Nov. 4



USA//CALIFORNIA:

Holocaust Stories Move to Academe
Foundation to transfer vast archive of survivors' testimonies to U. of
Southern California


The foundation started by the director Steven Spielberg that has amassed a
collection of nearly 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and
liberators will soon become part of the University of Southern California.
Scholars say the move will enhance the archive and Mr. Spielberg himself
says it will help fulfill his vision of a worldwide tool for teaching
about injustice and the need for tolerance.

Survivors "needed to tell their story," he says. Now the university will
preserve those stories and disseminate "the 52,000 voices that will never
be silent because we will protect them."

Mr. Spielberg's comments came in October before a packed audience of
students and university officials at a ceremony here marking the move a
change that will bring financial and technological obligations to the
university as well as new opportunities for scholarship and greater
international visibility.

Mr. Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History
Foundation in 1994, after he finished filming Schindler's List. ("Shoah"
is a Hebrew term for the Holocaust.)

Since then, the foundation has collected video testimonies from people in
32 languages from 56 countries including Jews, Roma, gay men and women,
and former political prisoners and stored them in a digital archive. The
foundation has also developed an extensive catalog and index of the
testimonies, making them electronically searchable by keyword. Researchers
at the archive and at four other institutions can call up any of the
testimonies from a search at the press of a button. So far, the full
collection is not available to the public online, in part because of
concerns that the films could be tampered with or misused, although
portions of it have been made available to museums around the world.

On January 1, the collection will move to the university, where it will
become part of a new interdisciplinary center, the USC Shoah Foundation
Institute for Visual History and Education. Joseph Aoun, dean of the
College of Letters, Arts & Sciences, says the university plans to use the
archive as the centerpiece for new programs and scholarship in the
emerging field of visual history. He also hopes the archive will help to
establish the university "as a magnet" for scholars studying the Holocaust
and other genocides.

'Opportunities for Collaboration'

The move will be good for the archive, says Douglas Greenberg, a historian
who has been president of the foundation since 2000 and will be executive
director of the new institute. The foundation is now located in a
collection of trailers on the lot at Universal Studios. "We don't live in
a community where education and scholarship are part and parcel of what
everyone around us does," he says of the current location. At the
university, with its schools of engineering, education, and communication,
he says, the "opportunities for collaboration are enormous."

Mr. Greenberg says he is eager, for example, to work more closely with a
University of Southern California professor of religion, Donald E. Miller,
who has been collecting testimonies from survivors of the Armenian and
Rwandan genocides. Such collaborations will allow the new institute to
evolve "to place the Holocaust in this broad context of genocide," Mr.
Greenberg says.

The institute will be part of the college, while the collection itself
will be managed by the university's Leavey Library, an early user of
digital technology.

A fundamental part of the deal is the university's pledge to preserve the
archive through time, and to make it accessible to scholars and others.
That means making sure that as technology evolves, archivists transfer the
digitized collection to the latest formats.

The university has already assisted the foundation in updating the archive
once, transferring the vast collection of digital tapes to a
state-of-the-art disk storage technology that makes the testimonies more
easily retrievable.

Jerry D. Campbell, the university's chief information officer and dean of
libraries, says the university doesn't know what kind of technology it
will use next, but promises that all the testimonies will be preserved.
The university will also assume financial responsibility for the
preservation of the original interviews recorded on Betamax videotapes,
which are stored and maintained by a private company in a secure,
temperature-controlled facility on the East Coast. Storage and maintenance
for the originals alone costs about $450,000 a year; the university
estimates it will have to devote an average of about $2-million a year to
the personnel and technology to keep the digital archive accessible.

Mr. Campbell says the archive is valuable because the testimonies offer
opportunities for research in many kinds of fields, including some "we
don't even know about."

It's "a quintessential research collection," he says. "It's the kind of
research data that will not age out."

Largest Collection

The Shoah Foundation was not the first to collect video testimonies of
Holocaust survivors and other witnesses, but it is notable for having
amassed the largest collection: 51,689. At the height of its activity, in
1995, the foundation had offices in 16 countries and was receiving as many
as 350 tapes a week from teams of trained interviewers. It stopped taping
in 1999. By the time the archive moves to the university early next year,
most if not all of the tapes will be digitized and cataloged.

A repository that began in 1979 in New Haven, Conn., and that is now
overseen by Yale University, contains about 4,300 testimonies in a dozen
languages. The United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial, in Washington,
holds about 6,000. Both continue to conduct interviews on a small scale.
Neither collection is available digitally, however.

The Shoah archive is believed to be the largest publicly available video
archive in the world, requiring 200 terabytes of storage space. (A
terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.)

Still, as some outside experts have noted, USC's challenge in taking over
the archive goes beyond issues of technology.

For one, it will have to figure out ways to distribute the content without
letting it get into the hands of people who might hack into it to distort
it. The Shoah Foundation has been sensitive to that concern and "has
avoided making things too public," says Howard Besser, director of the
Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at New York University.
"Universities don't have a lot of experience dealing with that."

Mr. Greenberg acknowledges that access policies in the early years of the
foundation were tighter because of concern for interviewees' privacy. That
concern has diminished as survivors have died, he says, but security
issues remain. "High-tech ability is not confined to people of good will,"
he notes.

Thanks to a $1-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2003,
the Shoah Foundation now makes the material available over the high-speed
computer network run by Internet2 to Southern California, as well as to
Rice and Yale Universities and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. As
a result, says Mr. Greenberg, there are now places at universities where
library users could burn DVD copies of the material off computer networks,
and do who knows what with it after that. At first, he says, "that was a
hard thing for us to get over." (Under the foundation's current policies,
any copying of the material that goes beyond "fair use" requires
permission from the foundation.)

But Mr. Greenberg says the risk of the material being misused is far
outweighed by the potential good that can come from students and others
seeing the testimonies.

Mark Jonathan Harris, a professor of film production at the university who
uses the archive in his documentary-film classes, says the testimonies are
a powerful teaching tool, even for students who think they know about the
Holocaust because they have "seen it on the History Channel."

Seeing and hearing it "on a personal level has a different kind of impact
on them," says Mr. Harris. It "teaches them about empathy, about
compassion, and about listening," he says. The professor used the archive
himself to find subjects for his Academy Award-winning documentary film,
Into the Arms of Strangers, about moving Jewish children out of
Nazi-occupied Europe to non-Jewish families in Britain.

Other scholars have also found the archive invaluable, particularly
because some aspects of the Holocaust are not very well documented or
studied.

Christopher R. Browning, a professor of history at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, is using about 80 of the Shoah Foundation's
testimonies, as well as material from other archives, to reconstruct the
history of three Nazi-era labor camps in the Polish town of Starachowice
for a new book. About 3,000 people worked as slaves in the camps'
factories during World War II, he says, making and shipping munitions for
the German military.

"Without this collection of testimonies, we had no history of these
camps," says Mr. Browning, whose previous book on the Holocaust is
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland (HarperCollins, 1992).

Society and scholarship will be better served once the university is able
to make the material more widely available, Mr. Greenberg says, assuming
that it can remain technologically secure.

"It's a mistake, an understandable mistake but a mistake nonetheless, to
treat the Holocaust as if it's different from another historical event,"
he says.

Within a year, he says, he hopes to extend access to the full archive to
as many as a dozen additional institutions with connections to Internet2's
network and then systematically broaden access to it after that while
making sure it can continue to support additional users. In their current
format the digital files contain so much data that they cannot be properly
transmitted over the regular Internet. The archive has no plans to make
the entire archive freely available online, but Mr. Greenberg says he
hopes that once the foundation moves to the university, it will collect a
representative sample of testimonies, compress the video so it can be
carried over the Internet, and then make them available online, along with
a simplified search engine.

Studying Memories

Like others, Mr. Greenberg says he understands that the Shoah testimonies
are imperfect history because they rely on aging witnesses. But he says
that is all the more reason he is glad to see the material being moved to
a university environment. "The job of scholars is to take these documents
and use them the way scholars would use other material," he says.

He says he expects the move will be "very much like a great collection of
manuscripts coming into a university." Before too long, he hopes the
archive will become a tool to recruit faculty members and graduate
students.

The foundation itself has produced a number of multimedia products, study
guides, and curricula on tolerance, using testimonies from the archive,
and that activity will continue under the oversight of the university.

The foundation will be leaner in personnel when it moves to the
university. About 25 of the foundation's 100 employees will join the
institution, including some fund raisers. The jobs of about 50 employees
who work in cataloging and indexing were scheduled to end at the end of
the year. University officials say they can use their own administrative
staff to handle the work of 25 employees who won't be joining the
university.

The university hopes to raise at least $100-million within seven years to
endow the institute. Over its lifetime, the foundation has raised about
$150-million, of which about $65-million came from Mr. Spielberg. The
filmmaker says he plans to remain involved with the archive "as an
ambassador" for its work.

In a talk with reporters after the ceremony, Mr. Spielberg said he
expected that fund raising would be a little easier once the foundation
moved to the university. For many years, he said, he had served as the
"kosher seal of approval" for the archive as benefactors considered
whether to donate to it. But being a successful and wealthy movie director
wasn't always a draw.

"There is a prejudice against figures from Hollywood, with their pet
charities and little do-good projects," he said. "I'm sad to say it, but
the Shoah Foundation is going to be taken much more seriously than it has
been with a filmmaker at its head."

C.L. Max Nikias, the university's provost, says the university was already
in talks with some donors about gifts to the institute's endowment, and
with another potential donor who may be interested in giving money for a
building on the campus to house the institute and other multimedia
programs.

Mr. Nikias, who negotiated the final deal on behalf of the university,
says Southern California will assume formal ownership of the foundation so
that the university can legally receive gifts that donors have designated
for the foundation in their wills or estate plans.

Mr. Spielberg did not attend Southern California he was rejected as a
transfer student in the late 1960s but he is a member of its Board of
Trustees. He said after the ceremony that the university's experience with
multimedia technologies, and its commitment to use that expertise to
preserve the archive, was an important factor in making the move. "I feel
very safe in that way," he said.

The worldwide reach of the university was also crucial to the decision.
"We need the credentials" that Southern California can offer, Mr.
Spielberg said.

Mr. Nikias says he also expects that as the institute becomes better
known, it can build upon the international relationships that the Shoah
Foundation has already developed, and attract interest from scholars
around the world. That, in turn, could help the university's own faculty
members win support from donors and foundations eager to support projects
that involve the archive. "I see a lot of grants coming through the
institute," he says.

Mr. Spielberg said he had watched about 200 of the testimonials from start
to finish, and bits of countless others in the early days of the archive,
they ran continuously on several computer screens in his office, as the
foundation was digitizing videotapes.

As the archive now shifts its focus to become more of a tool for scholars,
he says he has no misgivings about its evolution. The stories are so
powerful, he said, that even academics who are known for trying to be
dispassionate are struck by them.

"The content is the loudest voice," he said. "Scholars are moved to tears
just like every other human being."

(source: The Chronicle of Higher Education)


**********************


USA//MISSOURI:

Browning to address Holocaust denial

By Mary Kastens

Considered by many to be the pre-eminent scholar on the Holocaust,
Christopher Browning, Ph.D., will present the Holocaust Memorial Lecture
titled "Holocaust Denial in the Courtroom: The Historian as Expert
Witness" at 11 a.m. Nov. 9 in Graham Chapel as part of the Assembly
Series.
His talk will touch on his experience as an expert witness in recent
famous court cases involving Holocaust deniers.


Christopher Browning
How ordinary Germans came to accept the wholesale massacre of the Jewish
people is a central theme in Browning's pioneering scholarship of the
Holocaust.

The exhaustive research he conducted is evident in his definitive account,
The Origins of the Final Solution: September 1939 to March 1942.

The "Final Solution" generally refers to the Nazi plan to exterminate the
Jewish people. Browning's approach sets him apart because he does not see
the "Final Solution" as a master plan established by Hitler alone at the
beginning of the Nazi era, but rather as a series of decisions made by
many people that evolved over a period of time.

"The various perpetrators who became involved in the 'Final Solution' and
their decision-making processes were not unique," said Browning in a
February 2004 interview in The Atlantic Monthly.

He said the Holocaust was not a mystical event that we cannot understand.
It was a coming together of common factors and ordinary people.

Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University
of North Carolina. He earned a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin.

He has been an expert witness at trials of accused Nazi criminals in
Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as in the "Holocaust
Denial" trials of Ernst Zundel in Toronto (1988) and Irving v. Lipstadt in
London (2000).

(source: The (Wash. Univ.) Record)





(in) CANADA:

Reichert lecturer examines treatment of Holocaust orphans by Catholic
Church


Did the Vatican play a role in preventing Jewish children, harboured by
the Church and Christian families, from being returned to their community
after World War Two? Michael Marrus, speaker for the second annual Toby
and Saul Reichert Holocaust Lecture, presented new historical evidence
that shed light on this controversial question on Sunday.

Marrus, Canadas leading Holocaust expert, spoke about a recently uncovered
document written in French in 1946 from the Supreme Congregation of the
Holy Office stating, A [Jewish] child that has been baptized cannot be
given to an institution if their Christian education cannot be assured,
implying they would not be released to the Jewish community.

The letter also said the Churchs policy was to avoid putting anything in
writing about their position on what should be done with the thousands of
orphaned Jewish children around Europe, and deal with each case
individually.

The document further states that Jewish children in Christian custody who
were not baptized and lacked living parents, insofar as they were not old
enough to decide their own fate, should not be turned over to people who
have no right to them, implying that reclaiming the children was not a
prerogative of the Jews.

Although some have suggested this evidence indicates that Pope Pious XII
was a kidnapper and a war criminal, Marrus stressed that the language of
the document, and the socio-historical climate in which it was written,
must be taken into account before condemning the Vatican.

Jewish children, survivors of the Holocaust, were alone on highways, in
woods and in mountains: tens of thousands of them with nowhere to go. It
was clear that it was a desperate situation, but their numbers and
locations were unknown, he explained.

Marrus said that the Vatican was likely hesitant to solidify their
position on what should be done about the children, preferring to examine
the issues case by case because of the ambiguity and variability of facts
surrounding the issue.

He also pointed out that the Churchs response to releasing baptized Jewish
children referred to their surrender to the custody of Jewish
institutions, not families.

Catholic institutions and families rescued Jewish children from the Nazis:
these were acts of extraordinary generosity and courage. People risked
their lives to harbour them, he said.

Marrus said attachments formed during the foster care of the children made
Christian families and establishments reluctant to relinquish them to
Jewish institutions, rather than the childrens biological Jewish families.

He concluded that there is evidence that giving Jewish children who had
been baptized to Jewish institutions after the war was a problem in the
Vaticans eyes. However, he attributed much of the hype about the issue to
the culturally induced fear of Jewish assimilation.

Jewish officials were driven largely by a nightmare inherited from their
culture of losing their children to Christians who would take them, he
said.

They were thinking about survival, fearing assimilation and believed that
the Christians did not stop at the childrens physical rescue, but sought
to rescue their souls into the Catholic community.

The annual Toby and Saul Reichert Holocaust Lecture is made possible by
the couple whose namesake it bears: Saul is a Jewish survivor of the
holocaust who moved to Edmonton after the war. He lost his mother and
siblings during the Nazi regime.

(source: The Gateway)





GERMANY:

As recent films prove, Holocaust still on the German mind


Sixty-seven years ago, on Nov. 9, 1938, Nazi-organized mobs burned and
looted thousands of German synagogues and Jewish stores during
Kristallnacht, the opening salvo of the Holocaust.

How are the grandchildren of the perpetrators dealing with this legacy?
Four recent German movies show that far from forgetting its nations past,
todays generation is still wrestling with it, at times obsessively.

The Germans have a word, of course multisyllabic, for this internal
struggle. It's Vergangenheitsbewltigung, literally mastering the past, but
better understood as coming to terms with the past.

The four films themselves can be divided into three categories, or three
ways of wrestling with the Nazi legacy: As a documentary on the past evil.
As two movies celebrating good Germans who resisted. And through one
idiosyncratic comedy that carries the hope that Germans and Jews are
beginning to see each other as just normal neighbors, without guilt or
rancor.

"The Goebbels Experiment," which played in the Bay Area recently, is the
least artful and most depressing film of the lot, but it casts a hypnotic
spell.

Joseph Goebbels was the brilliant propaganda minister - Reich liar-general
of the Nazi regime, and he kept voluminous diaries throughout his life.

What the film does is to let Goebbels speak for 107 minutes, via the
English narration of actor-director Kenneth Branagh, while illustrating
the words with appropriate news clips.

"Before the Fall" helps answer the question of why Nazi youngsters fought
fanatically to the end when it was clear that the war was lost - and what
happened to the few who dissented.

The setting is an elite napola, a political institute where promising
teenagers trained to become the future Nazi governors of Moscow and
London. Graduation from a napola guaranteed a bright future career and
this prospect lures 16-year-old Friedrich. He fits right in until he
befriends Albrecht, who, as an unathletic, sensitive bookworm, is
obviously out of place. Albrecht is there because his father, the regional
Nazi governor, has the pull to force his son into the elite school.

But when Albrecht protests the massacre of unarmed Soviet prisoners of war
in the nearby woods, the story turns tragic. Friedrich stands up for his
disgraced friend and is expelled.

Carrying the point much further that there were some Germans who refused
to fall into line is "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days."

Scholl, a belated heroine in postwar Germany, was a 21-year-old university
student in Munich, who with her brother and some friends, organized the
resistance group called the White Rose.

In 1943, while surreptitiously stashing anti-Nazi leaflets at the
university, she was caught, put through a show trial and beheaded by a
guillotine.

In a category of its own stands "Go for Zucker: An Unorthodox Comedy,"
which swept Germany's top cinema awards this year as a surprise hit. Zucker
played at this years San Francisco International Jewish Film Festival.

This is a film that gets its laughs and warmth by showing what happens
when a completely secular and assimilated Jew has to host a fervently
religious one.

A similar plotline drives the current Israeli hit "Ushpizin," with the
difference that while the one is set in Jerusalem, the other takes place
in contemporary Berlin.

In "Zucker" middle-aged Jaeckie Zucker (formerly Jacob Zuckerman) ekes out a
precarious existence as a pool shark and gambler. Raised in Communist East
Berlin while his mother and brother fled to West Berlin, Jaeckie left the
Jewish "club" a long time ago and is used to living on his wits, such as
they are.

His fortunes look up when he hears that his mother has died, leaving a
sizeable estate. The catch is that as a condition of the inheritance he
must reconcile with his long-estranged brother Samuel, a fervently
religious real estate tycoon from Frankfurt.

Director Dani Levy, a Swiss-born Jew whose parents had fled Berlin, thinks
that "Zucker" has helped defuse some of the tensions.

"Jews have always been able to laugh at themselves and here is a movie in
which Germans can laugh with the Jews, not at them, he said. If we laugh
with other people, thats a sign that you like them. That's the best way to
win people over and cross borders."

(source: Jewish News Weekly)