Teaching Holocaust Remembrance Here and Now:
The Educational Approach of the International School for Holocaust Studies
Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
Introduction
Yad Vashem, located on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, was established by an
act of the Israeli parliament in 1953. Its name was chosen from a verse from the book of
Isaiah 56:5:
“To them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name …I will
give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.”
As the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority of the State of Israel,
the central task of Yad Vashem is to gather material about the Jewish victims who were
murdered only because they were Jewish and to perpetuate their names and those of
their destroyed communities, organizations, and institutions. In addition to documenting
and commemorating the Holocaust, Yad Vashem also places a very strong emphasis on
organizing educational programming and sponsoring academic research.
At the core of the Holocaust was the decision to murder every single Jewish man,
woman and child. Nazi antisemitic ideology, propagated by the Nazi Party from the early
1920s until Germany's surrender in 1945, was based on pseudo-scientific fallacies. This
ideology controlled political, national and economic considerations.
The Holocaust, an unprecedented event, has fundamentally challenged the foundations
upon which human civilization rests. It has forced us to reflect upon our most basic
assumptions about the nature of humankind and of society, of the modern state, and of
our responsibilities as citizens of the world to speak up and act to stop the unjust
suffering of innocent people everywhere. Clearly, the Holocaust serves as a universal
warning and places a heavy responsibility on us to teach it.
Educational Guidelines
The Holocaust is a human story and should be taught as such. It is what gives it
relevance today. The historian narrates the history, while the educator gives it its
meaning. In teaching we ask three main questions: Why, What and How? It is important
to first understand why this event should be taught and only then turn to the question of
contents and methodology.
The Human Being as the Center:
Victims, Bystanders and Perpetrators
Our educational rationale places the human being, the individual, at the center of our
understanding of history. Facing the Holocaust means probing not only such phenomena
as mass murder, Nazi policy, the statistics of death and the chain of historical, political
and military events. It involves an attempt to understand human beings and the manner
in which they contended with extreme situations and with profound ethical dilemmas.
The story of the Holocaust is first and foremost a human story. Any discussion of its
victims, its perpetrators or those who stood by and watched must attempt to understand
the human being involved. The encounter between students and the “simple” people
who were present in the events of the Holocaust – their daily lives and reality – must
serve as the foundation for meaningful educational work.
In addressing Holocaust education we first need to learn who were these people as
individuals, before they became victims. On the eve of World War II, there were
approximately 10 million Jews in Europe. The largest Jewish concentration was in
Poland. Looking at these people’s lives, we can see them struggling with questions of
identity in modern times. This is a time of great Jewish creativity in literature, poetry,
theater, newspapers etc. In politics, Jews were members of different groups including
Zionist, orthodox, assimilated parties, etc. Jews lived full and vibrant lives. The
Holocaust ended this varied Jewish civilization.
Only after speaking of their pre-war lives can we turn to study about the Holocaust and
the victims’ fates. Attention must focus not only on the heroes of uprisings and
resistance on the one hand, or on high-ranking murderers on the other. It is imperative
that we remember and attempt to understand the difficulties and dilemmas confronting
those whose names were all but lost along with their lives. Only in such a manner is it
possible to create a real and meaningful connection between the learners and the subject
matter, and to begin to discern the commonalties and the differences between our own
period and that of the Holocaust.
Aviva Unger was ten years old in Warsaw when the war broke out. In the Warsaw
ghetto, she had to steal food in order to survive with her mother. In her testimony, she
emphasizes the fact that her mother was troubled not by the fact that she stole, but
because she did not feel guilty for what she had done. The question of education was
intensified in those times. How does one preserve the ethical values in a world of chaos?
(In this case, they both understood that it was wrong to steal but critical for survival).
Examination of the various ethical crossroads at which Jews, Germans and others stood,
and the dilemmas and challenges that they faced, will allow the educational process to
progress from learning about the particular historical situation to a appreciation of the
universal human voice. Providing the history with a human face, an examination of the
human complexities involved, help to prevent the dangers of reducing the Holocaust to a
one-dimensional picture or an abstract, alienated view. These understandings serve as the
basis for all educational work.
Yad Vashem educational materials place a great emphasis on the everyday life of the
victims, and their struggle to survive under insurmountable conditions. When studying
this subject, Jewish students should grapple with some of the following questions: How
did Jews cope with Nazi anti-Jewish decrees? What ethical choices did they make on a
daily basis? How did they perceive their fate? What happened to faith, tradition, hope
and dignity?
The following is an example that illustrates this issue. In the winter of 1942 in the Vilna
ghetto in Lithuania, Dr. Avraham Weinreb, facing a difficult dilemma, assembled a group
of people to consider the options. He called to the meeting a fellow doctor, a member of
the Jewish leadership of the ghetto, a rabbi and a judge. The situation was as follows,
people were ill with tuberculosis and at the time the belief was that calcium was a
remedy. Dr. Weinreb had only a limited amount of medicine and many people who were
suffering from the illness. Therefore, the question was how to allocate the medicine. If
he would distribute equal amounts of the calcium to everyone, it would run out quickly
and all of their situations would eventually decline. However, if he would distribute the
calcium to only those who were slightly ill there was a greater chance that with the
additional dosages of medicine they would survive until the liberation.
Those present at the meeting responded in various ways. The rabbi advised that only
God determines who should live and who would die. The judge noted that one might
condemn to death only those who have committed a wrongdoing and therefore, refused
to make a decision of this nature that would in effect result in a death sentence for those
who were ill. Dr. Weinreb decided, to distribute the calcium equally, and later the entire
group of sick people died. A few months later, a similar problem arose with a lack of
insulin for diabetic patients. Again, Dr. Weinreb assembled the group of advisors people
and the same arguments were raised. This time however, he decided to give out the
insulin only to those who were less ill. While unfortunately, all of the sick persons died to
Dr. Weinreb great distress, the educational issue that can be explored here is that people
were required to continually ask questions and make choices in a grim reality. It is
important to not confuse the details of death with the life struggles during the Holocaust.
An in-depth inquiry about the identities of the victims should also not be limited to their
pre-war lives and Holocaust experiences. It is important to examine the post-war
journeys of the survivors and their return to life. For example, which dilemmas did the
survivors confront? How did they deal with issues of revenge? What kind of difficulties
did they endure? How did they rebuild their lives in the dark shadow of the Holocaust?
In the attempt to re-establish a new life approximately half of the survivors chose to
immigrate to Palestine/ The state of Israel while others immigrated to Australia, the
United States of America, South Africa etc. Abba Kovner, a Holocaust survivor and the
commander of the underground of Vilna Ghetto said: “Nothing amazes me more that
the Holocaust survivors had all the legitimacy to become thieves and robbers but chose
to return to life.”
Addressing complex questions vis-à-vis the perpetrators and bystanders are extremely
difficult tasks for educators. Students must try and comprehend that there are no easy
answers to questions regarding how it was humanly possible to commit acts of brutality
and be indifferent to suffering of such mass proportions. Wrestling with questions such
as why members of the German armed forces murdered Jews, or why people who lived
next to concentration camps in the Reich could claim that they did not know what was
happening in their midst, is part of the study of the Holocaust. We teach dilemmas and
encourage students to exercise their critical thinking skills rather than arrive at simplistic
conclusions.
The Righteous among the Nations
The Holocaust was a historical event in which extremes of the human capacity for evil
were brought into clear view. At the same time, however, it was also a historical event
that demonstrated incredible cases of uncommon human courage and compassion. Our
encounter with these two extremes of the human spirit awakens us to constantly examine
our own personal ethics and conduct. Awareness of the importance of the actions of
rescuers including the Righteous Among the Nations was recognized in the Israeli law
that served as the basis for the establishment of Yad Vashem nearly fifty years ago. Since
its founding, Yad Vashem has concerned itself with locating, identifying and paying
homage to these rescuers.
The Ulma family, for example, lived in Markowa, a small village in Poland. They had six
children and were expecting their seventh. Remarkably, they hid eight Jews in 1942, while
risking the safety of their whole family. They were discovered because of an informer.
Tragically, the family was executed along with the Jews they were hiding. To date,
approximately 22,000 men and women who risked their lives to save Jews have been
recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. Unquestionably, the actions of the
Righteous Among the Nations and the choices they faced serves as a powerful
educational tool.
Inter-Cultural Dialogue
Historians today point to the narrative nature of historiography, of a past that is open to
a range of interpretations and understandings, dependent in part upon the point of view
and perspective of the narrator. The International School for Holocaust Studies applies
this understanding to its pedagogical work and conceptions as well. Awareness of this
idea and of the manifold ways in which the memory of the Holocaust is shaped, is
among the factors which influence the School’s educational work and which allow
fruitful dialogue to take place in the dialogue it has with educators from various
countries. An understanding of other points of view enriches one’s own insights and
provides an opportunity to examine one’s own identity, past and memory. Sensitivity to
other perspectives and to other groups is among the central values that the School’s
educational work seeks to inculcate. It seeks to implement this value in the educational
materials that we develop and in the seminars and courses we conduct.
The Holocaust Survivors’ Heritage
Holocaust survivors play a central role in the writing of Holocaust history, in the shaping
of memory, in commemoration and in educational work. Testimonies and encounters
with individual survivors serve as a central axis in passing on the history and the memory
of the Holocaust to future generations. The impending disappearance of the survivor
generation challenges educators throughout the world to find new ways to relate the
history and to perpetuate the memory and heritage of the survivors to a younger
generation that will no longer come into direct personal contact with the generation that
experienced the Holocaust and its era.
Inculcation of Jewish and Universal Values
The mass murder of the Jews during the Holocaust stemmed from a radical racial
ideology which set itself the goal of demolishing existing humanistic ethics and physically
annihilating the nation which it identified as having created the infrastructure of human
ethics – the people who bequeathed to the world such ethical foundations as the Ten
Commandments and its injunction that “thou shalt not murder”. As one of the central
goals of its educational work, the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad
Vashem seeks to highlight these Jewish and humanistic ethical values, pointing to the
Nazi attempt to undermine them.
The program inculcates universal values of preservation of human rights, and promotes
individual responsibility in fighting racism and xenophobia.
A Multi-Level Approach
Yad Vashem supports an age-appropriate Holocaust curriculum that incrementally
introduces the Shoah to students according to their developing emotional and cognitive
abilities. The approach calls for an early start to Holocaust education that deals with the
factual history of the Shoah even in early grades, but in a way that accommodates the
capacities of young children. This approach scaffolds knowledge about the Shoah in a
spiral model of Holocaust education: values such as individual empathy and family bonds
are communicated to students from the youngest ages through primary school, via
stories of rescue and survival --generally stories with “happy endings”; junior high school
students are taught communal dilemmas and questions of ethnic identity; and only in
high school do students grapple with more complex social subjects of advanced historical
comprehension, including processes of cause-and-effect, national ideology, and
multifaceted global conflict. The spiral model moves from individual to community and
finally to society while relying on a safe but principled accumulation of knowledge about
the Holocaust itself. The student’s encounter with the past and with its ethical dilemmas
will be internalized over the years and will contribute to the construction of his or her
own identity and personal ethics.
An Interdisciplinary Approach
Study of the Holocaust as a human experience extends beyond the boundaries of the
historical discipline. Our presentation of the story as a human one mandates that other
fields of knowledge that contribute to our understanding of human beings and the
human spirit be incorporated into the learning process. These include art, literature,
philosophy and more. Incorporation of these disciplines allows access to parts of the
human psyche that the intellectual examination of historical documents alone does not
always facilitate.
The following is an example of the above:
A liberator, Zinovii Tolkatchev, drew a depiction of the scene as documentation of what
he witnessed. “I did what I had to do; I couldn’t refrain from doing it. My heart
commanded, my conscience demanded, the hatred for fascism reigned.” In these words,
artist Private Zinovii Tolkatchev (1903-1977) embodied the creative essence of one who
arrived at the gates of hell in a Red Army uniform. At the end of January 1945, he
accompanied the Nazi Crimes Investigation Commission to Auschwitz, literally hours
after the entrance of the Red Army into the camp. Tolkatchev was seized by the urge to
capture the scenes and the voices. In the absence of drawing paper he entered the
camp’s former headquarters and took stationery with bold black letters: Kommandantur
Konzentrationslager Auschwitz; I.G. Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft; Der
Oberpräsident der Provinz Oberschlesien. As if possessed by madness, he drew sketches
of what he saw. By using the meager materials of a pencil and paper, Tolkatchev
succeeded to create art of a monumental scope. The understanding that on these very
same pieces of paper just a few days prior were written orders of extermination endow
them with a tragic power that seems frightening. The drawing below reflects his memory:
“Before I reached the second storehouse, I noticed two women leaving in haste. One of
them ran forward and approached me. Unintentionally, my gaze was drawn to a pair of
children’s shoes dangling by their laces that the woman was holding in her hand. They
were two different shoes-one bigger than the other, and of different colors…
I saw her hunger-ridden face, the wrinkles, the exhausted glance of her one remaining
eye. From the empty socket of her other eye flowed a mucous-filled tear.
Her friend caught up with her. I asked the one-eyed woman why she was carrying two
different shoes, explaining that I was an artist and it was important for me to know
everything. “As a memento! I took them as a memento!” Again, a large tear ran down
her face.
We entered the storehouse to protect ourselves from the wind and snow, and here, next
to the shoes of tens of thousands of the dead, I heard Lisa’s story as told by her friend:
“…she struggled with the SS, who grabbed her children from her arms. One of them
beat her with a sharp object in her eye and she fainted. Her friends took care of her and
saved her… Lisa took the only thing left- two shoes- one brown and one blue. Shoes
similar to those worn by her children… What did they do to us? How did they torture
us!”
The friend finished telling Lisa’s story, pained and grieved…I looked at her and listened.
Her story was tragic in a way similar to a thousand other stories…
She hadn’t given up easily. She had struggled. The SS had crushed her body.
I couldn’t turn my eyes away from the facial expressions of these two young women.
They radiated an intense vitality. It was possible to imagine their charm.
“Lisa, Lisa,” she yelled again. My eyes surveyed the cold and foggy night. I felt the
horrific transformations of time…
Lisa, Lisa, Mona Lisa. Everything in that scene was clear, harmonious, wondrous: the
face, the hands, the folds of the garment and the exceptional landscape in the
background…
The more I contemplated her image, the more the riddle of her smile grew. Her face
expressed emotion and thought. So the great Leonardo da Vinci saw her and painted
her. Writers and poets wove Mona Lisa into their works. She smiled her small smile
forever, through the generations. Her eyes radiated the tranquility and joy of
motherhood…The howls of the storm drowned out the playing of the lute in my
reverie…
How they mistreated her! What did they do to her? They broke her heart, humiliated her,
crushed…The storm stopped. The wind quieted down. The world was covered with a
white blanket. A chilling silence prevailed. As if time had stood still… as if time had
no past… as if there would be no future… two bent over figures of women,
disappearing in the distance, fading, two figures merging into one…”
In “Lisa, Lisa”- the question asked by many- what happened to the world? To the
definition of humanity and its achievements? The Mona Lisa of da Vinci represented the
high Renaissance, Lisa represents the model after the Holocaust. Teodor Adorno, the
philosopher, said that there are two timelines to the world-one from Genesis to the
Holocaust, and from the Holocaust –on. We cannot live the same way as we did; the
Holocaust changed the western civilization and the whole world, and we cannot ignore
this event and its implications.
Conclusion
In summary, every teacher who wishes to teach this chapter of human history first has to
study to build a concrete base of knowledge. After teachers have acquired the
information and feel emotionally equipped to deal with the subject, the International
School for Holocaust Studies can offer them various interdisciplinary approaches on how
to teach the Holocaust in the classroom. The pedagogical methods and educational
materials can better prepare teachers with the invaluable skills to teach the Holocaust to
young minds in the twentieth century.
For more information about teacher-training programs on the Shoah in English,
educational materials in various languages, guidelines for Holocaust remembrance
ceremonies and participating in teacher-training seminars at Yad Vashem, please visit
www.yadvashem.org / or contact: [email protected]
Harper Collins study guide www.harpercollins.com.au
The Fiftieth Gate
By Mark Raphael Baker
Mark Raphael Baker
Mark Raphael Baker lectures in Modern Jewish History at the University of
Melbourne. He has a doctorate from Oxford University and is the Editor of
Generation: A Journal of Australian Jewish Life and Thought. Born in 1959,
Mark lives in Victoria with his wife and three children.
The Plot
This very personal story is a journey for the author through the experiences of his parents
during the Holocaust. Baker has researched the events surrounding the persecution of the Jews
in the areas of Poland in which his parents grew up, and from which they were removed during
WWII. His father, Yossl, was imprisoned in some of the most notorious concentration camps
while his mother, Genia, was forced to hide for several years once the Jews of her village had
been murdered. The relationship between Baker and his parents becomes strained at some
points during Baker′s probing of the past. When the family revisits the villages and death camps
familiar to his parents, the emotional pressure for Genia and Yossl becomes intense.
Issues and Themes
o The power of traumatic experience in shaping a person′s life.
o The experiences of Jewish refugees in Australia after the Second World War
o The struggle of the children of Holocaust survivors to understand, respect and move on from
their parents′ experiences.
o The cultural life of Jewish Australians.
o The effect of the Holocaust on Jewish thought, culture and community
o The role of memory and remembrance
Structure and Language
The novel is essentially a biography of Baker′s parents narrated by its author, Mark Baker. As
its subtitle, ′A Journey through Memory′ suggests, the book is comprised of reminiscences from
his parents about their lives and experiences during the 1930s and 1940s. Baker, a Melbourne
academic, supplements their stories with material from his own research into the period to paint
a more complete picture of his parents′ lives. Baker frequently reflects the heavy accents of his
parents in his spelling, which forges a stronger bond between the reader and two elderly Jews
reliving their horrific Holocaust experiences. The author is involved with and affected by the
project at every stage so that there appears to be no authorial distance between Baker and the
material he records. Baker includes documents from his research in the book, as well as
reconstructions of events, records of his parents speaking about their memories on tape and
records of his conversations with them.
Related Resources
Contextual Study:
The Reader by Bernard Schlink;
Klata′s Diary by Zlata Filipovic;
The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig;
Elli by Livia Bitton Jackson;
Davida′s Harp by Chaim Potok,
The Diary of Anne Frank;
If this is a man by Primo Levi,
The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Darville.
Film:
Shoah (developed from filmed interviews with survivors),
Schindler′s List;
Europa, Europa,
The Killing Fields
Student Activities
1. Working in small groups, use the resources of the Internet and library to
find out about the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s and
1940s. Once you have read enough to gain an overview of events, select
aspects of the Holocaust and present an in-depth examination of them in a
form which can be presented to the whole group. Include a bibliography and
suggestions for further reading. (The tv series The Holocaust is a useful
reference)
2. Working in pairs, develop a list of the different ways in which Mark Baker
responds to his parents′ experiences? Use your reading journal to describe
how the author can "bear the wounds of unresolved guilt" (p. 100) as a child,
as an adolescent and as an adult.
3. Discuss why Mark Baker has written this book, when, as a relative warns
him, it is a very public record of the family "forever"? Consider how Baker
might have kept the manuscript for family members only? What effects might
publishing the text have on members of Baker′s extended and immediate
family? As Yossl, describe your reaction to a newspaper interviewer who has
read the novel and is now asking you about your role in the story.
4. The Holocaust has had a profound effect on Genia and Yossl, for example
p. 37 and p. 107. Make a list of the ways in which the events of the Holocaust
are an ongoing presence in the lives of Baker′s parents.
5. Genia suffers differently from Yossl. Working in pairs, make a list of the
ways in which her Holocaust experiences were different from those of her
husband? How do these experiences affect her? As Genia, write ′a letter to
Rachel (Baker′s daughter) in which you describe your hopes and dreams for
your granddaughter
6. The Fiftieth Gate refers to the Jewish custom of placing pebbles or stones
on gravestones. The end of Schindler′s List shows survivors of the Jewish
Holocaust observing this ritual. Consider why the film ends with this
sequence? In what ways are the film Schindler′s List and Baker′s book
′stones on Holocaust gravestones′? Write an article for Baker′s journal,
′Generation: A Journal of Australian Jewish Life and Thought′ in which you
discuss this metaphor. Submit the article for publication.
7. How do counsellors help people to get over traumatic experiences? Using
the resources of the Internet and library, find out how victims of trauma are
helped in Australia. List some of the countries from which refugees come to
Australia. Suggest ways in which their experiences might be similar to those
of Genia and Yossl. Now consider how Genia and Yossl deal with their
traumatic past. Writing as either Baker′s father or mother, write a letter to your
son while he is in Jerusalem about how you have coped throughout you life
with your terrible past. What role has the Jewish community played in your
life? What personal resources have you had to draw upon to survive during
the years?
8. Why does Baker research the stories of his parents? What responses might
his parents have to his decision to find out more about what they are telling
him? Would ′The Fiftieth Gate′ be as successful without Baker′s research?
Form small groups, with one group acting as Baker. Explore these questions
thoroughly, then put the Baker group in the hot seat to answer some of your
issues.
9. "Don′t interrogate me. I′m your mother, not your prisoner" (p. 151). What
effect does Baker′s project of uncovering his parents′ past have on his
relationship with them? While in Jerusalem, Baker writes an email to his father
apologising for overstepping the mark in digging up an event in the past. As
Yossl, write a reply to your son in which you talk about how you are coping
with his questioning and research.
10. Phillip Adams has commented that The Fiftieth Gate "has the dignity and
depth to undo the damage of Demidenko". Using the resources of the library
and Internet, find out what happened when Helen Darville was discovered to
have invented a identity in relation to her novel, The Hand that Signed the
Paper, published under the name ′Helen Demidenko′. Having made a
thumbnail sketch of the issues raised by the case, write a letter to the
newspaper arguing whether someone who was not involved in the Holocaust
in any way can write a book about the event. Does your case hold for every
person speaking about a life experience in which they were not directly
involved - you might consider cases such as a male writing about female
experience, or a caucasian writing about a negro′s experience.
Mark Raphael Baker
In Jewish mysticism, it is believed that there are forty-nine gates that separate good from evil.
They are gates in our hearts. Beyond them, lies a fiftieth gate, the point at which we stop
moving but become aware of who we are. It is the gate we pass through when we say ′I am′. The Fiftieth Gate
What prompted you to write a book about your parents?
Well, it′s not really about my parents, it′s about me growing up with my parents′ memories. I
teach a course at Melbourne University on the Holocaust. For years, I have been studying
everyone else′s stories and testimonies. As a teenager, I would read any memoir I could get my
hands on. And then suddenly I realised, I′m an historian and yet I know so little about my own
history. The easy part was turning to my parents and asking them to tell me their stories. The
hard part was turning to myself and asking the questions I′d always evaded: ′Well, why haven′t
you confronted the darkness in your own parents′ lives? Why didn′t you listen to their stories
when you were young?′
So how did you actually write The Fiftieth Gate?
Initially, I intended to write the book in two voices. I planned to ask my parents to tell me their
nightmares, and then I would write an historical commentary around their words. It didn′t take
long to realise that I was using my identity as an historian to protect myself from relating to
their stories as a son. Slowly, the book took on an entirely different shape: it became my
journey into my childhood to try to understand what it meant to grow up in a household with so
much sadness and tragedy. I mean, on the surface my parents laughed and loved; but there
were all sorts of silences and coded signals which pointed to the terror of their own childhood.
The hardest was trying to understand my mother′s periodic depression.
How does she feel about you telling the world the most personal details of her life?
It′s hard, and I′m scared for my parents. When my mother read the book, on the first day I
called her on the phone and she said to me: ′I feel naked, like you′ve put me in front of a
mirror.′ On the third day, she was still reading, I called her and she said: ′I′ve finished the
book, I′ve put it away in the cupboard, and I′m going to the casino now. Goodbye.′ I think she
thought she could just put her memories away in a cupboard, forget them, but we′ve all come
to realise as a family that the remembering is only just beginning.
Why only just beginning?
Memory isn′t a story with a beginning, middle and end. The minute you remember one thing,
the next memory takes on a new shape. For example, my father never spoke of his two younger
sisters who were murdered. I found their school report-cards in an archive in Poland. I read out
their grades to my father. All of a sudden he is forced to remember his sisters as little school
girls, on the edge of their deaths. So he responds by asking new questions: ′What were their
dreams? Do I remember what they liked to play? Do I remember how they looked at me when
we were forcibly separated? Did they scream? Did they cry?′ So the next time I ask my father,
what do you remember about your sisters?, he remembers something different altogether.
That′s why my book never really ends. It begins where it ends and ends where it begins. With
the same words. There′s no escape; you can only tell the story in a different way.
So how do you tell the stories now?
I think I grew up with a lot of pain. Pain and anger. Anger at the world, for allowing my family
to be murdered; pain, because the wounds were still festering. Talking about it with my family
has been the beginning of our healing. I write in the book about letting go of pain so it can be
reclaimed for others. It′s very easy to get paralysed inside your own story of suffering. The
challenge is to link your suffering to the fate of other people. If we, as the children of survivors,
feel we were robbed of our grandparents because of the world′s indifference, then it′s our
responsibility to shout out in the face of any injustice. It doesn′t need to be six million deaths
for me to respond now. I′ve learned to break down the pain into a different kind of equation:
one plus one plus one. It doesn′t matter if it′s Rwanda, or Bosnia, or even just a homeless child,
a single starving refugee. It′s a question of redirecting the rage on behalf of others so it doesn′t
fester inside. That is a different way to tell my family story. It′s actually the biblical way. The
commandment to remember slavery in Egypt is always linked to the theme of social action:
memory isn′t about revelling in your own sorrow, but is about empathising with others who are
experiencing your slavery today.
So what exactly is the fiftieth gate?
The fiftieth gate is a metaphor which captures many dimensions of my family journey: fifty
years since liberation, the gates my father pushes against in his childhood town in Poland, the
gates of memory around which the book is constructed. In Jewish mysticism, there′s a belief
that there are forty-nine gates that separate good from evil. They are the gates inside our
hearts. Every second of our lives we make choices which move us along this path, back and
forward. Beyond them, lies a fiftieth gate, the point at which we stop moving but become aware
of who we are. It is the gate we pass through when we say, ′I am.′ It leads to either the
blackness or the light. For my parents, the fiftieth gate is the gate inside the other gates, the
one through which my family was led into the gas chambers. For those who survived, there is
no escape from this blackness, except by entering the darkness, so that ultimately it′s possible
to emerge on the other side, into the light. The key, as it were, is in the inside of the innermost
room, so the only way to enter is by tunnelling your way through the deep.
But where is the light in your parents′ stories?
We normally understand light and dark as two separate entities. I came to understand how it′s
possible to find lightness inside the darkness by looking at my parents′ lives. Every year they
used to dress up for an event they called the Buchenwald Ball. It was a fund-raising dance held
in Melbourne by survivors of Buchenwald concentration camp. Now, how does a child′s mind
take it in, this image of one′s parents dancing at Buchenwald but in Melbourne, singing,
laughing, inside the blackness? I knew I had to take the same journey as my parents: to enter
the darkness, so I could also come out laughing. I think of it as a candle flickering in a dim
room. You only see the flame because there is darkness all around.
What do you plan to do next?
There isn′t a natural sequel to a book of this nature. The Fiftieth Gate is a story that has been
brewing inside me all my life. But I′ve already started to write a novel. I want to play with some
of the same themes of truth, memory, history, autobiography. Only this time, all the characters
will be fictitious: but all writing, in a sense, is an act of imagination, even when you write about
yourself or your parents. You still have to set their lives in words. I′ve already invented a
protagonist for my novel: he′s an historian who gets involved in a murder investigation. I keep
telling myself as I write: ′just imagine you′re recording the life of this character.′ I let the
character talk and act through the logic of the personality I′ve planted within him. In that
sense, there′s no real difference between writing fiction and writing non-fiction.
Collective memory is a term coined by Maurice Halbwachs, separating the
notion from the individual memory. The collective memory is shared, passed
on and also constructed by the group, or modern society. The debate was
taken up by Jan Assmann, who wrote Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (The Cultural
Memory). Assmann distinguishes between the Cultural memory and the
Communicative memory, whereas the former fulfills a storage function and the
latter the function of an everyday memory that is situated in the present.
Scholars such as Paul Connerton have extended the concept to include the
human body as a site for the collective processes of retention and
propagation of memory. Pierre Nora's contributions to the role of place and
spaces of shared memory (the "lieux de memoire" that we all inhabit) are also
significant.
Collective Memory and Memorialization
The collective memory of a nation is represented in part by the memorials it
chooses to erect. Public memory is enshrined in memorials from the newly
opened Holocaust memorial in Berlin to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in
Washington DC. Whatever a nation chooses to memorialize in physical
monument, or perhaps more significantly, what not to memorialize, is an
indicator of the collective memory.
Collective memory is also sustained through a continuous production of
representational forms. In our media age - and maybe particularly during the
last decade of increasing digitization - this generates a flow of, and production
of, second hand memories (see e.g. James E Young). Particular narratives
and images are reproduced and reframed, yet also questioned and contested
through new images and so forth. Collective memory today differs much from
the collective memories of an oral culture, where no printing technique or
transportation contributed to the production of imagined communities (see
Benedict Anderson) where we come to share a sense of heritage and
commonality with many human beings we have never met - as in the manner
a citizen may feel a sort of 'kinship' with people of his nation, region or city.
The concept of collective memory, initially developed by Halbwachs, has been
explored and expanded from various angles - a few of these are introduced
below.
James E. Young has introduced the notion of 'collected memory' (opposed to
collective memory), marking memory's inherently fragmented, collected and
individual character, while Jan Assmann develops the notion of
'communicative memory', a variety of collective memory based on everyday
communication. This form of memory is similar to the exchanges in an oral
culture or the memories collected (and made collective) through oral history.
As another subform of collective memories Assmann mentions forms
detached from the everyday, it can be particular materialized and fixed points
as, e.g. texts and monuments.
The theory of collective memory was also discussed by ex-Hiroshima resident
and atomic bomb survivor, Kiyoshi Tanimoto in his tour of the United States
as an attempt to rally support and funding for the reconstruction of his
Memorial Methodist Church in Hiroshima. He theorized that the use of the
atomic bomb had forever been added to the world's collective memory and
would serve in the future as a warning against such devices. See John
Hersey's Hiroshima novel.
The idea was also discussed more recently in The Celestine Prophecy and
subsequent novels written by James Redfield as a continuing process leading
to the eventual trancendance of this plane of existence. The idea that a
futuristic development of the collective unconscious and collective memories
of society allowing for a medium with which one can transcend ones existence
is an idea expressed in certain variations of new age religions.