a heroic citizen soldier who fought to preserve our Union?

Further Reading:

Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Thomas J. Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 2004).

Stephanie Meeks, “Statement on Confederate Memorials: Confronting Difficult History.”

Paying for Peace: Reflections on the “Lasting Peace” Monument

Fredericksburg, TX in 1896. The photograph shows the 50th Anniversary parade celebrating the 1846 founding of the town, with the Vereinskirche in the background (via Wikimedia)

By Jesse Ritner

Fredericksburg is a small town in central Texas. Known for its wineries, beer halls, and its World War II museum, it is now often overshadowed by the urban hubs of San Antonio and Austin, both within a two-hour drive of town. Yet, in 1847 Fredericksburg was a point of serious contention for Texans, Germans, Americans, and the Comanche, marking the edge of many clashing frontiers. Fredericksburg was situated precariously on the border of the Comanche Nation, the Mexican-American War was in full swing, and the Comanche were the most powerful military force on the plains. The German Emigration Company (the founders of Fredericksburg) owned rights promised by the former Republic of Texas to lands starting on the north bank of the Llano river. At the same time, unfortunately, the United States guaranteed the Comanche that they would not spread north of the same river. As a result, come the beginning of 1847, the small town of Fredericksburg found itself at the center of an international crisis. German immigrants and businessmen, the Comanche, U.S. Indian agents, and Delaware Indian guides all walked a delicate line, trying to gain from the Comanche-German conflict while avoiding a Comanche-American conflict that risked pushing the Comanche into an alliance with Mexico. Simply put, the stakes were high. A Comanche-Mexican alliance could have ended U.S. dreams of a coast to coast empire.

In the end, the potential conflict was avoided. The Penateka Comanche and the German Emigration Company signed the Comanche-Meusebach Treaty in May of 1847. The moment is immortalized in Fredericksburg with the “Lasting Peace” monument, whose plaque claims that it “is the only known peace treaty with Native Americans thought never to have been broken.” The monument’s hero, John O. Meusebach, was an essential figure in the founding of Fredericksburg and in early Texas history, but his grandeur fails to disguise the intuitively outlandish claim that a peace treaty with the Comanche, who are now confined to a reservation over 340 miles away, remains unbroken.

The monument is far from alone in its celebration of Meusebach’s success. Historians, such as T.R. Fehrenbach, in his famous Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans, have celebrated Meusebach ever since naturalist Ferdinand von Roemer published an account of the treaty in 1848. As a rule, we should no longer be shocked by misleading histories and outrageous claims that seek to distance American expansion from theft of lands already controlled by indigenous peoples. Yet, the irony of the plaque is that on further exploration the claim of a lasting peace is, in a sense, true. The treaty, as it is written, was never broken.

“Lasting Peace” - Statue at Peace Garden, commemorating the peace treaty between settler John Meusebach and Chief Santa Anna of the Comanche Indians (via City-Data) — “Lasting Peace” – Statue at Peace Garden, commemorating the peace treaty between settler John Meusebach and Chief Santa Anna of the Comanche Indians (via City-Data)

In the monument, Chief Santa Anna sits cross-legged, receiving a peace pipe from John O. Meusebach who kneels on one knee before him. The peace pipe represents the Treaty, which Meusebach and Santa Anna (along with others) negotiated throughout the spring of 1847. The implications of Meusebach’s motion offering Santa Anna the pipe is essential to understanding how the monument misleads. Meusebach’s movement suggests power through action, while Santa Anna, seated, passively receives the gift of peace from the heroic German settler. A pre-conceived power dynamic in which Europeans dominated cross-cultural and geopolitical interactions is reinforced by the motion. Yet, we now know such power dynamics misrepresent Comanche-European relations. The Comanche held it within their power to offer peace. Bluntly put, the Germans could not mount a meaningful attack on the Comanche while the U.S. government’s fear of conflict and thinly spread army meant American forces were ill-prepared to go to war over Fredericksburg. Meusebach did not bestow peace on the Comanche. Rather, he bought it.

Meusebach’s treaty promised the Comanche $3,000 in gifts along with freedom to camp and trade in Fredericksburg in exchange for the safe passage of Germans to speculate and settle the land from the Llano river north to the San Saba river [1]. As a result, since the Germans lacked the means to force the Comanche out of Fredericksburg in the first place, the peace was kept, because the Comanche, not the Germans, maintained it. Nevertheless, the treaty is puzzling. Only one year before, in a treaty between the Comanche and the United States, the Comanche were promised all land north of the Llano River. They understood that the U.S. government feared their involvement in the war. Meusebach needed Comanche permission to settle the land. How the Comanche understood the treaty is less clear.

In order to tackle why this treaty was signed, we must reimagine the thought processes by which Comanche engaged in treaties and explore their potential motivations. First, the Comanche understood geopolitics in the region. Similarly, the Comanche, along with their Anglo-European counterparts, were sensitive to the specificity of language in treaties. Historians Vine Deloris Jr., Raymond J. DaMallie, and Pekka Hämäläinen remind us that not all treaties represent United States government taking advantage of Indian Nations, and the Comanche were rational, intelligent, and keen political actors who put great value in both real and fictive kinship. Texans at the time were acutely aware of Comanche power and of their political culture. The presence of Delaware Chiefs, a group know continentally as a wise, rational, and trustworthy people were thought of as distant kin by the Comanche. Their advice would have been well received by Comanches of the time. Similarly, the presence of R.S. Neighbors who was famously friends to the Comanche, suggests that the governor of Texas was aware of how the Comanche understood diplomacy, and that they actively catered to it [2].

Treaty of Peace by John O. Meusebach and Colonist with the Comanche Indians, March 2, 1847. Copied from original painting by Mrs. Ernest Marschull, daughter of John O. Meusebach (via Texas State Library and Archive Commission)

Importantly, the Comanche did not forfeit land rights in the treaty. The agreement is not a peace treaty at all. Rather, the Germans agreed to pay tribute to the Comanche for safe usage of Comanche land. Such an arrangement was familiar to the Comanche who often made similar arrangements with other Native Americans, allowing them to hunt in Comancheria in exchange for gifts and trade. There is little reason to think that Comanche approached this scenario in a radically different manner. The treaty is not an example of heroism and bravado on the part of Meusebach, as the monument would have us believe. It is an implicit acceptance of Comanche domination and power. The lack of violence following the treaty, which Fehrenbach correctly determined was proof of an unbroken treaty, was not due to the benevolence of Meusebach, who frankly lacked the military means to break it. Instead, it was a result of Santa Anna’s and the other Comanche war chiefs’ willingness to stick to their word.

Re-examining the treaty shows us how well told stories are sometimes in need of revision. Interpretations of the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty were not inherently incorrect, but they were limited in perspective. Upon seeing the monument, we presume that the Comanche were swindled out of land and that Meusebach bestowed the peace upon the Comanche. The sleepy town in central Texas that we see in 2018 was the center of conflict in 1847. Re-examination reveals the contingent nature of westward expansion and the Mexican-American War, while reinforcing the essential role that indigenous attempts to prosper and thrive played in Anglo-European expansionist policy.

[1] “Meusebach-Comanche Treaty, 1847”, Box 3S191, John O. Meusebach Papers, [ca. 1847-1889], Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.

[2] “Assassination of R.S. Neighbors”, September 28, 1859, Box 2E422, Folder 3, Misc., Robert Simpson Neighbors Papers, 1838-1935, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.

Additional Reading:

Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (2008)

Vine Deloria, Jr. and Raymond J. DaMallie, Documents of American Indian Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements, and Conventions, 1775-1979 vol. 1 (1999)

John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (2016)

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The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin

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On the “Polish Death Camps” Law

Picture of barbed wire fencing and buildings from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp — (Auschwitz-Birkenau, via Pixabay)

By Natalie Cincotta

Last Thursday, the Polish senate passed a bill that would outlaw public statements that acscribe responsibility or complicity to the Polish nation or state in crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. If signed into law by President Anrzej Duda, who supports the measure, using terms like “Polish Death Camp” would become punishable by fines or jail time up to 3 years. “The point I must stress most emphatically is that there was no complicity in the Holocaust,” explained Duda in a statement, “either on the part of Poland as a state, a non-existent state, or on the part of Poles perceived as a Nation.”

The pending legislation has prompted a diplomatic spat with Israel and is considered an “attempt to rewrite history” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. State Department has also expressed disapproval, citing concerns over the potential strains on Poland’s relationship with the U.S. and Israel, as well as freedom of speech.

Around the same time, state-owned Polish Radio (Polskie Radio) launched an interactive website “aimed at debunking misconceptions about Poland’s role in the Holocaust,” according to a release. The site is available in Polish, English, and German.

Titled “Germandeathcamps.info,” the first section shows a map of the Nazi camp network established across occupied Europe, followed by thematic sections including profiles of German perpetrators, a short timeline of the Final Solution, video footage of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, and oral histories of victims. The last section, titled “distortion of history,” refers to two cases of the usage of “Polish death camps” in the recent past – once by German broadcasting company ZDF and by President Obama in a 2012 speech.

Map featured on germanydeathcamps.info showing Nazi concentration and extermination camps in Europe — Map featured on germanydeathcamps.info

This public history project has a clear political agenda – that is, to show that camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau were Nazi, not Polish, camps, and thus attest that the Polish state bore no responsibility for complicity in the Holocaust. Opponents agree that the term “Polish death camps” is indeed inaccurate, but worry that the law would silence instances when Poles were culpable in Jewish persecution, whether by aiding local German authorities in rounding up their Jewish neighbors, denunciation, or, in some cases, killing. In a joint statement issued by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, Dariusz Stola and Piotr Wiślicki warned of a chilling effect in difficult discussions of crimes committed on Polish soil, calling for honest and open discussion.

The larger implications of a law banning the suggestion of Polish complicity is much larger than simple phraseology. Distilling the conversation into categories of “collaborator” and “victim” precludes a more difficult public conversation on the wide range of actions, experiences, and responses on part of gentile Poles in relation to the persecution of Jews during the war. Poles were victims of Nazi persecution, as they were also helpers, rescuers, and participants, and their motivations as such were complex and contradictory in ways that defy easy categorization. Two major studies illustrate this complexity.

Book cover of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross

Jan T. Gross’ Neighbors intensified the debate about Polish “complicity” in the Holocaust. Neighbors tells the story of how on one day in July 1941 a group of Polish residents in Jedwabne murdered 1,600 of their Jewish neighbors, about half of the population. According to Gross, it was Poles who did the killing, not the local German gendarmes. At a time when Poland’s national self-image of WWII was, and is, one of victimhood, the revelation of an instance in which Poles had brutally murdered their Jewish neighbors stirred a debate about “complicity” and “collaboration” that, as the proposed law might suggest, has not yet been resolved.

In Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in Occupied Poland, Jan Grabowski recounts the role of Poles in the rounding up and murder of Jews in Dabrowa Tarnowska, a county in southeast Poland. After the ghettoes in the area were liquidated in 1942, Germans relied on local Poles to hunt Jews (referred to as Judenjagd) who had escaped liquidation and hid among the gentile population or in the forest. The Polish Blue Police, the Baudienst, and local Polish peasants played an active role in denouncing Jews, participating in searches, or even killing. Jewish property was often a motivation for participating, as the Germans instituted a reward system. Importantly, there are also many instances of rescue: some Poles hid Jews from the Nazis, and their motivations for doing so varied, sometimes altruistic, sometimes materially-driven. Sometimes, if the hidden Jews were no longer able to compensate their Polish hosts, they were denounced to the local authorities.

The Polish state does not share some kind of equal “co-responsibility” with the Nazis (the state was actually in exile in London), because the Germans were the “undisputed bosses of life and death” in occupied Poland, as Gross argues, and “no sustained organized activity could take place without their consent.” Even if the law emphasizes the role of the Polish state, the law seems to be a pretext to stifle the discussion of the participation of Polish people, as seen in Jedwabne and Dabrowa Tarnowska. As works like Neighbors argue, we must account for the Holocaust both as a system of mass murder and also for its discrete episodes of impromptu violence carried out by local people. It is also important to note that Polish responses, actions, and attitudes are not easily distilled into categories like “collaborator,” “bystander,” or even “victim,” it is possible that individuals can be any or all three of these things to different extents, at different points in time, and for different reasons. Allowing space for honest, evidence-based discussion is vital to this kind of constructive engagement with difficult pasts, which has already been taken on by several Polish scholars and institutions. As these voices in Poland urge, ignorance is best challenged through education, not silence.

Also by Natalie Cincotta on Not Even Past:

Review of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler
Review of Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia

Virtual Auschwitz by David Crew
Looking into the Katyn Massacre by Volha Dorman
David Crew reviews The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer

Legacies of the Vietnam War

(via Flickr)

The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War (2017), shown in 10 parts on PBS, once again brought a divisive and contested conflict into American living rooms. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and preeminent historian of the Vietnam War, recently wrote about what we are learning from historians’ renewed interest in the subject, especially with new scholarship based on Vietnamese sources. Last month, Lawrence discussed the legacies of the Vietnam War on a panel marking the 35th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the National Archives in Washington D.C. and on a CSPAN program on the state of the war in 1967.

Watch: 35th Anniversary of the Wall

“In partnership with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF), we present a panel discussion about the history and legacy of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated on November 13, 1982. Participating in the discussion will be Jan Scruggs, Founder and President Emeritus (VVMF), Jim Knotts, President and CEO (VVMF), author and historian Kristin Ann Hass (Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), and others.”

Watch: State of the War in 1967

“Historians Mark Atwood Lawrence of the University of Texas at Austin and Lien-Hang Nguyen of Columbia University responded to viewer calls and tweets about the state of the Vietnam War in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s strategy, and the politics and motivations of the North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong guerrilla forces.”

Also by Mark A. Lawrence on Not Even Past:

Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship has Changed
Must Read Books on the Vietnam War
The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam
Changing Course in Vietnam – or not
LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation

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Aden Knaap reviews Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
Janet Davis on cultural memory and the Vietnam War
Clay Katsky reviews Kissinger’s Shadow

The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin

The monument at Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park (via Wikimedia Commons)

by Jesse Ritner

School children across the United States learn that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin. For seven weeks this past summer I worked at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Hodgenville, Kentucky, where that cabin (as legend has it) is encased in a stone monument. Imposingly large when viewed from the bottom of its 56 steps, the monument is almost claustrophobic inside. Designed by John Russel Pope, the early twentieth-century’s titan of neo-classical monuments and government buildings, the monument only has one room, about the size of a large living-room. The entire log cabin fits inside, reinforcing the difference between the monument built in Lincoln’s honor and his humble origins. The Grecian inspired edifice was built between 1909 and 1911, atop the knoll where legend (and some deeds with Thomas Lincoln’s name) lead us to believe Abraham Lincoln was born. The now largely forgotten monument was once national news. Over 100,000 Americans donated money to build the publicly funded temple. The cornerstone was laid by none other than President Theodore Roosevelt and, two years later, it was dedicated by President William Howard Taft, himself a member of the Lincoln Farm Association, which led the fundraising effort.

The intended lesson of the Lincoln Birthplace Memorial is clear. Those who begin in rags, can rise to riches. Those men who save the nation will, for their services, have their less than impressive childhood homes enshrined in granite and neo-classical architecture, thereby tying them for eternity to the everlasting fight for freedom and democracy that can be traced all the way from ancient Athens to today’s rolling hills of Kentucky. Yet, the monument and the cabin inside teach us much more than an overwrought story about the American dream; instead, it serves as a piece of history in of itself.

The cabin inside the monument’s granite walls never housed the Lincoln family. It was constructed in 1895 by entrepreneur Alfred Dennett and his agent, James Bigham, from logs found in a log cabin near the sinking spring where records suggest Lincoln was born. In 1897, the fabricated cabin was toured around the country, where it was matched with another ersatz birthplace cabin – that of none other than Confederate President Jefferson Davis. As the caravan of cabins continued around the United States, it finally landed on Coney Island. There, due to poor organization while shipping, parts of each cabin became mixed so they were simply joined together creating a single Lincoln-Davis Birthplace Cabin. According to James W. Loewen, author of Lies across America, when this cabin, now combining logs from the separate counterfeit cabins of the enemies of the Civil War, was sent back to Kentucky in 1906, it was represented as Lincoln’s “original” birthplace cabin. While the National Park Service does acknowledge that the cabin is not the original, but instead is “symbolic” (the quotation marks are theirs, not mine), it is largely silent on the actual origins of the cabin.

The symbolic cabin enshrined in the monument at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park (via Wikimedia Commons)

In today’s conversations about Confederate statues, few are discussing the relationship between Confederate and Union memorials dating from the early twentieth century, both of which quite consciously use matching metaphors to affect their viewers. In Kentucky, monuments such as Lincoln’s birthplace offer insight into the way historical narratives created by turn of the century endeavors in public history by both Union and Confederate supporters are often intertwined, despite the heated rhetoric and violence that results from these supposedly competing historical narratives today.

The Park Service’s silence calls to question why we need the monument in the first place and why we, as taxpayers, should support its preservation. As a remembrance of President Lincoln, the monument and park are markedly outdated. Far removed from population centers, the monument is largely forgotten. On the other hand, the story of the cabin now enshrined in its “Temple of Fame,” as Theodore Roosevelt dubbed the granite structure, gives real insight into the way Americans, both Confederate sympathizers and Union patriots, collectively built historical narratives about the Civil War in the late nineteenth century. Both Presidents Davis and Lincoln were born in Kentucky and, at the turn of the century, their rags to riches stories were not seen as inherently independent of each other, but were instead part of a single American narrative that both Southerners and Northerners could claim as their birthright.

A postcard of Lincoln’s Birthplace Memorial, ca. 1930-1945 (via Boston Public Library)

The cabin today, with no mention of the monument’s convoluted history, ignores the partially fabricated histories that brought both to power, and brought these Kentucky brothers symbolically back together, even after a long, violent, and devastating war. But, the monument, despite the faults inherent in its creation, also holds valuable potential as a piece of public history that can truly engage with the way in which historical narratives are created and why monuments are built, rather than simply reinforcing centuries old attempts at public education and nation building. It suggests historical precedents to the Republican Party simultaneously claiming heritage as the party of Lincoln, while supporting the maintenance of Confederate monuments and minimizing or even erasing the history of slavery and its role in the bloody Civil War. And it shows that in towns like Hodgenville, where Confederate flags fly freely next to memorials to Lincoln, the apparent conflict in historical memory is not new, but is part of a conscious narrative built in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and continuing today.

The current dialog revolving around Confederate memorials is far more complicated than many analyses acknowledge. Considering the current unrest regarding Civil War monuments, it is necessary for us to examine the influence of all sides on the historical narratives they choose to create. Remedying the wrongs that statues of people such as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee represent is harder than simply taking prominent statues down. As a nation we must reassess the way we have remembered the entire history of the Civil War and we must reexamine the ways past generations remembered as well, regardless of whether the historical figures in question are currently viewed as villains or heroes.

You may also like:

A Historian views Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), by Nicholas Roland
Watch: panel discussion of confederate statues at the University of Texas
Charley Binkow on the Lincoln Archives Digital Project

The Bombing War and German Memory of WWII

By David Crew

At the beginning of September 2017, construction workers in the major west German city of Frankfurt am Main uncovered a British “blockbuster” bomb dropped during World War Two. Nearly 60,000 residents were evacuated so that experts could defuse this huge bomb designed to destroy an entire street of houses. Unexploded bombs from World War Two are still being discovered in other German cities. During the war, the British and the Americans dropped some 2.7 million tons of bombs on Germany. All the major German cities were reduced to ruins and between 305,000 and 410,000 Germans, most of them women, children, and old people were killed, sometimes in quite hideous ways, by Allied bombs. By the 1990s, however, many Germans would insist that this traumatic experience had been overshadowed by Germany’s confrontation with the Holocaust. The experience and suffering of German civilians during the Allied air war appeared to be “off-limits,” the subject only of private conversations around the family dinner table but never a major focus of public memory. Germans who had lived through the bombing were, it appeared, victims twice over—victimized by the bombing itself and then by the silence to which they were allegedly condemned after 1945.
Yet, far from being marginalized in postwar historical consciousness, the bombing war was a central strand of German popular memory and identity from 1945 to the present. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, local narratives of the bombing war established themselves as important “vectors of memory.” Not produced by professional historians and usually lacking any scholarly pretensions, these local publications are examples of the kind of “public history” which has been so influential in constructing and transmitting popular understandings of the past to successive generations of Germans since 1945. Along with the flight and mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from the East and the mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers, the bombing war allowed Germans to see themselves as victims at a time when the Allied liberation of the concentration camps and the Nuremberg trials presented Germans to the world as perpetrators or at least as accomplices. The bombing war continued to serve this function even as Germans became more and more willing directly to confront the genocide of European Jews –which by the 1960s was beginning to be referred to as the Holocaust.

The power of the local master narrative established in the 1950s depended upon its ability to compress the local memory of the war and the Nazi past into the experience of the bombing. This version of local history depicted the inhabitants of individual towns and cities as innocent, unsuspecting victims of both Allied bombs and of the Nazi regime which had deceived and misled them. But by the late 1990s, this narrative had become intensely problematic. New scholarship, the activities of local History Workshops, public controversies about the traveling exhibition “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” (1995-1999) and about Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) all focused public attention on the participation of ordinary Germans in the crimes of the Nazi regime. At the end of the twentieth century, it seemed no longer possible to decontaminate local history.

US Bombing Raid Over a German City. (National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia)

Photographic images played essential roles in local publications about the bombing war. Photographs were used not simply to illustrate the written text but also to show aspects of the bombing war that the authors believed could not be communicated adequately in words. Yet the power of images was limited by the conditions under which they had been produced during and immediately after the war. Photographers had simply not been able to capture pictures of some of the most horrific experiences of the bombing. The images that were used might also generate contradictions that could not be resolved visually. Photographs of dead German bodies might conjure up the other images of dead and dying Jews and other concentration camp victims which the occupying Allies had used as evidence of German crimes in 1945. The early local publications established a fairly limited visual canon which relied primarily upon pictures of ruins and (less frequently) dead German bodies to construct a visual argument that presented Germans as victims. But as the repertoire of images expanded in the 1960s to include pictures of Allied air crews, of Jews or other victims of Germans, as well as photographs of the European cities destroyed by German bombing, these other images made it more difficult to maintain an exclusive focus on German suffering.

Hamburg after bombing by UK Royal Air Force (Imperial War Museum via Wikipedia)

Pictures of ruins have remained the most common motif in publications about the bombing right up to the present but the genre of ruin pictures has changed significantly since 1945. Ruin pictures now routinely include photographs of cities bombed by the Germans–Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Stalingrad. Pictures of forced foreign laborers, Russian POWs and even Jews in the ruins draw attention to Nazi racism and genocide. The important question is, however, not whether but how these pictures of Germany’s victims have entered the visual world of the bombing war. Are they presented in ways that require readers to look at the suffering caused by Germany while still allowing them to empathize with the German victims of the bombing? Or do they seriously disrupt the ability of photographs of Germans in the ruins to elicit the sympathy of contemporary readers/viewers? Or do pictures of Germany’s victims, when they are set side-by-side with images of Germans as victims, show readers that World War Two turned ordinary people on all sides into victims and created a European-wide community of suffering?

Berlin Women clearing debris. (German Federal Archives via Wikipedia)

The most recent visual and textual representations exhibit no clear agreement on the “right” narratives and the “right” images that should be used to depict the bombing of German cities. A range of different voices and pictures now compete for the attention of German audiences. This “pluralization” of bombing narratives and images both reflects and enables the competing, sometimes contradictory ways that Germans imagine the air war and its relationship to the Holocaust.

Related Reading and Viewing

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-house Five (1969).
The classic novel by one of America’s most important writers. Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden when the city was devastated by Allied firebombing on February 13-14, 1945

Richard Overy, The Bombers and the Bombed. Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940-1945 ( 2015)
An unusual approach by the eminent British historian of World War Two that provides a comprehensive discussion of the Allied bombing of not just Germany but of many other European countries

W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction(2003).
In this provocative short collection of essays, translated from the German original, the author and literary critic, W.G. Sebald faulted German writers for not having made the air war a more central and significant focus of post-war literature.

Jörg Friedrich, The Fire:The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (2006).
The English translation of Friedrich’s massive, tendentious and hotly contested critique of the Allied air war which quickly became a bestseller in Germany.

Dresden (Dir: Roland Suso Richter, 2006). The first fiction film about the fire-bombing of Dresden. It drew an audience of 13 million viewers on the first evening it was broadcast on German television in March 2006.

from Dresden (2006)

More than Archives: Dealing with Unfinished History

by Jimena Perry

In July 2017, as part of my dissertation research, I had the opportunity to participate in an assembly of the Association of Victims of Granada (Asociación de Víctimas de Granada, ASOVIDA), in Colombia. This organization is composed of the survivors of the violence inflicted by guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the National Army during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. ASOVIDA was legally created in 2007 after three years of victims organizing, learning about their rights, and finding ways to prevent brutalities from happening again. Since the early 2000s, amidst the ongoing armed conflict in Colombia, the people of Granada began a process of awareness, prevention, and production of memories of the atrocities they experienced. To this day, the members of ASOVIDA gather on the first Saturday of each month to talk about their concerns as victims, to participate in community decisions, and to continue with their grieving and reparation process.

Gloria Ramírez, President of ASOVIDA introduces Jimena Perry to the crowd (Jimena Perry, 2017)

My dissertation is about the production of historical memories about the armed conflict in Colombia, including institutions like ASOVIDA and The Hall of Never Again, a space for remembering and honoring the victims of massacres, disappearances, targeted killings, bombings, and other forms of violence in Granada. Therefore, ASOVIDA´s president asked me to present my project before the assembly. She wanted me to tell the community why I am interested in ASOVIDA and the Hall, what I am going to do with the information gathered, and what benefits my work could bring to them. ASOVIDA´s president requested my presence at the assembly because some of my primary sources are the contents of so-called bitácoras, notebooks designed to make the victim´s grieving process easier. In these texts, one can read mothers talking to their children, husbands to their wives, brothers to sisters, children to their parents, and other family members remembering their departed loved ones. The bitácoras become both objects to be exhibited and historical sources for studying the violence endured by a particular person or family and how they survived. Bitácoras also provide an account of the story and character of the dead person, why he or she was important and help the public and visitors of the Hall to learn about local history and to link the survivors to community reconstruction processes. They are intimate accounts of the survivor’s feelings along with very personal stories, consequently, using them requires an ethical commitment and a deep respect towards their authors.

When requested to present my project before the assembly, my first reaction was surprise. Why should I do this? If the bitácoras are part of the Hall of Never Again´s exhibit they are already public records; they are meant to be read, but when I thought carefully about the request, I realized that the authors had reasonable suspicions. I am an outsider, a researcher who comes and goes; I have not suffered violence in the same way, and there I am using their cherished stories for an academic endeavor.

Assembly victims discussing about what forgiveness means to them (Jimena Perry, 2017)

It made even more sense when I saw the inhabitants of Granada at the assembly´s meeting. Regular people working to achieve peace in their town looked at me with curiosity. They wanted to know who was I and what was I doing there. Seeing all those people, interested in finding peace for themselves, their families, and town, I understood that academic research becomes secondary to dealing with people´s lives and feelings. I was willing to leave out of my dissertation the contents of the bitácoras if the community did not grant me permission to use them. The main purpose of my presence at the assembly was letting people know that I intend to use their stories in an academic endeavor, as an example of memory production ASOVIDA´s president introduced me and stated why I was there giving me the floor. I started by telling them about my own story. I mentioned my background, where I came from, and why I was so interested in the bitácoras. They listened carefully. I emphasized the academic purpose of my research and assured them that I would not use their names, that I was not going to sell their stories, and that when my research is over I would go back and show it to them. So far, I have traveled to Granada three times.

After my presentation, ASOVIDA´s president told the members of the assembly to think about my request to use their testimony. She asked them to consider why would they let me use their stories and to take their time. When the time for voting came, I was surprised and delighted with the results. The victims’ assembly approved my project and my use of the bitácoras by a vast majority. Then there were some questions and even suggestions. Granada´s victims want visibility, their voices heard, the world to know all the brutalities committed against them and their struggles for survival. Granada´s inhabitants believe that letting the world know what happened in their town can help prevent violent acts to happen again. With this in mind, they told me they granted their authorization to use their testimonies. I thanked them feeling grateful for their trust and an immense commitment to use my work to serve the people of Granada.

During this assembly the victims were asked to work in groups to think about what peace and reconciliation can be achieved in Granada (Jimena Perry, 2017)

This experience with Granada´s victims of violence changed my priorities regarding my work. I realized the enormous ethical commitment I had made in dealing with memories about a recent violent past that is still fresh, remembrances that still give people nightmares and fears. I also understood that more than the bitácoras, victims themselves are the ones who really matter. I knew this before, but seeing the people, talking to them, answering their questions raised different questions about academic research. How can one deal with intimate stories of pain without being disrespectful? How far must researcher go to achieve her or his goals? How to avoid being the kind of person that goes to a community, takes what is needed from the people, and never returns? How not to be another source of stress for the victims?

After speaking to the assembly and talking to the real protagonists of the Colombian armed conflict, I believe that analyzing the community coming to terms with its pain can encourage other social groups to do the same. In addition, I want to think that my work will inspire more victims to tell their stories and start a grieving process. I want to honor the trust Granada´s people gave me. I want my work to help them heal and I want to make the testimonies of the bitácoras known to as many audiences as possible. After attending the assembly, I feel that one of the priorities of my work should be writing a story in which the community of Granada can recognize itself. I want my dissertation to become a text in which the Granada inhabitants find their own voices. Memory production is an ongoing process that hopefully would continue until the victims feel their healing is complete, but meanwhile, their efforts for achieving peace in their town should be encouraged and acknowledged.

More by Jimena Perry on Not Even Past:

Too much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellín, Colombia
Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory in Colombia, 2000-2014
History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

You may also like:

Madeleine Olson reviews Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra on Colombian history in the Netflix hit-series Narcos
Vasken Markarian traces complaint reports in the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive

IHS Panel: The Confederate Statues at UT

What do statues commemorating Confederate leaders mean? Why has the university decided to remove such statues? And why has the issue been so controversial? On Thursday, August 31 2017, speakers from the University of Texas, the Texas State Historical Association, and the Briscoe Center for American History came together to address these questions and more.

Featured speakers included:

Walter L. Buenger
Chief Historian, Texas State Historical Association; Summerlee Foundation Chair in Texas History, and Barbara White Stuart Centennial Professor in Texas History | The University of Texas at Austin

Peniel E. Joseph
Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy; Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs; and Professor of History | The University of Texas at Austin

Ben Wright
Associate Director for Communication at the Briscoe Center for American History and curator of “From Commemoration to Education: Pompeo Coppini’s Statue of Jefferson Davis” | The University of Texas at Austin

with

Jacqueline Jones, Moderator
Professor and Chair of the Department of History; Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History; and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History | The University of Texas at Austin

This event was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies.

Connected content:

Mark Sheaves on slavery and its legacy in the USA
Leslie Harris and Daina Ramey Berry on history and memory in Savannah
Jacqueline Jones discusses Civil War Savannah

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