Welcome. We are delighted you are here. Briefly, the center is a relatively new project and our mission is to bring to bear on a a host of contemporary issues. We host Public Programs like these. We have a blog where historians write for us about contemporary hit issues from a historical specter. We are in the midst of a collaboration with the Philadelphia Inquirer to have more historical scholarship in local journalism. We have a number of things here in kansas and out in the community. If your joining us for the first time, welcome. We are delighted you are here and hope you stay connected to us. We have other programs and events for you to attend. We hope this is the beginning of a long relationship with the Lepage Center and villanova university. For those of you tune in on cspan or on our livestream, i should let you know this is the fourth in a series we have done this year on the subject of rigid revisionist history. You may be thinking, is revisionist history a contemporary issue to be addressed . If you look in popular culture, you will find references to revisionist history in many places. How many of you happen following the Senate Impeachment trial, show of hands . You may have heard the president s defense team invoked revision of history two days ago during the trial and cited the New York Times 6019 project as the revisionist history project, something we can we talked about. Our purpose this year has been to explore and challenge the questions about the revision and to eliminate that scholarship and historical scholarship depends on that revision at the empirical start of the process. With tonights subject, the holocaust, the word revision can often have more nefarious and insidious affiliations. For that reason, i want to start tonights event with a joint prepared statement created by the Lepage Center and i would like to read it in its entirety, if you would allow me to. This years series of roundtable discussions seeks to to explore challenging historical topics and to introduce a public audience to the ways revision necessarily in ones all of historical scholarship. We are aware that in connection with the evenings topic, the term, revisionism, has suggested a willingness to downplay or to deny nazi germanys mid20 century efforts to exterminate your jewish population. We reject any effort to deny the well documented history of that. To start off on a clear foundation, we believe it is important to reiterate that any honest intellectual discussion of the scholarship on the holocaust must start by analogy with basic historical fact of the holocaust. That said, i want to put this up for a moment because we have been disport exploring through a series of conversations why revision is important and what the revision we envision relies on. Historical scholarship necessitates looking at new sources, it necessitates new examinations, it necessitates expanding the interpretations, bringing in a diversity of perspectives, and it is an evolving process. Understanding these complex historical events is continually evolving and being enriched by new scholars and scholarship. This is the premise upon which our conversation rests tonight. Our holocaust scholarship is being continually revised, new ideas, new sources, new interpretations, and new scholars. Throughout these events and tonight, you will meet scholars who have fresh perspectives, have done interesting things and research, and helped us figure out what happens and why it matters for today. Let me introduce you to the scholars on our panel who will be here for tonights conversation. I will manipulate back to this slide. You may have seen in the promotion for this event that Tina Grossman in new york city was scheduled to join us. Unfortunately, she is not able to be with us this evening but she sends her regards and regrets. Let me first introduce jennifer rich next to me, the executive director of the row and center for the study of holocaust, genocide, and human rights and assistant professor of sociology. We have a tradition not to create handouts that invariably going to the trash or the recycle them. Recycle bin. Your phone still on silent, we encourage you to look at more Information Online about speakers. Seated next to her is devon pendas. He is the professor of history at boston college. His research is focused on were crime trial at the world word to come particular west germany, the west Germany Holocaust trial. Seated next to him is our faculty director and assistant director of european history, paul steege, who is focused on history of everyday life. He has done scholarship on germany, berlin, and we will begin the evening by learning more about our scholars and where they come from on the topic and from there, we will dive into the conversation. For now, i will go back to jennifer. Allow me to welcome you to the Lepage Center. The easiest way to get into the conversation is for you to tell us a little about the center you direct and a little about your research in your area of study. Hi, everybody. I am the executive director for the study of holocaust studies and human rights. It is a bit of a mouthful. We are in glassboro, new jersey. We look at, certainly, the holocaust, also other genocides. One question we are asked most often is so what. What can we do about it now, so we made this decision this semester to switch our emphasis and push into human rights to answer the so what question that so many students have. My own research focuses on holocaust memory, what do the generations of those who survived the holocaust know, understand, and remember, and Holocaust Education. I was first an education professor and before that, elementary school. I had a strong indication of how this is remembered in communities. We like to say history is both what and how. You come from a sociology background. For those not familiar, what does sociology bring to this question . What is the how . It is looking at how people in communities active. What choices they had, what choices they made, what agency they took when they felt they did not have choices. The perspective of sociology is on the people and the choices and the communities formed throughout the holocaust and any other issue. If i may put you on the spot a little more, is there an example that you might be able to share off the top of your head from the research you have done or other work at the center, what is the example people might be able to put their minds around . One of the most common questions i get in the classes i teach is things like, why didnt people leave . If this what if this is what was going to happen, why did people not leave when they had the chance . I hear stories of families on the holocaust who started to leave their hometown and made the choice to go back. With things like, the devil you know is always better than the devil you do not. That would be one example of agency that people had and their understandings at the time and reinforcement between community members. One family who talk to another family who who you heard a rumor, and that is how decisions were made when they did not know what was ahead of them. Another example of community, thinking of my own research, children, would be the communities formed, that would be another example. Thank you. We will get much more into that as the conversation unfolds. Devin, i will put you on the spot next. We are delighted to have you here. Welcome to the Lepage Center. Thank you for inviting me here. It is my first time in villanova. Im excited to speak to all of you. The easiest way to explain my agenda is i started with the story of the aftermath of the holocaust. Sort of the question of, this horrible thing happened. Now what do we do . How do we respond to this awful event . Much of that focus has been on regal attempts at redress for this criminal trial in particular. I have done a little work on reparations as well, trying to look at this question of how do societies, mainly germany, but also, to some lesser extent, places like the United States where they are not privy trader nations, how they use the law and criminal justice to respond to this. I have expanded questions around general strategies i do a lot of history of International Law as well. I have done a lot of work on the history of the holocaust, what historians have said about the holocaust, how our interpretations and understandings of the holocaust have evolved not just since 1945, because jewish individuals while it was ongoing. Since the time of the holocaust itself, how our interpretations changed. I have done a fair amount of work on that as well. Is this something with collaboration, what are some disciplinary intersections . Every other year, i teach a course for judging in the state of florida of all places. So i teach a course. It is interesting to hear the kinds of things judges bring to the table. The way they are different than what historians would ask. What choices did people make, why did they make those choices. Whether people are following the rule. One exercise we do that is fascinating and slightly disturbing is i distribute briefcase studies of criminal cases for mixedrace sexual relations during the 1930s in germany. I asked them and i present the laws and how would you respond to this and how this was actually handled in a court of law. For the most part, the judges, by the law. You consider how unjust the law is. On the other hand would you want a world in which judges willynilly said i think that is unjust and i will not follow it . How far down the rabbit hole can you go . It gives you really serious and ethical quandaries. Before you refused to force them to resign from the bench. Do you stay on and try and make things less bad . Fascinating. We will get more into that as we go on this evening. Factory director of the Lepage Center, paul, same question to you. How do you enter this conversation . I would describe myself as an historian of everyday life. In terms of thinking about everyday life, it is sometimes hard to imagine ordinary life for everyday life as something that is at all pertinent to talk about, this her endlessly violent criminal act at the middle of the 20th century. I think in fact, looking at violence and the ways people make sense of and tell stories about and participate in the act of violence. Tremendous violence dont depend on monsters or dont tend on depend on people who are in extraordinary situations. So many people found it so possible to integrate this kind of violence into ordinary lives. You actually teach a class on nazi germany here at villanova. Maybe you can talk about that and how you deal with that in the classroom with students and bring up these types of questions with students and people study in the holocaust. My starting point is very much thinking about the humanity of the people with history, by taking seriously their humanity, that is both victims and perpetrators, the germans, jewish germans, polls, people from all over europe, americans, and think about the ways in which they were in some ways familiar with us. They are not going to be an exotic other that we look at and say, how can we imagine any connection to that, but what is so unsettling is the ways in which their story and experiences make a lot of sense. I always think the best history is not a history that draws a line under the past and tells us what to know, but rather, the history that unsettles the ground beneath our feet and forces us to ask questions about ourselves. Matt is very much the ways in which i try to keep those questions and unsettled our complacency even if we are comfortably and villanova in the first part of the 20th century. Thank you. I hope that gives you a window into the scholarship we havent expertise we have. To in case people want to participate in cyberspace. Ive done a little polling of the audience. Now and throughout the conversation. For those of us in the room, how many of you are actively aware there is continual new scholarship on the holocaust . How many of you think, i thought we knew everything we needed to know about this. I want to start with you and bring it back to the question of the revisions of the scholarship. Everyone here seems to assume already the scholarship on the holocaust continues to be revised and expanded. Can you give the history of the history . Very long time ago. Much of the postwar time period, there were two friends with a holocaust biography. One with a history of jews as an element of jewish history, how did jews respond to the holocaust, how did they resist, what kinds of strategies for survival, how did they die, how did they make sense of their loved ones, and they treated this like the aspect of a longer history. Sometimes, it could remain much more focused and interested in jewish identity. Then there was a history of perpetrators and of german history. Still a story within the history of modern germany, where are the origin points for germany, antisemitism, nazism all the way back to martin luther, with 1918 and world war i, what are the decisionmaking purposes to exterminate jews, these kinds of questions. These unconnected historiography is, there were times when we struggled with great hostility between the groups. A lot of german historians were mistrustful of survival testimony survivor testimony that they were overly biased. A lot of jewish historians were distrustful of german historians, thinking they were germans. In some cases, it turns out in the 1960s, it later turned out spent time at the ss end of the war for example. I would say really only in the 2000s, beginning with the work of the really important historian, he started to get what he termed integrated histories into the holocaust. They tried to bring together the history of the jewish experience of murder and survival and the perpetrator side of the story, that led to this. These were not separate events by definition. The jews were not need not merely reacting to initiatives. There was an interaction on there that tried to bring these not just in the dialogue but of the same story, there has been an Important Development to overcome the bifurcation. The other thing that has happened and may be more controversial, has been the history of the holocaust, but history of genocide the history of genocide. That this is an example of a broader and more general phenomenon in the way that world war ii as an example of the history of war. Yet there are distinctive elements of a specific war that is different from world war i and the civil war, but it is recognizable as a war. The holocaust as genocide, we have recognizable features with other instances in the history of the world that we can learn from, precisely to highlight the differences, which are distinct from instances of genocide, but also to recognize the commonality. In some cases, some historians have argued it is kind of an ongoing genocidal profit of the multinational european empires, starting in the late 19th century with the Ottoman Empire and the balkans, and stretching into the early 1950s with germans from europe that is kind of a process of what one historian called the unbelieving of europe, so it is a particularly rabid of phenomenon. That has gotten some pushback from people who would argue the holocaust is if not radically unique, certainly distinct from other processes of ethnic cleansing in the balkans, for instance. I think there should be a five minute youtube video. That was fantastic. Well done. You have got genocide and human rights at the name of your center. You seem to be in the later stages of development, where other questions of rights are integrated into what you do. Talk a little about how that came about and how you see the holocaust within these other dynamics. Sure. Between us in this room and anyone watching at home, we have had a huge debate about the name of our center. And whether it is repetitive to say study of the holocaust genocide and human rights. Whether holocaust and genocide are repetitive. Fundamentally, we have landed on the perspective of saying, at least for now, though we expect conversations to go on for months, years, decades, the holocaust is one of many and unique in its own way. Because Holocaust Education scholars talk about learning from the holocaust in learning about the holocaust, learning about the holocaust test do with learning facts. What happened when to whom and where. Learning these nebulous lessons we want to attach to Holocaust Education, we want students to stick up for the underdog, to question laws when they are just or unjust. There are perhaps generalities to a we can learn from the holocaust as opposed to about the holocaust. Human rights, when we think about human rights violations, in the holocaust and every other genocide and atrocities and in everyday life, we think about clean water water or voting suppression, human rights is meant to give us a broader umbrella to think about these things. One thing we talked about was, how much of the debates between scholars and historian debates ever reach out to the general public and should they . I wonder with your perspective what you think about some of the debates that happen within scholarship circles and how it manifests itself. I love that we have somebody people in the audience tonight, it speaks to the way scholars talk about this. It is of interest. Maybe the answer i would suggest is that the questions drive a lot of these conversations. Rather than thinking about scholarship as a way of formulating answers, think about scholarship as a way of posing new kinds of questions. Even in terms of, i suspect not all of you were maybe many of you have heard about the controversy of the 1990s. But this is about historians who uses similar set of archival data and come to very different conclusions about what it means. There was a big debate covered on cspan at the holocausts cm and overflow crowd and part of the question was about how you look at these people and perpetrators and what you call them. Ordinary men . Ordinary germans . Is there something particularly about their germaness that led them to be willing to participate in in mass murder, or is there something more generally ordinary about them that a variety of different factors appear pressure and ideology in the sense that they need to live up to the standards of other men in their units, this is something a lot of historians got very exercised about and a lot of inkless spilled about it. I think it has shaped the field in terms of the question of paying more attention not just to extermination camps like auschwitz, but to Pay Attention to police units engaged in the countryside of eastern poland. To think about the ways the holocaust is happening involving different people, that can its pushed along by some conversations that initially seemed to just a about who was calling names. I think this is relevant to us at the Lepage Center. How do we bring that scholarship to academic journals and debate to a broader public . I wonder if i can do another poll. For the students who are hereby show of hands, how many of you learned about the holocaust through your education somewhere down the line . Actually a good show of hands. How many have continued to do any research on it in college couple of history guys. I think this is a good said segway to the public memory side of the holocaust, which is distinct. Something that you have written about. The most information about the holocaust has come from films, maybe schindlers list or documentaries and things like that. Show of hands . Ok. Films do play a role in what people know about the holocaust. And you, jennifer, have done some work on this. You look at a particular film i will not say the name of. Maybe you want to tell people about that area of the research and how film is used to teach about the holocaust and what the shortcomings might be. The film that is not yet been named that ive written about i see a lot of headshaking and i heard that sigh of frustration. For those of you who do not know the film and have not heard some broad criticism, based on a book of the same title, the book has a label on it in the film does not. It is the mostwatched movie in American Public schools when it comes to teaching the holocaust for two enormously practical reasons full reasons. It is pg13 and 90 minutes long. It makes the showcasing of the movie in a classroom really practical. You do not need parental permission. Because the film is shown regularly, i have students who, all the time, when i teach holocaust and i say why are you here, they will see i saw the boy in the striped pajamas in high school and it saved my life. The problem with the movie, i think some of you know based on your facial expressions, it is almost completely ahistorical. It is set during the holocaust. The main character is a young german boy named bruno whose father is the commandant of a camp, we can assume is auschwitz. As a viewer of the film, we followed the story of bruno, who has no idea that jews are subhuman, even the as the son of a nazi, he would have known this. He befriends a young jewish boy who was imprisoned in auschwitz. Colonel passes chocolate to this little boy and they develop a friendship and in the end, both are murdered. Viewers feel the most in a gas chamber full of jews, and bruno who has snuck underneath the fence. The viewer is moved to tears at the fact that the young german boy has died at the end of the movie. You are not tuned in to what is happening to what their lives are like. I so often have conversations with students, how great this movie is and how they learned something about the holocaust, and at the end of a semester, they will watch them we will watch the movie and class in class and they sort of see it, that is one reasonable way to use the film as a teaching tool, to critically examine the movie. There are probably a lot of better choices in terms of what might be shown in school. Some people might critique schindlers list but it certainly is far more historically accurate but is sometimes impractical to show in schools. It seems like this is a to between learning from and learning about. One might argue from the film that you cannot learn much about the holocaust but you did say they are showing up to the classroom and seeing the film. Is there something in the learning from category for films like this or piano, where there is a spirit of humanity that can be inculcated . Is that a useful way to think about the holocaust question i hesitate to say there is a real upside using the boy mistretta pajamas in the classroom. I do not know that there is. If i had to pick a Silver Lining and that is sometimes important to do, it would be that students tends to become interested and they want to learn more and it gives them an opportunity to correct incorrect narratives that they have grown up believing about the holocaust in this story. Is there a redeeming narrative . I do not know. I am a little worried about the idea that we can learn or teach about the holocaust and have Students Walk out of the classes feeling cleansed, like to have done something really good by learning about this, and then they are done. That is still one question i raised before. I am not sure of exactly how i feel about finding humanity in it. I would add one thing. He there is a real risk in teaching or writing about or learning about the holocaust, which is what you learn from it is an empty moral platitude. That you learn, i am not a nazi therefore, i will not murder jews in the 1940s in europe, therefore i am problematically good and do not have to worry about anything. I think with these universalizing fables around the holocaust, we were talking before the event about life is beautiful, another film in that direction. It is all well and good to say be nice. You do not necessarily need to have the kind of holocaust in your backdrop for saying, do not be mean to people. I do think there are generalized lessons one can and should learn from the holocaust, but they have to be connected to the specificity of the event. They cannot, freefloating pablum that teaches kindergarten, love and morality. We can learn that in other contexts. Just very briefly, to build off of that, i would maybe say one or perhaps two things, it is so often the context of teaching about the holocaust, we teach particularly younger students the rescuers. The question the teachers so often want to ask is, how many of you think you would be the rescuer . Every kid will raise their hand. No one is going to say not me. I will leave my neighbor to their own devices. Not helping them through the gray areas. Why people made choices. There was a lot of context around this. My second point, talking about lessons from the holocaust were learning from the holocaust, there are things like nationalism, racism, antisemitism. I was thinking the most important thing is the realization of the fact that this is possible. To pick up on the example i gave, who is the rescuer . This presumption of distancing ourselves from the holocaust is that of course we would be on the right side of this story, that we identified with the victims and by learning about this, we are our place in the moral high ground. Even in a place like the Holocaust Museum and washington, d. C. , where you receive your Identity Card and you open up at various places along the way, which makes a lot of sense in that breaking down this idea of millions of people being killed in putting a human face on it, and you get a question that at the end, there is a person that i have been identified with, do they live or die, in some ways, it would be a much more provocative exercise if you get your Identity Card, and it is unclear whether you are a perpetrator or a victim and you humanize the experience find out where you were born, who you married and where you did your military service. Then perhaps it challenges you more provocatively to say, which cant did you serve in . Which camp did you serve in . That is a different and experience but in some ways it underscores the ways the lines between complicity and resistance are also blurred and that the real challenge and real benefit of exploring the history is to delve into the gray areas as opposed to acting that they are absolute moral certainties. As someone who spent 3. 5 years as a curator at a Holocaust Museum, teaching jewish heritage in me in manhattan, there is a real balance. A lot of the work of a territorial side of the house was on the about question. What are their stories and how do we connect with their stories. Then there is the education section which is working on, what can we learn from this, how do we instill these questions into the classrooms, and in some ways, specialties. In a museum setting. The challenge is how to integrate that into some sort of meaningful experience, which is a tough challenge. It is also a tough challenge for themselves. I want paul to talk a little about others that are less unknown. All of them have to rest of the questions of how much about and how they try to impart lessons for what they should be doing. People walk into the camps and bring their own sets of experiences and sometimes they bring provocative questions that maybe the people do not necessarily have great answers to. In the lead up to the conversation, we talked about exchanges happening with a young generation of Students Walking through the door. A number of news reports in the last few weeks about conversations about some of the guys in the camps providing provocative questions posed by students that were putting challenging questions about numbers. To some extent, they were locating questions, the political drain of germany in one case, that they were reflected in the fact that one of the teachers was a member of deal turned it the right wing extremist party, they are saying that political experience. It is a question about on the one hand and obligation of going to the camp to learn and then about whether people were willing to do that or not or if it is a sense of obligation and part of this is in terms of how one gets to the camps and goes and the experience of that. I was in poland and went to the auschwitz camp. I will never forget my first experiences getting off the train, obviously looking like a tourist. Running into people who say, taxi to auschwitz . Even in terms of this expectation that youre going to any of these camps, just a destination that you needed to go and see part of High School Education or as part of your european tour, you checked it off and had done that and munich is great. But i think that is precisely the challenge and the camps themselves are going to the camps, the lessons do not go without saying. I think that is precisely where historians and educators come in. One of the things about the u. S. A while ago was the relationship between scholarly work and scholarly conversations amongst scholars and general people. This is a reused a useful reminder. The story is a particular and scholars more generally, modern stuff. The question is usually not what happened, but why it happened. The empirical information about what happens is usually pretty well documented. A broad consensus. But generally speaking, is very different with ancient history as they do not know have a clue what happened. When you get to the 20 century, the documentation is so thick on the ground that it is not usually the thing scholars are most interested or assessed with, it is the lie. You cannot take the what for granted. You have to remember that as a term by holocaust deniers to lend completely unwarranted legitimacy to the pernicious lies. But the fact is that there is no dispute about the fact. Then we can have these conversations about why, where there is a lot of room for legitimate dispute, legitimate interpretive differences. To push back a little bit, i think there are still a lot of facts we do not know. Lets do a show of hands. How many people are aware of shanghai, china, and its connection to the holocaust. Fewer than half of the people in the room. How many are aware of the dominica republic and its connection . Again. Fewer than half. Iran and its connection to the holocaust, refugees who survived, people who escaped the holocaust to went all across the globe to various countries in south america. There are still a lot of facts to get at. One way we get into the holocaust is through individual stories of people who were murdered and who escaped, stories of people who were perpetrators. That seems to be a place where there was an infinite amount of what an facts to uncover. It is still such a complex set of things. As an educator and a teacher, working with teachers who teach the holocaust, do you hear anything about that, about what can move us, as opposed to the 6 million who died in camps . The short answer is yes, absolutely. For all of us sitting here imagining 6 million jews or 11 million victims, 9 million survivors, thinking about world war ii more broadly, the numbers are staggering. It feels a most impossible to take in the numbers. 6 million, 11 million, how do those sit think through the people were and what they meant. So absolutely a story, whether it is a book someone reads, a documentary, a film, its sort of gets at the Human Experience in a way that numerical facts do not. Particularly younger students really connect to want stories to hang onto as they try and make sense of the holocaust and try to move closer to making sense of the holocaust, because i am a sure it is possible to totally make sense of it, but it are it is the individual stories. I may be would argue there are other sources, primary sources, that can be used to get at individual stories i want to stay on the teachers think. One of the first states to mandate Holocaust Education, many followups found teachers had a limited knowledge about the holocaust and being told do we have a sense of what works . If some of the things are not working, do we have a sense of what could work or what is possible for Holocaust Education . It is the milliondollar question. So much of Holocaust Education is not working the way we want it to. As evidenced by my own research and large scale and the pew research center, all of which points to the same direction, that young people more broadly are lacking in content knowledge about the holocaust. The question of what to do, the question of the day yesterday, the never again, i think there are a couple of quick answers. One is taking new scholarship and emerging Teaching Strategies and marrying them together. Helping teachers understand what strategies work when teaching young people about the holocaust, genocide, slavery, the trail of tears. How do we help young people and how do teachers stay on top . Were still are learning the what how do the teachers learn that so theyre able to teach their own students this information . I would argue colleges of education in particular and museum settings have huge potential. Roles to play. I would also argue for meeting people where they are. Kids can concentrate in 15 minute chunks of time because that is what commercials are in television. Now i would argue kids have the focus for youtube video, chunks of time, or social media, and it is smaller than that. We may have whatever feelingly have about emerging technologies and kids attention spans, but as teachers, i think we have an obligation to see where students are and how we want to move them. I put us on this slide to get us back to where we have been thinking about. You touched on one of them, opening the conversation, to be on more platforms and married more media. I think it points to the diversity where they go for the information. A little bit about the expanding interpretations, you talked about 1933 versus 1941, reimagining how some of the interpretations than the scholarship and in the classroom. I think this question, they write an article or a book, they have to decide when to end and when to begin. You have to make some choices and that reflects, the committee how did hitler come to power, the second world war, and now, in terms of trying to understand how nazi germany matters, how do they come to perpetrate this on the jewish population. This is very much a moving target. We talked earlier today, i was reading a new article that came out that was discussing hitlers antisemitism, i was revisiting an interview conducted in 1994 with a woman who had been the daughter of the family that had rented a room right after the first world war. This has become the new source suggesting in terms of trying to figure out how the ideas move from this failed painter in austria to then become a political leader in germany. It is messy and complicated and there are a lot of debates about what the Different Things mean. This is a great example of the ways in which looking at a new source from the 1990s, can give us new insight into saying, what was going on in munich in 1913 and 19 14, and how should that matter for where we begin and end the stories . There is no question that, as with any field of historical inquiry, the questions historians bring to the table change over time and it changes the sources of 1994. Now, this is more of a source for me than i thought it was. In that perspective, certain aspects of historical for the holocaust will become known in a way they were not previously, sometimes rediscovered. You will go back to things he used to be interested in and are suddenly interested in again. One topic that got a lot of attention recently is in the context of the holocaust. Something totally not talked about for most of the post war. In an era that is front and finding information that people chose to not focus on it. In that regard, we ask questions of the past because they are important to us in the present moment we are living in. With the holocaust, one cannot escape the power, whether it is a striped uniform or a toy or shoe or hair, all of those things are sources, such a part of the story of how we made this transition and translation between scholarship and public understanding. I have the privilege of going down to the jamaican republic to work at the museum that documents refugees from europe and to be the first person to look at those in 50 years, it is a whole range of sources and artifacts scholarship can be derived from. There is a whole universe of documents that have not been fully explored. They also have pitfalls and challenges. I want to get you all into the conversation. We will bring up the house lights so we can see you the cameras can also identify you. Please remember you are on camera on cspan. I repeat my statement from previous events, which some of you may have heard. For firsttimers, we want audience feedback on all of our events. The number one comment we received back from people on what to include on is to ask people to make their questions short, or to make a short comment [laughter] so to help us make the experience that are for you, we request you keep your questions or comments brief. You can direct to an individual member of the panel, or to all of us. If you are willing, you can identify yourself. We have two microphones on either end. Lets bring you into the conversation now. Feel free to raise her hands and we will go from there. Hello, my name is jerry sankar. I have a question for the whole panel. It has to do with the 6 million. How and when did historian settle on that number and maybe there is a who in that question as well. The 6 million number was first used in the nuremberg trials. It was derived from a combination of german sources, some kinds of things, the killings in the soviet union they kept pretty good records so we have a fair sense of that. Some of them were based on prewar estimates of populations and then postwar count of refugees. One of the big problems is that for a lot of jews killed in extermination camps, the germans did not bother keeping records of how many people they were killing. So we have a very good count of the number of jews who were enslaved by the germans and many of whom were then worked to death and died in horrible conditions in slave labor camps. But to the jews who were sent directly to the gas chambers, the germans did not keep meticulous counts of those. So there is a lot of squishyness i guess you could say, in some of these precise numbers. So 6 million is a ballpark. I have seen incredible figures as low as 4. 8 million. I have seen figures as high as six and a half million. 6 million is a give or take number with a fairly large error estimate. But nothing lower than about 5 million would be the lowest credible count that i have seen. It is an interesting question i wonder if from an educator perspective, working with teachers, how does that number function . Does that number and the power and magnitude of it have some sort of a role in how teachers approach the subject . Or deem the subject to be serious enough it has to be taught in every classroom . Is there some power in that number . Certainly there is a power to the number. But i think because it is so unimaginable in so many ways, it makes the teaching of the holocaust normally complicated. There is an urgency because this high. Enormously complicated. Theres an urgency because it is so high. And when you add other groups in addition to the jews in the holocaust, the number gets higher and it makes it both urgent and enormously complicated because it feels incomprehensible. Particularly, the younger you go, the harder it is. 40 when youre young feels really big. So to think about 6 million feels impossible. On this side of the room. First, i am a catholic priest, i was stationed in poland for 18 years. I was pastor of a parish about five kilometers or six commoners away from auschwitz. My family, my mothers family perished as christians in the camp. I would have a question for the audience. How many have relatives or related to someone who perished . Thank you. Thank you for raising that. Appreciate that. Weve a couple of grad students on the side of the room and then we will move across. Kyle and then thomas. Hello, i am a first year grad student. A general question that could be for any of the panelists it mainly has to do with teaching. And combating Holocaust Denial in your classroom. This came up last year in a class i had, where a professor was approached by a colleague who said, they had students bring up facts that they learned online or reading david irving and the response was they were not really sure how to deflect these accusations from their own students about Holocaust Denial. So maybe a question of what are some ways you can combat these kind of questions in class . I will start with this one. Both because kyle was a student of ours in the past and i fill up getting to answer, also because i feel obligated to answer, and also because it is teaching. I have the experience and know the situation kyle is talking about. Also a situation in new jersey recently, a teacher was fired for teaching Holocaust Denial and he sued the School District. I was a witness in that case. On behalf of the School District who was fighting against him. And have given enormous amounts of thought to what happens when not only students bring up Holocaust Denial, but what happens when teachers trade in conspiracy and denial. One thingthere are two schools of thought. One thing is the two schools of thought. One is the devorah lip shot, i will not debate a denier, from the movie. Lip shots. If you cannot accept it, our conversation is done. Particularly with students, who have perhaps been taken down weird google algorithm rabbit holes and have been taken to sites like the National Historical reviewsites that have really solid sounding names and they do not necessarily know how to tell the good from the bad. I think what you have students who are relying on faulty facts there is a little bit more wiggle room to say, i see where you have gotten this, let me give you a stack this big of documents that are going to refute that. And then lets talk about it afterwards and see what makes sense. I do not know how you counter adults who are trading in denialism and conspiracy theories. But with students you can cite facts with facts. The only thing i would do is give a shout out to this webpage call the news corp. Process. It is the opposite of libshpshatz, and takes denial as in point by point and combats it. If it is a case where facts will make a difference, it is a really good resource for that. If it is a case of motivated reasoning that it may make more sense to disengage. I would say a plea for the value of doing history in a particular way and may be saying this calls for a footnote. [laughter] a way to think about providing, even if not actual footnotes but essentially providing sources to support the work we do, so this becomes a way of modeling but also of providing evidence. The reason why academic integrity is a big deal in a university is not just because we are trying to keep people from cheating. It is also about putting together the architecture where ideas come from. By demonstrating where our intellectual work on subjects like the holocaust comes from, we can also provide a much denser and more fully fleshed out sense of the foundations of those arguments. I think its a good time to reinforce the fact that credentials matter. I think we are unfortunately in a moment where there is a lot of ambiguity around credentials and credentialism and maybe even some populist pushback against credentials and expertise. But we at villanova and in history to permits and more broadly feel strongly about credentials mean something. History departments more broadly. Certainly everyone can have opinions, but when it comes to having deep expertise on something, that is a different kettle of fish. Lets get thomas and then well move back to the other side of the room. My question is based on the fact that one of the most wellknown holocaust deniers is arthur butz who is not a historian but he was in Electrical Engineering professor with a phd at northwestern. My question is, how do we balance insisting on the fact that the holocaust happened with a certain points in our history with making history accessible. Maybe not to people like arthur butz, but by keeping the holocaust street accessible while also insisting it happened, and keeping that argument in the forefront. You want to talk about instagram . [laughter] sure. All sorts of technology. Before this, we had a sort of twopronged conversation and diluted to this when i talked about eating young people where they are, right about meeting young people where they are, right . I used an example, a series of Instagram Stories. I believe it was a film maker in israel who did this. Instagram stories, maybe someone here can fact check me if i get the definition of Instagram Stories a little bit wrong. They are essentially short video clips that can be posted on a regular basis on an instagram page. Account. App. So there was this Instagram Story however was posted, called evo stories and it chronicled the true story of a young woman who was murdered in the holocaust. And portrayed her in the current day. So you saw eva taking selfies and eva out with her friends. And it was as if the holocaust were happening now in a lot of ways. While also staying true to much of her story. And it was lots of debates about this. It was appropriate, if was horrifying, if it should be taken down and condemned forever. Fundamentally, lots and lots of young people connected to this. It had millions of views and followers. And or followers. Students in my classeses would also come and say i saw this on this Instagram Story. How real is this . And it opened up the avenue for lots of conversation about what is accurate and what is not because they were able to see themselves and make connections to this young woman in these videos. But at the same time there is a tension with bringing serious scholarship and a serious subject into perhaps these more playful and modern platforms, right . There have been controversies about holocaust videogames. People have tried to use video games as a way to teach about the holocaust and their pushback against that. There was even a bit of game shut down because was deemed to be not the right tone and not the right message and not factual. So it is a relevant western about balancing the new platforms and opportunities with the seriousness that the subject demands. Questions historians reckon with in general which is what is the place of fiction in a history classroom, right . [indiscernible] has made up elements, all the light you cannot see, would you teach it in a class . Some are better, some are worse. Some are great literature, some are not. But all of them have fictional elements and how, what are the ethics of bringing any amount of fictional dimension into a story, the reality of which, is so profoundly important to acknowledge. How do you fit, we are acknowledging the reality of this but in order to make it accessible we are going to bring in fiction or selfies or, you know, came to the american gangster or life is beautiful. How does that [indiscernible] how creative and how imaginative can you get but still be true to the essence of your story. The other thing we have spoken about before, thinking about technology is something we are working on at rowan university, is the challenge to think about teaching and learning about the holocaust by using Virtual Reality. The first reaction everyone gives his a gasp. After extensive conversations inside the university and with other scholars, we decided to recreate certain parts of the warsaw ghetto. By using the documents from the ringell bloom archive which, devon mentioned it, jews who were imprisoned in the warsaw ghetto acted as citizen historians and wrote in some diary entries, daily life type of reports. About things they work sprinting. How much food they had in the soup kitchen. Have any people were there that day. So we are trying to do this, only using, many were preserved, so that generations too, could learn from the experiences of these jews who were imprisoned in the warsaw ghetto. We are using Virtual Reality to bring to life documents that were intended to be read by future generations, or at least that was the hope. So there, and i think, our biggest question continues to be, where are the ethical lines here . What is ethical and what is not . How do we do this without it feeling cool or like a videogame that really using it as a teaching tool . I think it is those ethical lines that do not keep shifting but become a more complicated as technology advances. And as we move further away from the event. Theres a balance of technology scholarship, ethics, teaching all of which we are thinking about. Lets make sure we get more people involved in the conversation. You have been patient. This is wonderful. I am wondering, do you mow dust you know the movie, the reader and what are your thoughts on that . Do you know the movie, the reader, and what are your thoughts on that . I found that very powerful. I am not a fan. For the reader, if you do not know the film or book, it was a sensation in the late 90s, i want to say. The story is, a young boy a young man has an affair with an older woman who turns out to have been a female guard in a concentration camp. Who ends up then having done some bad things or gone through bad things. It is the core message, he helps her learn to read and introduces her to the classics of german literature. And this is kind of a story of redemption and salvation for her. What i find troubling about that, is the thesis of the story if it has one is that german culture can save you from german culture. And, uh, i say that as a joke. But the problem emerges clearly in and of itself, right . The question is not, if only the germans had read more carta goethe, the holocaust were not of happened. The holocaust happened why the germans were reading goethe. The question is why didnt reading it prevent the holocaust . And that is not how the question was framed in that book. So that is why i found that to be not entirely successful. And the one, yes, i agree with everything you said. And also think it shows shades of gray that can be complicated for people to think about, students in particular to think about. In what ways is the perpetrator in this film humanized . She is not onedimensional. Shes not people. She did evil things. She did horrible things. She also is this person who loves and is loved in return. So while agreeing that certainly parts of it are problematic, i think theres something about the humanization of perpetrators and it makes it really hard to say, and i would never be that person, this is impossible. So that is one little comment. The other thing i would say and this gets to the point and messiness at the granular level of everyday life in the way in which the lines between actions they try to assess and evaluate their goodness or badness. My work focuses on post door to berlin. In one of the debates in the berlin useful assembly there was discussion, accusations of a socialist deputy. An accusation that he had collaborated with the nazis. Because he had purchased the shop of a jewish acquaintance so that person could emigrate. How should we understand this action . Is this an act of humanity, to facilitate the escape of 70 from nazi germany . Or is this an active collaboration contributing to the area and is asian of the German Economy aryanization of the German Economy . The level of detail i could access from the record did not get to the relationship between these two people and how that played out whether we know what is informing this decision, that is something the record is not quite give us access to. But i think that is precisely the case that, just because somebody was not a nazi, does not mean that ones actions were not contributing to the smooth operation of the nazi regime. Or just because one was a not see, does not this is really mean that one cannot do things that in individual moments also created opportunities for humanity or possibility. [indiscernible] how good historian can ruin any movie that you like. [laughter] i say that tongueincheek but he gets back to the questions earlier from our students. There are ways we want to engage with these topics, but it is not always in the classroom. It is not always at a panel conversation. Sometimes it is through a film or book or an instagram post. So it may not be the right tone or message but is there something we can learn from all this . And do these things as a collective still serve Public Interest purpose, by being out there and raising awareness, right . It would be worse if there were no films at all, i think. That is my personal opinion. Lets get a few more questions. We have had a lot of men raising their hands. I would like gender balance. You have been patient. Lets get you and then we will get my mother and then a few other people. [laughter] is called moderators prerogative. Hello, my name is janelle munro. I spent some time with a german colleague a couple of months ago. She had questions for me about how we have progressed from slavery and going through jim crow and reconstruction and the civil rights movement. And how she has been seeing a lot of that statues not being removed. She asked me about the education, how we are educated about slavery. Then she switched quickly to how we are educated about the holocaust and german history in the u. S. . I explained the difference i experienced in that slavery is a matter of fact thing that happened and that is how it was explained to me in the south. And that the holocaust was a sad thing that happened that, i do not know a lot about but it is just this sad sobering thing. The question i have for the panel, is how, if you know, in german studies, how is the holocaust taught there . And what can be gleaned from how the teacher there, to also teach holocaust here and also other sad events like slavery here in america . So, i think what is really similar about these issues is, even regardless of the difference in the distance in the past, i think these are two histories that in the United States and germany remained very close to the surface. They are present in lots of ways. And they continue to have, to remain significant parts of contemporary life. I think that germany, west germany in particular, was often held up and that unified germany is now held up as a Success Story in terms of an effort to deal honestly and factually and conscientiously with a very problematic past. And i think on some level that is very true. In terms of the ways in which it is part of the curriculum. It is, this recognition that nazism was wrong, that nazi germany perpetrated horrific crimes, and that this is something that contemporary germans need to need to wrestle with. Recent conversations have begun to wrestle with the ways in which the successful Civic Education was also detached from personal experience. There is a book a number of years ago that was called grandpa was not a nazi in german. This idea that yes, the nazis, it was horrible. But the crimes, nobody is doubting that. My grandfather, will he was just an ordinary soldier. So he had nothing to do with, the nazis were really bad. It is a good thing we were not one of them, kind of thing. I think that would be the challenge here. The ways in which we can recognize, whether in a personal family or institutionally, we have many more connections with these dangerous pasts. The question of universities, georgetown or princeton or harvard or yell, who are confronting their connections to the legacy of slavery. Not just in the south. . But are beginning to. Those are some of the ways in which we can think about. It is not just something in the past. At our institutions in the present, their wealth, their traditions, their names. They bear lots of connections. And i think that maybe is one of the Cautionary Tales about the success of germany, is the ways in which it also becomes depersonalized. And i would quickly add a question of generations. Right, the story of germans success in dealing with its past as a story of the second forward generation. The immediate postwar era, the dominant story in german public life is we are the victims. We are victims of the nazis, all four of them who started this horrible war. [laughter] and we are the victims of the allies who bombed our cities into rubble. And we were really unlucky. We are victims of communists. It is only really in the 1960s, with the next generation, you start to get people with a much more critical kind of engagement with that past, saying, yes, there were more than four nazis in the country, right . But my grandpa, there was my dad. And there they probably were pretty critical, that was the 1960s after all. What is interesting now, though, is again you are starting to see a generational shift, right . Mentioned that Holocaust Denial is making its face known in germany in a way it was not previously. Neonazis are, you do want to overstate this. But there more prominent publicly than they would have been 10 years ago or 15 years ago even. Right . So, progress on these kinds of confrontations with difficult past is not a oneway street. Right . You can learn lessons and then forget them. Or fail to train or teach them to the next narration, right to the next generation, right . And that is whats important about this kind of work, is making sure that lessons once learned are not forgotten. And i would add or argue that as many questions or concerns as we might have about Holocaust Education in the United States, i would argue it is probably still a lot better than the education we do around slavery. I think this is an overstatement. But i think it is easier for americans children or americans in general, to think about horrors that were committed by other people far away. Where americans were on the side of right. And when we confront our own history of slavery, we do not have the safety of space. And so i think theres an argument to be made that we do better when it comes to Holocaust Education then we do when it comes to slavery education. And we are running short on time. One last question. From my mama. [laughter] and there will be other questions you want to ask. So we will have a Dessert Reception in the lobby after the event. I invite you to join me with the speakers where you can ask additional questions and gain additional in fight insights. I would say your question points to something we have talked a lot about which is how different History Education looks, depending on what state youre in. I grew up in new york. I learned a lot more about the holocaust that i did about slavery. But the inverse could be true for people in other states. A lot of this work we have to do in the Public Interest is localized. We know more about the victims of that showa then we do about the victims of slavery. Victims of the shoah. Theres a lot more to uncover about the victims of slavery. The final question. In the front. [laughter] hi. So i am the daughter of two holocaust survivors. I was born in a dp camp in germany after world war two. I would like to thank the entire panel for a fabulous discussion. So i knew a fair amount because i went to a hebrew day school. And we have family in israel as well. But i never really appreciated how awful this was until we went, dan and i, my husband, went to birkenau. Not auschwitz. Because i think it is totally [indiscernible] but auschwitz is vast. If you imagine smoke, smell, dirt on the roads, shouting, nazis, dogs, complete oblivion for the people who came off the train. Trains. Even for someone like myself, an experience like that, it is really important. And the other thing that happened while we were there as there was a survivor, who was telling Israeli Soldiers about his experiences in the camp. So these were young men and women from israel, from there, who did not really know anything about it. What i would suggest, is in europe, hitlers decided to completely extinguish the jewish community. Some had been in europe for over 1000 years. And one way to teach kids, or to make it more immediate, i think, and you guys know this better, is to appoint people in the room and say to them, ok. You guys are going to disappear. The entire third or fourth or fifth of the class is going to disappear. How do you feel about this neighbor or that neighbor . How do you feel about not having this person in your class . I think that is the only way you can bring the stuff home to these kids. Because they live in a privileged world. And it is really hard to make them understand this. I want to be careful with how i frame this. To say there are lots of debates within education about the use of simulations like that. My biggest caution or concern, while i hear what youre saying and wrestle with this myself often, and ive asked this question on a regular basis, is are we giving kids then some sort of false equivalency . I was a part of this in my class. I was disappeared or i was asked how i felt when my neighbor was disappeared. And now i understand what it was like to be a jew in 1939 germany. So, there is this thing young people tend to do, which is to say they can understand everything. My pushback or caution with Something Like that, which i agree, in many ways would probably be effective and would really bring the message home, is that there is then this over identification with something that, thankfully, our children right now, in america, cannot understand. And it is both a blessing and a curse that they cannot. So that is my only bit of pushback to jasons mom. Im sorry. [laughter] thinking about different ways in which there can be an experience of a place like auschwitz or birkenau or doc how can depend dachau, can depend on the weather and the time of day you are there, that there is not a single way that can be experienced. If i can point you to one holocaust memoir i would encourage people to read, it is ruth kruger, still alive, holocaust girl remembered. She warns against this, even in the camps, rendering them at museumlike. She said she would never go back to auschwitz, because it cannot be like it was when she was there. I think this part is a challenge for all history. All history is kind of an approximation, right . And devon brought up the question of fiction. Theres a way all history requires a bit of imagination or inventiveness. I think the challenge for us is all to try to navigate that balance between making connections, flushing out stories we have in a fragmentary fashion. But at the heart of this needs to be recognized in the humanity of the people we are talking about and his stories were trying to tell. And whose stories we are try to tell. And to acknowledge that. And recognize how complicated that it is. Part of the point of History Education is to imagine yourself in this past, to try to understand what it would have been like to be in this past. But when youre talking about you know, mass murder events. It crates certain kinds of ethical challenges for that active imagination, right . Whether youre trying to get students to understand the nazis. What you want to do is to understand and nazis think that you do not want them to think like nazis. Right . So how do you make them understand that there was a kind of logic to what the nazis were doing all be it a perverse logic. You want them to understand what the jewish experience was like. But you cannot walk a mile in their shoes. Right . You just cannot. As somebody living in a peaceful, prosperous well sawed, well close, well fed, nobody shooting at me kind of world. Right . I can try to understand that but it is not my experience, right . We have to respect the ethical distance between the world you are living in and this world of pain and terror and death. Conversations have power and places apps power places have power and conversations have power and that is how this process unfolds and how we educate and teach. And that is what we hope to do here at the Lepage Center. We hope to have powerful conversations and i think we have had one tonight. [applause] i know your eagle to talk to the palace more. You are eager to talk to the panel lets that prevents them from getting a treat. I will ask you to make your way to the lobby and the panelists to be there in minutes and we can continue the conversation. Thank you. Next on American History tv the, u. S. Holocaust memo