Bowdoin College Bowdoin Digital Commons Honors Projects Student Scholarship and Creative Work 2020 Narrative, Identity, and Holocaust Memorialization in the United States Alexander Noah Kogan Bowdoin College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/honorsprojects Part of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons Recommended Citation Kogan, Alexander Noah, "Narrative, Identity, and Holocaust Memorialization in the United States" (2020). Honors Projects. 178. https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/honorsprojects/178 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship and Creative Work at Bowdoin Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of Bowdoin Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Narrative, Identity, and Holocaust Memorialization in the United States An Honors Paper for the Department of History By Alexander Noah Kogan Bowdoin College, 2020 ©2020 Alexander Noah Kogan ii For Mom and Dad iii Table of Contents List of Figures ________________________________________________________________ v Acknowledgements ____________________________________________________________ vii Introduction: Memorials, Museums, and Active Remembrance __________________________ 1 1 Narrative and the Holocaust ________________________________________________ 12 “This is still not something we can talk about”: Tatana Kellner’s Artist’s Books _________ 16 Theories of Narrative and the Holocaust _________________________________________ 22 Simplification and Fictional Holocaust Narratives _________________________________ 26 2 Local Memory and Identity: The New Castle Holocaust Memorial __________________ 39 Why 2019? A Snapshot of Modern American Antisemitism _________________________ 42 The New Castle Holocaust Memorial: A Brief Overview ____________________________ 46 “Never Again”: The Opening of the Memorial ____________________________________ 51 The Memorialization of Local Identity __________________________________________ 61 3 The Holocaust as American History: Active Remembrance in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. _____________________________________________________________ 67 Boston’s New England Holocaust Memorial and American Historical Identity ___________ 70 “An Auschwitz may occur again”: New York’s Auschwitz-Centered Exhibition _________ 76 Americans and the Holocaust: Toward an American Vergangenheitsbewältigung ________ 89 Conclusion: The Voices of the Holocaust _________________________________________ 102 Bibliography _______________________________________________________________ 108 iv List of Figures Figure 1-1: Bowdoin College Library’s copy of Tatana Kellner’s Fifty Years of Silence in its storage box. ___________________________________________________________ 18 Figure 1-2: Bowdoin College Library’s copy of Tatana Kellner’s Fifty Years of Silence. Title page. _________________________________________________________________ 18 Figure 1-3: Bowdoin College Library’s copy of Tatana Kellner’s Fifty Years of Silence. Family photographs are juxtaposed with graphic photographs of human suffering. _________ 20 Figure 1-4: Bowdoin College Library’s copy of Tatana Kellner’s Fifty Years of Silence. Handwritten narrative in Czech and typed narrative in English show through the translucent paper. The Czech text appears backwards. _________________________ 20 Figure 2-1: New Castle Holocaust Memorial, Chappaqua, New York. ___________________ 46 Figure 2-2: Aerial photograph of New Castle Holocaust Memorial in downtown Chappaqua, New York. _____________________________________________________________ 49 Figure 2-3: New Castle Holocaust Memorial, Chappaqua, New York. ___________________ 50 Figure 2-4: New Castle Holocaust Memorial informational plaque, Chappaqua, New York. __ 50 Figure 3-1: New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston, Massachusetts. __________________ 72 Figure 3-2: New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston, Masscahusetts. The Memorial separates Union and Congress Streets in downtown Boston. _____________________________ 72 Figure 3-3: New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston, Massachusetts. Numbers 0000001 to 6000000 line the columns. ________________________________________________ 73 Figure 3-4: New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston, Massachusetts. Steam rises through metal grates. The names of concentration camps are etched into the ground. ________ 73 v vi Acknowledgements This thesis is the product my love of learning, which is thanks to years of encouragement to explore my interests from inspirational teachers. I send my thanks to my first academic mentor, Robert Zambernardi, for his passion for history and patience for my boring high school essays. Thank you to Adam Levy who, as my advisor in the Bowdoin Mathematics Department, encouraged my studies in history to no end. I am most grateful for Professor Page Herrlinger, who first inspired my academic interests in studying the Holocaust, encouraged me to conduct an honors thesis, read nearly every word I wrote during this process, and supported me endlessly over the past year. This thesis surely would not exist without her. I am also thankful for Professors Dallas Denery and Sarah McMahon for reading drafts of this thesis and each of its chapters, as well as for the Bowdoin History Department for funding my research for this project. Thank you to the Bowdoin College librarians who helped me with my research and assisted me when I was frustrated by unusual citations. And thank you to Jan Day for making my space in the library a comfortable and welcoming work environment. To my friends: you all have contributed in more ways than you know to this project. You read drafts, recommended books, and housed me during my travel. You put up with my talking about history through countless lunches and dinners. Most importantly, you all supported me constantly through the ups and downs of my research and writing. If it wasn’t for you all, I would not have completed this project. And to Ian Ward, my thesis-writing buddy: I couldn’t have asked for a better companion during all those long hours when we were the only occupants of HL-2, arguing about baseball, throwing paper airplanes, and occasionally writing our theses. Finally, thank you to my family. Mom and Dad, you were my first teachers. All of my achievements, this thesis included, were (and are) possible because of you. You supported me through this process and everything else I’ve done in my life. Josh and Gabby, you’ve pushed me to think more deeply and critically all my life. And to my grandparents: each of you has instilled in me a love of learning with your endless support. Thank you all, for everything. vii viii Introduction: Memorials, Museums, and Active Remembrance Sometimes museums don’t tell the truth. Occasionally, museum exhibitions have factual errors or make accidental mistakes. Propaganda in museums is somewhat common in certain parts of the world, too. But sometimes a museum’s curators believe they are telling a true story–– even when the premises of the story are entirely questionable––because the story is ingrained in who they are. It is part of their identities. When I studied Jewish history in Prague for a semester in 2018, I took many trips to the National Monument to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror. The site is multipurposed. In the main room––the basement of a Greek Orthodox Church––there is a museum exhibition about the Second World War, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, and the ensuing period of random murders of Czechs, known as the Heydrich Terror.1 My Czech roommate took me for my first visit. During that initial visit, I was intrigued. I knew little about the story beyond the fact that Heydrich was assassinated in Prague and was awe-stricken to be standing in the very spot at which Heydrich’s assassins held their final standoff against Nazi soldiers. The second time, I went alone. The third time, I was with my classmates on a trip my program organized. I also took family and friends when they visited. Throughout these visits, I had the opportunity to hear Czech perspectives on the site––from my roommate, my program’s directors, and an educational film played by the site’s curators. My two takeaways were simple: (1) The narrative they told was neither fully accurate nor complete, and (2) the place was, and is, unmistakably important in Czech identity. 1 Military History Institute Prague, “The National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror” (web page), Military History Institute Prague (website), accessed April 13, 2020, http://www.vhu.cz/english-summary/. 1 First, the narrative. There were factual errors: for example, the film asserted that Reinhard Heydrich was Adolf Hitler’s hand-picked successor, the Nazi second-in-command. This is untrue.2 But there is a reason for stating Heydrich was Hitler’s number two: it adds significance to his assassination by Czech paratroopers. This is where the narrative becomes particularly misleading. The Czech paratroopers––who, by the way, were trained by the British Special Operations Executive––have come to symbolize the entirety of Czech resistance.3 The courage of the paratroopers is presented as the manifestation of the courage of the Czech people as a whole. It was the Czechs who assassinated Heydrich, who dealt a major blow to Nazism by killing Hitler’s number two. This role as resistors is the mythical national triumph of the war. Its counterpart, the national tragedy, came