Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

508680 Cover 8/16/08 7:23 AM Page 1 2007-2008 Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies The people, programs, and events advancing scholarship in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies YEAR END ACTIVITIES AND 2007 GIFT REPORT June 2007 through May 2008 508680 Cover 8/16/08 7:23 AM Page 2 Whoever fails to increase knowledge, decreases knowledge —The Ethics of the Fathers 508680 Text 8/16/08 7:55 AM Page 1 LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR 1 Letter from the Director August 2008 Dear Friends: Writing in 1940, after Germany had in- These are but a few of the knotty problems vaded Poland and before the Japanese Center doctoral students research. Our bombed Pearl Harbor, economist Mary public lecture series engaged equally Barnett Gilson took aim at the mission of bold subjects: Caroline Elkins on the his- the classroom in her book, What’s Past is tory of Britain’s internment and merciless Prologue. “Education fails,” she said, treatment of 1.5 million Kikuyu in Kenya “in so far as it does not stir in students a and the obfuscation of that history through sharp awareness of their obligations to systematic destruction of documents. Julia society and furnish a few guideposts point- Chaitin on confronting barriers to dialogue ing toward the implementation of these between Jews and Palestinians. And Jens obligations.” Gilson would have given the Meierhenrich on prosecuting concentration Center top marks. From the establishment camp personnel (and who else in the of a Clark chapter of STAND (a student future?) under international law. anti-genocide coalition) by undergraduates to, in 2007-08, no fewer than five graduate The Center’s mandate embraces teaching, students serving as Directors of Education research, and public service on all Debórah Dwork in Holocaust and genocide-related organi- matters pertaining to the Holocaust and Rose Professor of Holocaust zations across the country, Strassler Center other genocides. Every aspect of our work History students demonstrate a very sharp aware- holds to heart Roman historian Livy’s Director, Strassler Center ness indeed of their social obligations. dictum. “In history you have a record of for Holocaust and Genocide And a readiness to transmute their educa- the infinite variety of human experience Studies tion into action. plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your Our doctoral candidates’ research yields country both examples and warnings: fresh perspectives on ever current prob- fine things to take as models, base things lems. Jeff Koerber, hastily returned from rotten through and through to avoid.” Belarus on advice from the American con- sulate, plumbed local archives to explore Our aim is to identify solutions, using ethnic identity and inter-group conflict in past as prologue. The need is great. In the one borderlands region. A subject all too past few months alone we have witnessed relevant today across the globe. And in the a new escalation of violence in Darfur, midst of much public discussion about brutal interethnic massacres in Kenya, immigration and refugee reception, Adara and the erection of tent camps in South Goldberg’s work on Canada’s admissions Africa to shelter foreign nationals driven policies after the war clarifies the chal- from their homes in xenophobic attacks. lenges official agencies and desperate individuals face in our own time. We look to you for support as we move forward together. STRASSLER FAMILY CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE STUDIES 508680 Text 8/16/08 7:55 AM Page 2 2 EVENTS Samuel Kassow: Who Will Write Our History Students, faculty and Worcester community allowed Jews to take control of memory— members filled Tilton Hall on 19 Septem- the memory of themselves. They prepared ber 2007 for the Center’s first public a record of their lives and deaths and, in lecture of the 2007-08 academic year. doing so, showed their faith in a future. Esteemed Professor Samuel Kassow of Professor Samuel Kassow Trinity College delivered a riveting talk Ringelblum established a collective of of Trinity College about his new book, Who Will Write Our unrelated people to create the archive. History: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Communists and rabbis, Zionists and Ghetto and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Bundists labored together to assemble doc- “Samuel Kassow was the story of the Warsaw Ghetto through umentation of everyday existence in the amazing, not only the lens of those who documented it. Warsaw Ghetto. Many worked previously the story he had to tell, for YIVO (the Jewish Scientific Institute) but the way he told it.” Claims Conference Fellow Jeffrey Koerber and simply continued their endeavors —Thea Ashkenase, introduced Kassow, explaining that throughout the war. In some cases, those Holocaust survivor Kassow’s work and teaching inspired his working on the archive had never spoken own dissertation research and writing. to each other before the war; they came Kassow took the podium and, after thank- together out of a sense of obligation to “This presentation was ing Center staff and faculty and the Lasry their fellow Jews. intriguing, for its content, family (great friends of the Center who and from a professional share a connection to Hartford), turned to The partially recovered archive includes point of view. The the significance of Emanuel Ringelblum, diaries and essays, as well as everyday protection and accessibility his invaluable archive, and the heroic items such as tram tickets and candy of such valuable materials is so important.” resistance it represents. wrappers. Archivists also collected the testimony of ghetto residents and witnesses —Retired bookseller Emanuel Ringelblum, a high school of mass murder to amass evidence against from Worcester teacher before the war, happened to be in the German criminals. They sent reports Switzerland attending a Zionist Congress to London about the ghetto and eyewitness at the time of the accounts from the death camp Treblinka. German invasion of To no avail. According to Kassow, the Poland. He insisted on archive provides the unique voice of those returning to Warsaw, writing “within the experience.” Of the 60 only to find Jewish members of the Oyneg Shabes committee, leadership fleeing the only three survived the Holocaust; thus, city. He stayed to help the archive captures both lost voices and organize the community the perspective of the moment. This aspect and, ultimately, created of the Oyneg Shabbes archive differs from the Oyneg Shabes memoirs written after the war. Professor Samuel Kassow (center) with, left to right, (Sabbath joy) committee to archive and Carolynn Sharaf, Marie document the ghetto. The audience was visibly touched by Raduazzo, Judi Bohn ’75, Kassow’s presentation, their attention Orna Stern, Professor “Writing itself was resistance,” Kassow held not only by the powerful content Kassow, Center Director Debórah Dwork, Strassler explained. Ringelblum came to understand but also by his passion for and dedication Professor Thomas Kühne, that the Nazi aim was total destruction to helping Ringelblum and the Oyneg Clark Trustee Alan of European Jewry and he realized that Shabes succeed in their mission—to Sharaf ’72, Center graduate student and Claims Confer- history would be written by the victors. share their memories. ence Fellow Jeffrey Koerber The documentation of the Warsaw ghetto ■ Elizabeth Anthony STRASSLER FAMILY CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE STUDIES 508680 Text 8/16/08 7:55 AM Page 3 EVENTS 3 Caroline Elkins: Imperial Reckoning Students, faculty, staff, and community Elkins conveyed the violent conditions members filled Clark’s Tilton Hall on 10 of the detention camps through the October 2007 to hear historian Caroline testimonies of a male survivor, a female Elkins lecture on her Pulitzer Prize-win- survivor, and a guard who helped torture ning book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Kikuyu detainees. All, including the “Professor Elkins’s talk Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. Elkins, utterly unrepentant guard, described was completely and utterly the Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor the harshly cruel measures inflicted on fascinating. She illuminated a topic I knew nothing of African Studies at Harvard University, detainees by the British. Pictures of about and when I left her discussed her groundbreaking research Kikuyu prisoners further illustrated the lecture I felt compelled to on the British detainment of approximately brutality that occurred in Kenya, in a learn more.” 1.5 million Kikuyusome Kenyans. period just after the horrors of the Nazi death camps were revealed to the world. —Emily Mashberg ’08, majoring in international Elkins began by providing the historical development and social context of the British colonization of Deeply attentive to her lecture, audience change Kenya, also known as the “Hearts and members explored a range of interrelated Minds campaign,” for the uprising by issues during the question period. Asked Kenya’s largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, about motivations, Elkins described the who had been forced from their land by interviews she conducted with perpetra- British colonizers. The British responded tors. Even today they continue to believe to what came to be called the Mau Mau they did nothing wrong because, in their rebellion with a policy of internment and minds, the rebels needed to be stopped. merciless treatment of the insurgents. Elkins emphasized the negative perception Elkins described the prison camps erected of the Kikuyu that helped to justify the by the British as “sites of systematic vio- murderous tactics employed. Such percep- lence, torture, and murder…a system that tions helped the perpetrators justify their formed what I now call Britain’s Gulag.” use of violence and led British citizens to turn a blind eye to the brutal colonial Embarking on her research 10 years ago, administration in Kenya. That collective Elkins realized that on the eve of decolo- blindness to British policy and practice in nization in 1963 the British Colonial Kenya continued until Elkins’s meticulous government destroyed much of the archival research and scholarship shed new light material documenting the internment upon it.

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