Hearts of Darkness
5/11/2004By Richard Broderick
Sabina Zimering is not what most would consider a commanding presence. These days, the life of the white-haired, soft-spoken retiree quietly revolves around her children and grandchildren.
But there is more to Zimering than meets the eye. Milan Kundera once said that the history of the modern world is the story of the struggle of memory against forgetting. Zimering, a Polish Jew, is both witness to that struggle and living proof that, at least some of the time, memory triumphs.
This spring, the Great American History Theatre produced the world premiere of Hiding in the Open, an adaptation of Zimering's memoir of the same name. Opening to rapturous praise from critics and audiences alike, the script tells the improbable story of how Zimering and her younger sister managed to escape the Holocaust by posing as Catholics—a feat made possible by the fact that, in prewar
Poland, all public school students were required to study Catholicism. Escaping from the ghetto in their hometown of Piotrkow the very night the Nazis moved in to deport all the Jews to the death camps, Zimering and her sister made their way to Germany itself, where they managed to survive as "volunteer" laborers right in the heart of Hitler's Reich.
While her book and the play adapted from it tell her story through print and performance, Zimering travels to schools, community centers, colleges, retirement homes, and elsewhere, relating her harrowing tale of deception and survival. Speaking recently to gatherings at an alternative high school at Dakota Technical College and at Hill-Murray High School, she received what one observer describes as "overwhelming response" with "awestruck" students glued to their seats and school officials thrilled to see their charges so raptly attentive. In response to her appearance, the principal at the alternative high school has gone so far as to arrange a field trip next fall to Washington, D.C., which will include a visit to the Holocaust Museum.
"This is a completely new world for me, but very rewarding," says Zimering, who, after emigrating to the United States, spent much of her career as an ophthalmologist working with student health services at the University. She confesses that she was unable to talk about her experiences to anyone for a long time after the war ended—although she survived, other family members and virtually everyone she'd known growing up did not. Now, though, she realizes that what she has to say is not rewarding only for her.
"To high school students, the history of 50 or 60 years ago is not much different from 600 years ago," she says. "But when a survivor comes and tells their story, it's completely different. It makes an impact for a person to come that they can see and talk to."
Zimering's visits to high schools and college classrooms are arranged through the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS), a cross-disciplinary unit with a unique approach that weaves together scholarship, community outreach, and art to explore the darkest reaches of human experiences. This blend of scholarship, storytelling, and art reflects the vision of the center's director, Stephen Feinstein, who came to the University from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, where he'd been the chair of the history department.
Founded in 1997 with money from an anonymous donor, CHGS offers a wide-ranging curriculum of classes on the Holocaust as well as the genocides in Turkey, East Asia, Central Africa, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. But its reach is much broader than that—amazingly so, given the center's brief history. It also sponsors major art exhibits, such as "Coexistence," a traveling exhibition of poster art initiated by Jerusalem's Museum on the Seam (see page 34); brings Holocaust survivors like Zimering to the community (her memoir was also the subject of a class taught at the CHGS); conducts conferences; presents guest speakers like Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide; and offers training and curriculum materials for use in high schools and middle schools. One of the center's new offerings is six "teaching trunks" containing books, videotapes, posters, and curriculum guides loaned by the center to participating schools.
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Instead of establishing a separate department, the University decided to organize its new program as a center located within the History Department, an arrangement that, Feinstein explains, avoids the possibility of overspecialization. Although small—the center's faculty consists of Feinstein and a handful of adjunct professors—the goal of the center is, he says, "to think out of the box about how we create programs that are of interest to scholars and the public, to engage in research, and to gain prominence for the University by having an active public dimension in this area."
From the beginning, the center has drawn extensively from the Twin Cities' unusually large number of Holocaust survivors—about 150 individuals in all when the center opened its doors seven years ago. But its growing renown in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies owes a lot to Feinstein's enthusiasm for scholarship that examines and compares characteristics common to all episodes of genocide (to some, the Holocaust is seen as a unique event, standing outside of history) and his determination to weave the arts—literary, visual, and cinematic—into the mix of offerings.
"You could have a center like this without including art, but it wouldn't be complete," argues Feinstein, who has a background in art history and has studied the underground art of the Soviet Union. "There are people out there who think only straight history is worth studying—no literature or other works of imagination. There are some who even think that survivor testimony is of no value."
But art, he observes, adds multiple dimensions critical to coming to grips, if that is possible, with the worst of human behavior. Among the millions killed by the Nazis—as well as the millions killed by the Turks, the Khmer Rouge, and the Hutu—were musicians and artists and writers and filmmakers as well as "ordinary" people. Just as important, art—even mediocre art—has the power to engage a much wider audience than scholarship ever could. "Schindler's List is not the best movie about the Holocaust, but it got the message out to millions of people," Feinstein says. "More than I could possibly reach."
"The fact that the center is initiating bringing the 'Coexistence' exhibit to the Twin Cities is a testimony to what Steve's perspective enables him to add to this community," says Rabbi Joseph Edelheit, the director of St. Cloud State's court-mandated Jewish studies program and creator of the CHGS's class in post-Holocaust theology. "My experience with other institutions that offer Holocaust studies makes it clear to me that this center is unique. Steve's an internationally recognized art historian. He's not bringing untested theories to his role. His maturity allows him to provide the center with seasoned leadership."
Like other faculty associated with the center, Edelheit was drawn to CHGS through his personal connections to Feinstein but has remained involved with the center because of Feinstein's demonstrated willingness to think "outside the box." When Feinstein invited Edelheit to teach at the center, Edelheit responded that the only class he wanted to teach would deal with theology.
"I asked, 'Is that a problem at a public university?'" Edelheit recalls. Feinstein assured him it was not, so Edelheit, who counts 27 members of his extended family lost to Hitler's diabolism and has the distinction of having been the first rabbi to earn a doctorate in Christian theology, created a course in post-Holocaust theology, which includes the works of both Christian and Jewish thinkers.
"I go into this class not with merely my academic credentials, but more passionately my rabbinical credentials and my desire to create interfaith dialogue," Edelheit says. "My goal is to model the commitment to dialogue."
The center's willingness to break new ground is also what brought Patricia Baer, a professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus in St. Peter, Minnesota, to the University in 2001 to teach a course titled "Women in the Holocaust: Gender, Memory, Representation."
As with other instructors working with the center, Baer has found that her class draws a broad variety of students, attracting both undergraduate and graduate students from Jewish studies and women's studies, but also history, education, nursing, political science, Spanish, and art, as well as members of the broader community—including a student who works with a shelter for battered women. Baer's classes have included both Christians and Jews. What's more, each time she's taught the course, Baer reports, she's also had students from Germany enrolled.
"That's made for an interesting dimension to our discussions," she says. "For Jewish students, I think many times they have had a member of their family who is a survivor or know of family members who died and now have a particular interest in how these events affected women. International students often want to know how Americans look at this event and how that view differs from what they are taught in a place like Germany.
"Stephen is really quite extraordinary in his foresight," she says. "At the time I first offered this course, there were only five or six similar courses in the United States. Holocaust studies have been slow to embrace the insights of feminist studies. There are complicated reasons for that, like the hegemony male historians have had in the field who often feel that a feminist approach trivializes the issue." Some scholars and survivors, she says, also feel that a focus on gender issues threatens to minimize "the racial basis for the Holocaust."
Meanwhile, for Taner Akcam, a visiting history professor who teaches courses on the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915 and the rise of nationalism in the Middle East, it is precisely the center's willingness to compare acts of genocide that constitutes one of its principal values.
"This is something that has been lacking," says Akcam, an ethnic Turk who was the subject of a recent New York Times article detailing the outrage his work on the Armenian genocide has elicited from the Turkish government, which continues to deny any such event took place. "For the most part each genocide scholar deals with his or her own specialty. This helps bring us out of the shadows."
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The term crimes against humanity first appeared only in 1915 in response to the Turkish killing of Armenians and the then-novel German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the word genocide, which specifically refers to the intentional mass killing of a particular people or ethnic group, was not coined until 1943 (by Rafael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer). But genocide, along with the invention of weapons of mass destruction, could be considered the signature experience of the past 100 years of human history.
But why should this be so? What is it about global conditions that made the 20th, and now, it seems all but certain, the 21st century, an epoch so rife with a lust for extermination?
Not surprisingly, there aren't any easy answers. But if one examines the mass killings of the recent past, as the scholars and students at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies do, certain patterns begin to appear, not so much in the modus operandi of the killings—gas chambers in the Reich, machetes in Rwanda—but in the ethnic, national, and international circumstances that militate in favor of genocide. The conclusions that can be drawn from this study are not hopeful: The same toxic mix of forces that triggered the murder of more than a million Armenians nearly a century ago are still at large in the global arena.
"In order to understand the killing of the Armenians, you have to understand the emergence of the different nations within the context of the demise of the Ottoman Empire," explains Akcam. "The idea of the nation state is a very homogenous group living within a defined territory. In a polyglot empire like the Ottoman Empire, where 10 different ethnic groups might be living together in the same village, the rise of nationalism created hostility and the basis of ethnic cleansing."
Similar forces were at work, Akcam points out, in the former Yugoslavian Republic when it was disintegrating during the period following Tito's death, in the Kashmir and large swaths of Africa and East Asia as well, all but ensuring future outbreaks of genocide.
The rise of Hitler, it should be added, took place against a backdrop of what Feinstein calls "a template" of the collapsing empire/rising nationalism scenario described by his colleague Akcam. Fueling the downward spiral into genocide was a mix of pseudo-scientific theories about "race" and a fundamental misapprehension of Darwin's survival of the fittest—and its deadly misapplication to human beings.
The fact that similar forces, from the post-colonial hangover that continues to afflict much of the Middle East to the rise of fundamentalism as a 21st-century version of extreme nationalistic or racial ideologies, are still at work in the world today makes the work of the center all that more relevant—and urgent. Memory's struggle against forgetting goes on.
"We need to be talking about how to prevent genocide from happening in the future," says Feinstein. "We need to create an early warning system to predict the outbreak of these kinds of events that doesn't trample on national sovereignty.
"That's one issue," he continues. "The other issue is that we must study these events as a facet of humanity on the presumption that, by doing so, we can learn something from it." n
Richard Broderick is a St. Paul freelance writer.
 | | | |  | | “Coexistence” in the Twin Cities | In an effort to promote worldwide peace, the Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem launched “Coexistence,” a traveling art exhibit, in 2001. After a month at the Old City walls, “Coexistence” traveled on to Belfast, Sarajevo, Berlin, and Cape Town—cities scarred by deep divisions between groups of people and the crimes and atrocities they commit. But the giant posters—artists’ striking depictions of peace and unity, fear and intolerance—coexisted nicely with the crowds of viewers.
Earlier this year, as the exhibit left Miami (the first of 13 U.S. cities it will visit), curator Raphie Etgar said that he thought stopping in serene St. Petersburg might be a waste of time. But one night, just before the grand opening for the St. Petersburg show, vandals slashed and painted racial epithets across almost all of the images. Event organizers were shocked and saddened, but they decided to leave the vandals’ hate crime on display to underscore the need for just such an exhibit. Indeed, St. Petersburg’s “Coexistence” show has arguably spurred more dialogue in that Florida city and beyond about hate and intolerance than it would have otherwise.
Thanks to the University’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the College of Liberal Arts, “Coexistence” travels to the Twin Cities in May. Artists from 19 countries contributed work for the 38 giant posters that measure 9 by 15 feet and are mounted 7 feet off the ground. Each image is accompanied by a text panel in English, French, German, and Spanish. For the Twin Cities exhibit, Hmong and Somali will be added.
“Coexistence” will be shown on the Hennepin County Government Center Plaza in Minneapolis May 1 through June 12 and in Rice Park in St. Paul June 14 through July 6.
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