Holocaust

Review: The Memoirs of André Trocmé

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Cover image of "The Memoirs of Andre' Trocme' " by Andre' Trocme'

The Memoirs of Andre’ Trocme’, André Trocmé, Edited by Patrick Cabanel, translated by Patrick Henry and Mary Anne O’Neil. Plough Publishing (ISBN: 9781636081595) 2025 (published in French 2020).

Summary: His childhood, formative years, pacifism, and leadership in sheltering of Jews during the Holocaust.

“On January 5, 1971, Yad Vashem recognized the Reverend André Trocmé and on May 14, 1984 his wife, Magda, as Righteous Among the Nations. 32 other residents of Le Chambon sur Lignon were awarded the title, and in 1990 Yad Vashem presented the village with a special diploma of honor in tribute of their humane conduct during the war” (Yad Vashem | André and Magda Trocmé, Daniel Trocmé)

In 1994 Philip P. Hallie chronicled, in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, the story of the village of Le Chambon and their efforts under pastor André Trocmé, to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. They saved 5,000 by some estimates. It is a marvelous account, and thankfully, still in print. André Trocmé, in the 1950’s, penned a memoir of his life up to that time for his children. In 2020, it was published, in French. Now, we have an English edition for the first time.

As noted, the account covers the period from his childhood up to the 1950’s, when he was active in promoting the work of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR). If I had one criticism of the book, it provided a much longer account of his childhood than many memoirs or biographies. But it does recount the tragic death of his mother in an auto accident while his father was driving, and the impact on the family.

We learn of the family’s struggles as refugees in Belgium during World War 1, and the roots of André Trocmé’s pacifism. Theological studies after the war were interrupted by required military service at a time when France did not recognize conscientious objector status. Refusal to serve meant imprisonment. He offers a fascinating account of how he avoided carrying a gun!

Afterwards, he took advantage of an opportunity for studies in the United States. While in New York, he earned additional funds as a tutor for the Rockefeller children. It became an important connection later. He also met Magda in New York, returning to France to be married. After several pastoral assignments in depressed areas of France, he accepted a position in the small village of Le Chambon.

He recounts how he won the affection of the village and his educational efforts with the College Cévenol, a kind of college preparatory school. All the while, he pursued his pacifist efforts, both with his own congregation and in wider circles, even as France prepared to meet the Nazi threat. When France fell, Le Chambon came under Vichy rule. Vichy, led by Marshal Petain, cooperated in Germany in the areas not directly occupied by Germany.

As Jews seek refuge, he describes the delicate balancing act of complying with Vichy officials while breaking the law.. Then, at one point, they arrest him and fellow pastor Edouard Theis and intern him for several weeks. They could secure their release if they signed an agreement to comply with all Vichy officials. They refused but miraculously were released. His nephew Daniel, also sheltering Jews in a school over which he was principal, was not so lucky. He died under incarceration.

However, the Vichy and the Nazis were not his only problem. Resistance movements sought support, which would go against his pacifist principles. But perhaps the greatest strains were within his own family. Magda wore herself out as she supported this work. Then one of his teenage sons died by suicide, possibly accidental. Trocmé describes the lasting impact of this tragedy with painful honesty. (Another son later committed suicide).

The memoirs reveal the mix of noble and base actions of those around Trocmé. After the war, as he became more engaged in IFOR work, ambitious individuals nudged him out of his pastoral work in Le Chambon. Nor were things entirely agreeable in IFOR. He is unsparing in his criticism of English officials. However, he was able to set up the House of Reconciliation as a base for his international efforts.

The memoirs also reveal a man of firm conviction and a love for people. Out of that love, he refused administrative positions by which he would gain greater influence. Above all the memoirs reveal a man knowing his strengths and weaknesses, humble and honest about both. A great complement to Hallie’s book!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Begin

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Cover image of Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: Here My Troubles Begin" by Art Spiegelman

Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, Art Spiegelman. Pantheon Books (ISBN: 9780679729778), 1992.

Summary: Volume 2 of a graphic novel on surviving Auschwitz, the story of Art Spiegelman’s parents and his struggle to care for his father.

At the end of Maus I Vladek and Anja Spiegelman arrive at the gates of Auschwitz. Maus II tells the story of their survival. It came down to currying the favor of one’s captors. Vladek gets preference for teaching a Polish guard English. He works as a tinsmith and a shoemaker, and is able to smuggle food to Anja. It comes down to a game of calories in a regime of slow starvation. The weak or sick are “selected” and sent to the ovens.

Vladek sees the ovens, which are described and rendered. His detail tears them down for transport to Germany as the Russians approach. He describes the terrible conditions of the transports, stuffed into cars, left on sidings for starvation and typhus to take them. Vladek and Anja are separated, liberated, eventually reunited and they find their way to America. Art is born. As we learned in the first volume, Anja took her life in 1968, never free of the Holocaust nightmares.

Things have worsened for Vladek. At the beginning of the Maus II, Mala, Vladek’s second wife leaves him for Florida. Alone at his summer bungalow and in fragile health, he calls Art and Francoise for help. They come for a weekend and he tries to talk them into staying for the summer. They encounter the fussiness that drove Mala crazy. And his neighbors, who tried to help, expect the young couple to step in. Later, Vladek goes to Florida and he and Mala re-unite. Then his heart condition worsens and Art brings him back to New York, where he eventually dies.

But Vladek’s death isn’t the end of suffering. Because Vladek had inflicted his pain, the struggle against survivor’s guilt, on Art, Art could never live up to his expectations. Now a success, he feels bad to prove his father wrong. Through recounting the conversations with his psychiatrist, also a survivor, Spiegelman portrays the intergenerational trauma Holocaust families experienced.

Through the graphic format, we experience the prisoners struggle to survive. While their bodies weaken, they hope for liberation–that they will live just long enough. Meanwhile, friends go to the ovens. And the pall and the smell hangs over them. In the re-telling, we witness a father and son trying to make sense of their shared pain to each other. Through rendering this story, Spiegelman bears witness graphically to the horrors of the Holocaust, the resilient courage of the survivors, and their enduring pain and sadness.

[Maus I review]

Review: Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History

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Cover image of "Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History" by Art Spiegelman.

Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, Art Spiegelman. Pantheon Books (ISBN: 9780394747231), 1986.

Summary: Volume one of a graphic novel rendering the tightening control over Polish Jews, portrayed as mice, which ends at the gates of Auschwitz.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus is one of the pioneering works of graphic literature. It has been celebrated with a Pulitzer Prize (1992) and banned in at least one Tennessee school district as well as in Russia, and subject to a book burning in Poland. The Tennessee board banned its use in an eighth grade class for an image of Jews who were hung, an image of Vladek’s wife in a bathtub (no private parts are visible), and a few instances of profanity (probably far less than could be heard in an eighth grade locker room).

It is a story within a story. It is the true story of Anja and Vladek Spiegelman, Polish Jews subject to increasing anti-Semitism in a confined ghetto while friends and relatives are transported to Auschwitz. And it is the story of the author’s interviews with his father in the late 1970’s, re-telling the experience. In this graphic history, the Jews are portrayed as mice, and the Germans as cats and Gentile Poles as pigs.

Vladek Spiegelman was an enterprising young man who built a textile business with the help of his wife’s family. During an affair, he meets Anja, leaves the other woman and marries. They have a child. Then the Germans invade. Vladek loses his business. The noose begins to tighten. He has to register as a Jew. People are forced into a ghetto, into shared quarters with other families. Food becomes scarce, only available on the black market. The hanging portrays those buying food on the black market.

Then the transports begin. Germans separate the Jews into those who do essential work and others who are never heard from again. Jews make efforts to smuggle their children to safer places. Anja and Vladek do this with Richieu, their son. Later, an aunt poisons Richieu to prevent the Germans from taking him.

They realize that the Germans are trying to eliminate all Jews. Spiegelman describes the hiding places they use–rooms behind coal cellars, rooms behind false walls in attics. But one mistake can lead to arrest and capture. Anja, portrayed as nervous, wants to stay. But Vladek hears of smugglers who can get them out for a price. They leave but are betrayed and arrested. Volume I of Maus ends here.

During the interviews with his father, we learn Anja survived the camp, gave birth to Art, but was marked for life with what we would call PTSD. In a tense scene, Vladek comes across an earlier comic Art had drawn, Prisoner on the Hell Planet. In it, Art tells the story of Anja’s suicide in 1968. He spent three months in a mental hospital, which he portrays as a prison. His father destroyed diaries that would have helped Art in his research.

Part of the story is one of Art and his father groping toward reconciliation, understanding how the Holocaust had marked each of their lives. Spiegelman also vividly portrays his father’s memory. As the subtitle states, he bleeds history. It just comes out of him. And the story Spiegelman tells of one family’s struggle, tells the story of many others. He vividly shows the brutality of the Germans. He chronicles the increasingly desperate conditions, the ingenious ways Jews sought to elude capture, and the heart-breaking betrayals. And all the while, there is this spark, call it hope or delusion, that they will escape the worst.

The graphic history approach couples narrative and visual in a way that removes the Holocaust from the realm of the abstract. Holocaust survivors are dwindling in number. At one time, they visited school classrooms. Maus is another means by which a Holocaust survivor can visit a classroom. This is history we cannot forget. That does not stop people from trying, whether in Russia or Poland or Tennessee. Antisemitism is on the rise. We can repeat this terrible history. Spiegelman’s graphic history is one way to say “always remember” and ‘never again.” But will we?

Review: Unstoppable

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Unstoppable, Joshua M. Greene. San Rafael, CA: Insight Editions, 2021.

Summary: The biography of Siggi Wilzig, an Auschwitz Holocaust survivor who arrived in the U.S. with $240 and built a fortune in both the oil and banking industries while speaking out against the Holocaust.

His mother immediately went to the gas chamber. His father was beaten to death. In all, he lost 57 extended family members in the Holocaust. He survived by his wits, and he believes, the hand of God. This biography tells the story of Siggi Wilzig, who was not stopped by the brutalities of Auschwitz and a forced march to Mauthausen. Starvation did not stop him. He was not stopped by having only a couple of hundred dollars to his name and sweatshop labor. Nor was he stopped by the anti-Semitic character of both the oil and banking industries through which he made his fortune. He did not let the Fed stop him.

He made three vows. This biography describes how he fulfilled them. He vowed never again to starve. He vowed to raise healthy, productive Jewish children and help his people. And he vowed to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.

When he arrived, his first job was to shovel snow in front of a Jewish store front. In the late 40’s and 1950’s he worked in sweatshops and various traveling sales jobs. He figured out how to sell anything. He started investing in stocks, including Wilshire Oil. At a party, he met Sol Diamond, another Wilshire investor, and together they hatched a plan to take over the company with Siggi as president. They eventually acquired a significant enough share to influence the board, which accepted Siggi’s proposals to turn around the company. This began the company’s meteoric rise and a subsequent purchase of an East coast electronics firm. The challenge was to find adequate cash without exorbitant loans to fund the continued growth of the oil company.

The solution that presented itself was to acquire a bank and “upstream” the profits. His chosen target was the Trust Company of New Jersey (TCNJ). It was a small but profitable bank in which Wilshire eventually acquired an 87 percent interest. Some of the most fascinating aspects of this book are the accounts of how Wilzig ran the bank. He personally courted customers alternately wooing and cudgeling them to bring all their business to him. Much was highly unconventional, and woe to the person, even a family member, who crossed him! A portrait develops of a highly driven man relentlessly pursuing success, unwilling to take no for an answer. He eventually built a bank with $100 million in assets to one with $4 billion. When the Fed tells him that Wilshire must divest of the bank, he takes them to court. Forced to divest, he develops a scheme where his daughter runs the oil company with his “advice” and he runs the bank.

This brings us to family, and particularly his three children. Sherry is most like him in business savvy, and at 23 runs the oil company. Ivan, who Siggi wants to become a lawyer for the bank, and heir apparent, wants nothing of it, but submerges his desire for a music career for twenty years in the bank. Eventually he achieves his dream with a Billboard hit and second career on Broadway, finally making his peace with his father. Third son Alan eventually takes over the bank. Naomi never breaks with Siggi, although she is distant from a man married first to his work. What all understand and struggle with is the survivor who is never truly free of Auschwitz, plagued with nightmares and traumatic memories.

Finally, Wilzig was devoted to perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust. He was the first survivor to speak to West Point Cadets. He was named to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Council during Jimmy Carter’s presidency and helped the Council work through a thicket of issues before the Museum was finally opened in 1993. He spoke forcefully against Reagan’s visit to the SS cemetery at Bitburg and Reagan’s unintended equating of the German soldiers there with the Jews who died in the Holocaust. Dying of multiple myeloma, through the special efforts of Ivan, he records testimony of his Holocaust experience.

Nothing stopped him from keeping his vows. Joshua Greene renders a complex, multi-faceted person. His genuine interest in customers, his ability to crack one liners one minute, only to launch into a tirade the next, his shrewd ability to assess a balance sheet, his love of his children and grandchildren, his loyalty to friends and employees like partner in survival Larry Martel, and his effort to utterly control their destinies, and his undying commitment to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust all combine in this man who was small of stature, with thick, coiffed hair. This is a fascinating biography of a man I’d never heard of who carried the trauma of the Holocaust but was never stopped by it. Greene’s biography also succeeds in doing what Siggi himself sought to do, keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust as the survivors pass into blessed memory.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Brilliant and Bad

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In two different books I’m currently reading, I came across the perplexing challenge of the intellectual brilliance of Nazi era Germany combined with its unspeakable moral badness. How does it happen that a nation has both some of the most renown universities, and concentration camps? How can an Eichmann be both so cultured and so complicit in the death of thousands upon thousands of Jews? How can a country known for the excellence of its science turn to diabolical research on human subjects and scientific efficiency in exterminating a people?

I work in the world of higher education where the spoken or unspoken assumption is that education will make us better, more morally discriminating people. There is an assumption that knowledge invariably leads to progress, meaning improvements that enhance our lives and our societies.  I have friends who are working on cures for cancer, designing more reliable jet engines, safer automobiles, and pursuing more just social relationships. There is an element of truth in these assumptions that is undeniable.

Yet I think a danger in all of this is the denial of something yet more basic: that each and every one of us are capable of unspeakable evil.  We want to believe we are basically good. The danger is when individuals and groups become so convinced of the moral rectitude of their causes that they become blind to the evil of their actions. This can happen in all kinds of settings ranging from families to churches, to universities and even governments. More dangerous yet is when a broad swath of “enlightened” society is so convinced of its cause that it turns a blind eye to evil, perhaps accompanied by clever euphemisms where terms like “removal” are substituted for “extermination” or “purification” for “genocide”.

On the one hand, universities can be highly ethical places because of their research ideals. Institutional Review Boards carefully screen research for the consequences to humans or other live subjects, peer review scrutinizes the quality and repeatability of research, and various university regulations prevent invidious forms of discrimination and harassment. Yet I also am concerned that the very moral rectitude in these processes can blind universities to the potential of participating in unspeakable evil in other ways:

  • in the ethical scrutiny of research a blind eye may be cast toward the known potential uses of such research.
  • in the assumption that there is a technological fix for every technological problem, we turn a blind eye to the fact that this could likely create new problems requiring further fixes.
  • rhetoric may be used to divert attention from the true nature of a discussion. For example an expression of moral conviction may be labeled “bigotry” or “narrow-minded” or “puritanical” if it does not conform to prevailing norms. Categorical ad hominem attacks are made on the character of individuals apart from any considered discussion of their moral contention.
  • equally, the incitement of outrage is used to suppress unpopular views apart from any consideration of the cogency of those views. Examples of this include various commencement and other speakers who are “disinvited” because some view they’ve expressed or position they’ve taken was displeasing to some group within the university.

Most thoughtful people looking at the Holocaust respond by saying, “never again”. Yet I believe that the kind of moral rectitude that is blind to the potential toward evil  in some of these examples suggests that evils like the Holocaust could happen here. Whenever rhetoric and outrage clothed in ethical justification is used as a form of powerful suppression of an “other” with whom we disagree, we practice the same kinds of tactics of power used in Nazi Germany. When we assume that we will always use our science benignly we risk becoming sorcerers apprentices who may come to regret what we have unleashed upon the world.

I can hear some of my church friends saying “yeah baby” at this point. I would say to them (and myself) that we are equally in danger of cloaking in moral rectitude political power and political alliances that abuse others. What is striking to me about Nazi Germany is that most of the churches, along with most in universities went along with Hitler. What I wonder is whether the complicity with Hitler arose from the fact that on a smaller scale, both had basically been playing similar power games that Hitler perfected into a brutal art.

What can save us from being brilliant and bad? I wonder if a beginning is acknowledging that this is in fact the human condition. I’m given to understand that the checks and balances in our system of government arose from this assumption, to protect from any one entity so accumulating power to suppress the other, recognizing the basic human propensity to do so. What checks and balances do we need in our life, whether in the church or the university? One might be that of always being answerable to others. Another might be to refuse turning someone who opposes your ideas into a morally inferior demon to be disposed of in one way or another. Yet a third might be to question whether more technology and an increasingly technologized world can always answer the problems of our finiteness and capacity to do ill. Perhaps above all, we need the grace of God, if we believe a gracious God exists.

Do you think that the danger of being brilliant and bad is a real one for individuals and institutions? What do you think can save us from this danger?

Review: A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

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a problem from hell

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

Samantha Power gives a compelling account of the twentieth century history of genocide and American responses (largely non-responses) to this horrendous evil. She covers a sobering reality with a journalists skill of both careful documentation and rendering a riveting narrative.

384px-Samantha_Power

Samantha Power

She begins with the life of Rafael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who became fascinated at the crimes against humanity wrought by the Turks against Armenians in World War 1. Fleeing Poland when he recognizes the same patterns in the Third Reich, he suffered the loss of most of his family and became a lifelong advocate against these crimes, to which he gave the term “genocide”. His crowning achievement was to participate in the drafting of the UN conventions against genocide.

And so we come to the US response. Lemkin died in 1959 without seeing the US ratify these conventions, which would have done so much to strengthen the world’s response to genocide. We see the bloody regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the war-weary non-response of the US. Ultimately, our former enemies, the Vietnamese brought down this bloody regime and exposed their crimes. Only in 1985, after Reagan’s disastrous visit to Bitburg did he push for the passage of the genocide conventions, although in a qualified form to protect the US against genocide charges.

Sadly, even the Holocaust, even Cambodia are insufficient to arouse the conscience of the US. Power documents a studied avoidance by our political leaders, that discounts evidence of genocide, that equivocates on calling these crimes “genocide”, that fails to use even US diplomatic and economic influence against genocide, and is unwilling to risk American lives to save the lives of the thousands who died in the successive genocides she chronicles in Kurdish Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. By and large, Power chalks this up to a determination that American interests were not directly involved, resulting in the moral equivocations to justify inaction.

The latter part of the book chronicles what can happen when the US does act, as it finally did in Kosovo. Goaded by political opposition, the Clinton administration authorized US involvement with NATO bombings and subsequent peace-keeping efforts that brought an end to the Milosevic regime’s efforts to exterminate or “cleanse” the land of Albanians in Kosovo. And subsequently it supported the seizure of Milosevic and many other war criminals to be tried for genocide at the Hague. Very belatedly Rafael Lemkin’s dream is realized.

The book ends in 2002, just after 9/11. Since then we have witnessed genocide in the South Sudan, and a current ominous situation in the Central African Republic. Samantha Power is now US ambassador to the United Nations and a senior official in the Obama administration. It will be interesting to see whether Power can change from the inside the culture of inaction she decried from the outside.

Who is Raphael Lemkin?

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If “Raphael Lemkin” was a Jeopardy answer, the question might be, “who coined the word “genocide”? I’ve been reading Samantha Powers’ A Problem From Hell and the first part of the book is a fascinating account of the life and struggle of this Jewish lawyer from Poland to awaken the world’s conscience to systematic efforts to exterminate groups of human beings and to prevent further occurrences of such events.

His earliest exposure to this issue came with his study of Turkish efforts to eliminate the Armenian population in Turkey. In 1933, as an international lawyer, he made a presentation on The Crime of Barbarity at a League of Nations conference in Madrid. Nothing was done, and little did he, or the other delegates realize that they would soon witness one of the greatest examples of “barbarity” in human history–one Lemkin barely escaped and which took the lives of his parents and several other family members when the Nazis invaded eastern Poland.  All told, he lost 49 relatives to the Holocaust.

360px--The_Genocide_Word_by_Raphael_Lemkin.ogv

In the US, he became a tireless crusader to raise awareness of the Holocaust and create international structures to prevent similar occurrences in the future. Along the way, he recognized that there was no single word that adequately captured the particular phenomenon of seeking to extermination of a particular people that was universally adequate. Lemkin, who knew fourteen languages, and was something of a philologist recognized the power of words and arrived at the term “genocide” combining the Greek genos (family, tribe, race) with the Latin -cide (killing).

He succeeded in enshrining this word in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 and saw it ratified by over 20 countries (but not the US) before his death in 1959.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day and so it seems fitting on this day to remember Raphael Lemkin, who did so much to fight genocide, and who lost so much to the Holocaust.

[This post was written in 2014. In 2015 Holocaust Remembrance Day was April 16. A calendar of Holocaust Remembrance Days for subsequent years may be found here.]