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March 28, 2003
The diverse victims of Nazism
Recent scholarship studies the experience of non-Jews in the Holocaust.
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
In the oral tradition of the Sinti and Roma people of Europe, the
Holocaust is known as "the Great Devouring." The Holocaust
experiences of Sinti and Roma – the ethnic groups that are
sometimes referred to as Gypsies – have been explored in a
very limited way by historians, but recent revelatory books, including
one by an historian near here, is altering the way historians and
the public understand the Shoah.
Toby Sonneman, a Jewish daughter of European survivors, spoke in
Vancouver earlier this month about the experiences of Roma and Sinti
peoples and how their lives under the Nazis have been scarcely explored
in the nearly six decades since liberation.
Sonneman, an instructor at Whatcom County College in Bellingham,
Wash., has written the book Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers
the Holocaust. In a presentation at the Vancouver Public Library
March 6, she explained some of the similarities and differences
between Jewish and Gypsy experiences, and speculated on why the
Gypsy experience has been explored so incompletely.
Sonneman's book is a monumental examination of one Gypsy family's
fate at the hands of the Nazis and she acknowledges she probably
wouldn't have gained the trust of the Roma family to produce the
book were it not for her empathy based on her own family's experiences,
as well as the practical reality of being friends with an American
descendant of the European Roma family.
The nature of Roma and Sinti cultures discouraged the telling of
Holocaust experiences, she said. Where Jews have a literary culture
that tends to encourage writing, the Roma and Sinti have an oral
tradition. More significantly, the experiences were deemed too humiliating
to discuss, in part because they frequently included forced sterilization,
which is viewed with deep shame by Sinti
and Roma, as well as rape.
"Gypsy victims were reluctant to talk very much about their
experiences," said Sonneman. Moreover, while Jews and other
victims of the Nazis, such as ethnic Poles, Czechs and others, felt
relatively safe in post-war Europe, discrimination against Sinti
and Roma remained strong and entrenched in Europe, continuing to
this day. The sterilization of Sinti and Roma by the Nazis is what
Sonneman calls a "delayed genocide."
The author said she was devastated to read a New York Times
report just days before her presentation in Vancouver that said
Sinti and Roma were being sterilized in present-day Slovakia.
"Prejudice against Gypsies did not end with World War Two,"
said Sonneman.
The cultural particularities of the Sinti and Roma peoples, said
Sonneman, meant that their Holocaust experiences were reduced to
mere statistics – and not very accurate ones at that. About
500,000 Sinti and Roma are thought to have perished under the Third
Reich but that is an uncertain estimate.
"I felt if people were going to care about this issue, they
were going to need more than numbers and cold facts," Sonneman
said.
Sonneman's efforts to put a human face on the tragic statistics
reflects a distinct trend in Holocaust scholarship, said Roberta
Kremer, director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. It
is a trend that is seen very clearly in the approach her own organization
is taking in relation to non-Jewish victims of the Nazis, and it
is also, she said, a phenomenon that could not have occurred in
the absence of a nearly universally accepted "meta-narrative"
of (way of perceiving) the Holocaust.
It is now accepted as fact among historians that the Holocaust was
the Nazis' genocidal attempt to destroy European Jews, as opposed
to being simply a part of or due to a larger war. This over-riding
genocidal goal – at once both the most obvious and the most
inhuman goal of Hitlerism – places the Jewish experience at
the centre of historical studies of the Holocaust. The "Final
Solution" was put in place to fulfil the Nazis' long-held plan
to exterminate Jewry; other victim groups were inextricably swept
up in the vortex of the Holocaust, but the Final Solution was, first
and foremost, aimed at the Jews.
The Jewish experience remains the defining narrative of the Holocaust.
Yet, as historians have succeeded in establishing this perspective,
it has become possible and necessary for them to look beyond the
Jewish experience and integrate a broader understanding of how the
experiences of non-Jews alters or reinforces the historical understanding
of the Holocaust.
Kremer stressed that some people tend to become defensive when discussion
of non-Jewish victims arises, but said this discussion should not
denigrate the experiences of non-Jewish victim groups.
"No one is saying 'we suffered more,' " said Kremer. What
she does insist is that every genocidal effort is different and
must not be diluted by comparisons with other incidents, however
similar.
Some of the differences that define the Jewish experience is that
Jewish identity was immutable; that is, nothing could change the
identity, which is not the case for, say, Jehovah's Witnesses, who
could renounce their identity to survive. And, while the Sinti and
Roma experiences were similarly race-based, it was not central to
the Nazi ideology to rid the world of Sinti and Roma. They were,
rather, viewed as akin to the others who shared the Nazi sobriquet
"asocial," which included prostitutes, homosexuals, people
with learning disabilities, petty criminals and the unemployed.
Sonneman's study of Sinti and Roma is an example of the trend that
Kremer said accepts the meta-narrative as a starting point and is
opening a dialogue about the experiences of non-Jews and how these
stories add understanding to that narrative.
This perspective on the Holocaust did not emerge until years after
liberation. Jewish survivors, incapable of expressing the atrocities
they witnessed and perhaps unwilling to live them through again
in the telling, mostly kept silent for more than a decade after
their liberation. Kremer pointed out that, contrary to accepted
wisdom that the survivors didn't want to talk about it, it may be
more accurate to say that others didn't want to hear it.
"They always wanted to tell their stories," said Kremer.
"They were silenced."
Because the particular experiences of Jewish survivors were not
widely discussed or understood, the Six Million were originally
considered, in the popular imagination, as casualties of war akin
to the masses of war dead experienced by the Soviets and other European
peoples. The Holocaust, because it took place at the same time as
the Second World War, became subsumed by early historians as merely
part of the war. This, said Kremer, is a falsehood with worrying
contemporary lessons.
"There were two wars," she said. "There was World
War Two and there was the Holocaust." It is important, she
explained, to recognize that the Holocaust did not happen because
of the war, but may have been aided by the confusion that is inherent
at war times.
"Atrocities are almost always committed under cover of war,"
said Kremer, pointing to clandestine "ethnic cleansing"
in the Balkans in the last decade, which was parallel, but not intrinsic,
to the more visible and conventional wars occurring at the same
time.
With the Eichmann trial of 1961, the realities of the Holocaust
became more clearly entrenched in the public mind. In Kremer's meta
narrative, the Holocaust became less associated with the overall
picture of the Second World War and became accepted, over the next
couple of decades, for what it was: the deliberate effort to eliminate
a race of people.
That view was solidified in academia through an explosion in published
work on the subject throughout the 1960s and after, but also in
the public imagination through the recollections of survivors who
were finally courageous enough to tell their stories. Then there
were the cultural touchstones that include the monumental documentary
Shoah, the feature film Schindler's List and countless
factual or fact-based literary approaches to the Holocaust.
The historian and journalist Judith Miller has expressed the importance
of understanding the Holocaust as depicted through individual experience.
"Abstraction is memory's most ardent enemy," Miller wrote.
"It kills because it encourages distance, often indifference.
We must remind ourselves that the Holocaust was not six million.
It was one, plus one, plus one.... [Only thus] is the incomprehensible
given meaning."
Now that the Six Million are entrenched in the historical narrative,
it is appropriate to return to the individual experiences themselves
to gain a more intricate understanding, said Kremer.
Still, despite an emerging scholarly willingness to incorporate
the distinctiveness of experiences, practicalities stand in the
way.
The Sinti and Roma kept their stories quiet because of continued
discrimination, a cultural disinclination to write about it and
an absence of external forces such as investigative historians like
Sonneman.
The experiences of other non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust are
less known for a variety of reasons.
Like the Sinti and Roma, homosexuals continued to be discriminated
against after the war. Paragraph 175, an anti-gay law on German
books since imperial times, remained the law in East and West Germany
for several years after the war. Such academic works as Richard
Plant's The Pink Triangle and Hans Heger's Men With the Pink Triangle,
which were released in 1988 and 1994 respectively, offer tribute
to these relatively hidden victims, but do not constitute the sort
of first-person memoirs that have helped illuminate the myriad experiences
of Jews during the Shoah.
Difficulties in sharing Holocaust stories can be caused by such
seemingly simple barriers as language. While Jews tend to share
a couple of common languages, the other victims have generally not
formed a critical mass of Holocaust literature in their languages.
This issue was raised in a February lecture in Vancouver, when Dr.
Rochelle Saidel presented a lecture to accompany the opening of
the Vancouver Holocaust Centre's current exhibit on the women's
concentration camp, Ravensbrück. Only about 15 to 20 per cent
of Ravensbrück inmates were Jewish. Saidel, a political scientist
at the Remember the Women Institute in New York, said Ravensbrück
is one of the Holocaust's nearly forgotten camps, partly because
of patriarchal bias on the part of historians, but also possibly
due to the fact that the linguistic diversity of the camp meant
that testaments that might have been written by survivors may have
been in Romanian, Polish or any of the many languages of Europe
that are not the lingua franca of Holocaust scholarship. Ultimately,
though, the limited knowledge of Ravensbrück is blamed on the
enormous proportion of Ravensbrück internees who died. Of the
estimated 132,000 women who came through the camp, an estimated
117,000 did not survive, and memoirs, like history, are written
by the survivors.
But the very fact that exhibits like the one on Ravensbrück
are taking place suggests that a new phase in Holocaust scholarship
is emerging – and it is fully in evidence here in Vancouver.
Kremer noted the effort her agency has gone to in order to incorporate
the experiences of other ethnic and social groups into the larger
education about the Holocaust. In recent years, the centre has sponsored
speakers or exhibits on Greek, Italian, homosexual and Sinti/Roma
experiences in the Holocaust, among others.
With the Jewish experience thoroughly understood to be the central
ideological foundation for the Holocaust, scholars are moving out
to explore the distinct experiences of other victims of Nazism.
"Now I think we can talk with more specificity," said
Kremer. "It's time for more nuance in Holocaust education."
Pat Johnson is a native Vancouverite, a journalist and
commentator.
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