by Dr. Dennis Klein
Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I will be leading a two week seminar in June, 2021 (dates TBA), for university and college faculty, as well as for public servants and public intellectuals, on ideas for restoring a human bond after radical social collapse. While the seminar will deal with the aftermath of genocide and other atrocities, it will speak to extreme disruption in the United States, and elsewhere, due to the pandemic crisis, economic volatility, political conflict, severe climate change, and profound racial disquiet. Entitled “The Search for Humanity after Atrocity, it will draw on memoirs written by Holocaust survivors to explore the physical and emotional demands of survival and survivors’ reevaluation of a world that was governed by the craven behavior of perpetrators, their collaborators, and most everyone else who lent tacit support by remaining on the sidelines.
Historical inquiry will frame discussion and debate because many Holocaust survivors wrote about the radical betrayal of their neighbors and others who they believed could have intervened but remained silent. What they wrote about was the shocking violation of their historical trust – their neighbors’ silence if not collaboration with their assailants. Their accounts bear agonizing witness to the rupture of relationships they had come to rely on.
But they would not have recorded their testimonies in the first place unless they believed their memoirs would make a difference as a warning, a lesson, or a plea for justice. This belief pointed in another direction: a renewed if tenuous faith in humanity. Seminar participants will examine memoirs for evidence of this faith and try to make sense of how survivors could condemn their neighbors and seek to renegotiate relationships with them in the same account. By paying special attention to survivors’ perspectives, destruction, as the defining feature of atrocity, is both an outcome and a precondition of cautionary reconstruction. Their perspectives will suggest a path forward for the US as well.
Survivors’ testimonies have recently acquired renewed scholarly attention for their unique interpretive insights into the legacies of the Holocaust and, by extension, other extreme situations. For several decades since the 1960s, when Holocaust witnesses’ accounts entered the public domain, observers generally have not recognized their prominence: Lucy Dawidowicz and other seminal scholars dismissed them for their inaccuracies or, as Hannah Arendt commented in her report on the Eichmann trial, their blinding emotionality. In common polemics, scholars used them derivatively to confirm or illustrate arguments they already documented.
Significant exceptions emerged with the publication in 2001 of Jan Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.
The fatal journey of Jews in Jedwabne, Poland, who, in 1941, were coerced by their neighbors to a local barn where they were incinerated.
Though Gross’s main purpose was to show the local, open-air settings of genocide, his reliance on survivors’ testimonies suggested dimensions of destruction that historians, largely depending on perpetrator and official documentation, have missed. Besides observing fanatical violence, survivors deeply ruminated over their neighbors’ violation of what survivor Jean Améry had believed was an implicit durable social contract. For him and others, the violation was entirely unexpected. Survivors often regarded, with the advantage of hindsight, their expectations as naïve and, indeed, European Jews were generally so assimilated to their homelands that they disregarded the evidence of ascendant social tension or, more commonly, regarded incidents of social conflict as exceptional. But as we will explore in this seminar, their expectations were historically rooted in realities of social integration that were sufficiently stable. Turning their attention intermittently from perpetrators to bystanders, betrayal emerged as a considerable testimonial preoccupation.
The historical framework for this seminar offers distinctive parallels with research on psychological resilience, psychological flexibility, and posttraumatic growth. These fields presume varying degrees of personal recovery from or resistance to the calamitous effects of misfortune. The seminar will benefit from two half days of presentations by Dr. Donald Marks, the Project Scholar who is a member of the Advanced Studies in Psychology program at Kean University with whom I have collaborated and who is an expert on the behavioral dynamics of resilience.
A close reading of Holocaust survivors’ memoirs will take note of passages that were notably forward-looking but, in historical context, expressed a distinct longing for humanity and not only a quest for personal convalescence. As we will come to see, their longing for a human connection was embedded in ancestral memories of an attachment to European society. At the same time, their memoirs make clear that the effects of traumatic injury persists – something that theories of posttraumatic resilience and growth downplay – and shadows if not overshadows the search for humanity, suggesting that survival after atrocity is a heterogeneous experience alternating between aspiration and dread, hope and despair, faith in renegotiated human relationships and resignation to the world’s abject moral and physical collapse articulated, as this seminar will consider, at the level of what historians and other scholars call “deep memory” that reenact, in the words of Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “the continuing presence of the past.”
To hear more from Dr. Klein about Survivors' Memories, check out this radio interview: Red River Radio Tales from the Pages Welcomes Dennis B. Klein.
Email inquires about the seminar to Dr. Dennis Klein, dklein@kean.edu.
Comentarios