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Hearts of Darkness
By Richard Broderick
Minnesota Magazine (May-June issue)
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
http://www.alumni.umn.edu/index.asp?Type=PR&SEC={93B65015-7C3D-48FB-8718-AEBD88DE3D94}
Sabina Zimering is not what most would consider a commanding presence.
These days, the life of the white-haired, soft-spoken retiree quietly
revolves around her children and grandchildren.
But there is more to Zimering than meets the eye. Milan Kundera once
said that the history of the modern world is the story of the struggle
of memory against forgetting. Zimering, a Polish Jew, is both witness
to that struggle and living proof that, at least some of the time,
memory triumphs.
This spring, the Great American History Theatre produced the world
premiere of Hiding in the Open, an adaptation of Zimering's memoir of
the same name. Opening to rapturous praise from critics and audiences
alike, the script tells the improbable story of how Zimering and her
younger sister managed to escape the Holocaust by posing as Catholics—a
feat made possible by the fact that, in prewar
Poland, all public school students were required to study Catholicism.
Escaping from the ghetto in their hometown of Piotrkow the very night
the Nazis moved in to deport all the Jews to the death camps, Zimering
and her sister made their way to Germany itself, where they managed to
survive as "volunteer" laborers right in the heart of Hitler's Reich.
While her book and the play adapted from it tell her story through
print and performance, Zimering travels to schools, community centers,
colleges, retirement homes, and elsewhere, relating her harrowing
tale of deception and survival. Speaking recently to gatherings at an
alternative high school at Dakota Technical College and at Hill-Murray
High School, she received what one observer describes as "overwhelming
response" with "awestruck" students glued to their seats and school
officials thrilled to see their charges so raptly attentive. In
response to her appearance, the principal at the alternative high
school has gone so far as to arrange a field trip next fall to
Washington, D.C., which will include a visit to the Holocaust Museum.
"This is a completely new world for me, but very rewarding," says
Zimering, who, after emigrating to the United States, spent much of her
career as an ophthalmologist working with student health services at
the University. She confesses that she was unable to talk about her
experiences to anyone for a long time after the war ended—although
she survived, other family members and virtually everyone she'd known
growing up did not. Now, though, she realizes that what she has to
say is not rewarding only for her.
"To high school students, the history of 50 or 60 years ago is not
much different from 600 years ago," she says. "But when a survivor
comes and tells their story, it's completely different. It makes an
impact for a person to come that they can see and talk to."
Zimering's visits to high schools and college classrooms are arranged
through the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide
Studies (CHGS), a cross-disciplinary unit with a unique approach that
weaves together scholarship, community outreach, and art to explore
the darkest reaches of human experiences. This blend of scholarship,
storytelling, and art reflects the vision of the center's director,
Stephen Feinstein, who came to the University from the University
of Wisconsin-River Falls, where he'd been the chair of the history
department.
Founded in 1997 with money from an anonymous donor, CHGS offers a
wide-ranging curriculum of classes on the Holocaust as well as the
genocides in Turkey, East Asia, Central Africa, the former Yugoslavia,
and elsewhere. But its reach is much broader than that—amazingly so,
given the center's brief history. It also sponsors major art exhibits,
such as "Coexistence," a traveling exhibition of poster art initiated
by Jerusalem's Museum on the Seam (see page 34); brings Holocaust
survivors like Zimering to the community (her memoir was also
the subject of a class taught at the CHGS); conducts conferences;
presents guest speakers like Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power,
author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide; and
offers training and curriculum materials for use in high schools and
middle schools. One of the center's new offerings is six "teaching
trunks" containing books, videotapes, posters, and curriculum guides
loaned by the center to participating schools.
*
Instead of establishing a separate department, the University
decided to organize its new program as a center located within the
History Department, an arrangement that, Feinstein explains, avoids
the possibility of overspecialization. Although small—the center's
faculty consists of Feinstein and a handful of adjunct professors—the
goal of the center is, he says, "to think out of the box about how
we create programs that are of interest to scholars and the public,
to engage in research, and to gain prominence for the University by
having an active public dimension in this area."
>>From the beginning, the center has drawn extensively from the
Twin Cities' unusually large number of Holocaust survivors—about
150 individuals in all when the center opened its doors seven years
ago. But its growing renown in the field of Holocaust and genocide
studies owes a lot to Feinstein's enthusiasm for scholarship that
examines and compares characteristics common to all episodes of
genocide (to some, the Holocaust is seen as a unique event, standing
outside of history) and his determination to weave the arts—literary,
visual, and cinematic—into the mix of offerings.
"You could have a center like this without including art, but
it wouldn't be complete," argues Feinstein, who has a background
in art history and has studied the underground art of the Soviet
Union. "There are people out there who think only straight history
is worth studying—no literature or other works of imagination. There
are some who even think that survivor testimony is of no value."
But art, he observes, adds multiple dimensions critical to coming to
grips, if that is possible, with the worst of human behavior. Among
the millions killed by the Nazis—as well as the millions killed by the
Turks, the Khmer Rouge, and the Hutu—were musicians and artists and
writers and filmmakers as well as "ordinary" people. Just as important,
art—even mediocre art—has the power to engage a much wider audience
than scholarship ever could. "Schindler's List is not the best movie
about the Holocaust, but it got the message out to millions of people,"
Feinstein says. "More than I could possibly reach."
"The fact that the center is initiating bringing the 'Coexistence'
exhibit to the Twin Cities is a testimony to what Steve's perspective
enables him to add to this community," says Rabbi Joseph Edelheit, the
director of St. Cloud State's court-mandated Jewish studies program and
creator of the CHGS's class in post-Holocaust theology. "My experience
with other institutions that offer Holocaust studies makes it clear to
me that this center is unique. Steve's an internationally recognized
art historian. He's not bringing untested theories to his role. His
maturity allows him to provide the center with seasoned leadership."
Like other faculty associated with the center, Edelheit was drawn to
CHGS through his personal connections to Feinstein but has remained
involved with the center because of Feinstein's demonstrated
willingness to think "outside the box." When Feinstein invited
Edelheit to teach at the center, Edelheit responded that the only
class he wanted to teach would deal with theology.
"I asked, 'Is that a problem at a public university?'" Edelheit
recalls. Feinstein assured him it was not, so Edelheit, who counts
27 members of his extended family lost to Hitler's diabolism and has
the distinction of having been the first rabbi to earn a doctorate
in Christian theology, created a course in post-Holocaust theology,
which includes the works of both Christian and Jewish thinkers.
"I go into this class not with merely my academic credentials,
but more passionately my rabbinical credentials and my desire to
create interfaith dialogue," Edelheit says. "My goal is to model the
commitment to dialogue."
The center's willingness to break new ground is also what brought
Patricia Baer, a professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus in
St. Peter, Minnesota, to the University in 2001 to teach a course
titled "Women in the Holocaust: Gender, Memory, Representation."
As with other instructors working with the center, Baer has found
that her class draws a broad variety of students, attracting both
undergraduate and graduate students from Jewish studies and women's
studies, but also history, education, nursing, political science,
Spanish, and art, as well as members of the broader community—including
a student who works with a shelter for battered women. Baer's classes
have included both Christians and Jews. What's more, each time she's
taught the course, Baer reports, she's also had students from Germany
enrolled.
"That's made for an interesting dimension to our discussions,"
she says. "For Jewish students, I think many times they have had a
member of their family who is a survivor or know of family members who
died and now have a particular interest in how these events affected
women. International students often want to know how Americans look
at this event and how that view differs from what they are taught in
a place like Germany.
"Stephen is really quite extraordinary in his foresight," she says. "At
the time I first offered this course, there were only five or six
similar courses in the United States. Holocaust studies have been slow
to embrace the insights of feminist studies. There are complicated
reasons for that, like the hegemony male historians have had in the
field who often feel that a feminist approach trivializes the issue."
Some scholars and survivors, she says, also feel that a focus on gender
issues threatens to minimize "the racial basis for the Holocaust."
Meanwhile, for Taner Akcam, a visiting history professor who teaches
courses on the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915 and the
rise of nationalism in the Middle East, it is precisely the center's
willingness to compare acts of genocide that constitutes one of its
principal values.
"This is something that has been lacking," says Akcam, an ethnic Turk
who was the subject of a recent New York Times article detailing the
outrage his work on the Armenian genocide has elicited from the Turkish
government, which continues to deny any such event took place. "For the
most part each genocide scholar deals with his or her own specialty.
This helps bring us out of the shadows."
*
The term crimes against humanity first appeared only in 1915 in
response to the Turkish killing of Armenians and the then-novel German
policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the word genocide, which
specifically refers to the intentional mass killing of a particular
people or ethnic group, was not coined until 1943 (by Rafael Lemkin,
a Polish Jewish lawyer). But genocide, along with the invention
of weapons of mass destruction, could be considered the signature
experience of the past 100 years of human history.
But why should this be so? What is it about global conditions that
made the 20th, and now, it seems all but certain, the 21st century,
an epoch so rife with a lust for extermination?
Not surprisingly, there aren't any easy answers. But if one examines
the mass killings of the recent past, as the scholars and students
at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies do, certain patterns
begin to appear, not so much in the modus operandi of the killings—gas
chambers in the Reich, machetes in Rwanda—but in the ethnic, national,
and international circumstances that militate in favor of genocide. The
conclusions that can be drawn from this study are not hopeful: The same
toxic mix of forces that triggered the murder of more than a million
Armenians nearly a century ago are still at large in the global arena.
"In order to understand the killing of the Armenians, you have to
understand the emergence of the different nations within the context
of the demise of the Ottoman Empire," explains Akcam. "The idea of
the nation state is a very homogenous group living within a defined
territory. In a polyglot empire like the Ottoman Empire, where 10
different ethnic groups might be living together in the same village,
the rise of nationalism created hostility and the basis of ethnic
cleansing."
Similar forces were at work, Akcam points out, in the former
Yugoslavian Republic when it was disintegrating during the period
following Tito's death, in the Kashmir and large swaths of Africa
and East Asia as well, all but ensuring future outbreaks of genocide.
The rise of Hitler, it should be added, took place against a backdrop
of what Feinstein calls "a template" of the collapsing empire/rising
nationalism scenario described by his colleague Akcam. Fueling the
downward spiral into genocide was a mix of pseudo-scientific theories
about "race" and a fundamental misapprehension of Darwin's survival
of the fittest—and its deadly misapplication to human beings.
The fact that similar forces, from the post-colonial hangover
that continues to afflict much of the Middle East to the rise of
fundamentalism as a 21st-century version of extreme nationalistic
or racial ideologies, are still at work in the world today makes
the work of the center all that more relevant—and urgent. Memory's
struggle against forgetting goes on.
"We need to be talking about how to prevent genocide from happening
in the future," says Feinstein. "We need to create an early warning
system to predict the outbreak of these kinds of events that doesn't
trample on national sovereignty.
"That's one issue," he continues. "The other issue is that we must
study these events as a facet of humanity on the presumption that,
by doing so, we can learn something from it." n
Richard Broderick is a St. Paul freelance writer.
By Richard Broderick
Minnesota Magazine (May-June issue)
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
http://www.alumni.umn.edu/index.asp?Type=PR&SEC={93B65015-7C3D-48FB-8718-AEBD88DE3D94}
Sabina Zimering is not what most would consider a commanding presence.
These days, the life of the white-haired, soft-spoken retiree quietly
revolves around her children and grandchildren.
But there is more to Zimering than meets the eye. Milan Kundera once
said that the history of the modern world is the story of the struggle
of memory against forgetting. Zimering, a Polish Jew, is both witness
to that struggle and living proof that, at least some of the time,
memory triumphs.
This spring, the Great American History Theatre produced the world
premiere of Hiding in the Open, an adaptation of Zimering's memoir of
the same name. Opening to rapturous praise from critics and audiences
alike, the script tells the improbable story of how Zimering and her
younger sister managed to escape the Holocaust by posing as Catholics—a
feat made possible by the fact that, in prewar
Poland, all public school students were required to study Catholicism.
Escaping from the ghetto in their hometown of Piotrkow the very night
the Nazis moved in to deport all the Jews to the death camps, Zimering
and her sister made their way to Germany itself, where they managed to
survive as "volunteer" laborers right in the heart of Hitler's Reich.
While her book and the play adapted from it tell her story through
print and performance, Zimering travels to schools, community centers,
colleges, retirement homes, and elsewhere, relating her harrowing
tale of deception and survival. Speaking recently to gatherings at an
alternative high school at Dakota Technical College and at Hill-Murray
High School, she received what one observer describes as "overwhelming
response" with "awestruck" students glued to their seats and school
officials thrilled to see their charges so raptly attentive. In
response to her appearance, the principal at the alternative high
school has gone so far as to arrange a field trip next fall to
Washington, D.C., which will include a visit to the Holocaust Museum.
"This is a completely new world for me, but very rewarding," says
Zimering, who, after emigrating to the United States, spent much of her
career as an ophthalmologist working with student health services at
the University. She confesses that she was unable to talk about her
experiences to anyone for a long time after the war ended—although
she survived, other family members and virtually everyone she'd known
growing up did not. Now, though, she realizes that what she has to
say is not rewarding only for her.
"To high school students, the history of 50 or 60 years ago is not
much different from 600 years ago," she says. "But when a survivor
comes and tells their story, it's completely different. It makes an
impact for a person to come that they can see and talk to."
Zimering's visits to high schools and college classrooms are arranged
through the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide
Studies (CHGS), a cross-disciplinary unit with a unique approach that
weaves together scholarship, community outreach, and art to explore
the darkest reaches of human experiences. This blend of scholarship,
storytelling, and art reflects the vision of the center's director,
Stephen Feinstein, who came to the University from the University
of Wisconsin-River Falls, where he'd been the chair of the history
department.
Founded in 1997 with money from an anonymous donor, CHGS offers a
wide-ranging curriculum of classes on the Holocaust as well as the
genocides in Turkey, East Asia, Central Africa, the former Yugoslavia,
and elsewhere. But its reach is much broader than that—amazingly so,
given the center's brief history. It also sponsors major art exhibits,
such as "Coexistence," a traveling exhibition of poster art initiated
by Jerusalem's Museum on the Seam (see page 34); brings Holocaust
survivors like Zimering to the community (her memoir was also
the subject of a class taught at the CHGS); conducts conferences;
presents guest speakers like Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power,
author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide; and
offers training and curriculum materials for use in high schools and
middle schools. One of the center's new offerings is six "teaching
trunks" containing books, videotapes, posters, and curriculum guides
loaned by the center to participating schools.
*
Instead of establishing a separate department, the University
decided to organize its new program as a center located within the
History Department, an arrangement that, Feinstein explains, avoids
the possibility of overspecialization. Although small—the center's
faculty consists of Feinstein and a handful of adjunct professors—the
goal of the center is, he says, "to think out of the box about how
we create programs that are of interest to scholars and the public,
to engage in research, and to gain prominence for the University by
having an active public dimension in this area."
>>From the beginning, the center has drawn extensively from the
Twin Cities' unusually large number of Holocaust survivors—about
150 individuals in all when the center opened its doors seven years
ago. But its growing renown in the field of Holocaust and genocide
studies owes a lot to Feinstein's enthusiasm for scholarship that
examines and compares characteristics common to all episodes of
genocide (to some, the Holocaust is seen as a unique event, standing
outside of history) and his determination to weave the arts—literary,
visual, and cinematic—into the mix of offerings.
"You could have a center like this without including art, but
it wouldn't be complete," argues Feinstein, who has a background
in art history and has studied the underground art of the Soviet
Union. "There are people out there who think only straight history
is worth studying—no literature or other works of imagination. There
are some who even think that survivor testimony is of no value."
But art, he observes, adds multiple dimensions critical to coming to
grips, if that is possible, with the worst of human behavior. Among
the millions killed by the Nazis—as well as the millions killed by the
Turks, the Khmer Rouge, and the Hutu—were musicians and artists and
writers and filmmakers as well as "ordinary" people. Just as important,
art—even mediocre art—has the power to engage a much wider audience
than scholarship ever could. "Schindler's List is not the best movie
about the Holocaust, but it got the message out to millions of people,"
Feinstein says. "More than I could possibly reach."
"The fact that the center is initiating bringing the 'Coexistence'
exhibit to the Twin Cities is a testimony to what Steve's perspective
enables him to add to this community," says Rabbi Joseph Edelheit, the
director of St. Cloud State's court-mandated Jewish studies program and
creator of the CHGS's class in post-Holocaust theology. "My experience
with other institutions that offer Holocaust studies makes it clear to
me that this center is unique. Steve's an internationally recognized
art historian. He's not bringing untested theories to his role. His
maturity allows him to provide the center with seasoned leadership."
Like other faculty associated with the center, Edelheit was drawn to
CHGS through his personal connections to Feinstein but has remained
involved with the center because of Feinstein's demonstrated
willingness to think "outside the box." When Feinstein invited
Edelheit to teach at the center, Edelheit responded that the only
class he wanted to teach would deal with theology.
"I asked, 'Is that a problem at a public university?'" Edelheit
recalls. Feinstein assured him it was not, so Edelheit, who counts
27 members of his extended family lost to Hitler's diabolism and has
the distinction of having been the first rabbi to earn a doctorate
in Christian theology, created a course in post-Holocaust theology,
which includes the works of both Christian and Jewish thinkers.
"I go into this class not with merely my academic credentials,
but more passionately my rabbinical credentials and my desire to
create interfaith dialogue," Edelheit says. "My goal is to model the
commitment to dialogue."
The center's willingness to break new ground is also what brought
Patricia Baer, a professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus in
St. Peter, Minnesota, to the University in 2001 to teach a course
titled "Women in the Holocaust: Gender, Memory, Representation."
As with other instructors working with the center, Baer has found
that her class draws a broad variety of students, attracting both
undergraduate and graduate students from Jewish studies and women's
studies, but also history, education, nursing, political science,
Spanish, and art, as well as members of the broader community—including
a student who works with a shelter for battered women. Baer's classes
have included both Christians and Jews. What's more, each time she's
taught the course, Baer reports, she's also had students from Germany
enrolled.
"That's made for an interesting dimension to our discussions,"
she says. "For Jewish students, I think many times they have had a
member of their family who is a survivor or know of family members who
died and now have a particular interest in how these events affected
women. International students often want to know how Americans look
at this event and how that view differs from what they are taught in
a place like Germany.
"Stephen is really quite extraordinary in his foresight," she says. "At
the time I first offered this course, there were only five or six
similar courses in the United States. Holocaust studies have been slow
to embrace the insights of feminist studies. There are complicated
reasons for that, like the hegemony male historians have had in the
field who often feel that a feminist approach trivializes the issue."
Some scholars and survivors, she says, also feel that a focus on gender
issues threatens to minimize "the racial basis for the Holocaust."
Meanwhile, for Taner Akcam, a visiting history professor who teaches
courses on the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915 and the
rise of nationalism in the Middle East, it is precisely the center's
willingness to compare acts of genocide that constitutes one of its
principal values.
"This is something that has been lacking," says Akcam, an ethnic Turk
who was the subject of a recent New York Times article detailing the
outrage his work on the Armenian genocide has elicited from the Turkish
government, which continues to deny any such event took place. "For the
most part each genocide scholar deals with his or her own specialty.
This helps bring us out of the shadows."
*
The term crimes against humanity first appeared only in 1915 in
response to the Turkish killing of Armenians and the then-novel German
policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the word genocide, which
specifically refers to the intentional mass killing of a particular
people or ethnic group, was not coined until 1943 (by Rafael Lemkin,
a Polish Jewish lawyer). But genocide, along with the invention
of weapons of mass destruction, could be considered the signature
experience of the past 100 years of human history.
But why should this be so? What is it about global conditions that
made the 20th, and now, it seems all but certain, the 21st century,
an epoch so rife with a lust for extermination?
Not surprisingly, there aren't any easy answers. But if one examines
the mass killings of the recent past, as the scholars and students
at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies do, certain patterns
begin to appear, not so much in the modus operandi of the killings—gas
chambers in the Reich, machetes in Rwanda—but in the ethnic, national,
and international circumstances that militate in favor of genocide. The
conclusions that can be drawn from this study are not hopeful: The same
toxic mix of forces that triggered the murder of more than a million
Armenians nearly a century ago are still at large in the global arena.
"In order to understand the killing of the Armenians, you have to
understand the emergence of the different nations within the context
of the demise of the Ottoman Empire," explains Akcam. "The idea of
the nation state is a very homogenous group living within a defined
territory. In a polyglot empire like the Ottoman Empire, where 10
different ethnic groups might be living together in the same village,
the rise of nationalism created hostility and the basis of ethnic
cleansing."
Similar forces were at work, Akcam points out, in the former
Yugoslavian Republic when it was disintegrating during the period
following Tito's death, in the Kashmir and large swaths of Africa
and East Asia as well, all but ensuring future outbreaks of genocide.
The rise of Hitler, it should be added, took place against a backdrop
of what Feinstein calls "a template" of the collapsing empire/rising
nationalism scenario described by his colleague Akcam. Fueling the
downward spiral into genocide was a mix of pseudo-scientific theories
about "race" and a fundamental misapprehension of Darwin's survival
of the fittest—and its deadly misapplication to human beings.
The fact that similar forces, from the post-colonial hangover
that continues to afflict much of the Middle East to the rise of
fundamentalism as a 21st-century version of extreme nationalistic
or racial ideologies, are still at work in the world today makes
the work of the center all that more relevant—and urgent. Memory's
struggle against forgetting goes on.
"We need to be talking about how to prevent genocide from happening
in the future," says Feinstein. "We need to create an early warning
system to predict the outbreak of these kinds of events that doesn't
trample on national sovereignty.
"That's one issue," he continues. "The other issue is that we must
study these events as a facet of humanity on the presumption that,
by doing so, we can learn something from it." n
Richard Broderick is a St. Paul freelance writer.