Let's write about teaching the Holocaust history in America

The word antisemitism means prejudice against or hatred of Jews. The Holocaust is history’s most extreme example of antisemitism.

AUGUSTA, Maine- This echo essay was written by Erica Nadelhaft the Executive Director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center located on the University of Maine Augusta's campus and published in the organization's blog titled "And We Will Hope to Make a Difference":

In May, 2023, The Atlantic published an article by Dara Horn titled “Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?” 

Reading the article led to much thought and many conversations both within and outside of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine community. I found myself going back to it numerous times. It is distressing, honest, and, I think, spot on in many places. I have been thinking about it both in relation to my life as a Jewish woman in America and also in relation to my role as the Education Coordinator at the HHRC (although it is not always easy to separate those pieces of myself).

The article opens by talking about the vague sense of dread that exists in many American Jewish communities. Antisemitism is widespread and, if not increasing, certainly becoming more overt and violent over time. Just a few days ago, the FBI arrested a man in Michigan for stockpiling weapons and identifying a date and a synagogue in East Lansing. Big news items like this tend to get media time. But the regular and fairly constant level of antisemitic slurs, harassment, and other indignities suffered by American Jews on an almost daily basis don’t. Horn notes that American Jews seem to feel that they have no right to complain about them. “After all,” she writes, they aren’t “the Holocaust.”

"Juif" is French for "Jew". The English term "Jew" originates in the Biblical Hebrew word Yehudi, meaning "from the Kingdom of Judah" (Wikipedia)

Horn questions how best to respond to contemporary antisemitism and writes that, “The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against antisemitism. But it doesn’t.” Is teaching the Holocaust the best response to antisemitism? I agree with Dara Horn. Teaching about the Holocaust is not the best or the only way to respond to antisemitism. That is not to say that Holocaust education is not critical. It is, for many reasons. You cannot address antisemitism without teaching about the Holocaust, but that on its own is not enough.

At the HHRC, Holocaust education is at the core of much of what we do. We offer six different programs on various aspects of the Holocaust as well as sponsoring exhibits, guest lectures, workshops and teacher training seminars. The Holocaust infuses our building, our work, and our consciousness. It is part of who we are. We believe that the Holocaust should, indeed, must be studied for a number of reasons. First and foremost, simply for its own sake: to acknowledge the event, the victims, the survivors, the trauma and the history. Those who experienced the Holocaust deserve to have their story told. They existed and they were slaughtered and tortured because they were Jews and that is reason enough to learn.

There are also lessons we can learn when we study the Holocaust—in particular what it means to make ethical and moral decisions that carry immense risk; what it means to speak up against hate; and what it means when we choose not. We walk a fine line here, because studying the Holocaust is not a means to an end—the Holocaust did not happen so that we could use it to learn general lessons about humanity and what human beings are capable of. It’s not simply a teaching tool to help us learn about ourselves. It is a singular event that happened to a specific group of people, the Jews, for very specific reasons. We need to acknowledge both the universality of some of the lessons while focusing on the uniqueness of the event.

But why is teaching about the Holocaust not the answer to the increasingly overt, socially acceptable, and violent antisemitism in this country? Because, after all, the Holocaust could not have happened without the two thousand years of antisemitism that led, perhaps inexorably, to it. If the Holocaust is the ultimate expression of antisemitism, why is knowing about it not enough?

As Dara Horn notes in the article, the Holocaust is too often taught in a vacuum. When it is taught without the context of that two thousand year history of antisemitism; when it is taught without the context of thousands of years of vibrant and rich Jewish history; when it is taught without an anchor in history, it is difficult if not impossible for people to connect it with the antisemitism that exists in the world today.

Horn writes of an experience she had at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center and hearing the docent talk about how prior to the Holocaust life for Jews in Europe was normal and how “all of a sudden, things changed.” The Jews were living happy, normal, and ordinary lives and suddenly: “things changed.” The problem is that things didn’t just suddenly change. The Holocaust drew upon a two thousand year history of antisemitism. To say otherwise ignores reality and suggests that the Holocaust was an aberration that came out of nowhere.

And was Jewish life normal in the sense that it reflected the norms of non-Jewish European society? (Maine Writer comment- Anti-Semitism was not invented by the Nazis. Life for Jews includes a history of pogroms- displacements and being victimized by violent riots.)

While in a number of European countries Jews were increasingly assimilated, or at least acculturated to the majority society, they often retained differences—in language, dress, religious observance and culture. And the article argues that “teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews because Jews are ‘normal,’ only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of ‘normal,’ then it’s fine to hate them.” Rather than teach that Jews are “normal,” we need to teach that Jews are human - and that humans have differences—and that these differences are part of what makes us human.

If we are going to do that, we have to teach about both the unique and the universal in Jewish history and experience. And this is what we are doing, and have been doing for a number of years, at the HHRC. We teach about long, vibrant, and rich Jewish history and what life was like for Jews in Europe and elsewhere before the Holocaust. Six million dead is just a number if one has no understanding of what and who was lost. How do children, and adults, appreciate the significance of the loss if they don’t know who the Jews are? It’s not enough to simply teach how the Jews died. We have to teach how they lived.

Teaching about Jews’ humanity is important, but it is still not enough to combat today’s antisemitism. We also need to take a deep and honest look at the history of antisemitism—where and why it began, how it spread, and how it led almost inevitably to the Holocaust. Then, perhaps most importantly in the fight against antisemitism, we have to teach how antisemitism did not disappear after the Holocaust. One would like to think that it would. But it didn’t. And if the Holocaust was not enough to end antisemitism, teaching solely about the Holocaust won’t end it either. At the HHRC we teach not only about the history of antisemitism, but how antisemitism has continued in both old and new guises into the present day. And that includes tackling uncomfortable and frightening issues—including anti-Zionism and the demonization of Israel.

When we reduce Jewish history to the Holocaust, we minimize Jewish history. And when we reduce our discussion of antisemitism to the Holocaust, we minimize both the antisemitism of the past as well as the antisemitism of the present. And this allows antisemitism to continue to grow and flourish - in our schools, our communities, our political institutions, the media, and many other places.

And so at the HHRC we will continue to confront antisemitism and to teach the Holocaust. We will teach the individual and the communal, the unique and the universal. Our team will continue to do the work with honesty and courage, sadness and joy. 

And we will hope to make a difference.

Suppose you do not like your DNA? Let's write about it!

Bad blood: Hermann Goering's great-niece reveals that she had herself sterilized rather than risk giving birth to 'a monster' as relatives of infamous Nazis reveal how their family ties have blighted them. Reported in The Daily Mail.

An Interview With Nazi Leader Hermann Goering's Great-Niece
How do you cope with evil ancestry? Echo interview published in The Atlantic Magazine
By Roc Morin

DNA- the fabric of life

 
"After the last right turn," Bettina's directions read, "you will see a driveway on the left about 50 feet from the corner. The number 290 is placed on a fence post. (Many people can't seem to see this sign and go to the end of the road where they get shot, game lost!)"

It was a dark little joke, the kind of gallows humor I got used to hearing as an EMT and war correspondent--professions overly preoccupied with mortality. The attitude fit Bettina Goering well. As great-niece of Nazi Germany's second in command, Hermann Goering, death is her family legacy.

I tracked the 56 year-old down in Santa Fe at the office where she works as an acupuncturist living under the surname of her ex-husband, which she didn't want named in this story. Bettina invited me to her home outside the city for a formal interview. The last eight miles of the drive took nearly an hour as I bounded and jerked over a tangle of third-world roads, trailing a comet tail of dust. It had rained hard the week before, forcing the persistently barren land to yield lush displays of green, with only cows and horses around to enjoy it."When I see Hermann as a family person, I think he's really nice, and charming, and incredibly caretaking, and it's hard for me to see flaws. But then you see what he does in politics and how he killed people, including his so-called friends."

Bettina met me at the door of her modern two-story home. "You found it!" she exclaimed in her heavy German accent.

"No one's more surprised than me!" I replied with a laugh. "This place seems to want to stay lost."

She led me to her kitchen where her husband of 23 years, Adi Pieper, sat behind a table. We shook hands. The house was nearly empty: no clutter, no personal items. It seemed to be a place without memory. I later learned that the couple was in the process of selling their property and had purposefully made it neutral.


"So," I began, "you had the name Goering when you were growing up in Germany. Was there a stigma?"

"Not really," Bettina replied. "That is the weird thing. Because I grew up in the 50s and early 60s, there was this time of utter denial. Germany had just dug itself out of its past and they were starting to get wealthy again. Later, there were a few people who would make me cringe by saying Hermann was a good guy."

"My mother said that," Adi added, "'Oh, we all loved him,' she said, when she found out Bettina and I were starting a relationship. He was the most liked one, the most popular Nazi. He appeared so royal, so nice."

"Like a big child," Bettina added.

"You've met with the children of Holocaust survivors and have spoken publicly about your family history. Why do you feel that you have to embrace this Goering identity?" I asked.

"It was never a choice," she replied. " That's how I choose to deal with conflicts."

"What about the rest of your family, growing up?"

"I had trouble at home. That's the gist of the matter. My parents were always a bit rocky together, their relationship. But, when I was about 10 or 11 my grandmother from my father's side--the Goering side--moved in because she was very sick. That created so much more drama. She was the Nazi in the family and she was very difficult to deal with. She was in the last stages of syphilis, and that makes you very stuck in your ways. Your pupils don't move anymore, for example. They just stay in one stage. I think it literally eats up your brain. So, she made whatever trouble was there before even worse. I left home at the age of 13 after a fight with my dad."

"What kind of things did she believe?"

"It's hard to just put it in a few words. She had always this upper-class demeanor, that you think you're better than everyone."

"Not to mention that the Holocaust never happened," Adi interjected. "'All lies! All lies!'"

"It came up," Bettina continued. "because we watched a documentary on TV. It was about Auschwitz."

"Was that your first knowledge of the Holocaust?"

"That was one of them for sure."

"How did you feel?"

"I felt horrible! I felt even more horrible she'd deny it. And she was part of it. If anyone was part of it, she was."

"How so?"

"Well, she was very close to Hermann and she was in charge of the Red Cross. She should have known, you would think. I mean, they made Theresienstadt for the Red Cross. They built it in such a way with false walls and everything so that it looked like a nice working camp where they had theater groups and all kinds of stuff."

"Right," I added, "that was their showpiece concentration camp to demonstrate that the Nazis were humanitarians. Of course, they shipped off half the prisoners to Auschwitz before visitors came so it wouldn't look overcrowded."

(- 12 January 1893 – D- 15 October 1946) was a German politician, military leader and convicted Nazi war criminal.

"Maybe she believed the fantasy. At the same time, we found out later that she did some very shady deals with Jewish people who paid their way out of Germany. Hermann Goering did a bunch of deals for art or land."

"Did your grandmother have a good side?"

"I really judged this family as negative, almost all of them. That's something that I've been now working to change, and I'm seeing a much more complex picture even of my grandmother. It's very illuminating."

"What changed?"

"I did research. My grandmother was brought up in a family where all the men died all the time. They were all military. Her father died when she was five. There were so many wars back then."

"Yes, you can imagine that with so much loss in her life, she had to convince herself it was for something worthwhile."

"Exactly."

"Do you see any goodness in Hermann?"

"That's hard to say. Is somebody ever totally bad or good? I hope not. I think certain circumstances happen that might turn somebody into a psychopath. When I see Hermann as a family person, I think he's really nice, and charming, and incredibly care taking, and it's hard for me to see flaws. But then you see what he does in politics and how he killed people, including his so-called friends."

"What do you mean?"

"Are you familiar with the Röhm Putsch?"

"You mean when the Nazis purged the army?"

"That shocked me almost more than some of his later actions, because they were his friends. He had no qualms to shoot just anybody."

"Are you afraid that you inherited some of his traits?"

"Yes and no. I met a cousin that I hadn't seen in nearly 50 years and we both have big qualms to do anything too big--to be in a position of any power because there is something in the background that you could do something bad."

"And you have the desire for power?"

"No, not even. But, it's happened. I'm somebody who naturally takes charge, who can easily be in charge of people, but it scares me at the same time that I could abuse the power as he did. It's a collective consciousness thing. It might be in my DNA. I think they're starting to prove that all the experiences of your ancestors manifest themselves in the DNA."

"Interesting," I said. "I have Jewish friends who have dreams of being in the Holocaust."

"That's what I mean. It's in your DNA somewhere. Sometimes I get feelings that I cannot explain. I experience also the Holocaust. Do we have past lives? How come I have visions of that too?"

"Can you describe that experience?"

"We were in Weimar a few years ago, next to Buchenwald, one of the concentration camps. It was like these ghosts had attached themselves to me. Afterwards I couldn't eat."

"What did it feel like?"

"Like I wasn't myself. I was really depressed, afraid. I had a vision of being in a small attic room, it could have been in Germany, afraid for my life. I personally think there are past lives for sure."

"So, the implication is that you were a Jew in another life?"

"Or somebody who was persecuted, or a member of the resistance."

"Getting back to the issue of DNA, I wanted to ask you about your decision to sterilize yourself. Were you worried about continuing Hermann's legacy?"

"It's complex. I was about 30 when I did it. I was living in a commune with Osho in Pune, India and a lot of people did it in that commune. There are too many kids in the world, so I won't have any. My brother did it too."

"So, it wasn't specifically the Goering genes?"

"No. However, when my brother did it he said, 'I cut the line.' He's dramatic like that. And when he said that, it became clear to me that that must have influenced me too. I had a fear about my own power to maybe pass something on."

"What was it like living in the Osho commune?"

"There were a lot of Germans, Jews, and Japanese there. It was the 70s and it was like the kids of World War II all came together in a friendly way. And some of it was in encounter groups where you lived out some of these old experiences."

"What kind of experiences?"

Bettina glanced at her husband.

"For example," Adi offered, "I'm from Berlin, so I'm Prussian. They had me stand up and march and they all threw pillows at me, yelling 'You fucking Nazi!' They called me Obersturmbannführer and I had to just take that all in. They asked, 'How do you feel about that? That's what your parents did and that's what you are because you are their child.' And I felt a big collective guilt inside that I wasn't aware of. Nobody in my family did anything, but I still have this guilt. I didn't know I had it. I was so surprised."

"Were you able to get past it?"

"It's never totally past. You just put awareness to it so that it has no more power over you."

"Is that part of what coming to America represents--a clean start?"

"Part of it."

"So, having left Germany, do you still participate in German culture?"

"For sure," replied Adi. "We go to the opera..."

"Wagner?" I queried.

"No."

"When you say no, is that a reaction against the music or the composer?"

"No, I think it's nice music. It's really good. But, he was an anti-Semite."

"So, even musical notes can accumulate guilt?"

"Quite amazing."

"What else do you have from Germany?" I asked, turning back to Bettina. "Any heirlooms from Hermann?"

"Just photographs of him with my father and grandmother. I have a Goering insignia ring, which I actually wear. I inherited it from my mom when she died."

When I asked to see the photographs, Bettina pulled out an album and began to flip through.

"What do you see when you look at these photographs?" I asked.

"Different things. These are a bunch of my uncles--the brothers of my father who died so young. I've developed almost a relationship to them. It's funny. I got to know them or something. I feel like they are asking me to remember them."

"You got to know them through the photographs?"

"Yes, though sometimes I wonder if I should get rid of this album. I'm the only one who has any relation to these guys. Nobody else does. My brother doesn't and we're the last of the line."

"Can you talk more about the relationship you've developed with these images?"

"So, I had an illumination about the boy," she said, pointing at a photograph of her uncle, Peter Goering. "He was only a boy. He was 19. As I got to know more about them, I felt really bad. I felt the grief of losing them so young--of my father and my grandmother--I felt that."

"And what do you see when you look at the pictures of them with Hermann?"

"He's very proud of them, and they are proud of him. You can tell."

"You can see in the picture how much they love each other?"

"Yeah, yeah, for sure."

"Do you see a resemblance between Hermann and yourself?'

"Sure--cheekbones, nose, even the mouth. I was a teenager when I first saw a photograph of him before he got fat, back when he was young, and I took a deep breath."

"How did you feel?"

"I was shocked. I ripped it up. I was like, 'Fuck, is that me?”

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/an-interview-with-nazi-leader-hermann-goerings-great-niece/280579/#:~:text=Roc%20Morin%20is%20a%20journalist%20based%20in%20San%20Francisco%20and%20the%20curator%20of%20the%20World%20Dream%20Atlas.

A classic! O. Henry gave the literary world the real deal: "The Gift of the Magi"

Let's write about the brilliant writer, O. Henry!

"The Gift of the Magi" is a short story by O. Henry, first published in 1905. The story tells of a young husband and wife and how they deal with the challenge of buying secret Christmas gifts for each other with very little money. 

Read O. Henry's short story "The Gift of the Maji" at this Project Gutenberg site here.

In my opinion, the famous writer O. Henry made the Biblical story about The Magi (better known as The Three Wise Men) a real event. His story transcends the religious and he created a meaningful interpretation for the world to better understand and even internalize the Scriptures. 

An irony, in my opinion, because O. Henry was born in Budapest, Hungary in eighteen seventy-four. His father was a rabbi, a Jewish religious leader. His family moved to the United States two years later.

Scripture:  After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi, from the east, came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

In a 2010 article published in The Atlantic, O. Henry's classic and brilliant short story is explained by Kevin Fallon.

It was 115 years ago, when William Sydney Porter sat in a dim, high-backed booth—the third one from the window—in Pete's Tavern on Irving Place, which cross-sects the Gramercy area of Manhattan. While patrons drank at the adjacent rosewood bar—some say moved by romance in his own life, others think it could be as simple as witnessing a stolen glance from one stranger to his beau—he sat and penned one of the most enduring love stories to come after the turn of the 20th century.

That writer is better known as O. Henry, and according to legend—a plaque commemorates that booth at Pete's over a century later—he scripted his famous "The Gift of the Magi" right there.

The indelible short story was first published on December 10, 1905 in the New York Sunday World Magazine. O. Henry was among the most popular writers of his day, with "Magi" being published at the height of his fame. The tale, a simply structured, exquisitely told story of self-sacrifice, generosity, and love, closed with the O. Henry signature: an ironic twist. The writing has its flaws, and no scholar would venture that it's the century's finest romance, yet in its simplicity, it finds its stakes and its resonance. 

After all, is there any task more dire than showing your one and only how much you care? It's why "The Gift of the Magi" has endured for more than a century, popping up in references everywhere from Sesame Street to Glee.

"One dollar and eighty-seven cents," the story begins on Christmas Eve, "That was all." From its opening, the story is relatable; destitution is a theme that will never lose relevance. Della and Jim are 22-year-old newlyweds, earning a $20 a week income, and living in a humble apartment—the kind furnished with a "shabby little couch" and pier-glass window panes. There's already too much to empathize with: being young, poor, and madly in love...and inhabiting a glorified closet called "home."

"She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result," O. Henry wrote, the tragedy being that Della was still unable to afford a Christmas present for her beloved. She had one holiday desire, and that's to be able to buy "something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim." It's in that line that the magnitude of their love is conveyed, to be filled with so much admiration for someone, to hold them to such high regard that things must be worthy.

What happens next most of us should know, having already felt that burning lump rise in our throats upon reading it, shedding a tear at its dénouement. Della and Jim, we learn, have but two luxurious possessions: her cascade of beautiful hair and his grandfather's gold watch. So deeply in love with her husband, Della can't bear not giving him a Christmas gift and sells off her hair to purchase a fob chain for his watch (her one heartbreaking regret: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."). 

When she gifts Jim the chain, we discover that he has pawned the watch to afford the tortoise-shell combs Della had been eyeing to comb her hair. "I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less," he says, as readers swoon, "But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."

Jim and Della live their lives with such a sense of humor (O. Henry's wit is ever present, even in "Magi"). His nonchalant reaction to the irony (yes, Alanis this is ironic) makes the love story even more moving; she puts the pork chops in the frying pan, and their lives as a passionate couple move on. It's the consummate illustration of love being greater than the possession, and the case in point of there being a gift in giving. In the age where shoppers line up at 3 am to buy a HDTV at a 10 percent discount, perhaps the story constantly resurfaces to serve as a sort of moral compass, steering us back on course to the "season of giving."

And resurface it does, and often. Even Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie played out their own version of Della and Jim in 1978's Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, a TV special. Ernie pawns his beloved rubber duckie in order to buy a cigar box for his best friend, Bert, to store his paper clip collection in. Bert visits the same shop to barter his paper clip collection in exchange for a soap dish to give Ernie, for the said floating fowl. 

The act of selfless love plays out in everything from a one-hour musical adaptation "Magi", starring Gordon MacRae in 1958, to the 1978 television movie, The Gift of Love, starring none other than Marie Osmond.

But, O. Henry was really a private man who hardly gave interviews and was extremely guarded about his past (which included charges of embezzlement, an exile to Honduras, and an ensuing prison stint). 

Yet, what is known, is that he was devoted to his wife, Athol. They, like Jim and Della, married young and poor, living in rented cottages while he made ends meet as a banker. While he was in Latin America, she purportedly auctioned off a handkerchief to buy him a Christmas present; he returned to the States, and thus was sent to prison, to be with Athol as she died of tuberculosis. It's rumored that O. Henry wrote "The Gift of the Magi" in a hurried two or three hours because he was past deadline—and that may be true. But it's because he knew such great love that he was able to pen it so quickly.

It's also why I re-read his short story every year at this time. It's a reminder of the way we should be living, with love first, giving second, and possession below all. Admittedly, this is not the most original or nuanced analysis of O. Henry's short story, but, heck, his short story wasn't that original or nuanced either. That's precisely what makes it the default Christmas tale, and what gives me hope for finding that same kind of plain and simple love.

"Here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest . . . They are the magi."

Kevin Fallon is a reporter for the Daily Beast. He's a former entertainment editor at TheWeek.com and former writer and producer for The Atlantic's entertainment channel.