Heeb Magazine Must Be Hilarious—Fake Holocaust Memoir Writing Contest

Note: This is posted at InTheMoment, Moment Magazine's blog. Still quite pertinent to JJers, methinks. I'm curious what you all think about it. Am I overreacting?


In their most recent gimmick, Heeb has outdone even their own high standard of Jewish tomfoolery. Really outdone it. The idiosyncratic Jewish quarterly has announced a fake Holocaust memoir writing contest.

Entirely out of jest, the publicity stunt comes from the exposure of fake Holocaust memoirs by Herman Rosenblat and Misha Defonseca.

The contest's rules include the following:

7. We reserve the right to mock any and all entries.
8. We reserve the right to publish and mock the winning entry.
9. "Memoirs" shall be defined as a form of writing, not a collage, short film or interpretive dance piece.
11. No parking baby. No parking on the dance floor.
12. No use of the words "tumescent," "engorged" or "moist," unless they are referring to cake
13. No previously published fake Holocaust memoirs
15. We are not liable for anything, anytime, anywhere, no givesies backsies, infinity.

The Holocaust, it's true, is easy joke fodder. Almost every stand-up comedian, Jewish or gentile, has at least one Hitler or Nazi joke. And okay, irreverence is Heeb's M.O. But it's an entirely different thing to use farcical memoirs to openly mock what really did happen in the Holocaust.

It's hard to imagine a survivor—perhaps an author of legitimate Holocaust memoirs—reading about the contest and finding it as hilarious as Heeb thinks it is. For that reason, it's hard not be offended by their charade. It's insensitive to say the least, and, were one to consider the struggles of survivors themselves, downright cruel.

Distance and the Holocaust

(Photo of the electric fence at Sachsenhausen concretation camp by bsto.)

Last night I couldn't sleep after reading Tadeusz Borowski's short story within the eponymous book "This Way For The Gas Ladies and Gentlemen."

Having taking classes and written on both tragedy and comedy, I find it is the combination of the two that makes the most effective emotive impact. Regarding Holocaust literature, think Maus, by Art Spiegelman (who I will get to speak to in April). Anyway we can talk about dark humor another day.

...I couldn't sleep last night.

But honestly, I knew that I could have if I had really tried. I hadn't shed a tear. And it comes down to one thing:

DISTANCE

Distance is our asset right now. Now is the perfect time to study the Holocaust. We--my generation--are removed enough to face the facts without being paralyzed or suffocated by them; we are far enough from Germany to avoid getting sick of seeing artifacts, evidence at every street corner. Even as I was affected by "This Way For The Gas Ladies and Gentlemen," I knew I could sleep.

Still, we are close enough to be touched by real survivors, to see a grandfather struggle to pronounce the word "Auschwitz" not because of his experience but because of what could have been his experience. We are close enough to know what the Holocaust really was.

Our generation, therefore, has the biggest burden to shoulder. No one-on-one interviews with survivors or first-hand witnesses. They will mostly be gone by the time we finish graduate school, certainly before we reach 40.

No. We will be the ones who delineate the canon, who write the policies, who adjudicate between representations and memories of the Holocaust.

It's a responsibility and an honor. But our time, of course, is flying by.

Holocaust Remembrance Week III--"Holocaust"?

Where we're running a series of posts in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year is on Friday, May 2.

Earlier today I was approached by a JJ reader who wanted me to flesh out some of the things I had said on Monday's Holocaust post, especially regarding the Holocaust's position alongside other historical genocides.

Look. This is an exceedingly touchy subject. Obviously the entire Holocaust is, but what makes this so sensitive is that there are survivors alive today who I fear would feel disrespected by my conclusion. Now that we're some 60 years beyond the Holocaust, it's just too easy to be casual and flippant when comparing the Holocaust to other genocides.

This is why I said that nobody should ever say that any genocide is worse than another. It elevates the status of one people's lives above that of another country. I don't care how a people are massacred. Whether millions are killed by gas or by machete is irrelevant to me--a human life is a human life. And when they are wasted according to some bogus racial ideology it makes their deaths more iniquitous than, perhaps, a carjacking murder, but no Tutsi's death is/was better or worse than a Jew's.

And for that matter, I'm not so interested in how many are murdered. I have trouble imagining any collection of corpses larger than maybe 300. It becomes hazy to me. So whether it's one million or six million, why does it matter? Is the Rwandan genocide really 5 million bodies less appalling than the Holocaust?

Let's be perfectly straightforward here. The definition of the word "Holocaust" (despite how I and most people use it) does not necessarily include the death of 6 million Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany.

A "Holocaust" is a massive conflagration that results in utter destruction.

Really, then, it's a symbolic word--not unlike using the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to refer to the deaths in Bosnia in the 1990s.

And to a certain extent, one could argue that it is unfair to bestow the term Holocaust only on to the Jewish genocide. Well, I don't know about that. While I don't believe that the Holocaust can be elevated above other genocides, I do think that it can be distinguished from them. Indeed, each and every one of history's genocide's has distinct and unique characteristics.

I alluded a bit to what separates the Holocaust from other 20th century genocides on Monday. But here's what doesn't separate the Holocaust: the fact that a ridiculous amount of people were murdered in cold blood and the murder was officially sanctioned and carried out by the highest powers in government.

Also, that the idea of a "Jewish plague" (so well explained by Hitler in his Mein Kampf, right) was pervasive in the very foundation of Nazi Germany is not unique. The main justification for most of the other 20th century genocides, as far as I understand them, also involved "cleaning" a country of its "parasites."

I think what does separate the Nazi version, however, is that it occurred in such a large and Western state. This is what's so shocking about the Holocaust. While many people have (partly correct) notions of Africa and Southeast Asia as less educated and therefore closer to barbarism, this was Germany! Home of some of the world's greatest philosophers and artists and musicians and thinkers.

And the Holocaust also received a large amount of scrutiny after the fact thanks to the testimonies of perpetrators at the Nuremberg Trials and the Eichmann Trial, and thanks to the testimonies of survivors like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel who wrote about their experiences.

I have yet to read testimonies of the other 20th century genocides that appear on the New York Times bestseller list.

But again, this is not to say that the Holocaust is at all "worse" than other genocides.

Here's what I'll conclude. Because of its scope and enormity, because of its pseudo-intellectual basis, because of its highly structured execution, the Holocaust is probably the most impressive genocide of the 20th century. But isn't killing one million Tutsis in 100 days "impressive"???

Ugh, this makes me sick.

It all comes down to my original point: that any discussion of genocide comparison is grotesque and inappropriate. I tried, really. The victims' deaths deserve to be honored and studied so that we and future generations don't allow their deaths to have been in vain--we must learn so we can prevent it from happening again.
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Today's Holocaust art is a poem, much different from the painting I posted yesterday.

The poem is "Babi Yar" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (who I saw read once here in DC, and he was so animated and passionate and emotional when he read, it was truly beautiful...even if I could hardly understand the words through his thick Russian accent). It is about the massacre there, which I referred to in yesterday's discussion of the Einsatzgruppen.

Translated by Benjamin Okopnik, 10/96

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.

I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander o'er the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.

It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself. *1*
The Philistines betrayed me - and now judge.
I'm in a cage. Surrounded and trapped,
I'm persecuted, spat on, slandered, and
The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills
Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face.

I see myself a boy in Belostok *2*
Blood spills, and runs upon the floors,
The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded
And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.

I'm thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of "Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!"
My mother's being beaten by a clerk.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The "Union of the Russian People!"

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I'm in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other's eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed - very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.

-"They come!"

-"No, fear not - those are sounds
Of spring itself. She's coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!"

-"They break the door!"

-"No, river ice is breaking..."

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I'm every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May "Internationale" thunder and ring *3*
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that's blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that's corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!

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NOTES
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1 - Alfred Dreyfus was a French officer, unfairly dismissed from service in 1894 due to trumped-up charges prompted by anti- Semitism.

2 - Belostok: the site of the first and most violent pogroms, the Russian version of KristallNacht.

3 - "Internationale": The Soviet national anthem.



Photos by bbc and amazon.

Holocaust Remembrance Week 2008--Not Just Auschwitz

Where we're running a series of posts in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year is on Friday, May 2.


I used a poem for the art in Monday's Holocaust Remembrance post, so today I'll use a painting.

I remember learning about this painting (right)--Lager, 1982--while in Germany. It's by Sigmar Polke and I was shown it as a contrast to the majority of the art that was coming out of Germany after World War II. Artists struggled for decades to incorporate some kind of coherent German aesthetic into their work--considering the country was divided, history (which makes identity) was burdensome, and a cloud of guilt followed everyone around...it wasn't an easy task.

Yet their attempts were, in my opinion, a reflection of the nation's (and world's) reaction to what had happened from 1933-1945. Look at these cheerful works by Ernst Wilhelm Nay, for example. They reek of rationalization and ignorance to me. Or how about the famous "Concept Spatiale" (1959) by Italian Lucio Fontana? Sort of a creative way to get your anger out, don't you think?

The point is, I think that S. Polke's painting above is a more mature reaction to Germany's history. That it was painted in 1982 is meaningful, for by then there was time for an entire generation to come between the now and the Holocaust.

The reason why it is mature to me is that it is able to acknowledge the horror and the grotesqueness of the Holocaust and its concentration camp system--the fact that there is such an explicit rendering of a camp is itself important--while also pointing to the gray area in what the Holocaust really was. Whether he masked the area where the prisoners would be as a statement of victim anonymity, Germany's ignorance, or simply because their suffering is as dark as their cover--I don't know.
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Even though the painting features a concentration camp, I wanted to write today a bit about how the concentration camp system is overstudied. The fact is that the Holocaust is far more than the forced labor, or the extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The death camps are the most visible aspect of the Holocaust. And I wouldn't dispute the validity of this focus. But the fact is that the Einsatzgruppen also killed about one million Jews, the same number as Auschwitz.

Einsatzgruppen means "task force" in German, and they were in effect a special unit. As the German armies pushed East into Russia in 1941, these units filled in behind and disposed of the Jews in former Russian/Polish territories. They eventually became mobile killing units.

At first, these units killed mostly male Jews because the pretext that they were only killing political and physical threats still sufficed. The Germans also encouraged local anti-Jewish pogroms so that Jewish deaths could appear to be the result of grassroots hate.

But then Heinrich Himmler (who was in charge of the Einsatzgruppen) and others in charge decided they didn't want an entire generation of avengers to reach adulthood, and they began killing everybody.

Some of the killings you have probably heard about--Babi Yar, or "Erntefest"--and I don't think I have to go into much detail regarding the methods of killing or number dead, etc.

Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, which I've linked to in numerous previous posts already, describes one such unit in thorough disgusting detail. He tells of the amount of alcohol that was distributed by the higher-ups before the killings, and about how the previously regular German police forces were hardened and transformed into cold blooded mass murderers.

I wanted to write all this up so that when we think of the categorical destruction of the Jews in the Holocaust, we think of more than just the concentration camps, the death camps, and the ghettos. The fact that these units were created specifically to round up civilians in former Russian territories and summarily kill them tells a whole other story.

It deepens our understanding of the Nazi plan to kill the Jews and helps us recognize the abhorrent ways they went about it. After all, these were eye-to-eye deaths. Human-to-human. This wasn't about pressing bodies into a gas chamber and shutting the door.

This was about killing one person at a time...one person at a time...

...and they killed 1.3 million this way.

Holocaust Remembrance Week I--Other Genocides

Where we're running a series of posts in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year is on Friday, May 2.



The point of studying any genocide is to find the kernel of life-meaning that each carries. I firmly believe that the Holocaust sits at the pinnacle of human existence. The German intellectualization, rationalization, and physical implementation of the Holocaust truly astounds me. When I zoom out, far away from the emotions that entangle such thinking, I find myself almost impressed with the organization and execution of the Holocaust--not to mention the mental/emotional blockades required to carry out such disgusting actions.

But then we must zoom back in. And what is there at the bottom if not humans? And we must ask ourselves, what in the world could possibly induce humans to slaughter so many people?

The answer to these questions takes us into what we are really made of. I am a follower of the opinion of historian Christopher Browning, who, in his book Ordinary Men (above) follows Reserve Police Battalion 101 and concludes that they were utterly normal. That there was nothing innately evil about the men who killed so many.

Of course, such an analysis leads to the biggest question of the Holocaust: who's to say that if any one of us was in the position of the rank-and-file Nazis, we wouldn't have done exactly what they did?

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This week we're going to be running posts for Holocaust Remembrance, and though we at JJ realize that it's not exactly the most pleasant reading, it is above all necessary--even, or rather especially, when you don't particularly feel like dealing with it.

And that's going to be the only apologetic utterance you'll get out of this one in regards to dealing with Holocaust Studies on an otherwise completely not self-righteous blog.


Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi (right) writes about the Holocaust's position in the center of human history in The Drowned and The Saved:

Years ago, Norberto Bobbio wrote that the Nazi extermination camps were "not one of the events, but the monstrous, perhaps unrepeatable event of human history." The others, the listeners, friends, children, readers, or even strangers, sense this, beyond their indignation and commiseration; they understand the uniqueness of our experience, or at least make an effort to understand it. So they urge us to speak and ask us questions, at times embarrassing us: it is not always easy to answer certain whys. We are neither historians nor philosophers but witnesses, and anyway, who can say that the history of human events obeys rigorous logic, patterns.

The fact is that any intelligent human who cares about the sorts of things that lie at the foundation of humanity--indeed, of existence itself--would do well to take a long, thorough look at the Holocaust.

So why should I be defensive about running a week of Holocaust posts? We'll fight through it, Ok?

Ok.

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Sometimes we find it difficult to position the Holocaust appropriately within the history of genocides and terror throughout human history. People too often separate one from the other, and usually based on personal biases. So if you talk to Armenians, they would no doubt elevate their genocide above the Jewish one, and both would probably distinguish theirs from the Cambodians', the Bosnian, the Rwandans', or the Sudanese's.

And I've been guilty of it too, as you can see in this mammoth piece I wrote after visiting Sachsenhausen concentration camp last summer.

Certainly, on a human scale, it is foolish to try and compare genocides or argue about which one is worse. It's a grotesque exercise, really, because it carries an implicit satisfaction. And though it might provide momentary pleasantness for a victim to hear that what they went through was the absolute worst, upon any sort of inspection they would realize how arbitrary such a label is.

That being said, I think that the Holocaust's position at the forefront of the recognizability chain is not unfair for the simple fact that it was intertwined with World War II. We all know that WWII implicated so much of the world, for so many years, and because the Holocaust was involved with it (as well as the fact that the Holocaust's victims were western, white, and related to Americans), its status as the most recognizable genocide is understandable and fair.

However, to say that one genocide is "worse" than another one is ridiculous. It would elevate the lives of one nation above another. Of course, this would mean that we also can't call one genocide "better" than another one, which means that as soon as something is labeled a genocide there's simply no justification not to interfere.

It's interesting that Primo Levi predicted where the other genocides would occur. He said that the Western world is too sensitive to genocides right now, but the Third World is at risk. And sure enough, while Bosnia was interfered with, Rwanda was let to run, and Cambodia's genocide was likewise unencumbered.

(Last Friday, I mentioned the genocide trials going on in Cambodia right now. This will be worth following for the next weeks.)

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Part of this week's posts will be Holocaust art. If you readers have any favorites, put them into the comments.

Here's Dan Pagis's "Written in Pencil in a Sealed Boxcar"

here in this transport
I am eve
with abel my son
if you see my older son
cain son of adam
tell him that I


Photos from Wikipedia and

Our Generation's Ignorance

Earlier today, I was reading "The Drowned and The Saved" by Primo Levi--the last book for the class on the Holocaust I'm taking--when I saw a kid from that same class walking towards me. We made brief, insignificant eye contact and he nodded at the book, saying, "That book sucks."

He was walking past me, and I had my headphones on, but I exposed one ear and called after him. "Why does it suck?"

He goes, "I don't know. It just does. It's real hard to read, especially at the beginning."

After he was gone, I couldn't read anymore. I just kept turning the book over in hand, flipping through its pages, thinking to myself: we're screwed, we're so screwed.

It's something I've had to argue against constantly when we've discussed books in that class. The other students feel compelled to say whether or not the book was "a good read." Some felt that the "Diary of David Sierakowiak" was a bad read because "it says on the back of the book that he died in Lodz, it ruined the ending for me."

RUINED THE ENDING?!!!!!! What is this? It takes all the strength I have not to blow up when they go on about how these books are easy or hard to read. I mean, part of the point that Levi and others spent so much of their worldly energy trying to get across is that OF COURSE it's not easy--but that the only way we can possibly get to the bottom of all this is to fight through the intellectual, emotional, personal, and traumatic barricades that stand in the way of remembering the lessons of the Holocaust.

And I can't help but worry for the future of humanity when this kid--one of the smartest kids in the class, there's no doubt--feels like it's appropriate to judge Levi's writing like it was a comic book. And I realize that my disappointment and anxiety is not reflected by the majority of my generation. And I realize that we're screwed.