The Holocaust was an inconceivable historical event, which forever robbed Western culture of its innocence. As civilized human beings, we fail to understand how events of such horror could have taken place, and how an idea so inhumanly warped could have spread like wildfire through an entire continent, instigating the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews. This free online course was produced jointly by Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem – the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. This course is the second of the two courses and covers three themes in its three weeks: Week 1: The Final Solution We’ll look at the cultural and mental processes that paved the way to the comprehensive and systematic mass murder of Jews in Europe – that is, the Final Solution. As part of this hard lesson we will discuss the various characteristics of the murder sites and death camps, and reveal selected aspects of the horror that occurred in them. Week 2: Jewish and Non-Jewish Responses to the Holocaust We will try to explore questions regarding knowledge about the application of the Final Solution, as well as a variety of responses and annihilation of victims, local populations and perpetrators. Week 3: The End of the War We will dedicate this lesson to the events that occurred in the last years of the Holocaust, as well as questions of memory, commemoration and future research. We strongly recommend that you register for "The Holocaust - An Introduction (I): Nazi Germany: Ideology, The Jews and the World" as well. Taking both parts of the course would enable you to obtain a fuller and more comprehensive knowledge about The Holocaust. This online course is offered in an innovative, multi-level format, comprising: Comprehensive lectures by leading researchers from Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem. A wealth of voices and viewpoints presented by guest lecturers Numerous documents, photos, testimonies and works of art from the time of the Holocaust. Novel learning experience: Crowdsourcing – involving the learners themselves in the act of collecting and shaping information, via unique, exciting online assignments.
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The Holocaust - An Introduction (II): The Final Solution
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The Final Solution and the Drive for Eliminating All Jews and All Perceived Jewish "Influences"
This lesson will be devoted to the cultural and mental processes which paved the way to the comprehensive and systematic mass murder of Jews. We will deal with the specific decision-making process regarding the murder of the entire European Jewry, the implementation of the initial murder, the broadening circle of killing, and the early Jewish reactions to the "Final Solution".
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Professor Havi Dreifuss, PhDProfessor
Havi Dreifuss is a historian of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe; senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at TAU; heads the Center for Research of Holocaust History in Poland, Yad Vashem.
Dr Na'ama Bela Shik, PhDDirector, Educational Technology Department, The International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem
The International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem
[MUSIC]
The devil is in the details couldn't be more accurate regarding our previous unit.
But even this detailed description does not provide us some internal aspects of
Auschwitz or other camps.
This will be done now by my colleague, Dr.
Na'ama Shik from Yad Vashem who is not only my partner in developing and
preparing this course but also an expert in the field.
>> Hello, my name is Dr. Na'ama Shik from Yad Vashem and
I welcome you to a discussion on daily life in the camps.
In this section, we will talk about the experiences of the lives of men,
women and children in German concentration camps.
As you have seen throughout this course, concentration and extermination camps
were an essential part of the German State of end of the Final Solution,
concentration, extermination through labor and murder.
It must be said that not only Jews were imprisoned in the camps but
starting from mid 1942, Jews were the majority of the prisoners.
We don't have the time here to try and
describe the full scope of experiences in the camps.
The limitations of our understanding as people who haven't gone through
those experiences mean we can't really go into the differences between the camps or
the differences between the various experiences of men, women, and children.
But I will try to describe a few basic features of daily life in the camps.
Zalman Gradowski, a Jewish member of the Sonderkommando, kept a diary in Auschwitz.
In his opening lines, he wrote, come to me, you,
the contented citizen of the world.
You, who live in a country where only happiness, joy and pleasure may dwell,
and I will tell you how the modern and despised criminals have turned the joy
of a nation to a disaster, its happiness to everlasting agony and
the pleasantness of its life to the eternity of its destruction.
Bid farewell to your friends and acquaintances, for
after you have seen the dreadful and sadistic deeds of the supposedly cultured
legion of devils, you will certainly want to erase your name from the Family of Man.
Zalman Gradowski was murdered or killed during the only armed uprising
in the Auschwitz Birkenau camp, which took place on October 7th, 1944.
Yet, can we really accept Gradowski call an invitation?
Robert Antelme, a French political prisoner who was
deported to Buchenwald, then to a labor camp, and then to Dachau,
described the terrible experiences in the camps in his book, The Human Race.
He wrote about the basic fact of his and other camp survivors' inability to
really share their experiences with other people, to describe and
actually be understood, to try and explain the unimaginable.
Two years ago, during the first days after our return,
I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium.
We wanted at last to speak, to be heard and
we felt a frantic desire to describe it such as it had been.
As of those first days, however, we saw that it was impossible to bridge the gap
we discovered opening up between the words at our disposal and that experience which,
in the case of most of us, was still going forward within our bodies.
No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be choking over it.
And then even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable.
What was it that is so beyond our comprehension?
What are the camp survivors talking about
when they speak about the loss of humanity?
What human experiences can't be taught because they can't be understood?
What had human beings done to other human beings?
Those arriving at the camp immediately encountered a complex, scary,
incoherent world that was impossible to compare to anything they had known before.
They had no tools from the previous life
that would help them coping with this new reality they were thrown into.
Let me try and present a little of what we can try and
learn about the cruel world of the camps.
Life in the camp consisted of a difficult process of dehumanization and
the shattering of the self, loss, fear, terror,
terrible hunger, cold, unsanitary conditions, powerlessness,
loss of faith in mankind, a sense of their total ruin.
Isabella Leitner called the extreme manifestation of this experience
that of becoming a Muselmann, not quite alive, yet not quite dead.
But we also find brief flickers of friendship, of extraordinary
inner strength in attempts to maintain some kind of humanity.
Two separate components of the camps we're dehumanization and humiliation.
Even before the actual murder, we see in this total world of death,
physical and spiritual death combined.
The attempt to destroy the prisoner's spirit, destruction of the self.
This terrible process begun with the journey to the camp and
continued with the arrival there.
Most family members of the Jews sent to the camp had been murdered.
The prisoners had no property.
Their names had been taken away from them and instead they became a number.
Their hair and bodies were shaved.
They wore prisoner's uniform or rags and wooden clogs or worn out shoes.
The living conditions were abhorrent.
They were constantly exposed to the threat of immediate death, to extreme hunger and
cold and they had to perform harsh physical labor.
They lived in buildings designed for cattle and slept or
tried to sleep between 3 or 15 people in one bunk bed.
In many cases, they had no undergarments.
They were denied basic hygienic facilities, like showers or bathrooms.
Their bodily needs were controlled by the Germans.
Their daily schedule involved a series of tortures and punishments.
A violent wake-up call, standing in morning and
evening roll calls that often lasted many hours,
minimum food rations and the constant threat of punishment.
They were submitted to a constant threat of death in their work,
from starvation, epidemics and
during the regular selections, in which many were chosen to death.
Miriam Steiner was born in Hungry in 1929.
In June 1944, when she was 15,
she was deported along with her family to Auschwitz.
After they arrived, her father and brother were sent to the men's camp, and
Steiner and her mother were sent to Birkenau.
She speaks about the shock of going through the sauna,
the humiliation and terrible sense of dehumanization.
Suddenly they appeared and started shaving our hair.
They grabbed us, not in a very gentle way, and anyone who screamed received beatings.
And mostly they screamed,
because it was a shock that can't be imagined- they started shaving hair,
shaving hair from all parts of our bodies, meaning the armpits and the groin area.
I think that in that action, they got us into such a state of shock that they
took from us any desire to protect, to rise up, to complain,
it was like the curtains had closed on our previous lives, on our previous human
entities, and we became something else, some undefined creatures.
Daily life in the camps involved an endless series of prohibitions,
many of them illogical and difficult to understand.
The Germans completely controlled the daily routine of the prisoners,
what they ate, what they wore, who would live and who would die.
Paula Schreiber-Goldwasser was born in 1919 in Krakow, Poland.
In a diary she kept, in 1946,
she devoted an entire chapter to the system of restrictions in the camp.
A system prisoners encountered from the first moment of arrival.
Freedom of movement was completely denied from us.
Any movement- even the slightest- talking, eating, walking, were dictated in advance.
The conditions of life in the camps were designed so
that we do only as we're forced to do, while being beaten and cursed.
We felt like hunted animals, shaken- however you move,
anything you do, someone will always yell, forbidden!
There was no one in the camp who could act as was required, everything was forbidden.
Dead bodies, the presence of death and
the possibility of dying were always present in the camps.
In the first days of week in the camps, prisoners were forced to get used
to the presence of death and the terror of the selections.
This was where the weaker prisoners were chosen to be murdered.
Death was everywhere, in gas chambers, in the fatal injection to the heart,
in medical experiments, punishment, disease, injuries,
in the choice to die, and in the selections.
The selection was a curious part of the daily life.
From the first selection right after arrival to the camp, prisoners were
constantly faced with the threat of being sent to the gas chambers, this is
in camps where there were gas chambers, or of being murdered in other ways.
These selections were performed in camp hospitals and
in the barracks of the inmates and they were not announced in advance.
[BLANK AUDIO]
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