Avril Alba

“Here there is no why” – so why do we come here? Is a pedagogy of atrocity possible?

ABSTRACT This article argues for a “middle ground” with regard to the educational efficacy of increasingly popular group trips to the former sites of Nazi atrocities and in particular Auschwitz-Birkenau. Focusing on the dynamic interchange between the site, the educator, and the students, it explores the potential for these programs to challenge and transcend pre-determined or “instrumentalized” approaches to what is labeled “atrocity education.” Employing conceptual frameworks from educational social justice theories, the article seeks to ascertain through empirical investigation of one such program – the Australian March of the Living – whether a position of “aporetic mourning” that facilitates “deep learning” can be developed and sustained despite pre-existing ideological and educational goals. It concludes that such a posture can only be maintained through the conscious work of the educator, who in remaining “inconsolable before history,” facilitates a critical appraisal of the past that generates a deep and ongoing questioning in the present.

Transmitting the Survivor’s Voice: Redeveloping the Sydney Jewish Museum

As commemoration of the Holocaust passes from the generation of witness to succeeding generations, Holocaust museums have begun to embody a more self-conscious museology, accompanied by often-fierce internal, as well as public, debates. Increasingly influenced by both public and private intergenerational forces, these institutions must engage with the complex and often contested process of interpretation that defines a mediated, rather than immediate, relationship to the past. The following account of one such process, the redevelopment of the Sydney Jewish Museum’s permanent Holocaust exhibition, clearly illustrates the contentious, yet productive nature of these endeavors, demonstrating that for a growing number of these institutions, the passing of the survivor generation marks not only a human and historical shift, but also a shift in the shape of memory itself.

Negative Epiphany: From Sinai to Washington

Upon entering the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington DC, one is transported from the celebrated icons of American democracy to their antithesis. Exiting the elevators that lift the individual out of the present and into past, the visitor is confronted by the horrors of fascism, reflected in the now-infamous life-sized photographic images and film footage1 of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by the American army. Due to the proliferation and familiarity of Holocaust imagery in the present, it is difficult to recall the profound effect of these images when originally released.2 ‘Writers have tried to describe these things but words cannot describe them and, even if they could, there are details too filthy to be printed anywhere’, opined the New York Times Magazine on 6 May1945, articulating a trope of incomprehensibility vis-a-vis representing the Holocaust that would echo for decades to come.3 The shock was such that for many, including most famously Susan Sontag, the photographs became indicative of a turning point in the history of the West, an indication that a ‘limit had been reached’ and a ‘prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany’, experienced.4 An inverse ‘salvation history’ was created and a new epoch proclaimed. But what, exactly, was the content of this revelation? Who would make known its message and from where would the word go out? Such were the questions that, I argue, preoccupied those individuals charged with the development and building of what was to become the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

A Redeemer Cometh: The Survivor in the Space

In her speech at the opening of the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM), Holocaust survivor and then President of the Australian Association for Jewish Holocaust Survivors (AAJHS), Marika Weinberger, explicitly referenced Isaiah 51:1 as the ‘motivating spirit guiding the architects, curators, designers and our planning committee in establishing the terms of reference, guidelines, blueprints and, at times, in deciding even minute details of this unique museum’.2 Just how influential this directive was in the actual development of the SJM’s exhibition and memorial spaces is impossible to determine, but its significance regarding the museum founders’ understanding of their task is readily apparent. For this was to be a museum in which Jewish tradition would be modified and reinterpreted by those who understood themselves to be simultaneously the product of, and the exception to, the tradition itself. Against this backdrop the story of destruction would be told from the perspective of those who had endured it. In the telling, the figure of the survivor would emerge as the SJM’s ‘authentic voice’, the voice of both the witness and the victim, an embodied testament to the ‘living and the dead’.3

The Holocaust Memorial Museum: A Built Theodicy

Holocaust memorial museums are increasingly familiar fixtures in the public landscape.2 As active contributors to the development of communal and national memories, their political role, discernible in the careful weaving of civic values and national narratives into both architecture and display, has been broadly acknowledged.3 As the larger (and more influential) of these institutions are often state-funded, their very existence serves to frame Holocaust history within distinct national contexts. Subsequently, critiques of these institutions have largely focussed on how Holocaust memorial museums are ‘shaped’ by the dominant political narratives of the communities, states and nations in which they are developed.4 However, due to the prevailing understanding of these institutions as ‘historical’ and ‘secular’ in nature, their ‘metahistorical’ and ‘sacred’ underpinnings are yet to be fully explored and articulated.

Conclusion: The Return of Myth to History

For millennia, the Jews made sense of their history in light of their theology. In the modern period, they undertook this struggle within the two domains that enlightenment and emancipation offered them — the public (secular) and the private (sacred). In exchange for the fruits of modernity, they tacitly agreed to consign history to the former and theology to the latter. As a result, their foundational ‘myths’ were recast as ‘universal’ ethical imperatives or largely abandoned, only to continue as templates for the recording and understanding of history in the closed communities of the haredim. Outside of ultra-Orthodox domains and systematic theology, the Jewish experience in the modern period, and the Holocaust in particular, was not chronicled through traditional, metahistorical frameworks. History trumped theology.2 Redemption, it seems, was not part of the modern Jewish plan.

From Tent to Temple: Resurrection in Jerusalem

Enshrining the Prophet Ezekiel’s vision into law, the Holocaust Remembrance and Heroism Law, Yad Vashem, 5713–1953, section 4 seeks to bestow upon Jews who were exterminated, and those who fell in the Holocaust and in uprising, commemorative citizenship of the State of Israel as a sign of their ingathering unto their nation.1 This remarkable piece of legislation reverberates with the sacred archetype of resurrection, a theology that finds its roots in the Tenach, its fullest exposition in rabbinic literature and its continued expression in the recitation each day by observant Jews of the Amidah, Shmoneh Esreh, or Tefillah — the ‘Eighteen Benedictions’ that comprise the central prayer of the daily and Sabbath liturgy. The related concept of the ‘ingathering of the Exiles’, the national restoration of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland, also finds its beginnings in Ezekiel’s famous vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones. In the biblical context, the prophet’s vision points to the hoped-for end of the Babylonian exile and the actual, physical return of the Exiles to Jerusalem.2 The Remembrance and Heroism Law speaks of another kind of resurrection — of those whose physical bodies will never be recovered — a resurrection of memory that will be achieved through the collection of documents, objects, photos and, most of all, names, the millions of names of Holocaust victims that it is Yad Vashem’s self-declared mission to collect and display. Both visions share a hope for national restoration. For the latter, though, this is not to occur through supernatural means but rather through the political and legal actions of the modern State of Israel.

Displaying the Sacred: Australian Holocaust Memorials in Public Life

Focusing on the Sydney Jewish Museum’s (SJM) Sanctum of Remembrance, this article explores the relationship between Holocaust memorials, the Jewish commemorative tradition and the sacralisation of Holocaust memory in the Australian context. I argue that the building, design and function of the Sanctum reflects a deeply felt need within the Australian Jewish survivor community to develop alternative commemorative forms as a response to perceived ‘inadequate’ theology. Subsequently, the sacred Holocaust memory housed in this space departs significantly from traditional Jewish responses to destruction. Further, the public nature of the Sanctum has the dual effect of transforming the Jewish commemorative tradition and conveying that tradition to a largely non-Jewish public, explicitly linking Jewish tragedy to broader public concerns. In this progression, a sacred Holocaust memory is created that is at once particular and universal, providing Australian Holocaust memorials with unprecedented opportunities for empathy and identification with other victims of genocide. Yet this powerful dialectic remains, at present, under-utilised. Whether the SJM and other Australian Holocaust museums choose to engage in these opportunities will ultimately depend on the ability of these institutions to grapple with the complexity of Australia’s colonial past and contemporary multicultural society. To contend with these issues requires the ability to understand and ‘display’ the nation as perpetrator and resistor of genocidal acts, a complex narrative difficult to assimilate into largely ‘static’ museum and memorial space. To not do so, however, risks rendering Holocaust memory in Australian museums a solely ‘internal’, Jewish concern.