An anecdote:
In my last year of university, I was standing with a group of folks from my Holocaust film class. One girl decided to reveal that her ex-boyfriend’s grandfather was a member of the Einsatzgruppen, and isn’t that so ironic and funny. Laughter ensued. “Ha ha, what a subversive thing to say!”
I didn’t laugh.
I didn’t say anything, either, because I already knew that would be a quick ticket to ostracism. Sure, I could explore the Second World War, the War of Extermination on the Eastern Front and the Holocaust in papers, talk with professors, speak one-on-one with others of similar background. But that particular part of the past is Off Limits in polite conversation even when the topic turns to World War Two; the west has already come to terms with what happened through a set of popular narratives that, at this point, contain trends I find rather insulting. To make things clear, I am not Jewish; and I do not want to elevate the atrocities faced by Poles to the level of genocide. However, the Occupation was still an ugly thing for Poles. Last summer I documented my grandparents’ stories in my notebook to get a better handle on What Happened. My relationship with that part of the past is necessarily complicated by personal feelings.
I’m also immensely interested in how cultures and societies come to terms with trauma, not only on the part of the victim, but also on the part of the perpetrator. The proliferation of Victim narratives after the war, for instance. Questions of historical memory. The kinds of conciliatory narratives that try to flip a perpetrator’s status to that of a victim: victims of dictators, of ideologies, even of those they actually oppressed. I’m drawn to the work of Omer Bartov, who examines the narratives that emerged in Germany trying to reconcile Nazism with the greater German population: who gets blamed? To what degree is the regular citizen culpable for the atrocities of the Nazis? Who was a Nazi? Immediately following the Second World War the overarching narrative became German-as-victim to an Evil regime, denying that collective complacency was tacit support for fascism. In sum:
The public discourse on the Holocaust in postwar Germany has, until recently, largely concentrated either on the social marginality of the perpetrators or the anonymous forces that made it into reality. […] So-called “ordinary” Germans appear to have been untouched by or irrelevant to genocide, and arguments to the contrary have been seen and condemned as attempts to assign collective guilt. The largely defensive reaction to such arguments show the difficulty many Germans still have in accepting that the third Reich perpetrated crimes on such a vast scale with the support and complicity of large sections of the population. Indeed, it is German victimhood…that tends to be stressed again and again. (Omer Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews and the Holocaust”, 794)
The same strain of thought has more recently entered North American discourse concerning the Holocaust, as the increasing popularity of the “good German” in popular film and media attests. I am in no way saying, “All Germans were evil Nazis” (this is inevitably what I get accused of). It is also true that many German civilians weren’t aware of the extent of the genocide, as the death camps were all deliberately located east of Germany’s borders. Yet the denial of complacency as culpability never sat well with me. There’s something profoundly disturbing in seeing an important historical legacy left completely silent in popular historical memory. My family’s suffering written out of the west. This blog post by fantasy author Cathrynne M. Valente talking about The Book Thief is what turned my thoughts this way in the first place—maybe this issue isn’t off limits after all:
Oh my god I am not ok with this. This is so much worse than regular cultural appropriation I don’t know where to start. Like, I am not crazy? Yes, it is his family’s story? But the story of the Holocaust is not one you get to take away from the Jews and be all BUT LITTLE GERMAN KIDS ARE REALLY CUTE AND WISE! Because you cannot be German and write a book about how Germans are super sweet and kind of rascally and adorbs during the war, a book in which no visible German does a visible bad thing and I guess it was all just Hitler, who it is safe to say was a Bad Man but surely did not do it all alone? (Obviously you can, but should you? Yes? Carry on then?)
[…]
Basically, this is all based on his mother’s stories of growing up in Nazi Germany and basically no one is going to write a book where they’re all MOM AND ALL HER FRIENDS WERE EXTREMELY FUCKING CULPABLE AND BEAR SOME RESPONSIBILITY FOR THAT SHIT THAT WENT DOWN THERE. Because then mom will never speak to you again. Surely someone mom knew did something vaguely in line with Nazi principles? No? THIS IS CONVENIENT.
My discomfort with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is similar: yes, there’s this Jewish boy and all these Jews but the real horror is that the German boy who found that one part of the fence around Auschwitz that wasn’t electrified dies in the gas chamber because…because…
Um…
Yet few critics seem to have a problem with that. As if we’re suffering from a collective historical erasure that makes re-framing the Holocaust in this way suddenly acceptable.
The problem extends rather far into western cultural media. To what extent are popular narratives like John Boyne’s Pyjamas a form of victim appropriation? (Boyne is Irish). Taking on one of the most horrific traumas of the twentieth century in a simplified fashion to Make a Point while bearing no connection to the trauma itself can potentially cheapen the issue immensely. Especially when attempting to universalize a very particular experience while parading under the guise of authenticity. Writing about the Holocaust or the War of Extermination requires putting some serious thought into what you’re doing. I’m not saying that an outsider to that side of the war could not write sensitively on the topic, but the level of historical confusion in North America makes me wonder what sort of narratives will find an audience here, and which sorts will appeal to authors and filmmakers. The deep legacy of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe is all but invisible in North America outside of Jewish and other immigrant communities, glossed over, ignored, to the extent that most people don’t Get It—the deep scarring as a result of the War of Extermination, enslavement, Einsatzgruppen, and the Death Camps. The East has not moved on. The war is written into the very landscape. Take a visit sometime, you’ll see.
The popular discourse in the west smoothing over the Holocaust makes it impossible to engage critically with the subject in day-to-day life without immediate objection. I can’t react to offhand comments that I find personally offensive without facing ostracism. Historical memory, through distortion, has become exclusionary for those who suffered or felt the effects of those who suffered. Especially bad because my family history means nothing in current western popular Holocaust/World War II discourse: that many of my relatives were enslaved, shipped to Germany and made to work for those ordinary Germans who apparently totally didn’t support the Nazis in any way…means nothing. And if I do go into that Off Limits territory, either the conversation lapses into uncomfortable silence or else I get accused of guilt mongering.
I wish I could go back to that group of folks and say what was on my mind. Mainly, “That’s not funny.” On that, and many other occasions.
Despite the Off Limits nature if it all.
One Last Sketch 
It’s a thorny subject, I agree.
Being British, I can’t comment on the North American view of the Holocaust/Nazism/whatnot, but most of the people I knew growing up were centered around British-centric aspects of war: evacuation of millions of British children into the countryside, the constant fear of invasion, blackouts, rations, things like that. Perhaps the most chilling was the Blitz: there’s a photograph of the bombing of my hometown at my local museum from across the river (two or three miles away), and the entire town was ablaze. Even today, you can come across old buildings with bullet holes and shell damage. It’s a weird thing, seeing the town you’re familiar with wracked with fire and ruin.
I hadn’t really thought about the fact that many of my American friends and acquaintances just aren’t growing up with that legacy. The US lost 1,700 civilians in WW2: the UK lost 50,000 more. Naturally even that is a drop in the ocean compared to the losses of life in Europe, and definitely not like occupation, but the constant fear and threat of invasion is still pretty affecting to the nation’s consciousness.
Regarding culpability and “good Germans”: I think it’s just the cultural pendulum swinging. It’s just swung from the “evil nasty horrid Germans” side to the opposite “good unfortunate just-as-much-victims-as-anyone-else” side, as people try to make sense of this, frankly, insane part of history. People probably don’t like to admit that the atrocities of the Nazis could easily happen to any nation under the right(wrong) circumstances, so it comforts them to think that the Nazis were just super-special-evil.
Speaking as an American from Texas, I don’t know if the scars of World War II still have the potency that it still has for those who directly experienced the worst horrors of the war.
Personally, my own family has more scars from Vietnam than the Second World War. The uncle I’m named after was killed in a friendly fire incident. The scars persist to this day, I think. There is still some resentment towards the government, and Vietnam is a very touchy subject.
People probably don’t like to admit that the atrocities of the Nazis could easily happen to any nation under the right(wrong) circumstances, so it comforts them to think that the Nazis were just super-special-evil.
Discomfort or not, this is one of the most important lessons of the Holocaust– the banality of evil.
World War II barely touched the actual states. Englishmen commented on how Americans would put “Remember Pearl Harbor” on butter pats served while in flight, which was needed to remind them they were at war.
OTOH, the Poles were certainly facing genocide. It just didn’t get as advanced as for the Jews Their plan was certainly to eliminate all Poles from Poland. Perhaps some might have been shipped to Russia; some definitely were culled for their purported German blood and “re-Germanized”; but the rest were slated for death through hunger and overwork, and probably massacre in due course.
The plan was indeed eventual genocide, starting with a period of enslavement of those not labelled volskdeutsche/suitable for Germanization (which itself meant forced assimilation) and then complete extermination or else resettlement in Siberia (you can imagine the attrition rate). However, I don’t feel comfortable using the term when referring to the actual time frame of the war, as the Nazis did not implement systematized extermination of Poles in the same way as the Jews. Looking even further eastward, plans involved mass starvation in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, which would also amount to genocide, simply by different means.
The Holocaust would have only been the beginning.
Discomfort or not, this is one of the most important lessons of the Holocaust– the banality of evil.
Most assuredly. Like I always say, every human being is capable of wonderful and terrible things.
Something that occurred to me: how well acquainted were you with your colleagues? I could undertand being inconceivably insensitive if they didn’t know about your Polish ancestry, but if they did, that’s monumentally inconsiderate.
The lass who made the comment knew, though it might have slipped her mind. The professor for the class would also direct questions/commentary at me during a lecture because I was Polish (and he was Polish-Ukrainian), so it’s not like my ancestry was altogether hidden from the others, and some in the group were friends who knew me very well.