In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust (now known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day). Sixty years earlier, on that day in 1945, Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz concentration camp and began to organize assistance for the survivors whom the Nazi guards abandoned about a week earlier. In the last winter months of the Second World War, the Red Army of the Soviet Union was pushing westward across Poland and East Central Europe. After liberating Cracow, the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front reached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex (formed by three camps, the largest among the Nazi concentration camps). They found about 7,000 inmates left behind by the SS. Days earlier, the Nazi guards started to destroy crematoria and documents evidencing the industrial-scale mass murder of 1.1 million people and sent about 60,000 prisoners west on a death march as they retreated westward.
A view of the Auschwitz concentration camp after liberation. Photo was taken after Jan. 19, 1945. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of unknown Russian archive. Public domain.
The terms Holocaust (Greek) and Shoa (Hebrew) stand for the crimes the Nazi regime and its allies committed against Jews, including the systematic killing of six million Jewish persons. Notwithstanding, the Nazi concentration camps were instrumental in the mass-scale extermination of other groups too. In Auschwitz, Poles, Soviet POWs, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and about 25,000 captives from various ethnic groups deported from all across Europe were imprisoned. During its operation between 1940 and 1945, about one million Jews, 70,000 (or as many as 74,000) Poles, 21,000 Roma and Sinti, and about 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war were killed in the Auschwitz camp complex. (See a detailed examination of the different prisoner groups on the website of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.) Auschwitz was just one site of the Nazi extermination system, which included concentration camps in North Africa as well. In addition to the commemoration of the mass murder of Jews, the Roma and Sinti genocide is commemorated on August 2 annually on the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day.
The records of the Nazi crimes committed against Jews, which the perpetrators aimed to destroy, were central not only to the postwar search for justice, but also to the study of the Holocaust. Moreover, along with the remaining material remains of the victims’ annihilated communal and individual lives and the testimonies and reminiscences of the survivors, the documentary evidence shapes the memory of the victims and their lost homes and cultures. What we know about the Holocaust, how we understand it, and how the survivors recount what they experienced have been transforming since the victims began to collect the records of their persecution, years before the liberation of Auschwitz. The commemoration of the 80th anniversary is also a reminder that the information available about the Holocaust and the formation and preservation of its memory are the result of the collective effort of generations of scholars, survivors, activists, politicians, and artists that the murdered victims initiated.
It is already the third and fourth generation, descendants of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, or people who lived far away from the scenes of the crimes committed during the Holocaust, who embrace the task of commemoration and work to make sense of the human tragedy that enfolded on the collective and personal levels.
Two recent films, to be added to the Emory collection in the future, explore how the survivors’ descendants grapple with the memory of the atrocities their parents and grandparents endured.
In The Treasure, recently divorced New York-based journalist Ruth, played by Lena Dunham, travels together with her father, Holocaust survivor Edek, played by Stephen Fry, to Poland, not long after the fall of the Iron Curtain. They visit Edek’s hometown, and they even succeed in seeing the apartment where Edek and his family lived. They include Auschwitz in their itinerary and while Ruth argues with the employees of the memorial museum that it is not a museum but a concentration camp, Edek disagrees with the guide about what exactly happened at different locations within the camp complex. For Ruth, the trip makes it possible to learn firsthand about the world her parents came from and the persecution they suffered before leaving for the US. The journey also enables both father and daughter to form shared memories.
Jesse Eisenberg wrote and directed A Real Pain, and plays David, one of the main characters of the film. David lives with his family in New York and sells online advertisements. He invites his capricious and warm-hearted, unemployed cousin Benji, played by Kieran Culkin, to join him on a visit to Poland. They make the journey to learn about the place where their dearly beloved grandmother, a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, hailed from and to commemorate her. David and Benji join a Jewish heritage tour visiting various historical sites, including the city of Lublin and the nearby museum at the site of the Majdanek concentration camp. The two closely connected cousins, born just a few months apart, leave the group so they can visit the house that was once their grandmother’s home. The tour is not only an opportunity to learn about the Holocaust and the past their grandmother never mentioned. It is also a journey to cultivate and reassess their childhood memories connected to their grandmother and each other.
The 80th anniversary is commemorated worldwide. Among the institutions holding International Holocaust Remembrance Day events are the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum in Poland. Israel’s Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Center likewise marks the anniversary, even though Israel commemorates the Shoah on the anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw ghetto uprising on April 19, 1943. (In 1959, Israel designated the 27th day of the month Nisan of the Hebrew calendar as Yom Hashoah or the Holocaust Remembrance Day.) In Atlanta, the Breman Museum’s permanent exhibition Absence of Humanity reconstructs the history of the Holocaust and pays tribute to the lives of the survivors who came to live in Atlanta. Emory University’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies offers a rich curriculum in Holocaust studies and Emory Libraries house a broad range of resources in support of the academic program and to inform the Emory community.
—by Katalin Rac, Jewish Studies librarian