Who Are The Victims?

Historians have noticed that when Germans are asked about the uncomfortable issue of the Holocaust, many quickly bring up the war. ‘The Jewish war,’ as some Germans described it is remembered as a disaster for the German people as victims. The bombings stood out as the German civilian war experience. This is not the place to analyze how their self-image as victims might have alleviated German responsibility, embarrassment, or guilt regarding the genocide, nor how much serious damage was actually wrought. Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life In Nazi Germany

I have reflected elsewhere on my own experiences as a child being introduced to the mysterious forbidden world of sexuality by predatory grown up men. (“Truth Telling” April 13, 2010) I might well be described as a “victim” of these adults who abused their position of privilege and power in my life. I have no doubt that I suffered a complex emotional wounding from these experiences in my pre-teen years.

But, as I think about those adult males in my past who took advantage of the positions entrusted to them, I have no doubt that they acted out of the wounds, brokenness and unresolved hurts of their own early experiences of childhood and youth. No doubt the same could be said for those who perpetrated monstrous violence against the Jews in Europe and presumably even Hitler himself.

Holocaust Denial

In her book Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life In Nazi Germany, Marion Kaplan sets herself an extraordinary task. She attempts to recreate the experience of ordinary Jewish people living in Germany between the rise to power of the Nazis and the end of Nazi rule with Germany’s defeat at the end of the Second World War. Kaplan has read the diaries, memoirs and correspondence of Jews who lived and many of whom died in this terrible period of world history. She has interviewed survivors and read the historical accounts of the time in her attempt to recreate life for the Jew under Nazi rule.

You Are Not Human

Most of us, when we think about the Holocaust, probably think of ghettos, transport trains, concentration and extermination camps, gas chambers, crematoria, violent evil Gestapo agents, and monstrously inhuman prison guards.

In her book Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life In Nazi Germany, Marion A. Kaplan demonstrates that the sacrifice of European Jewry began long before the first Jew was locked away behind barbed wire. Kaplan chronicles the daily routine grinding inhumanities that began in 1933 as soon as Hitler came to power in Germany and continued until the War finally brought an end to Nazi brutality.