Daniel Blatman Opinion Yad Vashem Teaches the Holocaust Like Totalitarian Countries Teach History
The Warsaw Ghetto Museum, which the Polish government decided to establish eight months ago, is now at the center of a debate.
This debate has
political elements, but it’s mainly a clash between two views of what
should be stressed when researching and remembering the Holocaust, and
above all of what educational messages should be sent – what Israelis
like to call “the lessons of the Holocaust.” Haaretz’s Ofer Aderet, in his article about the Warsaw museum,
mainly discussed the political perspective, giving considerable space
to the criticisms by Prof. Hava Dreifuss, a Yad Vashem historian.
Dreifuss assailed the Warsaw museum and those who decided, despite all
the problems, to take on a project whose importance is hard to
overstate. This criticism deserves a response.
First,
the political context. There’s no more appropriate response to
Dreifuss’ criticism than the old saying that people who live in glass
houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Dreifuss works for an
institution that in recent years has functioned as a hard-working
laundromat, striving to bleach out the sins of every anti-Semitic, fascist, racist or simply murderously thuggish leader or politician like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.
My
heart breaks when I see my colleagues, honest and faithful researchers
of the Holocaust, giving tours of this historic museum, apparently under
compulsion, to the evildoers the Israeli government sends to Yad Vashem
to receive absolution in the name of Holocaust victims in exchange for
adding a pro-Israel vote at international institutions. For some reason,
Dreifuss has no criticism about this.
But
for the Polish government (every Polish government, both the current
one headed by the nationalist Law and Justice party and the previous one
headed by a liberal centrist coalition), which is spending tens of
millions of zlotys every year to preserve historical Jewish sites,
Jewish graveyards and countless memorials, she has scathing criticism.
Fear and demoralization
A week and a half ago, Matti Friedman published an opinion piece in The New York Times
about what’s happening at Yad Vashem, and it made for difficult
reading. When you read his conclusions, your hair stands on end. He
doesn’t quote a single Yad Vashem employee by name, because no one
wanted to be identified. After all, they have to earn a living.
Friedman
described a mood of frustration, fear and demoralization among the
employees because the current extremist, nationalist government has
turned Yad Vashem into a political tool reminiscent of history museums
in totalitarian countries.
But the most
astonishing thing Friedman reported is that the institution’s chairman,
Avner Shalev – who turned the museum into an international remembrance
empire, and who for years has viciously fought every attempt to present a
different conceptual or research approach than that of Yad Vashem – is
reluctant to retire, despite having reached the age of 80.
The reason for his
reluctance is that many people at the institute fear that when he
leaves, his place will be taken by someone nominated by the relevant
minister, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who will turn Yad Vashem
into a remembrance institute in the spirit of Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi
party. It would be interesting to know what Dreifuss thinks about that.
Yad Vashem is now
paying the price of the many years in which it nurtured a
one-dimensional, simplistic message that there’s only one way to explain
the Holocaust. Today, the institution is apparently willing to place
its reputation for Holocaust research, which it has built over many
years, at the service of a government that has recruited it to accuse
anyone who criticizes Israel of anti-Semitism. So it’s no wonder that
its researchers have become partisan explainers of the Holocaust.
It’s one thing when,
at dubious conferences with political leaders whose governments include
former neo-Nazis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tries to pass
resolutions calling criticism of Israel the new anti-Semitism. It’s
another when a research and remembrance institute doesn’t stand
courageously against all such attempts.
Thus Yad Vashem would
do better not to look for evidence that other governments are
attempting to distort history and dictate nationalist content – not to
mention engaging in Holocaust denial, as Dreifuss charges.
The Polish angle
Does any of the above
justify the current Polish government’s position on the Holocaust?
Obviously not. The Polish government has a problematic agenda in
explaining the past, which we aren’t obligated to accept and in fact
should even criticize.
But Poland’s
government hasn’t interfered with the work of the museum’s employees,
who have now started working, and certainly not with the development of
the museum’s narrative. Had Dreifuss and her colleagues gotten involved
in this effort, as they were invited to do, they would have been
welcomed. Had Yad Vashem offered its help and support instead of giving
the project the cold shoulder, nobody would have been happier than we at
the museum.
And now we come to
the historical issue. To take part in the effort to establish the Warsaw
Ghetto Museum, one has to agree that the Holocaust can be presented and
explained from perspectives other than an ethnocentric Jewish, Zionist
and nationalist one.
One has to accept
that the Holocaust can be studied in a way that sees Jewish history
during this period as an integral part of Poland’s history under the
Nazi occupation. One has to agree that the horrific Jewish tragedy that
occurred during World War II can and should be understood in part by
simultaneously examining – while noting both the differences and the
common elements – what befell Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and
others who were murdered alongside Jews in the vast genocidal expanse
that occupied Poland became.
To set up a museum
with a humanist, universal and inclusive message about the Holocaust,
one has to accept an approach that sees the Warsaw Ghetto – a horrific
terror zone that caused the deaths and physical and spiritual collapse
of hundreds of thousands of Jews – as one element of a much bigger
terror zone in which hundreds of thousands of other people suffered and
fought for their existence: the Poles who lived on the other side of the
wall.
The obvious
differences between the fates of these two peoples don’t absolve the
research historian, or a museum depicting the history of this period,
from presenting this complex message and demanding that visitors to the
museum grapple with its lessons.
Therefore, the new
Warsaw Ghetto Museum won’t be Yad Vashem. It will be a Holocaust museum
in the heart of the Polish capital that remembers the fate of the
450,000 Jews, Warsaw residents and refugees brought to the ghetto.
After all, the vast
majority of them were Jewish citizens of Poland. That’s how they lived,
that’s how they suffered, and that’s how they should be remembered after
being murdered by the Nazis.
Prof. Daniel Blatman is a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the chief historian for the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.
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