ACCIDENTAL FICTION

I wrote my novel by accident.

My goal was to address a gap in Holocaust education and encourage educators to consider two rarely asked questions:

When we teach about Holocaust history, what's the best way to include—alongside Jewish Holocaust narratives—the Roma, disabled, homosexual, political, and many other victims of Nazism? And why are these victim groups so often forgotten?

To address that gap, I started to create educational materials and easy-to-implement lesson plans for teachers and school districts interested in these hidden histories. But putting together an educational unit around historical data that relied on encyclopedic reports full of dry facts and figures wasn't cutting it.

After all, much of Holocaust education is taught through compelling film (Schindler's List, The Pianist, The Diary of Anne Frank, Fateless, and so on) and fiction (Number The Stars, The Book Thief, The Devil's Arithmetic, The Reader, and others), all of which humanize history through individual stories. These books and movies go beyond dates and events to underscore key concepts of human behavior in the lead up and response to genocide.

And so I began to write a series of vignettes to make the narratives of Roma, homosexual, disabled, political, and other victims of Nazism engaging and relevant to middle school and high school students. Based on historical truth, I created a handful of fictional characters—all teenagers—each of whom, through a compelling short story, would represent the central narrative of a distinct victim community.

To tie the stories together, I set the stories in Nazi-era Berlin. And I found a way to place them all in early 1943. To stress the immediacy of each narrative, I wrote each story in present tense, first person so that events were unfolding in the moment.

For example, here, nineteen-year-old Tsura, a young Romani woman, is plotting to free her family from Marzahn, a Nazi encampment for 'Gypsies' at the edge of Berlin:

     Biting the skin on my chapped lips, I walk almost as fast as
     the chilling wind slipping between my neck and turned-up collar.
     The woolen overcoat hides the curves of my breasts and my
     dark hair is tucked tight into a flat cap. I look like a man—
     intentionally so—and feel stronger for it.

Surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly), as those single stories developed, they became entwined with one another.

Ruth and Alex, I discovered, are step-siblings. And Elise saves the life of street-smart Marko after they run into each other in Berlin's Hakescher Market. Elise, I realized, is a member of the Nazi Girls' League, but rarely talks about it to her best friend, Ruth. Meanwhile, Marko's sister Tsura, a member of an anti-Nazi resistance group, is over-protective of her younger cousin Kizzy who hates being treated like a kid. I also discovered that two of the characters are in love (take a guess which two!).

I was suddenly writing my first novel and it was turning into a bit of a page-turner!

I shared my first draft of TRAIN with some friends, colleagues, and members of my family who were as excited to read my book as I loved writing it. Their feedback led to a few more drafts and submissions to literary agents and a couple of publishers.

While I received flurries of rejections, a number of scholars and educators in the Holocaust education field were getting excited about the book and its accompanying curriculum.

A series of introductions and exciting moments led me to author and editor Christa Desir. Christa became my editor and, as soon as she took a look at my opening chapters, she pointed out a problem (echoed in the feedback I'd already received):

With multiple voices narrating interweaving accounts in present tense, first person, TRAIN wasn't working. The style was too jarring. And the individual voices sounded too similar. It all had to become one story.

I rewrote the first chapters of TRAIN in past tense, third person close point-of-view. The new style seemed to work. I was able to tell the story and still retain the important thoughts spinning inside the head of each central character. Here's the same scene as above, now re-written, plus a little more:

     They'll never know we were here.
         No sound. No impression in the dirt. Tsura had learned to keep
     her head below the brick walls of the city. To become the shadows
     and sidestep the light. She could recite each route by heart. Over
     railway lines and through private gardens, across main roads and
     public parks. But some checkpoints were impossible to avoid.
          A crowd had gathered close to the U-Bahn station. Two young
     soldiers blocked the entrance.
          "What's going on?" Tsura asked them.
          "The train station is closed," one of the soldiers said. He held
     out his gloved hand. "Papers?"
          Tsura handed over her identity documents for inspection. "What
     happened?"
          "Someone fell on the tracks."
          "Why are you dressed like a man?" the second soldier asked,
     rifle at his side.
          Tsura pointed at the sleeves of his jacket which didn't even
     reach his wrists. "Why are you dressed like a schoolboy?"
          The other soldier laughed. As he unfolded and checked her
     papers, his grin widened. "Nice to meet you, Greta. We share a
     birthday."
          "Lucky me," Tsura said. Her fake smile matched her false
     identity.

Today, I reached an exciting milestone. I've re-written all of TRAIN in the past tense, third person close. And I just sent the manuscript to Christa for comments.

Although anything could happen on this exciting journey toward publication, there's a chance TRAIN (and its accompanying curriculum) will be in print and online in early 2015. Stay tuned.


(Post updated in December 2014 to reflect recent manuscript edits.)

A SECRET MAP

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on my first novel, TRAIN, a historical thriller for young adults, based on real events.

Lost In Berlin

A while back, eager for honest feedback, one of my readers suggested I do a better job with the novel’s “logistics of space.”

The Roma and Jewish teenagers at the heart of TRAIN are fleeing their homes. They crawl through the back gardens of Berlin and cower in damp basements. But, in an earlier draft, I hadn’t yet painted a clear picture of those houses, streets, and hiding places.

Despite chases across the city, I’d left out journey times across Hitler’s capital. I was depriving my characters—and my readers—of directions, times of day, proximity to key landmarks.

I’d paid lots of attention to character arcs and plot, and I’d ensured historical accuracy, but I hadn’t provided enough details of Nazi Germany to make those ten days in early 1943 come alive.

Writing From Photographs

I needed to get to know the geography of Berlin. But during the early writing phase, I was nervous to read beyond what was necessary for historical research, mostly because I didn’t want the descriptive prose of other writers to influence my own writing style or my characters’ voices.

First, I browsed photographs. Online searches brought up vivid black and white images of Berlin’s monuments and parks. Tram tracks embedded in the cobblestones crisscrossed and split, weaving themselves between grand buildings from which Swastika banners hung, dead, in the winter air.

I got the hang of describing the novel’s spaces. But I still needed to include journey times and directions for my characters’ routes of escape.

Finding My Way

I’d visited Berlin once before, but only for a week or so. I didn’t have a good sense of the city. There was no map in my head.

I searched online for precise directions—by foot—from the Moabit neighborhood to Charité Hospital; then directions—by car—from the Jewish Community Center on Rosen Street to Marzahn, the site of a Nazi camp for Roma families.

From my laptop screen to my head and into my manuscript, my characters began to find their way.

I created a single online map. On the map, I marked every event of my novel’s plot. And every home and workplace belonging to my central and minor characters. Every front step. Every meeting place. Every escape path, from Hackesher Market to St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, from Gestapo-raided homes to improvised hiding places.

I downloaded an up-to-date satellite image of the terrain; the ultimate bird’s-eye view of Berlin.

A Secret Map

But I had a problem. I’d superimposed Nazi-era history onto a contemporary landscape. My manuscript and I were full of doubts.

Did certain streets and public parks even exist in 1943? Had the West German or East German governments in post-war Europe moved a road? A bridge? Which neighborhoods had witnessed war up-close? Which buildings had the British warplanes destroyed?

When I noticed Google Earth’s “historical imagery” icon, I literally gasped and danced around my living room.

As if uncovering the key to a hidden passageway, caught in a sudden Internet-trance, I found myself sliding the years back to 1943 and staring in amazement at an aerial photograph of war-torn Berlin.

Comparing the modern-day map with this digitized historical artifact (the 1943 aerial photograph was likely taken from a British fighter plane), I discovered redirected streets and old buildings. I zoomed in on strange unfamiliar shapes. To figure out what they were, I compared search engine results with old-fashioned printed books in my home library.

I found that I’d placed the secret meeting place of two central characters, Alexander and Marko, close to a Nazi watchtower. I’d positioned the home of Elise and her fragmented Nazi family within walking distance of The Fountain of Fairy Tales. I realized that the British had bombed St. Hedwig’s Cathedral on the same day as a key turning point of my story.

Altered Fates

Just as some roads and houses of Berlin had been moved and rebuilt over seventy years, the plot of my historical thriller began to shift.

Tsura, a young Roma woman and anti-Nazi dissident, must now avoid certain cross-streets for fear of running into German soldiers.

Ruth, a Catholic girl dreading the deportation of her Jewish stepbrother, now becomes exhausted and pessimistic after a long trudge uphill as she passes bombed landmarks and houses that are still burning.

In moments of fear and reflection, the teenagers are now drawn to places of their childhoods. My rewriting of the story to reflect the nuances of history altered my characters responses, their decisions, and ultimately their fates.

While the key historical events of TRAIN stand in place, its fictional teenagers have become more real, their actions more credible. The precise moments, movements, and twists of the story are now more satisfying, more authentic, more compelling (to me, at least!).

As I work to finish editing my manuscript, I expect to discover a few more secrets of Holocaust history that, I hope, will surprise my future readers and, I know, will surprise me, too.

"IS THERE A CANOPY IN STORE FOR ME?"

What do the fictional characters of Fiddler On The Roof think about same-sex marriage?

On Tuesday, speaking during the Illinois House of Representatives debate on marriage equality, State Rep. David Harris summarized the acclaimed musical Fiddler On The Roof. He then used its plot points to argue against equal rights for people who are gay or lesbian. Eager to know what others thought of his confusing analogy, I tracked down the residents of the Russian shtetl of Anatevka. The villagers’ comments (translated here from the original Hollywood-accented Yiddish) were surprising and insightful:

Do You Love Me?

“I’m flattered and honored,” kvelled milkman Tevye (who did not provide his last name). “To be referenced by Illinois State Rep. David Harris has been a lifelong ambition of mine, right alongside escaping persecution and building a dream-home for my wife, Golde. And not only that—David Harris said my name on the House floor and he almost pronounced it correctly. What a mensch!”

As she watched the marriage equality debate, Tevye’s wife Golde paid attention to the politicians who explained that her heterosexual marriage was under threat. “After 25 years of cooking Tevye’s meals, cleaning his house, and milking his cow, I was worried that the gays and the lesbians would ruin everything for us. Would our marriage last another 25 years? Would Tevye still love me? But, after the bill passed, my Tevye reassured me that our healthy bickering and kvetching about each other would continue until one of us dies. Thank God. So, now my only fear is that I’ll be expected to invite these newly married gays and lesbians for Shabbes dinner all at once. I mean, where would they all sit?”

Matchmaker, Matchmaker

Golde’s friend Yente, the local matchmaker, was incredibly excited when the marriage equality bill SB10 passed with 61 votes to 54. “Oy, it’s vonderful!” she clapped. “All the boys and boys, and all the girls and girls I can now set up together! They have vebsites and smart phone apps. for hook-ups, I know, but you just can’t beat a good old fashioned shidduch [arranged marriage]. To be honest, with a same sex-marriage, I’m not sure vhich side of the family will need to pay the dowry, but, as I’ve said before, even the vorst husband, God forbid, is better than no husband, God forbid.”

Newlyweds Motel and Tzeitel Kamzoil were somewhat apathetic to the passage of the bill. Motel, a tailor and rising fashion designer who is rumored to appear on Season 82 of Project Runway, explained: “All these Illinoisans are running around calling the vote a wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, but Tzeitel and I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It doesn’t make a difference to us.” Tzeitel, Tevye and Golde’s eldest daughter, added: “It doesn’t affect us, true, but we’re still delighted that every person in the Land of Lincoln will soon be able to find and catch and marry her or his own perfect match.”

Tradition!

With Tevye and Golde’s fourth and fifth daughters still unmarried, Tevye acknowledges that marriage equality could now double each daughter’s chance of finding a husband or wife: “I’m all about TRADITION!—as David Harris reminded us—but my children and grandchildren come first. As my son-in-law Motel once told me, even a poor tailor is entitled to some happiness.”

“Representative Davis Harris doesn’t get it,” Tevye’s son-in-law Perchik snapped. Perchik is known for his modern interpretations of biblical texts and for insisting on dancing with his girlfriend, Hodel (now his wife), at a family wedding. Perchik argued, with passion in his voice and a camp skip in his step, “David Harris failed to understand that the story of Anatevka is about the history of antisemitism, the roots of prejudice, and the struggle of social minorities to live in freedom and without fear.”

“Exactly!” Hodel agreed, speaking over Skype from Siberia, far from the home she loves. “The central point of the musical is that traditions change over time. As we danced at my sister’s wedding, Russian thugs, encouraged by the authorities, set the venue on fire. Yet David Harris has the chutzpah to use the historically-inspired 1905 story of our Jewish family’s struggle to justify the contemporary discrimination of another minority group that simply wants to live and love in peace.”

Sunrise, Sunset

Tevye’s daughter, Chava, was also unhappy with Rep. David Harris. “I’ve been awake from sunset to sunrise thinking about what he said,” Chava sighed. David Harris cited Chava’s quarrel with her father over her marriage to Fyedka, a Christian man, as an example of tradition stretched too far. “At first, Papa didn’t approve of my marriage to a non-Jew,” Chava explained. “But at the very end of our Tony Award winning play and Academy Award winning film, Papa gave me his blessing. 'May God be with you,' he called out to me. I know it’s a three hour film, but it’s available on YouTube, for goodness sake; there’s just no excuse for misquoting the plot.”

“And on top of that,” Fyedka chimed in, “David Harris seems to not realize that in the United States it’s perfectly fine to marry someone of a different faith. So his analogy was as unstable as...” His father-in-law Tevye interrupted: “You could say his analogy was as shaky as a fiddler on the roof.”

A Blessing On Your Head

On hearing the news of the passing of the marriage bill, a number of shtetlfolk were overjoyed. “To life, to life, L’Chayim!” shouted local butcher and business owner Lazar Wolf and he pledged one month’s profits in support of defending the bill from lawmakers who may try to repeal the new law.

Even voices from beyond the grave shared their elation: “A blessing on your head, Mazal Tov, Mazal Tov,” sang Golde’s late mother, “To see a daughter wed, Mazal Tov, Mazal Tov.” Tevye, who heard her voice in his dream, found himself changing his mind on equal rights for gay and lesbian people: “I’m now certain that her blessing was a sign that full marriage equality will become a new tradition for all of us. As my sweet, gentle child Chavaleh once told me, the world is changing. In fact, if I were a rich man, I’d consider moving to Illinois and running against David Harris in the Republican primaries, biddy-biddy-biddy-biddy-bum.”

Tevye had to cut his interview short. But as he ran off to deliver the last milk cans to his neighbors before dragging his cart home before dinnertime, he called back with a final thought. “You know, there’s a bigger lesson here,” he said, looking up at the beautiful, autumn sunset. “As the good book says, thou shalt not cite a Broadway musical when arguing against gay rights.”

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

THE H WORD

As our three weeks in Poland come to an end, I've been thinking about why I do what I do. “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 #1

Nine summers ago, I had just finished putting together a human rights youth program. But, just before its launch, I was told to remove all references to the Holocaust.

In 2004, as a youth worker in inner-city London, I traveled with my colleagues to Cape Town to plan an anti-racism youth exchange program for British and South African teenagers.

We recruited around 30 young people, we facilitated human rights training in both countries, and we prepared them for a summer of travel. First, the teens from South Africa would fly to London for two weeks to meet the Brits. Later in the summer, the Brits would fly to Cape Town and its surrounding townships. Working with the London teens, I was responsible for putting together the itinerary for the UK-based part of the program. We planned trips for the South African teens to various London neighborhoods, focusing on racism in the UK, immigration, homophobia, sexism, Islamophobia, and social inequality.

I decided to start the two weeks of learning by focusing on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the United Nations in 1948. I was especially excited that I had arranged for the teenagers to meet with a Jewish Holocaust survivor who had lived in South Africa before settling in the UK.

But when I presented the schedule to the program funders, I was ordered to remove two elements from the itinerary. First, I was not allowed to focus on the gap between rich and poor (which is another story!). Second, I had to remove all references to the Holocaust and Nazi antisemitism, including canceling our meeting with the Holocaust survivor. I was stunned and it became very clear that the person overseeing the project would not allow the program to go ahead if references to the Holocaust remained in the schedule. I argued back. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the international community had the guts and the will to advance major human rights and anti-genocide laws. Beginning a human rights education program by learning about Nazi genocide and its implications seemed, to me, entirely appropriate. But I was overruled. The Holocaust content had to go. The Holocaust survivor had to be cancelled. Disgusted by the decision, I apologized to our program partners for the last-minute changes. Then I quit the program in protest.

I still don’t fully understand what happened. I was young. I didn’t ask the questions I would know to ask today. I didn’t understand the politics. I’m still not sure if quitting the program was the best decision.

A year later, I found myself in graduate school, training as a learning scientist. As I explored various specializations, with my experiences in London at the back of my mind, I began to form questions around Holocaust education design. I focused my work on Holocaust museums and collective Holocaust memories. And it was soon time to choose a dissertation path.

I remember the methodology class session. Two faculty instructors and my peers listened to my presentation—a proposal to conduct research on Holocaust pedagogy. When one of the faculty instructors told me—in front of everyone—that focusing on the Holocaust was a terrible idea because “Nobody will care about the Holocaust in 20 years,” I was shocked, angry, and determined to prove the professor wrong.

I walked out of the classroom knowing that despite—and perhaps because of—the professor’s comment, I would dedicate my research, my teaching, and my design work to Holocaust education.

These experiences triggered in me a sense of indignation; at first, my work was a protest against those who would rather we not mention “the H word.” But, over time, as my frustration was replaced by my excitement for my work, these moments became reminders that not everyone understands—or wants to understand—the importance and power of Holocaust history to shed light on ongoing atrocities.

Was I right to quit the youth program in protest, back in 2004? I don’t know. But what I know now is that it’s part of my work to stand up to people who would rather we stay silent.


Why I Do What I Do: Reason #2

CRYING TO BE HUMAN

As far as I can remember, learning about the Holocaust has never made me cry. How would I respond in Auschwitz?

I cried when I said goodbye to my friends and family before moving from London to Chicago. I’ve been known to cry when I've had a few too many drinks! I cried when my grandmothers died.

I teach about Nazi eugenics and the development of gas vans and Nazi experiments on pregnant women. And rail cars and Jewish and Roma and homosexual survivors and post-war suicide and inherited trauma. I’m an avid reader of Holocaust literature, particularly for young adults, and I watch and teach Holocaust films. I’ve listened to many Holocaust survivor testimonies—both recorded and live—and I’ve explored Holocaust museums around the world. I’ve tried to wrap my head around the fact that the Nazis murdered so many children who were disabled or Jewish or Roma or Sinti. I learned about the Holocaust in primary school and at home. But the horrific content of Holocaust history, testimony, film, and fiction has never made me cry.

Today, as we stood by the ruins of a gas chamber in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I talked about my personal connection to the Holocaust. My grandfather escaped Nazi-occupied Holland, I explained. But, as far as I know, he didn’t talk about his family’s story. We don’t know the details, but we’re pretty sure that many members of his extended family were murdered in the Nazi camps.

As a teenager, during an organized trip to Yad Vashem, I took myself up to the museum’s archives. The woman behind the desk warned me that finding information about my murdered family would be unlikely; unless, she said, they were Dutch and had an unusual name. “They were from the Netherlands,” I replied, “and the name is Ziekenoppasser.” She led me to the books of the dead. In the final book, on the final pages, I found a list of men and women with the last name Ziekenoppasser, deported from Amsterdam and other Dutch cities and towns, murdered at Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, the Yad Vashem online database lists 33 entries for Ziekenoppasser. I suspect some of these people are our relatives, but we might never know.

This morning, in the Birkenau prisoner processing center, I found myself searching the anonymous family photographs for people who resembled my Mum’s side of the family. I felt sick as I looked at each image—children playing, weddings, family portraits. But I didn’t cry.

A little while later, standing at the ruins of Gas Chamber III, I recited to my group the little I know of my family’s story. As I did, I wondered if this was exactly where they were murdered and I felt—suddenly, unexpectedly—as if I was honoring their memory. But I didn’t cry. Instead—and this now seems absurd—I realized that I might want to return to Auschwitz, one day.

Yesterday, at Auschwitz I, we stood inside the still-standing gas chamber and walked through the reconstructed crematorium. We wandered into rooms displaying piles of adult shoes, stolen before their owners were gassed. The shoes of murdered children were displayed separately. When I saw the mounds of human hair, I felt a pain in my chest—like a punch. I found myself asking our guide a question about the exhibit, perhaps to prevent myself from crying.

In the Auschwitz prison block (a prison within a prison), we looked at the original bunks, we walked past standing-cells, and we stared at walls covered in official photographs of camp prisoners in their striped uniforms, emaciated men, androgynous women, all soon to be dead. I didn’t cry.

I followed our tour guide, as if in a trance, staring at a pile of hairbrushes and toothbrushes and shaving brushes. My mind took me to the perpetrators. How did the Nazi guards allow themselves to participate in these horrific crimes? How could human beings treat other human beings in these horrific ways? It’s unfathomable.

As I walked through Auschwitz, I thought about my family, murdered here. But I didn’t cry. And I thought about the Nazi guards who led them to their deaths. The Nazis must have been in some kind of trance, I found myself thinking. These murderers had hypnotized themselves. They weren’t thinking things through. They were confused, intoxicated by the mist that moved through the system of violence and murder that they had designed. If the Nazi guards and their leaders had stopped for just one second, surely they would have realized what they, as humans, were doing to other humans.

Last night, I shared this notion—of Nazi guards in a trance—with the rest of my group. “The Nazis knew what they were doing,” people in my group reminded me, “they knew what they believed.” I was listening carefully to what they were saying, but it didn’t make any sense.

When I teach about Holocaust history, I not only strive to humanize the Nazis’ victims; I also strive to humanize the Nazis themselves. Too often, through Holocaust films and museum exhibitions and fiction and the sensationalist media, we portray the Nazi leadership and lower-level camp guards as monsters. We display photographs of Nazi officers in their pressed uniforms, smiling with their fingers on the triggers of their guns, watching with cold eyes as children are marched to their suffocation. We call them evil. Monsters. As if their actions were inevitable, uncontrollable. By doing so, we excuse them; we ignore the decisions they made. The frightening truth is that the Nazis were just as human as their victims. Years before they became Nazis, as children, they played games and did their homework. They had life dreams and ambitions. They fell in love. They had children of their own. But if we paint these men and women as monsters, we keep the perpetrators at a distance. Look what they did, we say. This is what evil looks like! By painting the Nazis as inherently inhumane, we are saying that “real” human beings could never perpetrate or become complicit in genocide; we could never be capable of committing such atrocities, we tell ourselves.

The image of Nazi guards, walking in a trance, following murderous orders, replayed again and again in my head. How can it be possible to see others as anything but human? “It’s impossible,” I said to my colleague. “No. It’s possible,” he said to me, “—it’s just impossible for you.” I understood what he was saying and, for a moment, I choked on my tears.

FROM MY HOTEL ROOM IN AUSCHWITZ

We just arrived in the town of Oświęcim (pronounced Oshvienshim; renamed Auschwitz by the Nazis). We’ll be here for one week. But I’m ready to return home.

It’s as if everything we’ve seen and talked about so far has been leading to this.

I arrived in Poland with a number of misunderstandings. I didn’t expect its towns and cities and buildings to be so beautiful. I didn’t expect to be eating at sushi restaurants while listening to Adele and Justin Timberlake. I didn’t expect to meet people dedicated to rebuilding the Polish Jewish community. The Poland I’m experiencing is modern and vibrant and, at the same time—like every country in the world—struggles with its past.

Last year, when President Obama referred to a “Polish death camp”—rather than a Nazi death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland—his comment enraged Poles and others around the world. The Nazis murdered approximately six million Polish people, around half of them Jews. From 1939, the Nazis kidnapped tens of thousands of Christian Polish children who looked “Aryan” and raised them as Germans. I understand why it’s so offensive to think of these sites of atrocity as Polish sites. The so-called “Hitlerites” are hated here.

After our arrival in Kraków, we visited the Gestapo headquarters and prison where we learned about the Nazi brutality against Polish intellectuals and clergy. We entered the cells that had witnessed obscene violence and murder. Just as we were leaving, an old man arrived—he was a former prisoner of the Nazis, our guide told us. We toured the old city. We talked to survivors of Nazi camps. We met with modern-day Jewish leaders. We explored the areas that were once the Jewish ghettos of Kraków, Warsaw, and Łódź. We stood inside synagogues, some restored, some in ruins. We met with a woman who risked herself to save Jewish lives. We explored sites of Jewish, Roma, and Sinti deportation. We walked into Jewish cemeteries. We met with a man whose grandfather was a high ranking Nazi officer. We stood at the mass grave at Płaszów. And we walked through the killing field at Treblinka. I came to Poland and to these sites of Nazi atrocity for a purpose. To see for myself. To become a better educator. To be a witness of memory.

But I’ve seen enough. I want to go home. I miss my family.

It’s after midnight now. Here in my hotel room. Here in Oświęcim. Peaceful, pretty Oświęcim where I ate pizza for dinner. The Auschwitz camp complex is just a short walk away. We’re scheduled to head over to Auschwitz tomorrow afternoon. The next day, we’ll tour Auschwitz-Birkenau. We’ll see the brick buildings and barbed wire. The barracks. The gas chamber of Auschwitz I. The mounds of shoes and the piles of disintegrating human hair. We’ll be here in Oświęcim for one week.

I’m trying to push away any expectations. I’m trying to swallow my fear. I’m trying to pretend that being here is normal. People live here in Oświęcim. Thousands of tourists and teenagers walk through Auschwitz every summer. I’ve seen Treblinka. How much worse can it get? Every day, I read news reports about ongoing genocide. I walk past people starving on the streets of Chicago, all the time. I watch news clips of mass shootings in American schools. And gang rapes in India. And fire-bombings of Roma homes in Hungary. And petrol burnings of gay men and transgender women in Iraq. Seeing Auschwitz shouldn’t be any different. Human suffering is human suffering. Mass-murder is mass-murder. Right?