Skip to content

Where different views on Israel and Judaism are welcome.

  • Home
  • Subscribe / donate
  • Events calendar
  • News
    • Local
    • National
    • Israel
    • World
    • עניין בחדשות
      A roundup of news in Canada and further afield, in Hebrew.
  • Opinion
    • From the JI
    • Op-Ed
  • Arts & Culture
    • Performing Arts
    • Music
    • Books
    • Visual Arts
    • TV & Film
  • Life
    • Celebrating the Holidays
    • Travel
    • The Daily Snooze
      Cartoons by Jacob Samuel
    • Mystery Photo
      Help the JI and JMABC fill in the gaps in our archives.
  • Community Links
    • Organizations, Etc.
    • Other News Sources & Blogs
    • Business Directory
  • FAQ
  • JI Chai Celebration
  • [email protected]! video
Weinberg Residence Spring 2023 box ad

Search

Archives

"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

Recent Posts

  • Who decides what culture is?
  • Time of change at the Peretz
  • Gallup poll concerning
  • What survey box to check?
  • The gift of sobriety
  • Systemic change possible?
  • Survivor breaks his silence
  • Burying sacred books
  • On being an Upstander
  • Community milestones … Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation, Chabad Richmond
  • Giving for the future
  • New season of standup
  • Thinker on hate at 100
  • Beauty amid turbulent times
  • Jewish life in colonial Sumatra
  • About this year’s Passover cover art
  • The modern seder plate
  • Customs from around world
  • Leftovers made yummy
  • A Passover chuckle …
  • המשבר החמור בישראל
  • Not your parents’ Netanyahu
  • Finding community in art
  • Standing by our family
  • Local heads new office
  • Hillel BC marks its 75th
  • Give to increase housing
  • Alegría a gratifying movie
  • Depictions of turbulent times
  • Moscovitch play about life in Canada pre-legalized birth control
  • Helping people stay at home
  • B’nai mitzvah tutoring
  • Avoid being scammed
  • Canadians Jews doing well
  • Join rally to support Israeli democracy
  • Rallying in Rishon Le-Tzion

Recent Tweets

Tweets by @JewishIndie

Tag: Laurence Rees

History is constantly new

History is constantly new

Laurence Rees, former head of BBC TV History and author of the award-winning book Auschwitz, has written a very compelling and authoritative “new” history of the Holocaust, based on 25 years of research, and on many personal meetings with survivors and perpetrators – The Holocaust: A New History (Public Affairs, 2016).

The “new-ness” of Rees’ book is evidenced in the 100 pages of footnotes, which contain more than 100 references to “previously unpublished testimony,” plus new evidence from heretofore unrecorded diaries, speeches, stenographic reports, Wehrmacht soldiers’ letters, journals, private conversations and interviews. Add to this the results of “hundreds” of visits Rees made to exact killing locations, all of which have their first exposure here.

As with other great one-volume histories of the Holocaust, such as Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust (1986) and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), Rees’ history is difficult to read – not because of the writing (Rees’ prose is more engaging than either Gilbert’s or Hilberg’s) but because of what the reader has to face in reading about the Holocaust. The cold, impersonal, machine-efficient systematization of genocide; the brutality, the humiliation, the sadism and the ear-piercing silence of the church: all are offered here in unremitting detail. The silence of the world-at-large is also indicted here – as one survivor told Rees about her “liberation”: “What liberation? No one wanted us. There was no Israel, no England, no America and no Canada, with its wide open spaces.”

book cover - The HolocaustRees lays his cards on the table in his prologue: “make no mistake about it – the Holocaust is the most infamous crime in the history of the world.” Rees’s words echo almost exactly the words of Winston Churchill in July of 1944.

To his credit, Rees sees through the usual “excuses” for the Judeocide – that is, need for “Lebensraum,” for “ridding of the world of a bacillus” or for the preventing of a Jewish plot for world domination. Rather, says Rees, the perversions which truly fueled the killing machinery were mad racism thoroughly laced with sadism and opportunity for profit.

On the usual controversial points: first, Rees agrees with Ian Kershaw that “No Hitler, No Holocaust”: no one who studies Holocaust history, he says, “can help but conclude that Hitler was primarily responsible for the Holocaust.” Second, Rees sides persuasively with the “functionalists” rather than the “intentionalists,” an old dilemma among historians of the period wrestling with the idea of whether the Judeocide was planned out in advance (“intentionalism”), or just came about piecemeal (“functionalism”). Third, as mentioned, Rees is adamant that the Holocaust was unique: “a crime of singular horror in the history of the human race.”

Rees is particularly, and rightly, harsh on the slavish complicity of the Dutch civil service (75% of the Dutch Jewish population perished) and the atrocious treatment of Jews in Vichy France, and bitterly condemns the hideously self-serving complicity of the Romanians in joining up with the German Nazis. But he saves his bitterest attack for the end of the book, vehemently accusing the Hungarians of a major crime for allowing what he rightly refers to as the “Hungarian Catastrophe.” (Nor does Canada escape indictment: Rees reminds us of Mackenzie King’s loud admiration of Hitler in the late ’30s, and of the antisemitic pronouncements of Canada’s Immigration Branch in 1938, preventing any Jewish immigration to Canada.)

Rees has some interesting insights on the “Danish Rescue” – the spiriting away to Sweden of almost all of Denmark’s Jewish citizens. Jews were thoroughly integrated into Danish society, and there had been a great number of intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews in Denmark. In never-before-published interviews, Rees offers heart-warming evidence of the bravery of Danish non-Jews in warning, hiding and planning passage for their Jewish neighbours. As a result, says Rees, when the Germans called, “most of the Danish Jews were not at home.” Rees offers “no simple explanation of why this happened in Denmark and nowhere else,” but he guesses that the Nazi functionary (Werner Best), known to have warned the Danish police about the upcoming “Action” in October of 1943, may have been motivated by the need to “avoid bad feeling” in a country that was supplying considerable food supplies to the Reich. No less of a motivating factor, Rees further conjectures, was the fact that Best, who had been appointed in his 20s to a judgeship, was intelligent enough to foresee the Nazis’ future defeat and subsequently “needed to start improving his CV as far as the Allies were concerned.”

Rees’ book reminds us, then, that history, ironically, is always “new” – and we are, therefore, reminded to constantly view it, and to re-view it, through ever-changing historical lenses.

Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education department at Simon Fraser University. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Format ImagePosted on November 10, 2017November 10, 2017Author Graham ForstCategories BooksTags history, Holocaust, Laurence Rees
Proudly powered by WordPress