Isolated Islands? Memory of the Holocaust in Formal and Non-Formal Education. The Case Study of Post-Communist Poland

Existing studies revealed several conflicts around the memory of the Holocaust in Poland: between understanding the need to teach about the Holocaust and indifference toward anti-Jewish graffiti; a conflict around the perception of Polish help to Jews; and the competing images of Polish and Jewish suffering during World War II. Those conflicts will be addressed in the paper as reflecting educational gaps in the Polish education system (lack of bad memory). This paper will look at the consciousness of young Poles, in terms of attitudes toward Jews, the Holocaust and memory of the Holocaust. The data presented are the preliminary results of the author’s longitudinal study „Attitudes of Young Poles toward the Jews and the Holocaust”. Quantitative and qualitative studies include field studies and participant observation of educational projects in Tykocin, Treblinka, Warsaw, Lublin, Bodzentyn and Kielce. The paper will present some components of the development of education about the Holocaust in Poland. There is a need to evaluate the attempt to bring back the memory of Jewish neighbours in some of the states of Central and Eastern Europe, a process with an ongoing effort to renovate monuments, destroyed cemeteries and synagogues. The number and scope of such initiatives in Poland indicate that civic institutions and individuals are intensifying their efforts to teach their fellow citizens about the Holocaust, however their impact should be assessed in detail.

Opening Keynote: History, Politics, and Education: Teaching about Holocaust and Genocide

Format: 5 minute introduction, 20 min per speaker, 30 minute discussion Moderator: Debórah Dwork, Strassler Center, Clark University

Life and death in the forest: Landscape agency during the Holocaust

To escape certain death during the Nazi regime, approximately eighty thousand terrorized and persecuted Eastern European Jews sought refuge in the forests surrounding their communities. Most often, their forest deaths were the result of Nazi-sponsored activities such as ghetto deportations and hunts for Jewish escapees. However, anti-Semitic partisans, partisan combat, hostile peasants, and environmental elements were also factors contributing to an estimated ninety percent fatality rate. This dissertation explored the role and meaning of forests to these Jewish fugitives. It investigated the bodily and social practices they developed to enhance their odds of survival in the forest landscape. I develop the concept of landscape agency as a response to my research question: What was it like to live and survive (or die) in the forest during the Holocaust? Moreover, it is an approach to theorizing about the humanity of space. Landscape agency builds upon a phenomenological approach to space and place that links landscape and action through bodily practices. This dissertation analyzed the fugitives' actions as functions of various forms of capital, namely economic, cultural and social. The sample included thirteen individuals who were themselves forest fugitives during the Holocaust. Face-face qualitative interviews were conducted from 2004 to 2006. Primary data from these interviews was used extensively to demonstrate the practices utilized in the fugitives' experiences with life and death in the forest. This study concluded that the odds of survival for forest fugitives were enhanced by use of landscape agency.

On Record: Soundscapes as Metaphor and Physical Manifestation of Memory in Early Holocaust Novels and Contemporary Criticism

This thesis compares two perspectives on the production of Holocaust memory: a novel that leads up to The Holocaust in Britain and one that reflects the hindsight perspective of a liberator in the Soviet Union. The novels are Virginia Woolf’s BETWEEN THE ACTS and Vasily Grossman’s LIFE AND FATE. The analysis offers a locus of analysis for the diasporic literary energy created by the catastrophe in the 20th and 21st centuries. The project offers a theorized standpoint on the role of literature on official historical archives. Proposing a method through which contemporary readers can engage the diasporic event of The Holocaust, the project adopts both the extended metaphor and literal expression of soundscapes. Soundscapes encompass the immaterial processes of memorialization and the literal sonic textures developed in Holocaust novels. The critical perspective incorporates contemporary notions of narratology, archival practices, and cultural manifestations of language into the notion of literary ethnomusicology.

KNOWING THE ENEMY: NAZI FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE IN WAR, HOLOCAUST, AND POSTWAR

“Knowing the Enemy: Nazi Foreign Intelligence in War, Holocaust and Postwar,” reveals the importance of ideologically-driven foreign intelligence reporting in the wartime radicalization of the Nazi dictatorship, and the continued prominence of Nazi discourses in postwar reports from German intelligence officers working with the U.S. Army and West German Federal Intelligence Service after 1945. For this project, I conducted extensive archival research in Germany and the United States, particularly in overlooked and files pertaining to the wartime activities of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Abwehr, Fremde Heere Ost, Auswärtiges Amt, and German General Staff, and the recently declassified intelligence files pertaining to the postwar activities of the Gehlen Organization, Bundesnachrichtendienst, and Foreign Military Studies Program. Applying the technique of close textual analysis to the underutilized intelligence reports themselves, I discovered that wartime German intelligence officials in military, civil service, and Party institutions all lent the appearance of professional objectivity to the racist and conspiratorial foreign policy beliefs held in the highest echelons of the Nazi dictatorship. The German foreign intelligence services’ often erroneous reporting on Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and international Jewry simultaneously figured in the radicalization of the regime’s military and anti-Jewish policies and served to confirm the ideological preconceptions of Hitler and his most loyal followers. After 1945, many of these same figures found employment with the Cold War West, using their “expertise” in Soviet affairs to advise the West German Government, U.S. Military, and CIA on Russian military and political matters. I chart considerable continuities in personnel and ideas from the wartime intelligence organizations into postwar West German and American intelligence institutions, as later reporting on the Soviet Union continued to reproduce the flawed wartime tropes of innate Russian military and racial inferiority.