I was more than a little startled when Konrad Adenauer approached me in the Old Market.

Sure, I was visiting Cologne, Germany, Adenauer’s hometown. But I had never imagined I’d lay eyes on the famous statesman who served as the German republic’s first post-war chancellor—much less get a wave from him.

Not least because he died six years before I was born.

But I had traveled back to 1926, when Adenauer was Cologne’s mayor, courtesy of TimeRide, a virtual reality tour.

I’m not much for tourist attractions, which TimeRide—which also operates in Dresden, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt—most certainly is. I took the tour, which involves entering a storefront on Cologne’s Old Market and sitting in a streetcar inside, after my colleagues at a Cologne-based democracy NGO suggested I try it. I’m glad I did.

Because TimeRide suggests possibilities not just for remembrance of difficult pasts, but also for how communities envision their democratic futures.

The idea of using virtual reality to document horrors is not new. The state of Bavaria created a virtual reality version of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp to assist with the prosecution of Nazi war criminals (VR can answer claims by suspects that they couldn’t have seen executions or the gas chambers from where they worked.) And VR has become an important tool for Holocaust museums and other sites that memorialize genocide—notably with the recent Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center exhibition The Journey Back, which takes viewers on a journey through concentration camps with survivors.

And, as with TimeRide’s Cologne 1926, VR represents a form of historical preservation, a virtual re-creation of structures and spaces that have been damaged or lost, like ancient sites destroyed during warfare in Syria and Iraq.

But such VR projects have also raised questions. Can there be equal access to history if it’s tied to an expensive technology? Could “virtually real” representations of extermination camps or war force people to relieve old traumas—or cause new ones? Might virtual reality technologies, or the images they produce, be manipulated in service of false narratives that incite violence, renew old conflicts, or undermine democracy?

These risks are real, but so is the power of the technology to construct memory. TimeRide succeeds because it does something elemental—it shows just how much human actions can destroy our communities.

I found TimeRide more haunting than some war and Holocaust exhibitions precisely because it does not show you horrors. Instead, it takes you on a tour of interwar Cologne, in a moment of  Golden Twenties bloom. After I paid my 24 euros, boarded the stationary streetcar, and put on the VR headset, the ride transported me back to 1926. Cologne was renewing its Carnival tradition after World War I, the Spanish flu, and British occupation. I was visiting a city of horses and joyous music and people wearing colorful clothes.

The streetcar ride feels real. The VR renderings are detailed (TimeRide credits dozens of artists), and vibrations and airflow provide a sense of movement and atmosphere. “We want to make history that people can feel” with technologies that “open up a completely new experience of history,” Jonas Rothe, who founded TimeRide seven years ago, has said.

In this, TimeRide succeeds. Over 45 minutes, the ride recreates some 2,000 buildings and more than 3,000 people, among them Mayor Adenauer. You wind through dozens of neighborhoods, including the Jewish Quarter, before finishing at the beginning of a Carnival parade.

But the greatest power of the ride comes once it’s over, when you walk outside into the Old Market, adjust your eyes to the sunlight, and look around. Yes, the Rathaus—the old city hall where Adenauer governed—is visible, as is Cologne’s dome, its ancient cathedral. But almost nothing else remains as it was.

Of the 2,000 buildings it rendered in virtual reality, just 26 still exist.

Humans destroyed the rest. The Nazis took power in 1933. In Cologne, they disbanded the city government, removed Adenauer as mayor, and seized his home and bank accounts. What followed in Germany is all too well-known: the Night of the Long Knives, Kristallnacht, the Final Solution, world war, and the deaths of tens of millions.

Destruction continued after the war had ended. Some structures in Cologne that survived the war were torn down under ill-considered or corrupt post-war redevelopment schemes. (Cologne’s less-than-clean politics once earned it the nickname “Chicago on the Rhine.”)

After TimeRide, I sat for a while in the Old Market, scanning the buildings around me. I felt the fear of looking anew at this modern German city, recognizing just how fragile all of it is.

Once the intensity of the experience wore off, I found myself thinking of the possibilities. We could use virtual reality proactively, to force us to reconsider how we impact our cities and communities.

Imagine visitors to today’s massively overdeveloped Beijing taking a virtual reality tour back to the long-gone hutong neighborhoods of the capital city, which I wandered as a small child in the 1970s. Or if we could sail virtually on lakes that have dried up (like Peñuelas Lake in Chile), or take a boat through the Amazon of 200 years ago, or lace up virtual snow shoes to walk across melted glaciers.

Could we see the Indigenous communities destroyed in previous centuries by settlers and soldiers? Could we visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki before the atomic bombs? Or could we go back just two years ago to Mariupol before the Russian military destroyed it in their Ukraine war?

In my hometown of Los Angeles, a city of great imagination and thoughtless urban planning, I want virtual reality to take Angelenos back to the great neighborhoods we’ve bulldozed—the Old Chinatown obliterated for a train station in the 1930s, or the Chavez Ravine evacuated to build Dodger Stadium in the early 1960s. Could visiting that past give us more respect for our communities and neighborhoods, and ourselves?

Even more than that, I want virtual technologies to show us different futures of our communities, our cities, and our societies. This way, everyday people can deliberate and vote on what gets lost, what gets kept, and what gets built—and all the power doesn’t belong to the people and institutions with the capacity to destroy nearly everything you can see.

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A man leaps into the air. The theater audience gasps, then relaxes as he safely lands. Jan Karski—scholar, diplomat, World War II Polish Resistance fighter, and the messenger who brought news of the then-secret Holocaust to the world when there was still time to stop it—has just escaped from Gestapo custody into the literal arms of Polish Resistance fighters, who will nurse him back to health.

The actor playing Karski, David Strathairn, tells the audience in Karski’s melodious Eastern European accent that after the escape, the Gestapo rounded up 100 Poles in retaliation. And executed 32 of them.

“Thirty-two lives for his one,” the play’s co-author, Clark Young, told me—describing the scene as a “profound moment of failure and trauma” for the protagonist.

The burden of Karski’s mission was tremendous, Young and co-author Derek Goldman highlight in their one-man play Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, which opens off-Broadway this month. The show debuted in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2019 and played at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater in the fall of 2021, which is when I saw it.

The play is a powerful reminder of Karski’s principles—truth and valor in the face of forces more powerful than you. The playwrights have shared Karski’s life and work with students at Georgetown University, where the real-life Jan Karski taught international relations. They and inclusive pedagogy specialist Ijeoma Njaka have been teaching a course focusing on the play since 2020.

During the play, the character of Jan Karski lands safely after jumping from a third-floor window to escape Gestapo custody. Photo by Rich Hein.

“It’s the kind of thing that truly inspires students, to see there is value even when you ‘fail,’” Young said. And Karski’s “failure” was truly profound: When world leaders did not act upon the proof of the Holocaust Karski delivered, millions died.

Like Karski, I was born in Łódź, Poland, and I also ended up in America, as he did after the war. When two childhood friends invite me to see Remember This in Chicago I initially balk. I struggle with the Polish part of my identity, distressed by developments in my homeland. But I revere Karski, so I go. And I am deeply grateful. Words and truth and witness—always an indelible part of my core—are so important, particularly today.

Jan Karski was born in 1914, and trained as a soldier and diplomat. He joined the fledgling Polish Resistance at the onset of World War II, after Poland was attacked by both Germany and Russia. Karski worked as a courier, delivering messages about clandestine German and Russian operations to the Polish government-in-exile in London. In late 1940, he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured for three days. He feared he would reveal secrets and tried to kill himself. The Gestapo took him to an army hospital, where he recovered from his suicide attempt and then escaped, a pivotal scene in the play.

Remember This opens in early World War II, when Germans established the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, forcing one-third of the city’s population into a section comprising just over two percent of its area. Leaders of the Jewish Underground arranged for Karski to enter the ghetto so he could report what was happening to the Polish government-in-exile, as well as to British and U.S. officials. He and Jewish and Polish Resistance fighters believed that if they told the world—if the Powers That Be realized what was happening—they might stop it.

Karski visited the ghetto twice in 1942 and saw the horrors we today know all too well: starvation and death and decay. Disguised as a camp guard, he later entered a transit camp from which thousands of Polish Jews were transported to Belzec death camp.

In 1943, Karski traveled to London and Washington to meet with Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Karski was told Churchill was too busy; he was passed off to the British foreign secretary. Karski met with FDR—who addressed him as “young man” and inquired about the fate of Poland’s horses, but did not ask a single question about Karski’s horrifying news about German Nazi death camps.

“You will tell your leaders that we shall win this war,” FDR told Karski. “The United States will not abandon your country.” But as we know, as Karski and the Jewish and Polish leaders would come to know, as the millions slaughtered would come to know, FDR and Churchill did not act to stop the Holocaust.

After his meeting with FDR, Karski stayed in the U.S. He published a memoir in early 1944, and earned his PhD from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service eight years later.

He taught at the university for 40 years, but did not speak publicly about his war activities for decades, until Claude Lanzmann interviewed him for the Holocaust documentary Shoah in 1985. In his first appearance in the film, Karski is silent for a few beats, breathing deeply. “Now, I go back,” he says. But he cannot. He breaks down and walks off screen. The trauma that still haunts him is painfully clear. Then he returns, and speaks.

In the documentary, Karski details his work with Szmul Zygielbojm, a Polish Jewish leader who figures prominently in the play. In a poignant scene, Karski reads a letter from Zygielbojm, written after the Warsaw Ghetto has been destroyed and most of Zygielbojm’s family has perished. Zygielbojm is anguished but still believes something can be done. “The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime,” the letter—a suicide note, it turns out—reads.

Zygielbojm hopes his final act of protest will finally spur action. But it does not.

A photo of the real-life Jan Karski on screen while the actor David Strathairn as Jan Karski stand on stage. Photo by Rich Hein.

That’s something that the Georgetown students passionately debate, Georgetown’s Njaka told me: What does it mean to tell, speak, live the truth in the face of such monumental opposition? They also discuss witnessing trauma that isn’t one’s own, especially relevant in many students’ passion for racial and social justice, she said.

It’s relevant to me too, and is why the plays affects me so.

Karski died in 2000. A decade later, I arrived in D.C. to attend journalism school and then went to work as a content director at the Polish embassy—where Karski had stayed when he came to warn FDR. I felt his presence everywhere: in the embassy’s hallways; in the robin’s-egg-blue main room where we held events and where he sits during the interviews I viewed on YouTube. On the anniversary of his death one hot July afternoon, I accompanied embassy officials to lay a wreath at his grave, on a sloping hillside in Mount Olivet Cemetery. The stone is stark, with just his and his wife’s names, and dates of birth and death. I also visited his memorial bench at Georgetown University—where Njaka held some of her classes on Karski this past fall.

When I watch Remember This, it is my first time in a theater since the pandemic began, and I am spellbound. I scribble notes in my program. I also weep—for Karski and his courage; for the Resistance fighters who helped him over and over again; and for today’s Poland: this small country that matters so much to me and my fellow Poles, but probably not to many others. I think about how one of the greatest sins against humanity was perpetrated on our soil and how terrible that legacy is. I think about the trauma that is so deep within those of us whose families were killed, and in those of us whose families survived.

Today’s Poland has veered away from Karski’s message of unity, humanity, and hope, embracing antisemitism and nationalism, declaring that the LGBTQ+ community is “an ideology worse than communism,” and enacting oppressive anti-choice laws.

Maybe this is why the current Polish government’s cruelty feels especially atrocious to me: You know better, I think. You know what it means when you define and vilify one part of a population as Other. You know what it means when people who can help, don’t.

At the end of the play, Karski says—about all he’s seen, all he’s witnessed: “It haunts me. And I want it to be so.”

I too was, and am, haunted. And I too want it to be so.

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In June 1941, when German troops overran the country, Vilna was home to 55,000 Jewish residents and 12,000–15,000 refugees from German-occupied Poland. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the spiritual and academic center of Holocaust remembrance, described Vilna before the Nazis arrived as “the spiritual centre of Eastern European Jewry, the centre of enlightenment and Jewish political life, of Jewish creativity and the experience of daily Jewish life, a community bursting with cultural and religious life, movements and parties, educational institutions, libraries and theatres; a community of rabbis and gifted Talmudic scholars, intellectuals, poets, authors, artists, craftspeople and educators.”

The Nazis, with the help of some Lithuanians, destroyed all that. In September 1941, they imprisoned the Jews of Vilna in two separate ghettoes.

The smaller, filled with Jews deemed incapable of work, was liquidated after six weeks, with 10,000 of its residents massacred at Ponary, a forest just outside the city. The 30,000 Jews imprisoned in the larger ghetto were kept alive, barely, and sent off to work in nearby labor camps until September 1943, when the second ghetto was closed. Some 8,000 ghetto residents too ill to work any longer were sent to be shot at Ponary or to the Sobibor death camp to be gassed; a few thousand of the stronger men and boys were transported to suffer and be worked to death in Estonian labor and concentration camps; the strongest of the women and girls were sent to labor camps in Latvia.

What happened in Vilna was just a microcosm of atrocities committed throughout Lithuania. By the war’s end, 90 percent of the country’s pre-war Jewish population of a quarter million had been murdered. While it was the Germans who pulled the triggers, they were aided and abetted at every step by local Lithuanians, who sought out the Jews or gave names and addresses to the Germans, who invaded their homes, stole their property, and marched the Jews to the killing fields where they would be shot, and who stayed behind to bury them in mass graves.

In traveling to Lithuania, I had hoped to find that, as in Rome, the past remained present in some way; that I would be able to experience it in its absence, soak in what had once been there and now survived in the ruins and the memorials. But the Vilna and Lithuania that I wanted to visit was no more. It had been cleared of its Jewish population. There were no Jews left in Butrimonys, the small village where my maternal grandmother’s family had come from, and only a few thousand in all of Lithuania.

Vilna had been replaced by Vilnius, which, now, in the third decade of the 21st century, had branded itself as one of the most attractive, tourist-friendly cities in Europe, with wondrous shopping opportunities, magnificent parks, a picturesque old city, world-class hotels and restaurants, and a thriving night life.

On my arrival and for the next several days, I wandered and was escorted through Vilnius and its outskirts in search of Vilna and some vestige of the Jews who had once lived there. I walked the broad pedestrian-friendly streets of the Vilnius Old Town, where I was staying, past small shops overstuffed with antiques, designer clothing, handicrafts, linens, books, and amber jewelry. Outside the Old Town, I visited the beautifully designed and overflowing malls and markets and fashion houses. And all the time, I thought about how this city had once been a center of Jewish life and learning, all of it now vanished—105 synagogues and prayer houses, six daily newspapers, and dozens of active, thriving theaters, libraries, museums, hospitals, schools, universities, institutes, and publishing houses.

On my final day in Vilnius, I visited Ponary just outside the city, where, according to historian Timothy Snyder, 72,000 Jews had been shot, buried, and then, at the end of the war as the Soviets approached, had their corpses dug up by the Nazis and their local helpers and burned so that no trace of the atrocities committed there would remain. The scene I took in in 2019 was bucolic, with tamed forests, well-marked paths, and memorials along the way. One had to struggle with one’s imagination to link together the memorials to the dead with the still green, verdant parkland.

Having spent five years trying to distance myself from the horrors of the Holocaust in eastern Europe so that I could write my book and lead my life, I was now standing where the atrocities I had read and written about occurred. I had expected that the keynote of my visit to Vilna and Butrimonys, and Lithuania, then Latvia, would be an inescapable mourning. But I quickly learned how difficult, if not impossible, it is to mourn an absence.

I found myself grieving not only for those who had died in the past, but for the Jewish activists and educators who had done all they humanly could to resurrect the community that had been destroyed. At war’s end, a few thousand Lithuanian Jews who had escaped and survived the Holocaust—in the Soviet Union or in hiding, or who had fought as partisans in the forests—returned to Vilna. But their attempts to rebuild a Jewish community were thwarted by the Soviets, who feared any expression of ethnic pride or nationalism, other than reverence for the Soviet state and the Communist Party.

The Germans had murdered the Jewish people. The Soviets, through the 1950s and for the two decades that followed, engaged in another form of genocide, removing any remnant of the built community. Schools and shuls and libraries and theaters were destroyed or repurposed; the gravestones in the Jewish cemetery were removed, pounded into fragments, then used as building materials in the new brutalized, Sovietized streets and buildings.

By the early 1970s, increased Jewish immigration from Russia and Ukraine led to the expansion of the Jewish population to almost 20,000. But these migrants found it impossible to put down roots in the city and the country where so many of the previous generations of Jews had been murdered. When the establishment of an independent Lithuanian republic in 1991 enabled the Jews to abandon the Soviet bloc, they did so. Most migrated to the United States or to Israel, where they could be part of thriving, living Jewish communities.

For those who remained in what was now an independent Lithuania, there remained a glimmer of hope that the Jewish community, after five decades of occupation by the Germans and the Soviets, had a chance to finally be reborn. But it was not to be. Non-Jewish Lithuanians were more concerned with memorializing the suffering of their people under Soviet tyranny than they were in recognizing the destruction of the Jewish community by the Germans and atoning for the participation of some Lithuanians in the genocide.

There are today roughly 3,000 Jews still in Vilnius—many of them recent arrivals with no ancestral ties to the city. Those I met and talked with on my trip still held tight to their mission to revive a living Jewish community with cultural institutions, yeshivas, day schools, shuls, but I got the sense that they knew their cause was lost.

If a thriving Jewish community was out of reach in the present, there was among the Jewish activists I met, the hope that physical markers and memorials to the past might preserve the memory of the atrocities that had been committed in the vanished prewar city, that Vilnius’s and Lithuania’s school children might be educated about this stain in their national history, and reminded that their capital city had once been the capital city of Jewish thought and culture.

The Jewish activists are proud of the progress they’ve made since 1991—and the declaration of Lithuanian independence—in integrating the history of the Shoah in Vilna into the history of Vilnius and Lithuania, proud of the memorials that have been erected in the city and at the killing fields of Ponary, proud of and seizing on every opportunity to educate rising generations about the city’s Jewish past. Still, it is an uphill battle that they and other Jewish residents in eastern Europe are fighting. The inhabitants of today’s Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, do not want to be reminded of the sins of their fathers and mothers, or of the atrocities they witnessed or participated in. They would rather not revisit the past or, to be more accurate, they would rather revisit a sanitized past where Lithuanians were the victims of violence, not the perpetrators.

As a historian, I try to bring the past back to life because it is a vital part of our present. We live in a continuum of time—the past is with us, embedded in our present, and we must recognize it as such. But that past is difficult to locate and resurrect. It is a foreign country that we can visit, but never inhabit, never speak the language, eat the foods, worship and live and love as the departed once did. No amount of effort on our part, as historians, can bring it back to life. All we can do is struggle to re-present that past in words and images.

This is what I tried to do in writing The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War. I wanted to recapture this forgotten chapter in the history of World War II, the Cold War, and the Holocaust. I wanted to instruct present generations to the reality that the suffering of the victims of war did not end with the cessation of hostilities. I wanted to show how 1 million refugees, 250,000 of them Jewish Holocaust survivors, were, after the German surrender, trapped in displaced persons camps in Germany for three to five years because their homes and homelands had been destroyed and no nation on earth would accept them for resettlement.

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The central insight is that a country can’t face up to its past alone. Germans needed help from Jews who came back to their hometowns after the war.

Spiegel, who was born in the nearby town of Versmold in 1905, belonged to a long line of cattle traders, a typical profession of rural German Jews into the 20th century. Well-liked and respected by both Jews and Christians in Warendorf and the countryside around it, he felt a part of the community, even with the intensification of antisemitism after the Nazis seized power in 1933. But the violence and destruction of Kristallnacht, in November 1938, convinced Spiegel that Jews had no home in Germany, and he and his family fled to Brussels.

When the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, they discovered the family’s hiding place, caught Hugo, and deported him. (The Nazis also caught Hugo’s first child, Rosa. His wife Ruth and son Paul escaped and survived by hiding in a village in Belgium.) Miraculously, Hugo survived Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz—the infamous camp where the Nazis ultimately took the life of his daughter when she was just 11 years old.

There are many remarkable stories of survival. We read fewer accounts of those who survived the Holocaust and then came back to their local communities in Germany. The Spiegels, without Rosa, returned to Warendorf and rebuilt a life, with Hugo Spiegel starting his cattle trading business once again.

Hugo Spiegel as “Champion Shot” by Leonard Freed. From the series “German Jews Today”, Warendorf 1961 – 1962; Jewish Museum Berlin, Inv. no. 2006/198/3

It would be easy to tell the story of how Spiegel’s postwar Warendorf chose to shut its eyes to the events of the Nazi period, especially in the first decades after the war. Yet in my research about how small towns in Germany eventually confronted the recent past, I have found that there is another story too. It is one of begrudging cooperation, of gradual acceptance, and of Jews and Germans eventually working together to commemorate the past.

The road to cooperation was a difficult one. In Warendorf, not everyone was happy about the Spiegels’ return. Hugo Spiegel did not shy from noting who had been a malicious Nazi and who not—and he had to fight tenaciously for years for the simplest commemorative gestures.

In 1946, Spiegel proposed to erect a stone that listed the names of the Jews who had been buried in the local cemetery, which local Nazis had destroyed in November 1938. But after two years of wrangling, the proposal was turned back. In 1953, he suggested establishing a memorial stone to recall “the Warendorf members of the Jewish community who died in the concentration camps.” For reasons difficult to discern, it, too, was refused.

Then, in 1960, Spiegel tried again, and began working towards a memorial to both the Jews who lay in the Warendorf cemetery and those “who died in the years 1933 to 1945.” Warendorf finally accepted the proposal in 1968. Two years later, in November 1970, a quarter century after the end of the war but early for such commemorations generally, the town unveiled the new memorial, with the mayor and Hugo Spiegel assuming center stage at the ceremony.

There were not many Jews like the Spiegels who came back to make their homes in the very towns where locals had jeered and howled with approval when the Nazis destroyed and desecrated synagogues. The Spiegels certainly remembered how Hitler’s stormtroopers wrecked the small synagogue on Freckenhorster Street, tearing up prayer books and Torah rolls, and tossing them on the street.

Most of the more than 200,000 Jews still alive in Germany when the Nazi government capitulated in April 1945 were from Eastern Europe, and by 1950 the vast majority of them had left the displaced person camps for the United States, Israel, and other countries. Only around 25,000 Jews remained in West Germany, and 2,000 in the East. Most were German-speaking and chose to live in big cities, where anonymity guaranteed a quieter life. Fewer returned to their erstwhile small towns, and in the general vicinity of Warendorf they probably numbered not more than a few hundred.

Interestingly, a lot of them were cattle traders, with genuine ties to the rural world. They included Hermann Michel, who survived Theresienstadt, and came back to his native Burgsteinfurt, where he ensured that the synagogue was commemorated early on; and Hans Frankenthal, a survivor of Auschwitz, Dora-Mittelbau, and Theresienstadt, who returned to the town of Schmallenberg, only to encounter a much more recalcitrant community in which old Nazis quickly occupied key positions and confidently told returning Jews, “One has to forget.”

But if we go beyond these noteworthy if infrequent cases of genuine returnees, we see that many Jews came back to visit hometowns in order to honor deceased parents and grandparents who died (one wants to say fortunately) before the horrors of the Holocaust began. As air travel became affordable in the 1970s, their numbers increased. And their first stop was typically the local cemetery.

In 1933, there were still some 1,700 Jewish cemeteries in Germany. In the 12 years after their seizure of power, Nazis desecrated or destroyed at least 80 percent of them. But most were only partly destroyed. In the postwar era, Germany remained the home of over a thousand Jewish cemeteries, their cracked and broken stones overgrown with weeds and brush. Neo-Nazis, hooligans, and ill-tempered and inebriated teenagers knew of them, and perpetrated hundreds of desecrations between 1945 and 1999. They desecrated some Jewish cemeteries numerous times—the cemetery in the small village of Randegg near Lake Constance in 1945, 1966, 1970, and 1986, for example.

Yet it was precisely when returning Jews gathered the courage to complain about the state of the cemetery in their home town, or to ask why there was no plaque or sign stating what had occurred during Kristallnacht, that something began to move among local people. This was often the moment that the work of commemoration began.

The local movers and shakers who sought to recognize the past were of different ages and occupations. They were schoolteachers, archivists working in a tiny office in the town hall, women from the preservation society, retired mayors and their wives who had time on their hands, idealistic high school students, and people who knew the Jews or family members who had come back. Their politics are not easy to pin down. Not a few Bavarians who reached out to returning Jews supported the Christian Socialist Union, one of Germany’s most conservative parties.

I have used this map to track when these communities put up a sign near the cemetery that told of the fate of the local Jews during the Holocaust, or a plaque noting where a synagogue once stood. The timelines show activity in the late ’40s (right after the Holocaust), followed by silence in the ’50s, the beginnings of work in the ’60s, a slowdown in the early ’70s, an uptick in the second half of that decade, and a commemorative explosion, starting in the early ’80s, and continuing thereafter.

In the midst of this commemorative explosion, in 1987, Hugo Spiegel died, and was buried in the very Jewish cemetery he had spent so many years trying to reconstitute. Three years later, largely on the initiative of its private citizens, the town erected a memorial stone for the synagogue and for the “Jewish citizens expelled, taken away, and murdered.” Caught up in what was now Germany’s pervasive culture of remembrance, Warendorf also renamed the small side-street leading to the synagogue “Hugo-Spiegel-Strasse.”

Historians sometimes attribute the impetus for these acts of remembrance to the famous trials (especially the Eichmann and the Auschwitz trials of the early ’60s) and, later, to the mini-series “Holocaust”, which aired in West Germany in 1979. But I am skeptical. In my investigations, I rarely read of local activists—those school teachers, archivists, and retirees—who mention being inspired by the miniseries (though some invoke the trials). Instead, I often see another logic at work.

Especially in the ’60s and ’70s, the fortuitous occurrence of German-Jewish cooperation, in this or that town, often made the difference. Sometimes an organization was behind it—the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, for example. Sometimes, it was a Jewish émigré or survivor coming back, and striking up a conversation. The USC Shoah Archive, colloquially known as the Spielberg Archive, has many such stories of return (indexed as “post-conflict visits”), including testimonies of some German Jews who rejected such visits, and who simply could not fathom why others would want to go back and visit.

German-Jewish contacts increased in the ’80s and ’90s, as scores of towns and small cities began to stage so-called “visitor weeks.” Large cities, such as Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, and Hanover had been staging them since the ’60s, asking hundreds and hundreds of Jews to return. In the last two decades of the 20th century, many smaller places followed suite, and invited the surviving Jews, now living across the globe—from Buenos Aries to Pasadena, from Tel Aviv to Paris—back to their home towns in Germany. The towns also paid for the trips.

For a whole week Germans and Jews talked about what had occurred, what has happened since, how their kids were doing, and where to go shopping. Regional politicians, and sometimes even national ones, attended too. Typically, the mayor spoke, local notables offered their reflections, and writers read deeply felt poetry aloud. Visiting Jews also got up and gave speeches, usually offering words of reconciliation. As the town served coffee and cake, Germans and Jews who were once neighbors looked at old pictures, putting together the shards of what was once a genuine community. Photos and transcripts of the proceedings were published in the local newspaper, and sometimes reproduced, complete with lists of attendees, in small books.

If we can believe newspaper interviews and follow-up statements, most Jews were glad they went back to their German hometowns, just as the Germans in those towns were proud of the steps that their local communities had taken. Often after one town had its “visitor week,” other communities in the region soon followed, wishing not to be left behind. More teachers got involved, and more students—even the bored ones. Soon the very definition of Heimat, of home or hometown, changed. No longer was the history of town X or Hamlet Y thinkable without the Jews who once lived there, and the wrong that had been done to them.

By the ’80s and ’90s, there were also larger, national developments that pushed Germans to enter into their history more truthfully: country-wide essay contests on the subject of Germany and its past; the galvanizing effect of a president, Richard von Weizsäcker, whose measured, precise, and sensitive words helped a nation think more deeply about its own history; the constant drum of prominent politicians, publicists, philosophers, and historians reflecting on an “unmasterable past”; and another infamous anniversary in 1988, marking 50 years since the November Pogrom. Meanwhile, all manner of organizations, such as the History Workshop (Geschichtswerkstatt), had sprung up, urging communities to look more critically at their Nazi past.

When it’s finally written, a good history of how Germans faced their past will show the constant feedback between the local and the national. Actually, it will do more than that—for Germany’s past was hardly its own. The turn to an honest telling of the German past had long been a transnational undertaking, with foreign eyes observing it with keen interest for decades. In important respects, it was also a German-Jewish undertaking.

The story of Hugo Spiegel and his family is instructive. His son Paul did not follow his father into the business of cattle trading, but instead became a writer for the Jüdische Allgemeine, one of the most important Jewish newspapers in Germany. In 1993, Paul Spiegel would become a major figure in the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and in 2000 its president. In that year, he also helped found an organization against xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism: Gesicht Zeigen! Für ein weltoffenes Deutschland e. V.M The name translates as: “Show your Face: For a Germany Open to the World.” The people of Warendorf evidently approved. In 2001, the town publicly honored Paul Spiegel.

There are many lessons—local, national, and transnational—that we could learn from this German-Jewish story: the importance of community work, the necessity of reaching across divides, and the crucial role that local schoolteachers, archivists, retirees, hobby historians, and preservationists may well play in the great transformations of a nation’s memory.

After reading literally hundreds of accounts of towns from Bavaria and Baden in the south to Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein in the north, I am especially impressed by the patience of these local actors. For it is they who put in the many years of work that often went into convincing town councils to repair a cemetery, put up a plaque, restore a synagogue, rename a street for a famous Jewish son or daughter, or add a monument in the central square of a hometown that had once wronged its former citizens. In many cases, they would also be the first to admit that they had help, and that the work of memory was not a German effort alone.

Another lesson is that, while tearing down hurtful monuments has its time, the necessary if arduous road of putting up the right monuments—fixing the wording on plaques, bringing histories together, commemorating forgotten victims and unsung heroes—runs through communities, town after town. It is a long road, and in the United States, it is still ahead of us.

The post It Takes a Village to Create a Nation’s Memory  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The house from the old photograph. The house my mother once called home.

For a moment, the curtain seems to flutter and everything else stands still. I am not overcome with emotion or moved to tears; I simply feel this jolt, and a little voice inside shouting, “Give me back our stuff.”

The real “stuff,” of course, cannot be preserved under glass. Along with a few gold coins hidden in a jar of cold cream and a box of photographs, the beating heart of the family escaped with my mother in 1939, on Kindertransport #8.

While more than 1 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust, my mother, Anita Heufeld, was one of 10,000 rescued by the Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Relief). Just short of her 14th birthday, she became an unaccompanied minor, fleeing for safe haven in England. Her parents and most of her extended family remained behind and were killed. She never went back.

My trip to Fischach was instigated when the Jewish Museum of Augsburg launched an exhibition on what had happened to the Kindertransport children from the region after they escaped. The curators wanted to include my mother’s story, and I surprised myself by deciding to travel to the opening of the exhibition, accompanied by my husband and my nephew. I wanted to honor my bracingly intelligent mom, fondly called Ni, who had emerged from her disrupted childhood remarkably intact, running her dress-making business and our family with aplomb. I was also goaded by the resurgence of white supremacy in the U.S. and Europe, and by a president who gleefully incited hatred in a way that my immigrant parents would have recognized with horror, betraying the American ideals they had taught us to value.

While my mother did not hide the past, she also did not dwell on it. But in the mid-1980s, when she was about 60, Ni agreed to an oral history and told us about the close-knit family she had left behind. We learned that Aunt Mina loved growing strawberries; that my mother’s parents were very happy together, their twin beds were pushed together, “no space between”; that my grandmother Erna wrote skits and my grandfather Samuel grew red carnations. Samuel was the respected secular head of the Jewish community, who “was just as anxious that other people should be safe as that we should be safe,” Ni said. When her children grew up to became social justice activists, my mother claimed us as the inheritors of the values her father had embodied.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Fischach had 853 inhabitants. That included 127 Jews. Today there are none. Yet in our absence, a curious phenomenon has emerged: Small committees, comprised largely of non-Jewish older women, have made themselves guardians of Jewish history and cultural memory in towns around southern Germany. In Fischach, the local history committee of the Historical Synagogue Locations Network is headed by retired schoolteacher Anne-Marie Fendt and a deputy to the mayor, Marianne Koos. “It was my mother who told me what she remembered about the Jewish families,” Anne-Marie recalled. “I think of her as an empathetic woman … She always called your grandparents’ home the ‘Heufeld Haus,’ When I started school, I passed the house every day.”

Marianne, who moved to Fischach as a young adult, grew up as part of a new generation that held their parents accountable for being “the perpetrator generation.” Her interest in history drew her to the committee. “When you hear the stories of the families who lived here, and you know the houses where they laughed and loved, had children, and thought they would live their whole lives there because they were Germans, like everyone else in Fischach—I think that changed my way of thinking a bit, it became more personal. It was no longer just German history; it also became my history.”

As the Fischach women showed us around the village, my mother’s memories took physical shape: the former Jewish school next to the building that had once housed the synagogue; the corner bakery where the Jewish families had taken their Sabbath challah to be baked, and where each child could recognize the family loaf by how it was braided. And the awareness, too, revealed in the census maps that Anne-Marie had constructed, that this community had not been ghettoized, that the Jews had lived side by side with their non-Jewish neighbors.

The incremental rise of Nazism put an end to that existence. In May of 1932, the Nazis came to Fischach, plastered the town with anti-Jewish propaganda, and beat up a young man for tearing a poster off the synagogue wall. In 1933, the Jews were tossed off the city council and the volunteer fire department.

Even if townspeople had better angels, most fell in line. Jews were ousted from the town chorus and the garden club. Children were banned from the soccer team, and then from attending school. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, when the Nazis incited open warfare on the Jewish population, destroying synagogues and businesses, the Jews of Fischach—stripped of most livelihoods and restricted from travel—could neither feed their families nor flee. And then, all the Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 60 were arrested and hauled off to KZ Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. Among them were my mother’s father and her brother, Walter.

Through the intercession of the town mayor and my grandfather’s tenacity, or perhaps simply by happenstance, the men were released by December. But from that moment on, my mother’s mother made it her mission to get the children out. Walter left first, when relatives in Great Britain arranged for his emigration. When a neighbor told my grandmother about the planned Kindertransport, she wrote a letter requesting spaces for my mother and her cousin Rudi.

Of all the details in Ni’s story, I always linger on her departure. Her tough and smart mother prepared her for the trip: hiding pieces of jewelry in her belongings so she would have something to sell if she was hungry; trying to fill her with all the information a growing girl might need; making meringues with whipped cream for her last dinner at home—the dessert my mother would love for the rest of her life.

But in the end, it was her beloved father who saw her onto the train full of fleeing Jewish girls.

My mother didn’t come to the train station with us, she stayed outside the house and waved goodbye. I had a little navy coat and a hat with red ribbons down the back, and a navy-blue dress I had made myself, with red buttons. And on the platform in Munich my father checked me in with the leader of the transport. And he put his hands on my head gently, blessing me, and he cried, and he kissed me goodbye, and he put me on the train. And that was the last time I ever saw him. And there was a train full of children. And there was a platform full of parents, all weeping.

The End of the Road

As one of the final stops on my Fischach journey, the Fischach committee women led me up a little gravel road to the old Jewish cemetery, resting behind a locked iron gate on a tree-shaded hill above the village. The committee played a key role in restoring the cemetery and lovingly oversees its maintenance.

My great-grandfather Max Heufeld, who died in 1936, is buried here, but my great-grandmother Amalie isn’t resting beside him in the space reserved for her. Instead, at age 79, she was among the village’s last 10 Jewish elders who were rounded up in August 1942 and carted off to their deaths at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Kim at the cemetery where her great-grandfather Max Heufeld, who died in 1936, was buried. Courtesy of Kim Fellner.

Fifty-six younger people from the village, including my grandparents, had been deported earlier that year, sent to Piaski, a prison town near Lublin, Poland. As best we know, they were all taken out to Piaski’s Jewish cemetery and shot—except for my grandfather, who was sent to nearby Trawniki as part of a work detail. By winter, he too would be dead, shot in another mass murder, dumped in another unmarked grave.

Decades later, my mother’s brother would return to Fischach and, on Amalie’s side of the gravestone, carve the names of those in the family who had been killed: Amalie. Samuel and Erna. Samuel’s two brothers and their wives. His sister Mina, only 36 when she was deported, well-remembered as the proprietor of the family kiosk, from whom many villagers had purchased their spirits, cigars, chocolate, tea and coffee. And my mother’s little cousin Rolf, deported from Munich to Theresienstadt along with his parents in June 1942 and killed at Auschwitz. My mother, her brother, and their cousin Rudi, who escaped on another Kindertransport for boys, were the only immediate family to survive.

Truths and Reconciliations

My mother recalled going to the movies in England in 1945 and seeing the ghastly first newsreel footage of the concentration camps, with their mass graves and skeletal survivors. She never looked at the footage again. “I never let myself specifically think about the people I knew going through that,” Ni told us. “I always include them in with all the other people. What happened to my parents is never far removed from my consciousness. But I have never allowed myself to individualize them in the event. That would have been intolerable.”

No wonder that I too insulated myself by seeing the murder of my family as part of a grim collective. But as I returned to the place of their existence, I was able to fully reclaim them as my own, and to confront the difficult knowledge of my grandparents’ final months on earth. Standing in that graveyard, I recognized for the first time that my family had constituted the largest grouping of victims from that village, and that they had mostly been in their prime, living full and nuanced lives, and so much younger than I had imagined them.

Sifting through that past with Anne-Marie and Marianne, we acknowledged that our current moment has discomfiting echoes of the history that had brought us together. As in Nazi Germany, the bluster about national greatness, comingled with a narrative of racial supremacy, is like a magician’s sleight of hand; what we are ostensibly seeing and hearing about current emergencies distract us from the concurrent erosion of civil rights and democracy. We are always warned not to make these comparisons, that doing so always undervalues the unique evil of the Holocaust and Hitler, while overstating the evil of the event or person to which they are compared. But real parallels reside in the sneaky accretion of particulars—from propaganda and dehumanization to inciting people with fear and hatred, to bullying and punitive legal action, to the stripping of rights and freedom, to acts of brutality and murder. We can only hope that we have more success than those thinkers and journalists who opposed the onset of Nazism if we want to save our democratic values, our neighbors, the people we love, and ourselves.

But Marianne and Anne-Marie, thoughtful and willing to engage, gave me hope. They reminded me that history does not always evolve as the tormentors of the moment might wish—and that the children of the perpetrator generation and the children of the victims can find themselves on the same side of the struggle a generation or two later.

“I learned a lot, and like you, had a lot to think about,” Marianne wrote me after our visit. “What would I have done if I had lived at those times? I know for sure that I never would have been one of those Nazis! But what about being a coward? Saying nothing, doing nothing…. Maybe our generation isn’t responsible for the past, but we are responsible for the future.”

Like them, I know which side I’m on. And taking a stand is not someone else’s responsibility; it’s our own.

The post Coming Home to the Holocaust appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This poses a problem not just for the city but also for those who want to create the broadest and most complete understanding of Jewish heritage.

As the cradle of the Jewish history in America, New York City, and especially the Lower East Side, represents that breadth. Advances in literature, comedy, café life, politics, and labor can all be traced to the Jewish experience here. The city’s popular culture—from Fiddler on the Roof to Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld—has mainstreamed a nostalgic version of “schmaltzy” New York culture as a wellspring of American culture.

Yet all this heritage hasn’t drawn Jewish heritage tourists in large numbers—a predicament that reflects a profound shift in Jewish heritage tourism over the past few decades.

In the mid-1970s, in the wake of the blockbuster TV series Roots, people rushed to participate in destination travel around the world in search of their heritage. Cities began looking to tourism, including heritage tourism, as an alternative economic engine for their deindustrializing urban economies.

The United States, which provides the greatest number of heritage tourists worldwide, shows how big this trend was. The U.S. State Department reported the number of passports issued grew from 7 to 113 million between 1989 and 2013, an extraordinary 16-fold increase in a quarter of a century.

But all these passports didn’t help New York. To the contrary, the passport surge showed that Jewish Americans were leaving the country in search of their heritage. And New York City lacked what many Jewish Americans wanted to visit: Holocaust sites.

This shift in sensibilities first drew attention at a 1999 conference in New York. The conference had been called to commemorate the quarter-century anniversary of Irving Howe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history World of Our Fathers (1976), which chronicled the heyday of Yiddishkeit and Jewish socialism among the millions of Jewish immigrants who peopled the Lower East Side after 1880.

At the event, the critic Kenneth Walzer noted a troubling new consensus about the shifting terrain of Jewish heritage: “Yiddishkeit, socialism, and Jewish labor have been displaced by the new centrality of the Holocaust, Israel, and new forms of Jewish particularity.” The historian Peter Novak attributed this new focus to an increased Jewish self-conscious commitment to witness the Holocaust in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War.

Since then, other scholarship and my own travels around the world for a book on Jewish heritage and tourism have confirmed the truth that a nationalist redemptive Holocaust narrative has come to dominate Jewish heritage tourism. Cities such a Budapest, Berlin, Krakow and Warsaw are hot destinations that can sate Jewish appetites for Holocaust remembrance.

The irony is that New York’s Jewish history, while broad and varied, has heritage institutions that for all their strengths don’t match the moment.

Today, the City has three major Jewish museums, but its oldest, the Jewish Museum, is an art museum far removed from the Lower East Side. Founded in 1904, since 1947 it has been located in the former home of the banking titan Felix Warburg on the Upper East Side at 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue. While it displays its vast collection of fine art, Judaica, folk art, and ceremonial artifacts to depict Jewish culture and identity around the world, the Museum primarily focuses on Jewish artists, many of whom are New Yorkers of the contemporary era.

The two other major Jewish museums do address Jewish history more directly, though again, with special attention to the New York experience and limited attention to the long and worldwide story of Jewish heritage. Both emerged as part of the major growth of Jewish heritage at the end of the twentieth century. One, the Jewish History Center, opened in 2000 on 16th Street. It is home to five partner Jewish research institutions—the American Jewish Historical Society, the Yeshiva University Museum, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. But the Center is less a museum than a major site for historical research.

Each institution within the Center mounts small temporary exhibits. And these exhibit spaces, in a nod to demand, do tend to draw more upon the German and Polish historical archives of the institutions than on records for the history of Jews in New York. Exhibits hosted by the American Jewish Historical Society, often in conjunction with another Center institution like Yeshiva’s Museum, are the exception. They address themes in Jewish history and occasionally detail Jewish heritage in New York. But despite the high quality of the programming, the site is not a major stop on the heritage trail.

Neither is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located on Orchard Street. At first glance, it would seem to make the ideal center for Jewish heritage tourism. Founded by two Jewish women, Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson, with strong senses of their own heritage, the Tenement Museum is however, by design, a museum dedicated to the story of American immigrants. A series of rooms have been outfitted to reflect how individual families of particular ethnic groups including the Irish, the Germans, Jews, and Italians lived in the tenement during different eras. The museum’s cause is not Jewish heritage per se, though the framework adds an illuminating comparative perspective.

Would a direct appeal to interest in the Holocaust work in New York? For tourists seeking sacred ground for a ritual of mourning and remembrance, the answer is a frustrating no. The Museum of Jewish Heritage, opened in 1997 and located in Battery Park, has a focus reflected in the first part of its title: “A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.” The museum’s core exhibit is principally dedicated to the story of the Shoah. But this museum has struggled to turn a profit and match the crowds that visit the uptown Jewish Museum and the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum. Its 41,000 walk-up visitors per year are one-quarter the number who visit the Tenement Museum and the Jewish Museum.

Beyond the museums, the staple of Jewish heritage tourism in New York remains the walking tour. But such tours in the Lower East Side stick to the Tenement Museum’s broader focus on immigration. To be sure, Jewish themed tours exist. The Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy advertises a roster of nine different tours, but during the eight months between April and November 2016, they advertised public walking tours on just 11 days. In contrast, the Chassidic Discovery Center in Brooklyn offers daily—except on the Sabbath—bus and walking tours of its specific Jewish New York experience: the Chabad synagogue, a mikvah (ritual bath), a matzo factory, and a Torah scribe/repairs shop.

Joyce Gold, described by CNN as the “doyenne of walking tours in New York,” typically offers about 20 public walking tours each year, only one of which (offered each fall and spring) on Jewish Colonial Manhattan is Jewish. And so forth. In sum, Jewish tours are few, and the trend finds them increasingly folded into the kinds of edutainment tours about moguls, scamps, artists, and food lore that can win guides a favorable TripAdvisor review.

In the last decade, I took several tours with Big Onion Walking Tours, whose president Seth Kamil legitimately claims it to be “New York City’s premier walking-tour company.” The company leads over 2,000 tours a year for upwards of 40,000 customers, offering a “rotating roster of thirty history-based neighborhood tours.” A few include Jewish history sites, but only one, “Jewish Lower East Side,” has Jewish heritage as a focus. Most of Big Onion’s LES tours begin in Kleindeutschland, the one-time German immigrant area, and move on to Little Italy, Chinatown, and then northward to the Jewish rialto on Second Avenue.

Others reverse the order and begin at the northern end of the area near Astor Place. Both starts allowed guides to reference the earlier history of the Irish and German immigrants, with stops at the site of the notorious Five Points Irish slum visited by Dickens or the site of the Astor Place Riots of 1849. The Italian, German, Irish, Chinese and other immigrant sites are interspersed with old Jewish sites.

It was not always so. When Kamil began giving tours in 1990, clients wanted to learn about Yiddishkeit and the life of the Lower East Side; twenty years later, this history was eclipsed by interest in the Holocaust, about which the Lower East Side has little to say. Big Onion’s Jewish tour business has now been reduced to about 15 tours a year, 20 percent of what it had once been. As of 2013, the “Original” Big Onion Walking Tour, “Immigrant New York,” had once again become the bread-and-butter of Kamil’s business.

Kamil roots New York’s declining Jewish heritage tourism to the opening up of tourism in eastern and central Europe after 1989. As part of the rise of Holocaust tourism, third- and fourth-generation American Jews identify with the Holocaust, not the Lower East Side, as the core Jewish heritage experience. Increasing numbers want to “go back” to homelands in which grandparents and great-grandparents perished or from which they fled.

Remembrance though has become a religious experience and Holocaust tourism commodified, a ritual of atonement. As important as this is, the focus on concentration camps and memorial sites narrows Jewish identity to a devastating moment in time and space, ignoring the long, lived history of a vibrant Jewish culture.

Kamil’s tourists commonly ask to meet Holocaust survivors in the neighborhood. While measuring his words carefully, Kamil playfully echoes this view.

“If the Germans had invaded Brooklyn and established a concentration camp there,” he quips, “I’d be making a fortune.”

The post Why Don’t American Jews Search for Their Heritage in New York City? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Likhachev was not the only person who recalled gifts of food during detention. While researching concentration camps around the world, I learned that even the memory of food helped sustain prisoners, linking them to distant friends and family and building bonds between detainees. Through interviews, written memoirs, and even archival “recipes,” the way in which imaginary feasts created community in places that were beyond hope came up again and again, revealing how even in its absence, food defines and shapes the most rudimentary forms of society.

Real food, of course, offered more sustenance than reminiscence could provide. But many concentration camp systems failed to feed prisoners enough to survive, and administrators wielded food as a weapon of control. Enduring forced labor as a teenager at Monowitz—part of Auschwitz—Elie Wiesel described hunger reducing him to “nothing but a body. Perhaps less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.”

Though his experiences were horrifying, Wiesel was fortunate enough to have avoided the gas chamber during selection. But extermination through labor—a combination of brutal work and deliberately limited rations—further culled prisoners assigned to the worst work details. Detainees died of gastroenteritis, pneumonia and a host of conditions that easily took hold as prisoners slowly starved to death.

In these conditions, access to additional food was critical. A post working in the vegetable cellar of a camp, such as the one German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann found in the Soviet Gulag in 1939, could provide a way to expand on the watery soup and bread typically allocated to prisoners. Buber helped to keep herself and others alive with stolen food.

Sometimes prisoners were buoyed by food from loved ones, as Likhachev had been touched by the present of a cake. Held with thousands of other suspects at the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, in fall 1973, Felipe Agüero recounted the joy of receiving a care package in detention, but also how the meagerness of what was sent—a few cigarettes or a little bread, maybe some chocolate—revealed that hard times had come for family on the outside, too.

Where they could not scrounge or steal real food, captives turned to their imaginations. Despite the most desperate conditions, concentration camp inmates routinely spent their fleeting idle moments discussing recipes. At Neuengamme, not far from Hamburg in northern Germany, after work in factories, digging in clay pits, or dragging rubble out of bombed-out streets, during the only time they had to try to remain human, detainees talked about their homes and families, their previous lives that had vanished forever, and their favorite meals. They had little else to live on. As the war dragged on, life expectancy for new arrivals at Neuengamme dwindled to 12 weeks.

Shared recipes preserved from this era of camps found improbable publication with In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. This 1996 compilation included a series of recipes that had been collected in the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt. A detainee named Mina Pachter had gathered recipes from inmates in the camp and given them to a friend to carry to her daughter, if he found a way to survive. After Pachter died, the collected recipes took more than 20 years to make their way into the hands of her daughter in New York, who eventually decided to publish the instructions for making such dishes as chicken galantine, liver dumplings, stuffed goose neck, asparagus salad, plum strudel, and chocolate torte.

The book was condemned by some who called it “sick,” wondering if cookbooks from Auschwitz or Treblinka would soon follow. The recipes themselves were often missing key ingredients or had completely mismatched measurements that made them useless. Others lauded the publication as Holocaust literature rather than a literal cookbook, a memory of how detainees consoled themselves in humanity’s darkest hours.

More cookbooks emerged over time, but not necessarily for publication. At the age of 12, in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück in Germany, Nurit Stern listened to adults commune with each other. “Hungry people can only dream about food,” she explained in 2016. “I was a child. I didn’t know anything about cooking. I memorized the recipes and wrote them down.” The small notebook she cobbled together out of stolen materials ended up enshrining the women’s recipes—chopped liver, goulash, stuffed cabbage rolls, and cholent with kishke—for posterity in Yad Vashem’s archive. Stern explained the role the recipes played for people struggling to maintain their humanity. “These women used their memories and imagination to memorize this most basic experience… Many chose this way to protect their sanity.”

Nurit Stern made this recipe book as a child to record the recipes she heard adults discussing in the Ravensbrück camp. (The letters “FKL” stand for Frauenkonzentrationslager, or “Women’s Concentration Camp.” Courtesy of the Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection.

While recipes and fantasies about unlimited food helped detainees endure the everyday horrors of the camps, the issue of food has also been used as a tool of propaganda to keep the public from sympathizing with detainees.

During internment of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War, a series of allegations about detainees being “pampered” in camps centered around food. One New York Times headline from May 1943 reads, “Wyoming Senator Asserts Japanese Go Unrationed and Have Vast Stores of Food.” While much of the U.S. was using ration tickets to buy food, Senator Edward Robinson accused detainees of hoarding meat and mayonnaise in the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, claiming they had enough supplies on hand to feed the camp population for “three years, seven months and fourteen days.” The actual historical record on Heart Mountain, not surprisingly, contains references to late food shipments in insufficient quantities.

The very idea of food for detainees remains a highly politicized subject—partly because detention is seen as a way to punish a targeted group, even when governments deny that punishment is the goal. In 2005, a group of political activists who saw reports on American torture as “military bashing,” assembled a book of their own: The Gitmo Cookbook. Gathering recipes for halal meals including curried eggs, tandoori chicken, and Lyonnaise rice that the Navy had developed to serve those held on the Cuban base, the book’s authors aimed to show just how well detainees in American custody were treated. Nearly a decade would pass before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Torture Report verified many of the worst accusations of torture and abuse of detainees.

Why do propangandists feel the need to ascribe gluttony, extravagant meals, or hoarding to detainees? Food is so basic to existence that our common need for it provides the root of our ability to empathize with one another. This empathy lies at the heart of how society functions. When propagandists want to show that those held without trial do not deserve empathy, or are abusing it, they use stories of lavish food as a way to further isolate detainees from society.

A similar principle is at work when prisoners take comfort from the shared ritual of imagined meals. Written and spoken recipes offer a performance of survival when survival is uncertain. They provide detainees the kind of social interactions that camps are typically created to prevent. Sharing the desire for a specific food prepared a specific way further takes the animal impulse to survive and transforms it into art, reasserting the shared humanity of both the teller and the listeners.

Food offers those closed off from society a way to resurrect its ghost behind barbed wire. In China’s Xihongsan Mine labor camp in 1961, prisoner Harry Wu recalled “food-imagining parties.” Inside stone barracks atop a tamped mud floor, Wu described how one person would take a turn, and the next night, another detainee would reciprocate.

Wu was himself altogether ignorant of cooking but joined in, using invention where experience failed him. Before going to sleep, inmates lovingly narrated the creation of a favorite dish, sometimes a secret recipe from childhood or something specific to their home province. “We would explain in detail how to cut the ingredients, how to season them, mix them, and arrange them on the plate.” Once the dish was ready to eat, the detainee would first describe the smell, and then the taste. Decades later, Wu recalled the spell that was cast. “Everyone,” he wrote, “would listen in silence.”

The post How Concentration Camp Prisoners Found Comfort in Imaginary Feasts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Kubrick was, according to Frederic Raphael, who co-wrote the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut (1999), “known to have said that he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents.” Jewish by birth through both his mother, Sadie Gertrude Perveler, and his father, Jacob (also known as Jack or Jacques) Kubrick, the director was given by his parents a very typical first name for Jews born in that era. In addition, he steadfastly stuck to using that name in an industry where fellow Jews—at least the actors with whom he worked—had frequently changed them.

Born in 1928, Kubrick grew up in the heavily Jewish West Bronx, surrounded by Jewish neighbors and immigrants. The Bronx was, at that time, home to 250,000 Jews, from which Kubrick drew his early circle of childhood friends. His maternal grandmother spoke Yiddish; Kubrick adored Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987), set in Rockaway Beach in Queens, identifying with the little boy, Joe, the film’s protagonist. The language of that film, and the tastes and smells it conjured up, were those of Kubrick’s childhood in the 1930s and 1940s.

However, as an assimilated American-Jewish family, the Kubricks were not religious. They practiced little, if any, Judaism. Jacob had changed his own Hebrew name to the more cosmopolitan Jack/Jacques. When asked once by an interviewer, “Did you have a religious upbringing?” Kubrick replied, “No, not at all.” His education was completely secular. He received no formal Jewish instruction and, as far as is known, never attended a synagogue or Hebrew School or was bar-mitzvahed. None of these things interested him.

Some collaborators have characterized Kubrick as a self-hating Jew. Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay for Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), accused the director of being “a guy who is a Jew, and he’s a man who hates Jews. He has said to me that the Jews are responsible for their own persecutions because they have separated themselves from the rest of humanity.” In his memoir of working with Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open, Frederic Raphael claimed Kubrick said that Hitler had been “right about almost everything.”

Yet Kubrick’s Jewish identity was much more complex than these labels—and unproven assertions—suggest. Kubrick was more than just Jewish by birth; he was a Jew by culture and feeling. He was acutely aware of his Central and Eastern European Jewish origins—his ancestors emigrated from Poland, Austria, and Romania to the United States around 1900. This cultural inheritance deeply influenced Kubrick. He loved the Jewish literature of the region: Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Jacob Schulz, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig. His father, who was a well-read man, owned an extensive personal library, which he encouraged his son to read, supplying an informal Jewish education during Kubrick’s childhood.

Kubrick’s lifelong interests manifested a Jewish sensibility. He was passionate about photography, chess, drumming, boxing, jazz, and filmmaking, all extraordinarily Jewish professions and pastimes in the 20th century. He married two Jewish women in succession (albeit in civil ceremonies), both daughters of first-generation European immigrants, Toba Metz and Ruth Sobotka.

Kubrick also can be described as a gastronomic Jew. He loved lox, bagels, salt beef, and pastrami. His long-time assistant, Tony Frewin, recalled, “I think of Stanley going to sleep at night dreaming of Carnegie Deli.” Kubrick objected that the nearest deli was miles away from his home north of London.

Unfortunately, he also experienced anti-Jewish prejudice. In an interview with Tachles, his third wife, Christiane Harlan, recalls how, “Early on, as a photojournalist for the magazine Look, he was confronted with anti-Semitism.” When traveling in the U.S. Southern states, he was barred from restaurants and hotels. Even in Vermont, he once was denied a table. Kubrick never, as far as we know, responded. He did not comment on it publicly or in any letter I have seen.

He also experienced it later when working in Hollywood, on Spartacus. “Get that little Jewboy from the Bronx off my crane,” grumbled veteran cinematographer Russell Metty. How Kubrick reacted in these instances is unknown, but it led him to further embrace his relationship with Tony Curtis, another Jewish Bronx native. No doubt, these experiences hardened him and lay in part behind his reason to relocate to England in the early 1960s to make Lolita (1962), where he lived until his death in 1999. But he never felt truly comfortable in certain social circles there, either. He was often invited to social events and refused to go.

Maybe this was because, as his brother-in-law and producer, Jan Harlan, said, “he knew he looked Jewish and his big beard emphasized this.” In the opinion of Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay for 2001, the director’s full and untrimmed facial hair gave him the “aura of a Talmudic scholar” and the look of a “slightly cynical rabbi” that he retained for the rest of his life.

As a parent, his daughter Anya described him as “a very nice, good, rather Jewish father—probably overprotective.” The Kubricks always had a Christmas tree, and Kubrick also loved bacon. Although they did nothing Jewish, his eldest daughter, Katharina, said, “He did not deny his Jewishness, not at all. But given that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust and researched it for years, I leave it to you to decide how he felt about his religion.”

Indeed, Kubrick read many books about the Holocaust throughout his career, and not only in preparation for his never-to-be-made Aryan Papers. This included Raul Hilberg and Primo Levi, whom he recommended to various collaborators, including Michael Herr and Brian Aldiss. He just could never complete the film he dreamed of making. When asked if he would adapt Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, he said, “I don’t see how I could make it? … I’m Jewish….”

In the final analysis, Kubrick had no faith. In an interview with Playboy in 1968, he stated, “I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions.” His driver and handyman, Emilio D’Alessandro, recalled, “Stanley wasn’t particularly interested in religion, nor did he really understand religious fanaticism.” Yet, Jan Harlan says, he was “always taking a big bow to the great Unknowable.” Maybe this explains why the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, was performed at his funeral in 1999.

Nonetheless, if you watch Kubrick’s films often and closely enough, the Jewish moments will gradually rise to the surface. Private Sidney, played by Jewish actor Paul Mazursky in Kubrick’s first feature film Fear and Desire (1953), very much resembles the stereotypical Jewish soldier of so many World War II combat films. Davey Gordon, the boxing hero in Killer’s Kiss (1955), very much fits into that period of Jewish boxing movies. The Jewish loan shark played by Jay Adler in The Killing (1956) has a Jewish sensibility encapsulated by the Yiddish saying, “Man plans, God laughs.”

Kubrick’s two films with Kirk Douglas, Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960), project the new 1950s creation of the macho-mensch character type. Douglas and his co-star Tony Curtis were both Jewish but had taken on non-Jewish names, seemingly playing non-Jewish characters. Kubrick’s two films with the British Jewish actor Peter Sellers—Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964)—were both imbued with a ’60s Jewish shtick of the type at which Lenny Bruce excelled. A poster of Lenny Bruce can be glimpsed in The Killing (as can a young Rodney Dangerfield, a Jewish comedian). Lolita also stars Jewish actress Shelley Winters, and there’s even a Jewish navigator in Dr. Strangelove. Both films have an underlying Holocaust theme.

Kubrick then made 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, a film rich with allusions to the Hebrew Bible, liturgy, and especially Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah. His next two films also featured Jewish actors—Steven Berkoff and Aubrey Morris in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Berkoff again in the period film Barry Lyndon (1975), as well as Marissa Berenson and Ryan O’Neal, both of whom had Jewish ancestry. While the former film deals with the nature of free choice, a key Jewish tenet, the latter explores the interloper in WASP society, something that Jews confronted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a host of countries. As a shabby-genteel Irishman, Barry Lyndon was clearly an interloper in 18th-century elite Anglo society. In Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford’s status as a party-crashing “outsider” is similarly based on social class, being out of his depth among the superrich elite in 1990s New York City. The protagonists of both Spartacus and A Clockwork Orange also fit into this interpretation of the outsider/anti-hero who disrupts the dominant social order.

While there was seemingly no one or nothing Jewish about The Shining (1980), adapted from Stephen King’s bestselling horror thriller, the story draws heavily upon Genesis 22, in which a father, the Jewish patriarch Abraham, seeks to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at the bidding of a higher power.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) perhaps comes closest of all Kubrick’s work to referencing the horrors of the Holocaust, in its depiction of how ordinary men can become hardened killers. In this Vietnam War drama, young boys are degraded and dehumanized in boot camp so they can kill with hard hearts in Vietnam.

And all of this was capped off by Eyes Wide Shut, an adaptation of Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, a story that was Jewish to its very core but seemingly scrubbed clean of any trace—except for casting Sydney Pollack in a key role as Victor Ziegler, a rich, unsavory, and morally suspect Jewish businessman. Pollack, like Kubrick, was a Jewish director and his physiognomy added what might be described as a stereotypical Jewish “look.”

As alluded to above, the ritual of unmasking and expulsion which Dr. Bill undergoes is something that Jews metaphorically feared and actually underwent in European society.

Kubrick and his films were complicated and defied simple readings. We can read them as Jewish, but this is just one element to be added to the mix of interpretations that already exist and no doubt will keep coming in the future.

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I wanted to hate Germany. I wanted to see nothing of myself in the people whose ancestors forced my grandpa and grandma into exile in 1937 and 1939, respectively, and murdered or enslaved those members of my family who could not get out.

In the bigger city of Bad Kreuznach, my grandpa’s parents recognized the full danger of Hitler’s anti-Semitism from the start and by 1933 were already working to get U.S. visas. My grandma’s family, on the other hand, did not have the same exposure to the Nazis in their small hometown. It took Kristallnacht, the night of coordinated attacks on Jews and Jewish property on November 9, 1938, to convince them they had to escape Germany, but by then visas were hard to come by. As a result, my grandma’s only choice was to leave alone, at the age of nine, on a Kindertransport to Switzerland. Her grandmother–and my namesake–Caroline Nachmann, was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Nazis spared her because she could mend and sew their uniforms. Her husband, and many other family members, were not so lucky.

Frankfurt was sleepy and chilly, not at all seductive, and we had few interactions with locals, who looked nothing like me. “I am just Jewish, not German,” I thought. But as we left Frankfurt for the small towns in the Rhineland, where my family once lived, my feelings grew more complicated.

Part of it had to do with the beauty of the landscape. The drive from Frankfurt to Wallertheim, where my Grandma Ann grew up, was all rolling hills, wheat fields, and blooming sunflowers. The town itself was a cluster of quaint stucco houses and cobblestone roads. We located her childhood home and found ourselves imagining what our lives would have been like had she never been forced to flee. My grandparents first met at a bakery in Milwaukee, but, strangely enough, they would probably have met all the same had their families not immigrated to the U.S. Their German hometowns are only about 10 miles apart, and members of their family were already acquainted.

We decided to look for the Jewish cemetery before leaving Wallertheim but couldn’t find it. After a few aimless laps around town, we peeked into a pub by the train station to see if anyone could point us in the right direction. As luck would have it, Wallertheim’s two Lutheran ministers–Klaus and his wife, Marianne–were there, finishing their lunch. Klaus whipped out his cell phone and called up the town mayor, who promptly arranged for the cemetery caretaker to meet us at the pub with a key to the cemetery gate.

Klaus and Marianne joined us for the visit and laid pebbles on the gravestones of our ancestors. They showed us where the town’s synagogue once stood and explained how it had been damaged on Kristallnacht and then finished off by the war. Content with our visit and the history we had gleaned from Klaus and Marianne, we were ready to pile back into our van. But Klaus convinced us to stop by his nearby church first. It housed an organ, originally built in the 1740s, that he wanted to show us.

When we’d ascended the steep stairs to the organ loft, Klaus began to play a song. It was not a traditional Christian hymn but “We Shall Overcome.” As I awkwardly began to swat tears from my eyes, Klaus went on to play “Havenu Shalom Aleichem” and “Shalom Chaverim”–two traditional Jewish songs about peace, love, and friendship. When my mom asked why these Jewish and English songs were included in their hymnal, Marianne answered, “It’s for our peace.”

When I applied to law school last fall, I wrote an essay about having always seen my life through multiple windows–about how growing up half in Chicago and half in a rural town in Wisconsin defined my world outlook. I was three-quarters city slicker, one-quarter cheesehead. But it was my trip to Germany that made me realize I was something else, too. So many of the family characteristics I’d once viewed as Jewish–our obsession with organization and neatness; the goose-down comforters on all our beds; the apple strudel I associate with special occasions; the dark rye bread my dad cannot seem to get enough of; even our fondness for sweet Riesling wines–I now realized had a different origin.

So I am not just a Chicagoan or a Wisconsinite. In Germany, for the first time in my life, I felt at home in a foreign country. With every town we visited and every street we walked on this summer break, I fell more and more in love with the home of my ancestors, the place they also loved, until they no longer could.

Caroline Esser is a first-year student at Stanford Law School.

*Photo courtesy of Caroline Esser.

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