Notes to Chapter 1

Notes Notes to Chapter 1 1. The art of memory valued by the Ancient Greeks and developed in medieval times is still present in modern day books claiming to teach people how to improve their memories. Hence, Tony Buzan in Use Your Memory (1999) argues that by using a series of images and systems people can artificially enhance their memories. He combines this idea with contemporary ideas in brain science and New Age ideas on how thought and imagination can result in material changes. The Roman Room System, as he names it: is particularly amenable to the application of the left and right cortical skills, and to the Memory Principles … if you begin to imagine yourself, in possession of certain items that exist in your imaginary room, both your memory and creative intelligence will begin to work paraconsciously on ways in which you can actually acquire such objects, increasing the probability that you will eventually do so.’ (Buzan, 1999:66). 2. Part of this erasure of Jewish memory began in 1936 with a law in Germany banning stonemasons from carving Jewish gravestones (Young, 1988:189). 3. In the material relating to the trial of the commander of Helmbrechts, Alois Dorr, a number of former prisoners describe how one Jewish women was forced to stand in the snow with her hair shorn, because she had in her possession a photograph. (See S. K. Dorr, Vol. 4, p. 607, cited in Goldhagen (1997), note 54, p. 584). 4. For example, survivor Gena Turgel (1995) describes in I light a Candle how the Nazis forced people to participate in the erasure of their crimes. ‘It was the tra- dition for relatives to participate in the Nazi’s ritual of death, and the day after my sister and her “husband” were shot, we had to carry the wood for the bodies to be burned, my mother and sister Hela and I together. As always, the Nazis wanted to destroy every trace of evidence from their crimes. (p. 62). 5. Research on gender and memory in cyberspace is forming part of my new study at South Bank University on digital heritage. For a publication that discusses some of the preliminary results of this work see: Anna Reading, ‘Clicking on Hitler: The Virtual Holocaust@Home’ (323–39) in Zelizer, B. (ed), Visual Culture and the Holocaust, Rutgers University Press, 2001. 6. For general historical research on the Romany see Bauer, (1994); Hancock (1996); Kenrick and Puxon (1972); Lewy (2000); Milton, 1997 and Ramati, 1986. For literature on the Nazi persecution of gay men see Heger, 1994; Lautmann (1998); Rector (1981), Plant (1988). On the persecution of lesbians see Elman (1999). For a perspective on the persecution of Slavs see Lukas (1997); Wytwcky (1980). Donald Niewyk and Frabcis Nicosia’s (2000) The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust provides a short up-to-date bibliography relating to historical research on the Nazi’s other victims. 189 190 Notes Notes to Chapter 2 1. In the American Civil War, there were 5213 cases of nostalgia reported among white troops in the North in the first year. Thought to be in some way infectious, ‘in some camps, soldiers were punished for singing or whistling tunes that reminded them of home’ (Colley, 1998:3). Not until the nineteenth century did nostalgia as a clinical entity begin to disappear from diagnoses, although it remained a familiar theme in Victorian culture and writing (Colley, 1998:2–3). Notes to Chapter 3 1. One account of a perpetrator that I do not look at in this book but which was mentioned by young people in Poland is Commandant of Auschwitz by Rudolf Hoess. This is an autobiography first published in a Polish translation in 1951 under the title Wspomnienia (Warsaw: Wydanictwo Prawnicze). The German text was published in 1958 as Kommandant in Auschwitz by Deatsche verlags-Anstalt. Although a version of the book was published in English by Wiedenfeld and Nicolson in 1959, it went out of print and was not republished with the full text until 2000 by Phoenix Press. The account was written by Hoess in prison in Cracow, Poland, in 1947, on the suggestion of the Polish criminologist Dr Stanislaw Batawie. Hoess was executed following trial in April 1947. An analysis of gender and atrocity in this text forms part of a further separate paper (Reading, forthcoming). 2. Judith Zur, in her work on the memories of violence among Mayan Indian War Widows who experienced La Violencia (1978–85) in which villages were bombed and people murdered by death squads, has shown how ‘Intolerable truths may be rejected and less painful versions, constructed. Pertinent detail (in terms of absolute truth) may be omitted, either consciously or as the result of memory fragmentation)’ Judith Zur in ‘Reconstructing the Self through Memories of Violence among Mayan Indian War Widows’, (In Ronit Lentin (ed) (1997) Gender and Catastrophe. London and New York: Zed Books., p. 63. 3. See, for example, Cynthia Crane’s (2000) Divided Lives The Untold Stories of Jewish–Christian Women in Nazi Germany., New York: St Martin’s Press. Notes to Chapter 4 1. The English word ‘usher’ has its roots in the words ‘ostiarius’ (door-keeper), ‘ostium’ (door) and ‘os’ (mouth/bone). See T. F. Hoad (1993) English Etymology, Oxford University Press. 2. See, for example, Thomas A. Abercrombie’s (1999) fascinating study of memory, Pathways of memory and Power: Ethnography and History Among Andean People, Madison, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press. 3. Special thanks go to Jenny Owen and Barbie Zelizer for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 4. See also Nora Levin (1973), The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945, New York: Schocken Books, p. 231. Notes 191 5. An earlier film of eight minutes duration, made in 1942, was discovered in a cupboard in the Czech Republic in the 1990s. Since named the ‘The First Theresienstadt Film’, its provenance is explored in Karel Magry’s ‘The First Theresienstadt Film, 1942’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 19 no. 3. 1999. A copy of the film is held in the Imperial War Museum’s Film Archive, London, UK. 6. A copy of the British Army shot Memory of the Camps (F3080) is held by the Imperial War Museum’s Film Archive, London, UK. There is also a VHS version, ME0057. The archive also has copies of the original secret caption sheets by film crews, as well as an archive of oral histories of the British men that shot the film going into the concentration camps in Germany. 7. See, for example, the comments of the following survivors: ‘My mother didn’t even give us a piece of bread, nothing. We just had that egg’ (Nitzan, 1998:117). ‘The Nazis took the child away from me … my child would be now forty-four years old. She was four years old when they took her from my arms’ (Small, 1998:88–9). 8. For a German documentary on the memory of women at Ravensbruck see Loretta Walz (Dir) (1995) Erinneren An Ravensbruck; For a film about ‘gypsies’ and the Holocaust, see Forgotten Holocaust (George Case Dir, 1989). 9. Post-production was also wrought with gender and age-related anxieties: The laboratory processing the atrocity films was so concerned about the impact of the footage that, according to Elizabeth Sussex (1984), although originally ‘They had young girls working on the coding or numbering of the film … they took them off’ (p. 93). 10. This is unlike the post-war analogy established in Israeli culture between strong masculinity and Jews (see Dworkin, 2000:102). Notes to Chapter 5 1. Many thanks to Joan Ringelheim, Director of Oral History, US Holocaust Museum for her comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990 Macmillan, New York, volume 1), edited by Israel Gutman in March 1942 the women’s section established at the camp in Auschwitz 1 was moved on 16 August to Birkenau (p. 117). 3. The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto shows that there were more women present than men. And more men were dying from the conditions (Dobroszycki, 1984). 4. Other examples of Holocaust museums’ stated objectives in relation to citizenship and democracy include the Sydney Jewish Museum of the Holocaust and Australian Jewish History which states: ‘The Museum challenges visitors’ perceptions of democracy, morality, social justice and human rights’. (see www.join.org.au/ sydimus/about/htm). The Holocaust Memorial Centre, Michigan has as one of its stated objectives ‘To help future generations understand and direct their lives to the maintenance of an open, free society’. (see http://holocaustcenter.org). 5. Such national discourse, as a number of writers have noted, forgets the other aspect of America’s past with its roots in the slave trade. 192 Notes 6. The Imperial War Museum itself has a much longer history, however: it was first established in 1917 to document the history of the First World War and the contributions made by people in Britain and its Empire. It has had various homes in London, but was established on its current site in what used to be the Bethlem Royal Hospital on Lambeth Road, London, in 1936. At the outbreak of the Second World War its remit was extended to include documentation of the conflict, and after 1953 this remit was extended further to include all world conflicts in which British citizens or Commonwealth peoples were a part. It is now Britain’s ‘national museum of twentieth century conflict’ (Imperial War Museum, 2001: www.iwm.org.uk:) seeking to ‘provide for and to encourage, the study and understanding of the history of modern war and war-time experience’ (Crawford, 2001: www.iwm.org.uk).

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