Author: Webb

Court Reporter Still Haunted

Dated:

Court Reporter Still Haunted

By ALEXIS CHIU

.c The Associated Press

BOSTON (AP) — When she was 21, Vivien Spitz embarked on a dark, two-year journey. Her destination: the Nuremberg trials of accused Nazi war criminals.

Spitz wasn’t a lawyer, a victim or a relative of the millions killed under Adolf Hitler’s regime. She was a court reporter whose job was to record the atrocities of the Third Reich.

Now a 75-year-old retiree, Spitz is still haunted.

“I have never really recovered from it,” said the Aurora, Colo., resident, in Boston on Thursday to address the 100th anniversary meeting of the National Court Reporters Association. “It was a horrific experience. We had to write sometimes with tears in our eyes.”

The Allies — the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France — set up the international tribunal to bring Hitler’s henchmen to account. More than 200 Nazi military leaders, diplomats, government officials, industrialists and doctors were tried. Many were sent to prison, a few were sentenced to death and some were acquitted.

In all, the 13 trials produced 330,000 pages of testimony.

Spitz was one of 26 American court reporters who went to Germany in 1946. She used pen and paper, while others used stenotype machines.

Spitz sat through nearly two years of wrenching testimony and graphic evidence, including scores of photographs and videotapes depicting the dead and tortured.

One of the most dramatic moments for Spitz was in June 1947, as prosecutors were presenting evidence of the Nazis’ “sea water experiments,” conducted with the goal of finding a process to make the briny water potable.

“The victims were German, Czech and Polish gypsies deprived of food and given only sea water for weeks, which resulted in excruciating pain and foaming at the mouth and, in most cases, madness,” Spitz recalled.

One witness was a survivor of the experiment who, when asked to identify his torturer, darted toward the defendants’ section and leaped over a table, arms outstretched toward the German doctor. A guard later told Spitz authorities found a knife on the witness.

“This little man (was) futilely bent on delivering his own brand of justice,” said Spitz, who is half German, adding that the victim was later sent to jail for three months for contempt of court “after all of the torture he had already suffered.”

At Nuremberg, Spitz met an Army policeman she would marry. Since divorced, they have two grown sons.

Spitz went on to serve as court reporter in criminal and civil trials in Denver and in military courts around the country. She was a reporter of debates for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1972 to 1982 and, after another stint in Denver courts, retired in 1985.

Spitz said she reopened the wounds of Nuremberg when she learned a Colorado teacher reportedly told students that the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews, was a hoax.

“That fired me up so badly,” Spitz said. “I just hauled out my files and put together a prepared lecture. A mission has found me.”

In the last 10 years, Spitz has spoken about her experiences to more than 19,000 people in at least 30 states.

For years after Nuremberg, and occasionally since, Spitz had a recurring nightmare set in a concentration camp. In the dream, she is trying to escape with five small children through an underground tunnel, holding a candle for light and praying the Nazi guards above do not hear her.

She always wakes up before the ending, never escaping that tunnel — or her memories.

“I have not escaped to this day,” she said.

AP-NY-07-30-99 0123EDT

The Holocaust’s Legacies

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Philip Gourevitch’s article on Binjamin Wilkomirski and his memoir “Fragments” (“The Memory Thief,” June 14th) reveals much about the Holocaust industry. In 1996, Suhrkamp, also Wilkomirski’s publisher, published a German translation of my account of a wartime childhood in Poland. It is entitled “Dobryd” — an anagram of the name of the real town where the action takes place. I chose to write it as fiction, because, like Aharon Appelfeld, I did not trust the factual accuracy of my recollections. At the time of publication, it was suggested to me that the book would sell much better if it was reclassified as nonfiction, but I did not accept the suggestion. Though the book has received excellent critical notices, it has never enjoyed the attention given to “Fragments.”

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My Five Years in the Death Camps, and How They Grew

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The Nazis Killed my Dinner

“My story begins in 1940. When I was nine years old, the Germans took me from my home in Krasnik, Poland. For five years I was a prisoner of the Nazis in 10 death camps, where I saw thousands of men, women and children brutally murdered and starved.

“I lived on bread crumbs, sawdust, human remains, and one small prayer for redemption or death — whichever was quicker.”

— Stephan Ross, “Holocaust Survivor Backs Flag Protection,” Manchester Union Leader, Saturday, June 12, 1999, pg. D8

It’s Lucky They Weren’t Electrocuted

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Auschwitz: truth too painful to believe

Try telling concentration camp survivors that Hitler didn’t exist.

GEORGE RYBA

Sydney Morning Herald

Date: 05/05/99

[…]

For a memorable 3½ years, I was a Polish political prisoner in Auschwitz. Beginning in October 1941, we prisoners were put to work building New Camp No 2 (Birkenau) to accommodate more than 200,000 new prisoners. As a construction electrician, I worked installing electrical power in four gas chambers and the adjacent crematoria. Later, during gassing, wires and cables were often ripped off by victims gasping for air and writhing in the agony of asphyxiation. We had to repair such damage when the still convulsive bodies were being lifted up for cremation.

Dozens of my Jewish friends in the camp died by gassing. Seven of my close non-Jewish friends (five Poles, one Slovene and one Corsican), unable to carry out heavy work when weakened by typhus and malaria, were thrown naked in winter frost, one on top of another, like sardines, screaming onto a truck, 80 to a load, for the 15-minute journey to the gas chamber. In the aftermath of the German defeat at Stalingrad, from the middle of 1943, the Nazis restricted gassing to Jews and Gypsies and still managed to exterminate 1.5 million people before the Red Army liberated Auschwitz in 1945.

I was still there till about three weeks before liberation, when the SS demolition squads were blasting away anything indicative of what had been going on in Auschwitz for nearly five years.

All this I described in painful detail while giving evidence against Himmler’s deputies, Kaltenbrunner and Pohl, and eight SS leaders during the first two main trials of war criminals at Nuremberg in 1945-46. My testimony withstood long and forceful cross-examination by dozens of the best German lawyers defending the Nazi elite.

[…]

George Ryba, a Sydney resident, is a survivor of Auschwitz and was a leader of the camp’s underground resistance.

Webmaster note: It may be true that the truth about Auschwitz is too painful to believe — that certainly would go a long way toward explaining the thousands of lies that are told by so-called “survivors” and eye-witnesses such as Mr. Ryba.

I’ll never forget the (non-existent) gas chambers at Dachau

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THIS SPRING break I had the opportunity to travel to Germany with my school, and out of the whole trip there is one place I will always remember. We visited the concentration camp in Dachau. Up to that point the trip had been all fun. No one had spoken of or thought about the Jews or Kosovars. We were reminded daily of the effects of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain, but not what had gone on during the war. The day was cloudy and grey and I remember waking up, as all of us seem to do on such days, much like the weather. I knew we’d be going to Dachau but I didn’t know what to expect. A wave of something hit me when we walked through the gates, something telling me to run as fast and far as I could from the evil within. The first thing we did was view a short documentary on the history of the camp. Half of the people in the theatre could be heard sniffling. Occasionally, a solitary sob would escape someone. We walked around the camp and saw the buildings. We walked by the row of ovens, through the gas chambers, by the many graves dedicated to the unknown thousands who were murdered there. I wiped my eyes and took a deep breath. Two days later I learned what ethnic cleansing was. No one had told me before that it was merely a fancy term for genocide. I am home now and every time I watch the news or read the papers, all I hear about is NATO’s indecision. It is the same indecision that caused Neville Chamberlain to hesitate. His hesitation ended with the murder of over six million innocent people. How long will NATO hesitate? How long will the world listen to leaders like Bill Clinton as he says with bemusement that Slobodan Milosevic just had no reason to hold three American soldiers hostage? How much longer can the world sit back and watch the extinction of our fellow human beings?

Jennifer Barrett

(Tragically, genocide is taking place somewhere on the globe at all times.)

Letters | Edmonton Sun ([email protected]) | April 28, 1999

Crimes of the Holocaustologians

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In 1977, the Israeli scholar Yehuda Bauer offered a heartfelt warning “against the creation of ‘Holocaustology’ and the careerism of ‘Holocaustologians.”‘ At first glance, Bauer’s warning seems peculiar. After all, what could be more honorable and more important than the study of the systematic murder of 6 million Jews — a study undertaken for the purpose of preventing such an act in the future? In the past 20 years, Holocaust studies has become a glamorous and exciting field for American academics, as money from Steven Spielberg and others earmarked for Holocaust studies is flowing like cheap wine all across the world. The Holocaust, the most unspeakable event of the modern age, has become a career for some folks — the source of their livelihoods.

Now Bauer’s fears are being realized, because Holocaustologians have decided they are beyond reproach and that anyone who dares utter a word of criticism against them is essentially guilty of an intellectual crime against humanity.

The crime I speak of is Holocaust denial — the disgusting field of pseudo-scholarship dedicated to “proving” that the murder of the 6 million did not take place. Now, one of the founders of the Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches has accused the Jewish writer Gabriel Schoenfeld of “a subtle form of Holocaust denial.” The perpetrator of this assault on taste and reason is Franklin Littell, 81, who proves that you can spend 81 years on this earth and still be a damned fool.

In a series of brilliant articles last year, Schoenfeld took on the controversial topic of Holocaust scholarship and its inevitable descent into academic politicking. Far from denying the reality of the Holocaust, Schoenfeld argues that the Holocaust was the singular calamity of the modern age — and therefore that trying to use the Shoah to draw universal lessons about hatred and oppression is ignorant at best and intellectually corrupt at worst.

And yet the effort to draw comparisons between the Holocaust and other events is what motivates most Holocaustologians. Schoenfeld quotes a scholar named Joan Ringelheim as saying: “Women and minorities, the working class and the poor, prior to and after the Holocaust, have often lived in conditions similar in kind (although not always in degree) to those in the Holocaust.”

The conditions of the Holocaust were these: gigantic camps designed explicitly for the purpose of mass-murdering millions of people. Ringelheim knows this. But she cannot help comparing the plight of the working class to those consigned to the gas chambers.

This sort of thinking ought to have seen Ringelheim shunned by her fellow scholars. Instead, she runs the education department of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

“Today, not only are academic careers built on the Holocaust, but research into it has also been thoroughly academicized,” Schoenfeld wrote in Commentary, the monthly magazine where he works as executive editor (and which was edited by my father for 35 years). “The very language in which the murder of 6 million Jews is discussed has become in no way distinguishable from the language of agricultural macroeconomics or the sociology of chimpanzees — which is to say that even at its best, it is often full of the most egregious professional jargon.”

Outside the universities, the Holocaust has become the ultimate real-world horror-show that the whole family can enjoy. Schoenfeld writes of a list of “40 Fun Things To Do” offered to visitors in St. Petersburg, Fla. Number 11 is “Remember the Holocaust,” which you can do by visiting the city’s Holocaust museum — “where for $39.95 [you] can purchase a scale-model replica of a Polish boxcar used by the Nazis to transport Jews and others to the concentration camps.”

As a result, says Schoenfeld, “much of what goes by the name of Holocaust remembrance today … drains the nightmare of its horror, treating the most shattering event in modern history as a banality, or worse, an entertainment.”

With words like these, you would think the last thing people could accuse Schoenfeld of is Holocaust denial. But Littell, the 81-year-old fool, explicitly compares Schoenfeld with David Irving and Raymond Robert Faurisson, the world’s two leading Holocaust deniers. They are “vulgarians,” to be sure, whereas Schoenfeld is “more subtle” — but the impulse is the same, Littell says.

Another Holocaustologian, Stephen Feinstein of the University of Minnesota, says that Schoenfeld “has done as much damage as deniers.”

What can these men possibly mean? Simple: They now equate the field of Holocaust studies with the Holocaust itself. Thus, any effort to question Holocaust studies is itself a form of Holocaust denial in their eyes.

This was exactly what Yehuda Bauer feared when he expressed his concern with the rise of Holocaust studies — that the academics would confuse the scholarship with the Holocaust itself. That the effort to come to grips with an unimaginable horror would be replaced, in time, by the mundanities of academic life — careerism, corruption, naked ambition, and the thin-skinned inability to accept criticism.

Nobody would gainsay the inestimable value of the seminal scholarship about the Holocaust done by Raul Hilberg, Dorothy Rabinowitz and others. But they were not working in the field of Holocaust studies — they were historians trying to determine what happened and ensure that what happened would not be forgotten.

There is something indefinably questionable about making a permanent career out of the murder of 6 million people — especially when they themselves want to believe that they and their field of study are both beyond criticism.

Source:

John Podhoretz

New York Post, April 21, 1999

Debate rages over future of the Holocaust’s legacy

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Some say politicizing event will trivialize it

By Douglas Belkin

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

In the past 14 months, the director of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., was fired when he objected to the museum being used for political purposes.

The editor of an influential magazine on Jewish affairs was called “brainless when it comes to the Holocaust” for criticizing the growing field of Holocaust studies.

And scores of museum directors, curators and academics have been accused of commercializing the memory of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust to further political agendas and boost ticket sales for an increasing number of Holocaust exhibits and museums.

More than half a century after the Holocaust, defining, owning and placing it in context have become more complex and more contentious issues than ever. As the last generation of survivors enters their 70s and 80s, a debate within the Jewish community is intensifying: Who will speak for the victims after the last witnesses are gone? And what will they say?

The questions are not new, but as American colleges and universities study the Holocaust through a continually broader variety of lenses, the debate surrounding it is intensifying.

There are those who say the Holocaust should be treated as a sacred and distinctly Jewish event. Comparing the horror to anything else is demeaning to the legacy, the argument goes.

But others say for the Holocaust to be fully understood, it must be put into political context and interpreted through as many perspectives as possible. One result of that argument: Dozens of academic conventions pop up every year and hundreds of papers deconstructing the Holocaust through feminist, environmental and current geopolitical viewpoints are presented.

Last year, conservative columnist George Will slammed the growing industry of Holocaust studies in a column: “As the Holocaust becomes academicized, it becomes trivialized, reduced to just another instance of injustice.”

And in an opinion piece that ran in newspapers across the country last month, Gabriel Schoenfeld, the senior editor of Commentary Magazine, accused many Holocaust museum and exhibit curators and academics of “treating the most shattering event in modern history as a banality, or worse, as entertainment.”

Trivializing tragedy

“As the generation of survivors passes from the scene, this tragedy is up for grabs,” Schoenfeld said last week from New York. “There is a wide-scale trivialization being committed by people who purport to be the custodians of their memory. In a way, the Holocaust is being pigeonholed into the general trend of victimization.”

Stephen Feinstein, the acting director of the Center of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the man who called Schoenfeld “brainless,” said that deconstructing the Holocaust through secular or feminist or even environmentalist lenses is inevitable. The Holocaust did not just happen to Jews, Feinstein said, it happened to the world.

“There are some people out there who want to make (the Holocaust) a sacramental, pseudo-religious event to remember the victims,” Feinstein said.

“But whether we like it or not … the words `Holocaust’ and `genocide’ have come to intersect.”

As far as the academic debate on the Holocaust, Feinstein sees no basis for criticism: “Anything that gives rise to a rational discourse is good,” he said.

But it also can lead to charges that the memory of the 6 million is being exploited. That’s what Walter Reich accused state department officials of doing when they invited Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to visit Washington’s United States Holocaust Museum last year during stalled Middle East peace talks. Arafat would have been the first Arab leader to acknowledge the Holocaust, but Reich did not want the museum to be used as a political tool to jump-start the negotiations. Reich ultimately lost his job as the museum’s director.