Holocaust May 2005

Holocaust Studies

Last November, after more than a year of research, an international commission delivered incontrovertible proof that Romania had been directly responsible for the deaths of at least 270,000 Jews during the Holocaust – a conclusion that had been consistently denied by successive Romanian governments. The commission, which was established and funded by the Romanian government, became known as the Wiesel Commission after its chairman, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, and comprised 30 scholars from Romania, Israel, Germany and the United States. The low level of Holocaust awareness and understanding in Romania prompted the commission to include in its recommendations the implementation of Holocaust teaching in schools – a recommendation supported by both the former president, Ion Iliescu, and President Basescu. Andrew Begg recently met two Wiesel Commission members, Dr Paul Shapiro, Director of Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and Dr Radu Ioanid, Director of the museum’s International Archival Program.

May 2005

Vivid: Perhaps we could begin by your describing briefly the museum and the centre.

Paul Shapiro: The museum is quite a significant institution in the United States. It’s permanently authorised by the Congress, which means that as long as there is a government of the United States, this institution will function as part of the government. At the same time, the museum has very broad popular support. Most of our programmes, with the exception of the main exhibition of the museum, are supported by donations and private endowment funds. So we are very lucky to enjoy strong bipartisan support in Congress, and tremendous support out of the White House, under one president after another, and to enjoy very broad support from the American public. About two million people come to the museum each year, to see the exhibitions that are there.

The museum is also heavily dedicated to education and research, I understand.

Paul Shapiro: Correct. Beyond the exhibitions, and the more narrow definition of what a museum is, we have major programmes of education that reach every state in the United States. Last year, 20,000 teachers had some sort of contact with the museum for teaching purposes. And because we feel we only know the tip of the iceberg about the Holocaust – the broad lines, the umbrella lines, if you like, but not the detail – the museum has also made a commitment to research, and that’s where the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies comes in. Basically, our programmes are designed to make it possible for today’s scholars and future scholars to learn more about this subject. It’s possible to learn a whole lot more because in the last decade and a half, since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and since the opening of archives after 50 years of restrictions in the rest of the world, we’ve just discovered an avalanche of archival material relating to the Holocaust that no one had ever seen before. So we support programmes of research and we also assist university faculties to teach the subject in a way that reflects the most recent research and in a way that has relevance for students today. We all like to think that this was an event of the past, but in fact there are so many survivors and eyewitnesses still living and the impact of what happened in world war two, and the impact of that first systematic genocide – in fact the word genocide emerged from the Holocaust – is still being felt today. So it’s not just a historical event, it’s a contemporary event as well. And unfortunately there are plenty of genocidal events that still take place in our world, and the museum focuses public attention on them as well. So the museum has a far broader mission than a typical museum. One aspect of promoting research and knowledge is to gather the materials which scholars typically work on, to discover new knowledge and to gain better understanding and that’s really where Radu’s work comes into play.

Can you tell us a bit about what you do there?

Radu Ioanid: I want to be very brief about what I do. Dr Shapiro mentioned an avalanche of new material that has become available in Europe. My small department is in charge with collecting this evidence and finding out more about it.

Paul Shapiro: I’m going to add – because he is modest – that his “small department” has brought to the museum over 30 million pages of archival material, from 40 countries, including the kinds of records that no one ever anticipated that we would discover. For example, records at the ground level: what local official decided to do what to whom, and who might have instructed that person – you learn a whole lot about human beings by seeing things at that ground level. Secondly there is a huge and growing amount of material put forward by Jews and Jewish community organisations, material that we all believed for sixty years that the Nazis had destroyed. One of the great myths about what we can learn of the subject is that the Nazis systematically destroyed all the records of Jewish communities – it turns out not to be so. To find them today opens the door to understanding about how people who are really under assault can draw on the strengths of their traditions and values and can also suffer because of the weaknesses of their values. And its opened the other side of the equation – so that one can see not just the killers, but see also the interaction between people under assault. I think this is very much in keeping with the mission of our museum, which is to be a memorial to those people who were in that terrible situation.

You are in Bucharest to talk to the Romanian government about Holocaust education.

Radu Ioanid: Indeed, we think that Holocaust education is one of the most important recommendations of the Wiesel Commission. Romania needs come to terms with its past.

What is the situation now as regards Holocaust education? I know that the government has made various promises.

Radu Ioanid: The situation is quite complex. It is absolutely clear that the government and people in general are much more willing to deal with this issue of the Holocaust in Romania. They want to understand it better, and to cooperate on this issue. But some government agencies are much better equipped and more willing than others. For some time the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania was in the forefront of trying to help to do something beyond the short-term commemorative events in this respect.

Why the Ministry of Foreign Affairs?

Radu Ioanid: Probably because they understand better the impact outside Romania on the country’s image, and the consequences of not dealing with such an issue. But I have to say that we are quite disappointed by the fact the Ministry of Education, which should be in the forefront of such an issue, is lagging way, way behind.

The new ministry, in the new government?

Radu Ioanid: The new ministry, and the former ministry. It’s very sad to notice that a small but active group of Holocaust survivors who are trying to do a lot in terms of Holocaust education in this country has nothing beyond lip service when it comes to gaining the support of the Ministry of Education. I’m wondering if this is not a relic of the past because my understanding is that the leadership of this ministry is committed to do something about Holocaust education, but once you go to the second and third level in the bureaucracy of the ministry, you find quite powerful forces that are doing their best to slow down the process.

Paul Shapiro: I totally agree with Radu here. I would just put one additional gloss on this though. What we are seeing is the country move through a series of stages. Certainly one of the motivating factors that led to the creation of the Wiesel Commission was a series of statements of Holocaust denial or Holocaust minimalisation, from the highest ranks of the government. And in reaction to the response to that, the Wiesel Commission was invited to prepare and present a factual record of what happened here, and that report was accepted by Ion Iliescu when he was the country’s leader, and since then President Basescu has reiterated his acceptance of the factual record. That is a significant step, because until that time the main currents of thinking in the country at all levels were to deny the factual record. This week we had the opportunity to meet with participants in courses at the National Defence College, the SRI advanced training school, and foreign intelligence services, and I must say we encountered very little resistance to the facts themselves. And there was quite a sophisticated discussion of what the meaning of the facts were. Now that is progress, because suddenly the facts are on the table. What Radu is saying absolutely correctly is that there is considerably more resistance to taking that factual record and laying it before the population through the education system, which of course is the most important thing to do. Because through the education system you assist the future leaders of the country, the next generation that will have responsibility for Romania.

It’s not surprising that there is resistance, because suddenly your talking about not having a discussion within a confined circle, but rather in the country as a whole.

Paul Shapiro: My feeling is that we will pass through this. We certainly stand ready to help Romania, but of course Romania has to be willing. It has to be something that Romanians want to implement themselves, and that is where we stand as of now.

Radu Ioanid: Also, it is only natural to encounter these difficulties here, because Romania still has huge problems in terms of facing its own history. This does not only relate to its involvement in the Holocaust, but relates also to its communist past.

How for example is the Holocaust taught to German schoolchildren?

Paul Shapiro: The situation in Germany is so different to other countries. At the very beginning, immediately following the war, Germany was then an occupied country. There was a major effort by the occupying governments to press ahead with de-Nazification and with Holocaust education. One method of convincing people that Nazism and fascism were wrong was to demonstrate the results. From the very beginning, there were strong programmes of education at the secondary school level – very systematic, mandatory – not optional – for every student coming through the German school system, and that continues right up until today. And of course in Germany there was an ongoing series of public trials of war criminals and people implicated in these crimes, ranging from the leaders of the Nazi regime and the leaders of the SS units and killing squads – the Einsatzgruppen – that murdered innocent people in open fields, to trials of doctors who performed medical crimes, and of trials of businessmen who reorganised their businesses to basically become a machinery of murder. And that extensive series of trials also had an educating impact. So in Germany there was quite a special situation from the beginning.

Maybe the defining factor is that Germany never had the opportunity to create a Holocaust myth. After the war, it never had the opportunity to make Hitler out to be some kind of hero. It had to confront the realities of the situation from the first day.

Paul Shapiro: Every other country had an opportunity to create a myth, and Romania is in the same boat as many other countries. In Romania the myth was there was no Holocaust here, because there was a large Jewish community that survived, even though Romanian authorities were responsible for the deaths of 270,000-280,000 – and maybe as many as 380,000 – Jews. But because there was still a large community that remained, the myth was: “Look, we still have all these Jews after the war. Conclusion: there was no Holocaust here.” In France the myth was that all French were resistors, and it’s really only in the last 15 years that we’re coming to understand the level of collaboration and complicity by French authorities and individuals. In the United States the myth was we didn’t know what was going on. But if you come to our museum, you see how much information there was in the press about anti-Semitic discrimination in Germany, starting in 1933 and right up to the beginning of the war, so the public in general knew something was going on. But of course we didn’t permit a larger number of refugees to come to the United States. We know now something we’ve only learnt in the last decade – that the United States knew the details of the killing squads from the moment they began, because the British were intercepting German radio transmissions about the killings and passing that information to the US. So every single country has basically come from a situation of not assuming the history, and different countries are at different stages of assuming the history. I participate in a US government commission that is forcing federal agencies in the United States to declassify their Holocaust-related records. There is not a file that has been declassified – and so far there are millions of pages – where I do not find something that makes me cringe. As an American citizen, I’d like to think that my country and my government can only do the right thing, but of course history proves that that’s not the case in any country. You just have to deal with it, and the more you deal with it head-on, the better off you are.

I guess a measure of the effectiveness of Holocaust education is to force a mindless vandal to think twice before he scrawls a swastika on a wall. Is it out of crass ignorance that people do this, or do they really still harbour so much hate?

Paul Shapiro: Some people are mindless vandals. Some people are not. And there is, even today, a network of forces in different guises that have an interest in promoting anti-Semitism. I think its important to recognise that anti-Semitism is not the only hatred that becomes greater when anti-Semitism is permitted. Anti-Semitism is the easiest hatred. But if it’s accepted it makes it possible to construct hatred against other target populations. Therefore the danger is not only a danger for Jews, it is a danger for every society where this is accepted as something normal, or in some cases even as something desirable. Let’s face it, in the period of the Holocaust it wasn’t particularly the mindless vandals who murdered six million Jews, and murdered people in other victim groups. Roma were a principal target as well and they were largely as defenceless as Jews. It takes a calculating leadership group to decide to use force systematically, and then the mindless vandals might fall into line. In the Holocaust it was government leadership in Germany, in Romania, in Hungary – and we can go down the line – that said, “Yes, this is what we are going to do, we’ve calculated why this is of use to us, and off we go to murder people.”

I was under the impression that the Romanian government had agreed to introduce a certain number of hours of Holocaust education for high school students. Is this actually going to happen?

Radu Ioanid: At this point, a textbook for high school students will come out, maybe in the next three to six months. It is unclear what this will mean in practical terms because study of the book will be optional. Also, there are seven or eight mandatory alternative manuals which all deal in one way or another with the period of world war two. I have browsed through these manuals and most of them are far removed from the reality of world war two. This remains a very serious issue and I do not see light at the end of the tunnel.

Why is the book you wrote – The Holocaust in Romania, which for me is the definitive work on the subject – not on the syllabus?

Radu Ioanid: It is too big and too detailed for high school students. Perhaps if something could be written that was based on it, then that might be a solution. But it has to come from Romanian teachers, from the Romanian school system.

Paul Shapiro: For the members of the Wiesel Commission it was our hope that scholarly texts such as Radu’s would at least form the basis of an understanding of the Holocaust here.

I want to back up a bit here, having raised the issue of government leadership. Government leaders can create such a problem, but they also bear responsibility for correcting it in society. Because the mindless vandals often cannot find their way to the truth.

Paul Shapiro: Maybe it would be helpful to present some of the lines of thinking that have been damaging in the past and that have been stated by government leaders in the past that have perpetrated disinformation. I think its fair to say that today if a government leader tries to imply there was no history in his country of anti-Semitism – when a government leader tries to imply that it was not the Antonescu government and the military forces of the country which murdered 270-280,000 Jews and maybe more, but that it was the Iron Guard – that is a misrepresentation of history, an attempt at avoiding government responsibility for fixing it. When a government leader tries to deflect the facts by saying, “Well, where the Jews were killed wasn’t part of Romania because the territories involved – Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria – are neither part of Romania or under Romanian administration” – that is an attempt to falsify history, because during world war two those territories were under Romanian administration. I think there is a very strong responsibility for leadership here to confront the issue head-on and recognise that it is the governments of countries that decided what happened during world war two.

President Basescu visited the museum several weeks ago. What happened?

Paul Shapiro: He was most moved and most troubled by the places in the museum where the complicity of the Romanian government in the Holocaust was clear. Now I have to say that when President Bush came to the museum at the beginning of his first term, where did he stop? He stopped and was most troubled – and you could see it – at the places in our permanent exhibition where the American failure to act was most clear. He saw the complicity of American government agencies and forces in allowing this to happen without acting. Governments bear a special responsibility for addressing the issue because they lead their countries.

I was quite satisfied with former President Iliescu’s immediate reaction to the findings of the Wiesel Commission. There wasn’t very much else he could say, because the facts were beyond dispute. But right on the eve of his departure from office, he awarded the Star of Romania, Romania’s highest honour, to the country’s most influential and outspoken anti-Semite, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and another high honour to the country’s most prominent Holocaust denying scholar, Gheorghe Buzatu. It reminded me of President Clinton’s last minute presidential pardon to Marc Rich, who was once one of America’s most wanted men. Wasn’t that terribly disappointing for you?

Radu Ioanid: Of course it was indeed very disappointing. In the very best case, it was a major gaffe, a very, very serious miscalculation. It is difficult to know, and it is difficult to understand, why he did it. I am personally confident that sooner or later this will be fixed because it is unjust for Romanian society that a major Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite should receive such awards. It is so ironic, so confusing, why he did it.

Paul Shapiro: We started this discussion by talking about the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. I can tell you that the impact of the museum on American society has been far greater than even its founders had ever imagined, and its founders were brilliant people. One of the recommendations of the Wiesel Commission is that there be created here in Romania an institute for study and documentation of the Holocaust. Because when people come face to face with documentation and testimonies the impact on people of goodwill is very positive. It begins a process of thinking and consideration of how one acts in society. It certainly makes it clear that individual decisions make a difference. So having had the experience of our own government-backed institution in Washington, that has really transformed many people that have come into contact with it, we are hoping that such an institute would be created here. We are hoping to see the quick implementation here of that particular recommendation of the Wiesel Commission.