(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)January 17, 2018

MAHWAH, N.J. – In November, The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in cooperation with and funding from the New Jersey State Commission on Holocaust Education sponsored a Gumpert Teachers’ Workshop, “Neighbors on Neighbors: Complicity in Genocide.” Held at Ramapo College, it was attended by 55 educators from throughout New Jersey.

Center Director Michael Riff noted in his welcoming remarks that this was a topic of increasing concern and one that shed light on human behavior in general.

The workshop’s keynote speaker, Tim Kaiser, Deputy Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education, made clear from the outset that during the Holocaust, on both the individual and national levels, contradictory behavior was in evidence. Kaiser’s expertise came primarily from co-curating the Museum’s acclaimed exhibit, “Some were Neighbors: Complicity and Collaboration in the Holocaust,” that examined what motives and pressures led so many individuals to abandon their fellow human beings and collaborate with Nazis in their persecution of the Jews, while others made the choice to help.

Much of Kaiser’s talk, which was supported by photographs and video excerpts, centered on the Museum’s research project in Lithuania that interviewed ordinary people who lived through the Holocaust–survivors,witnessesand collaborators. One Lithuanian army veteran spoke about how he shot a middle-aged Jewish man in Belarus and later went with his unit to a Catholic Church to confess their sins. Another Lithuanian volunteer recalled that a young woman with whom he had danced in high school hugged him and begged for her life. “It was terrible,” he sais, but, ringed by the Gestapo, “there was nothing you [could] do.”

There were a few instances, however, when people displayed courage and defied the authorities, sometimes even risking their lives, to protect Jews. But other times, as Kaiser pointed out, such acts of rescue became tinged with ambiguity and accompaniedwithsexual abuse, work without pay and eventual betrayal. As has been pointed out before, protectors of Jews were paradoxically themselves anti-Semites. In Kaiser’s view, there were a great many situations that were morally ambiguous and some in which the worst aspects of human behavior–greed, opportunism and sheer cowardice–manifested themselves in abundance.

Providing the link on how to bring the subject of collaboration and complicity in genocide into the classroom was Dr. Ann Mahon, who teaches Social Studies at Hunterdon Regional High School in New Jersey. It was her third time at Ramapo in a similar capacity. She emphasized the importance of having a variety of participatory exercises in which students would gain an understanding of the kind of moral and ethical choices people faced as bystanders in genocide. She drew upon examples from not only the Holocaust, but also the Rwandan Genocide, where many of the Tutsi victims’ killers were their neighbors, and the horrible massacres perpetrated by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Along similar lines to Kaiser, Mahon emphasized that we should look not only at the many examples of bad behavior in which betrayal becamethenorm, but also the few instances when individuals and/or a group became “upstanders” instead of bystanders and did the right thing.  Regarding pedagogical approaches, Mahon recommended that teachers used a scrupulously fact-based line of enquiry that wedded the use of archival material, press reports, memoirs and testimonies with exercises that elicited students to make choices in their behavior that in some measure replicated the decisions that bystanders in genocide have had to make. One example she suggested was to involve students in role playing and taking a stand involving bullying among their peers.

Eric Mayer of Wayne, New Jersey, who grew up as a young Jewish boy in Worms, Germany during the Third Reich, provided a first-hand depiction of the blend of behaviors he experienced not only in his home town, but later when he and his brother were sent by their parents to France. There were the people of Worms who became Nazis and sympathizers who participated in the November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht. There was a neighbor who risked incarceration by buying food for his family and the police chief who placed Mayer and his family in protective custody to prevent them from being attacked by the marauding mob on that fateful November evening. There was also the courageous English woman who escorted Mayer and his brother from the occupied to the non-occupied zone of France. Were it not for these individuals and several more, Mayer emphasized, he and his brother would not have been able to survive.

Participants ringed Mayerafterwards to express their gratitude for his presentation, peppered him with questions and asked him to speak at their schools.

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