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| You are here: 2000 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Workshops on Remembrance and Representation / Workshop 1 on Remembrance, "It Happened There: The Existence and Meaning of Historical Locations" / Presentation by Mr. David Barnouw | |||||||||
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Report from Workshop 1 on Remembrance and Representation: "It Happened there: the Existence and Meaning of Historical Locations" Presentation by Mr. David Barnouw Presentation by Dr. Jan Munk Presentation by Dr. Robert Sigel Presentation by Dr. Teresa Swiebocka Presentation by Dr. Jonathan Webber Presentation by Dr. James E. Young Presentation by Mr. David Barnouw Barnouw, David Presentation by David Barnouw History is not static A few months ago an American visited my institute, the Netherland Institute for War Documentation, because he wanted to visit places in Amsterdam connected with the Holocaust and he was well prepared. He was eager to see among other places the buildings used by the Sicherheitsdienst and the Zentrale fur Judische Auswandering. These were in housed in two schools and when I told him one of those buildings was still used as a school he was really shocked. Was it really possible youngsters were teached in such horrific surroundings. My answer was yes, yes it is poosible. Just as I live in a part of a former orphanage for Jewish girls, right in the middle of the city of Amsterdam. And I know about the 80 girls hwo were taken brutally away in February 1943. More then 100.000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands; to Auschwitz, to Sobibor and to the many so called workcamps in Eastern Europe. Only a few thousand returned. It was obvious that 10% of the Amsterdam population had vanished. In the former Jewish quarter hundreds of houses were empty and mostly stripped of the wood, which was used as fuel in the so called hungerwinter from 1944-1945. But did the gentiles realise what had happened? There were no deathcamps in the Netherlands, no Auschwitz or Sobibor, but there were sites in teh Netherlands, where Jews stayed for short or a longer time before the trains went to the gaschambers. What did happen to the sites after the war? Were they used as places for remembrance? Not at all as I can show you with the examples of camp Westerbork, camp Amersfoort, the Vught-camp and the hiding-place of Anne Frank. Firstly Judendurchgangslager Westerbork. It was founded before the war, after the Reichskristallnacht and used for Jewish refugees. The Dutch Jewish community paid for the camp, which was originally planned in the middle of the country. But the local touristindustry protested, as did Queen Wilhelmina. She did not wanted a refugee-camp so close near her summerresidence. So the plans changed and the camp was erected in the east, not far from the German border. After the invasion in May 1940 the Germans took over, but still the guards on the outerpost were Dutch military policemen. Westerbork became one of the most efficient Judendurchgangslager in Europe and after the war Eichmann used to boast how happy he had been about the punctuality of the trains running from Westerbork to the deathcamps. After the war it was used as a prisoncamp for political prisoners and after the independance of Indonesia South Moluccan members of the Dutch colonial army, who did not wish to stay there, found refugee in the barracks.in an independant Indonesia. Now it is a National Monument with an interesting museum. My second example is Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Amersfoort. It was a concentrationcamps for Jews and non-Jews; and just as camp Westerbork it was used after the war as a prisoncamp for political prisoners and Dutch members of the Waffen-SS. Later the Dutch army took over the former barracks and their example was followed by the national police: a police-academy. Not long ago protest was raised because people claimed a part of the the nearbye golf-course had been a burialground during the war. Vught, or officially Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch, had a Judendurchgangslager, where more then 10.000 Jews stayed for a while before deportation. After the war the camp was used as a prison for youngsters and, again, for former members of the colonial army, the South Moluccans, just as Westerbork. My fourth example is the Anne Frank House, now one of the most famous 'Holocaust'-places in Amsterdam? It was only in 1957, after the Broadway-play The Diary of Anne Frank had conquered the USA and later Europe, that people started to worry about the house at the Prinsengracht and founded an organization to protect it. Is this situation different from other 'lieux de memoire' of the Holocaust in Europe? Yes and no. Everywhere former concentration-camps were used as prison-camps for old or for new enemies, like in the former Eastblock or for refugees. The war, and especially the resistance-movement, became part of an 'official' state sanctioned memory, but the Holocaust was the first decennia more or less excluded from that official memory. The resistance-movement was far more important then the killing of the Jews.Not long after the war committees of ex-deportees, Jews and non-Jews, but mostly non-Jews, came into existence. Sometimes pampered by the state, sometimes not, but they all had a sense of being part of an elite brother- and sisterhood; the survivors. And the survivors were telling and writing how it had been in the camps, sometimes questionable stories, but hardly anybody dared to put questionsmarks with survivor-tales. After the euphory of the liberation and the shock of a new dictatorship in the east the Second World War, and the masskilling of the Jews seems to be forgotten, just part of history. It was in the sixties and the seventies that the Second World War became 'alive' and with it the Holocaust. It has been said before; the 1978 Hollywood-televisiondrama Holocaust brought an extra impuls. The United States had discovered or rediscovered the Holocaust and became a protagonist for everything around that event. Now every State, from Alabama to Wyoming, has its Holocaust-center, although some of them are very small. But there is a Wiesenthal-center in Los Angeles and a Holocaust-museum on the prestigious Mall in Washington. But the real highlight of the Americanisation of the Holocaust came in 1993 with Spielberg's blockbuster Schindler's List. Back to Europe, 'where it happened' In late 80's you see a shift towards more Second World War-sites, including 'lieux de memoire' on the Holocaust and a shift towards more independence, especially in Eastern Europe and the participation of more professionals. To say it trivial: the Second World War is a growth market with more and more people becoming dependant on it and professionalism is coming in at the same time the survivors are becoming really old.During the opening-session the representative of the Imperial War Museum spoke openly about their 'marketing team'. But the other presentations were not more then PR-talks for their own countries Germany, England, Israel, France, the USA and the Netherlands. In this growth market there is of course a Disney Park-tendency.In Yorkshire, Engeland, you can play POW, with the whole family in a real camp, constructed in 1942 for Italian POW's. And a businessman in Thailand launched years ago his Bridge on the River Kwai-idea. A real steam-train manned with actors as English POW's and Japanese guards; the tourists would love it, he thought. But the protests were fierce, especially from the Australian embassy and this plan was cancelled. And what do we think about the two-hour 'Retracing Schindler's List Tour' in Krakow?But serious plans do not go unnoticed either. Not long after D-Day the French village Oradour was wiped out by an SS-unit, consisting mostly of French SS-soldiers, and the burned-out village is still a museum in itself. Untill last year a new museum 'for peace' was erected next to the village. One of the survivors of Oradour complained bitterly; 'they had stolen our history' and with 'they' he means the professionals, who will running the museum and with 'our history' he means of course his interpretation of the Oradour-history. On Internet one can find the site 'Gedankstatte fur NS-Opfer in Deutschland' from the Berlin Stiftung Topographie des Terrors. This website shows a map of Germany with hundreds of dots and every dot is a camp, open for public or soon to be opened. The amount of camps will cause problems, because they will compete to attract visitors. And the professional directors will use modern techniques to lure would-be visitors into the sites. And I doubt if those techniques are all ful of pedagogic values. But I think there is also a tendency to overvalue the pedagogic results of those visits. 'If you are at the real place, you will know how terrible the Holocaust was'.In the Netherlands, and in other countries, survivors, Jews and non-Jews, are going from school to school to speak to the children. For decades I am told these visits are a tremendous success, that children who misbehave otherwise in the classroom, are now very polite and quiet and learn a lot from those survivors. I am afraid these stories are too good to believe and too positive because being critical on survivors is not done. Of course you learn more from a visit to an 'authentic place' if you are prepared, but if you go to an unknown village or castle you will have more profit if you prepare yourself. A last remark about the sites; do we have to preserve all of them? I do not think so; I rather have 10 sites with good information then a few hundred with poor information. What could be done is to give information on informationshield at the spot itself, even if there is nothing to be seen. Even if you have your doubts about Holocaust-education; did it stop ethnic clensing in former Yugoslavia?, we are obliged to honor the dead by not forgetting them and not forgetting the sites of destruction. >> Back to top |
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Introduction Opening Session: Messages and speeches Plenary Sessions: Messages and speeches Workshops, Panels and Seminars
Other Activities |
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