SYRIA & PILLARS OF SALT

When disturbing YouTube videos of atrocities go viral, should we hit “share” or should we look away?

Almost every week, I meet with artist and writer Ava Kadishson Schieber (her book Soundless Roar is exceptional) to learn about her experiences and memories as a Holocaust survivor. Once, during our conversation, Ava compared herself to the wife of Lot (the nephew of Abraham). Despite the warning, the biblical woman could not resist looking back at the burning cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, causing her to be transformed into a pillar of salt.

Twice a year, Ava visits my classroom to share with my students her experiences as a teenager during WWII when she hid on a farm for four years, pretending to be unable to hear or speak. Her father, Leo, was murdered in Auschwitz. Her older sister, Susanna, disappeared forever, consumed by Hitler’s war.

“How old are you?” a student asks. “I am fifteen,” the eighty-something-year-old woman smiles. When Ava turns to look back at her traumatic past, she is confronted by a reality that, in many ways, kept her girlhood frozen in time.

I’ve always thought of the story of the pillar of salt as a warning against human bystanderism. If we’re not prepared to take action against atrocities, then we cannot look only to be voyeurs. If we choose to look at violent scenes, we need to do so for the right reasons.

As we stare in shock at violent images that play on repeat on our television and laptop screens, we must know why are we watching. Are we fulfilling our collective responsibility to bear witness, or are we satisfying a collective morbid curiosity?

The photographs and videos of the recent Syrian attacks on civilians are omnipresent and continue to make headlines. Children and adults shake uncontrollably or lie still on the ground, asphyxiated on the fumes of chemical weapons. And YouTube views climb.

Smart phones and cameras in the hands of the world produce countless images that can go viral in minutes. This is both a blessing and a curse. The amount of evidence and publicity of these crimes multiplies, yet victims and survivors are captured and catapulted into the media at their most vulnerable; in ways they may not want to be seen or remembered.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many survivors were told to keep their heads facing forward. To look back on and talk about past trauma was once synonymous with opening—and reinfecting—old wounds. But, in just a few decades, our ideas of therapy have changed dramatically. Today, we encourage survivors of any traumatic experience to reflect on and to confront their psychological injuries. And rightly so. Ava Kadishson Schieber and other survivors of atrocity recall their experiences and losses in order to rebuild their lives—and in order to teach.

As we dare to look—and encourage others to look—at very real violent images, we must be prepared to respond beyond hitting “like” or “share”—to email our political representatives, to sign petitions, to educate others, to voice our disgust loud and clear. Otherwise, what are we turning into?

THE OLYMPIC SHAMES

Leading up to the 1936 Olympics, Hitler’s government re-opened a number of gay bars and cafés in Berlin as part of a broader campaign to conceal Nazi violence and hateful rhetoric.

At the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, what will Putin do?

The world was watching as Nazi Germany prepared for the 1936 Summer Olympics. Activists, politicians, and organizations around the globe called for a boycott. The Jewish community in Germany and abroad hoped the Games would draw attention to Nazi antisemitism (the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws had been passed just months earlier).

Intending to impress and dazzle the world, in the weeks before the opening ceremony, Hitler ordered the “clean up” of Berlin.

The Nazi government removed and relocated Berlin residents they deemed undesirable. Roma and Sinti people were evicted and transferred to Nazi “Gypsy” encampments on the outskirts of the city with the false promise that they could return to their homes once the Olympics were over.

At the same time, mindful of public opinion and mounting international criticism, the Nazi government temporarily relaxed its oppressive policies and actions against certain racial and social minorities. Nazi rhetoric was tempered. Anti-Jewish signs and pervasive antisemitic propaganda were hidden from sight. Gay bars and cafés that the Nazis had shut down were re-opened. Foreign homosexuals were not arrested.

For the two weeks of the 1936 Olympiad, the Nazi capital resembled elements of the open, tolerant, vibrant Berlin of the late 1920s.

Learning from history isn’t easy.

Before the 2004 Athens Olympics, the Greek government evicted some 2,700 Roma from their homes and created a housing crisis that continues to this day. These evictions were mostly ignored by the international press.

In the months leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the Chinese government removed and relocated hundreds of thousands of people living in poverty, people who were homeless, people involved in the sex trade, and other people deemed undesirable. The world watched the spectacular Beijing opening ceremony, mostly oblivious or indifferent to China’s human rights abuses.

Again and again, governments with shameful human rights records have been awarded the honor of hosting the Olympics. Each time, discrimination and violence is overlooked or excused. Giving an oppressive regime the opportunity to host the Games could lead to improvements for human rights, we tell ourselves.

And now, with the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi in southwestern Russia just months away, Putin’s government has passed an outrageous law that makes it possible for police to arrest and jail anyone—Russian citizens, foreign tourists, Olympic athletes—who voices support for the rights of gay and lesbian people. A senior public official has gone as far as calling for gay people to be banned from organ donation: “Their hearts, in case of the automobile accident, should be buried in the ground or burned as unsuitable for the continuation of life.”

There are reports of a recent increase in government-sanctioned violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Russia (or at least an increase in media attention), leading to calls for LGBT-friendly countries to grant asylum to Russian victims and targets of homophobic and transphobic violence.

News organizations, bloggers, and activists have compared Russia’s new anti-gay laws with the anti-Jewish and anti-homosexual laws of Nazi Germany, citing parallels between the Nazi-hosted Olympics of 1936 and the upcoming Sochi Winter Games. Just as the Nazi Games raised questions about the participation of athletes of Jewish or African descent (a number of Jewish and Black sportspeople competed and won medals in Berlin), LGBT athletes and LGBT spectators at the 2014 Games could face harassment, arrest, and imprisonment.

Activists are calling for a boycott of Putin’s Olympics. Boycotts of Russian products have begun (gay bars in Chicago and New York have stopped buying and serving Russian vodka, for example). And there are calls for public protests, to be led by Games participants and medal winners, that would dare Russian police to arrest and jail Olympic athletes.

When President Obama cancelled his recent meeting with President Putin, although he made clear his opposition to the idea of a boycott, he took the opportunity to speak out in support of LGBT athletes and against Russia’s homophobic legislation.

When the Berlin Olympics of 1936 came to an end, Nazi Germany returned to business as usual. The gay bars and cafés were boarded up again. The Nazi roundup, deportation, torture, and killing of homosexual men resumed. Later, the Roma prisoners of the Nazi “Gypsy” encampments were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and elsewhere. The regime’s discriminatory anti-Jewish laws accelerated into meticulously planned and implemented genocide.

In the coming months, even if Putin tones down his anti-gay rhetoric, even if he softens legal restrictions and threats of arrests over the duration of the Games, there’s a good chance that the persecution of LGBT Russians will return in full force once the Olympic athletes and media have returned home.

We cannot be silent. Every person who chooses to participate in the Sochi Games—as an athlete, as a vendor, or as a spectator, including those watching from home—must do something that draws attention to the plight of LGBTs in Russia. The international community, particularly each country that has pledged to protect the rights of LGBT people, has a responsibility to voice its objection to Putin’s anti-gay legislation in the strongest possible way.

GAYS, GYPSIES & GENOCIDE

“How did you get into Holocaust education?” is a common question and I tend to answer differently depending on who’s asking and what’s on my mind.

Why I Do What I Do: Reason #3

Exactly 69 years ago, Nazi guards at Auschwitz murdered in one night almost all Birkenau prisoners categorized as “Gypsies.”

Three months earlier, when Auschwitz guards surrounded and sealed off the Birkenau Zigeunerlager (Gypsy camp), the prisoners armed themselves with shovels and iron pipes and refused to leave their barracks. In response, over several weeks, Auschwitz administrators transferred Roma and Sinti prisoners capable of work to other camps. Just under 3,000 people—mostly children, the elderly, and the sick—remained.

On the night of August 2nd 1944, Birkenau guards marched with their guns into the Gypsy camp and forced the women, men, and children toward and into the gas chambers.

Until a few years ago, I didn’t know that the Nazis had systematically sterilized, ghettoized, and murdered people of Roma and Sinti descent. Just as the Jewish community refers to the Nazi genocide as the Shoah—catastrophe—, the Roma community uses the Romani term Porajmos—devouring. The Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered approximately 25% of the one million Roma and Sinti living in Europe.

Yet the Roma and Sinti were not recognized as victims of Nazism until 1979.

The Nazi genocide of European Jewry echoed through familial and community memories into my 1980s childhood. The Holocaust films we watched in Jewish youth clubs, the Jewish Holocaust survivors we listened to at school, and the hushed conversations we overheard at home ensured that our Jewish identities would be molded by a Jewish responsibility to remember our dead. The dead Sinti and Roma were never mentioned.

It wasn’t until 2005 that I started to notice.

I’d just moved from London to Chicago. I was getting used to the larger food portions and the divisive politics. And I started to become involved in the gay and trans rights movement. I came across a news article that would change the way I think about Holocaust history: In January 2005, world leaders gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. But Polish authorities had prevented representatives of the gay community from attending.

I asked one of my professors if, instead of sitting an upcoming exam, I could research and write a paper on Holocaust memory, focusing on how and why the narratives of homosexual victims of Nazism had been pushed to the margins of genocide commemoration.

I knew a fair amount about the Jewish Holocaust narrative, but I felt embarrassed, as a politically engaged gay guy, that I knew so little about the Nazis’ persecution of homosexuals. I began to explore books and articles. I didn’t know about the origins of the pink triangle. Or the German anti-homosexuality law Paragraph 175. Or that the Nazis considered lesbians non-threatening—a euphemism, perhaps, for “easy to rape.” I learned about the Nazis’ forced castration and arbitrary torture of homosexual prisoners. In some concentration camps, concerned about masturbation, the Nazis forced homosexual prisoners to sleep with their arms outside of their blankets, even in the dead of winter.

My work led me to ask questions about collective memory and silenced histories.

I learned that, after liberation in 1945, British and American lawyers recommended that homosexual prisoners of the Nazi camps be re-incarcerated. Homosexual survivors were denied reparations. Paragraph 175 remained on Germany’s books for decades. And in the 1990s, Ultra-Orthodox rabbis and conservative Christian clergy protested against any inclusion or mention of homosexual victims in U.S. Holocaust museums. Homosexuals persecuted during the war were not considered victims of Nazism—and did not qualify for reparations—until 2002.

Marginalized victimhood became the focus of my doctoral research. And my work broadened. Surely, I began to argue, if a goal of Holocaust education is to identify warning signs of future atrocities, then students should learn about the relationships between different forms of Nazi prejudice, policy, and persecution. This approach is especially vital in the face of continued government-led oppression of Roma, LGBT, and other minority communities around the world.

We can’t understand—not fully—any one of these victim group narratives without the others. The Nazis conducted experiments with gas as a method of murder on people with disabilities before building the gas chambers and ovens that consumed the Jews, Sinti, and Roma. While the Nazis tried to find a “cure” for homosexuality, they considered people of Jewish or Gypsy or African descent as “incurable.” If we omit the non-Jewish victims of Nazism from our collective Holocaust memory, then we lose something critical to our understanding of the Nazis’ full intentions.

I understand why Simon Wiesenthal was frustrated with the insistence of some prominent historians and scholars that definitions of “The Holocaust” refer to only Jewish victims. Definitions matter. Definitions determine what and who makes it into history textbooks and exhibitions and remembrance ceremonies.

I now focus my work on helping educators find ways to include—meaningfully and appropriately—all of the Nazis’ victims within Holocaust commemoration and education. After all, if the Nazis made room for all of these categories of people in their concentration camps, if they made room for them in the same mass-graves, then we have a responsibility to make room for all of the dead in our classrooms, museums, and memorials.


What I Do What I Do: Reason #1

What I Do What I Do: Reason #2