chapter one

Public Lessons and Personal Lessons

Just over half a century ago, in family libraries throughout the English-speaking world, one could probably find, alongside the Bible, a dictionary, and a few other books, an eleven-volume set by a couple, Will and Ariel Durant, entitled The Story of Civilization. Somewhat anodyne by present-day tastes, their work presented a celebratory account of the human past. The Durants’ history, although never completed (they both died in the 1980s), was a triumph of middlebrow culture of the day, written between 1935 and 1975 in some four million words and covering over ten thousand pages. These books arrived regularly into millions of households via the Book-of-the-Month Club, which included volumes as an inducement to join, and thereby put thirteen million copies into print. The Durants’ work became a landmark of accessibility, eventually publishing some seventeen million copies. Recognized by the Pulitzer Prize (1968) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), the couple achieved great acclaim as masters of a huge panorama of popular history.

The Durants and their oversight introduce one theme of this book: the lessons of the Holocaust and indeed much else of what we deem to be important in history are not settled matters, as most people might think, but are rather the object of perceptions that differ and that change. Moreover, while opposing views flourish over what to include, contestation is, if anything, even more vigorous when it comes to the lessons of history. I would go further: while these lessons are constantly mentioned in popular discourse, historians generally avoid the issue as an embarrassment, out of keeping with their professional standing. Indeed, the more expert the historians, the more respected they are in their craft, the less disposed they are to proclaim lessons of history with any confidence. Put differently, historians and others who know their subjects well are likely to be far more sceptical than lay persons or popularists about the lessons of history – and whether such lessons even exist.

Over the course of some thirty-five years of reading, writing, and teaching the history of the Holocaust, I have contended with the questions that the Durants omitted – what we can learn from the history of the Holocaust. Although the topic of “the lessons of history” has gone somewhat out of fashion, reference to the lessons of the Holocaust is ubiquitous. Unsurprisingly, perhaps. After all, it is about unprecedented horrors: the brutalization of men, women, and children across Europe, in a sinister racially inspired scheme of wiping millions of Jews off the face of the earth; rounding them up everywhere they could be found, often after murderous attacks; exposing them to disease, cold, hunger, and other degrading conditions; robbing them, torturing them, beating them, shooting them, and in some cases murdering them by gassings in trucks or in specially constructed gas chambers, and by the killing of many hundreds of thousands, amounting to close to six million, in all. What should all of this say to us, now that we have had time to reflect and research, over the passage of time? What should we take away, as we say, not only about the events, but about the killers, those immediately responsible, and also those who directed, who facilitated, who helped, who stood by – and for that matter the victims themselves, coming from so many different Jewish cultures, rich and poor, young and old, sick and well, believers and non-believers, scattered across an entire continent in their great diversity?

At the very least, most feel, there should be lessons to learn. Surely we should not be without something that we might use for the world in which we live. It is hardly surprising that so many expect that specific lessons should emerge from exposure to the massacre of European Jewry during the Second World War, and that studying this catastrophe should make these lessons explicit. By lessons, I mean admonitions drawn from investigations of the past – directions that ought to be deduced both from the history of the Holocaust and from comparisons with other state-directed massacres in other situations. Such lessons are not quite the same as “lessons” understood as a portion of Scripture or some other body of material to be studied. Rather, lessons of the Holocaust, in the sense used here, are directions that flow from Holocaust history – the product of research into these matters by historians and others who have thought deeply about the subject.

We hear all the time about these lessons of the Holocaust in public pronouncements by dignitaries and in commemorations and educational contexts. More often than not these are part of public advocacy – as in, for example, “We should heed the lessons of the Holocaust” or “We must not ignore the lessons of the Holocaust” – rather than historical analysis, the kind of talk in which my colleagues and I are likely to be engaged. When I tell people that I am writing about lessons of the Holocaust, they immediately recognize a category and pause, wondering how I can possibly add to what is so regularly alluded to. They may also feel that the topic is hackneyed. Don’t we already know the lessons of the Holocaust? From a different perspective, my fellow academic historians usually consider the topic radioactive. Engaging it means messing about in public expectations, or aspirations, rather than historical understanding. My colleagues may also be somewhat mystified because, although we so often hear about these lessons, we have really not thought it worthwhile to probe them very deeply. But I do believe we should. What are these lessons of the Holocaust, after all? Is there general agreement about them? Do the lessons differ from one place to another? And do they change over time?

I believe that these questions about lessons go to the heart of Holocaust history and even history in general – in particular why we care about studying the past and what we expect to learn from it. There are many purported lessons out there, and they cannot all have the same transcendent significance or validity. Moreover, the lessons vary a great deal depending on when, where, and by whom they were formulated, and they derive crucially from often-contested interpretations of the Holocaust. For example, some contend that the lesson of the Holocaust is that Jews are always hated, in one way or another, and can only count on themselves. Others claim, quite differently, that the lesson of the Holocaust is that all seemingly well-integrated minorities are vulnerable and require special protection. Which is correct? Can they both be right? And even more important, is there something wrong with formulating in this way what we are supposed to learn from the Holocaust? I think it is interesting that those who are most intensely and systematically involved in the subject have the keenest sense of difficulties in establishing such lessons. That is why, sensing that their competence does not extend to the formulation of such matters, specialists often feel so uncomfortable with them. Similarly, closely related questions probing the prospects of new Holocaust-like catastrophes are seen as awkward. I have certainly watched on many occasions as lecturers try to duck queries about the future or respond evasively about lessons. How many times have I heard speakers protest, as I have indeed myself, saying, “I specialize in the past, and not in the future”?

With non-Holocaust fields, such respectful caution is widely accepted as appropriate. Few historians nowadays will presume to proclaim “the lessons of history” or the capacity to predict the future deriving from a study of the past. Certainly academic historians who venture to do so from their work are likely to be considered either eccentric or hopelessly old fashioned. Occasionally historians might appear who craft some general injunction as an afterthought, but few would wager the authority of their learning in service of such sweeping formulations. And fewer still would dare to propose that these lessons should be universally accepted. One rarely finds modern historians proclaiming historical lessons derived, for example, from the French or Russian revolutions, or the histories of imperialism, gender relations, or whatever. Moreover, for the most part no one complains that such historians are remiss. Audiences usually accept that specialists in these fields have enough on their plates to understand the past without proposing directions for future courses of action based on their particular historical research.

And yet, the public at large seems to be firmly committed to the notion that with the Holocaust it is different, and there are lessons that can be specifically derived from that series of events. Overwhelmingly, people seem to believe that there are lessons of the Holocaust that can be reduced to explicit propositions and that Holocaust scholars, of all people, should not shrink from proclaiming them. Holocaust specialists’ disclaimers are often dismissed as irresolute, even as indications of moral inadequacy. Many involved in Holocaust education actually agree with such charges. If you enter “lessons of the Holocaust” in Google you will find more than nine million hits – certainly more than any willing student, even armed with a computerized strategy, could digest. And if you comb mission statements of Holocaust-related museums, community centres, and memorials you will find copious references to the lessons of the Holocaust. No less an institution than the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, highlights teaching these lessons as among its foremost objectives, and entitled one of its recent educational projects Bringing the Lessons Home.^* Recent Museum draft planning documents that I have seen seem to have removed the commitment to “lessons,” however, seeing in the Holocaust rather “a warning that the unthinkable is possible and that human nature makes all of us susceptible to the abuse of power, a belief in the inferiority of ‘the other,’ and the ability to justify any behavior – including inaction.”
The California-based Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, to take another example, launched in 1994 by the film director Steven Spielberg, has collected a vast archive of videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors from all over the world. “By preserving the eyewitness testimonies of tens-of-thousands of Holocaust survivors,” the Foundation claimed, this work “will enable future generations to learn the lessons of this devastating period in human history from those who survived.” And there are many more examples, some of which I will refer to in this book. People do seem to believe that there are lessons of the Holocaust.

Perhaps one reason for this is that the Holocaust is not like other subjects. The historian Arno Mayer once referred to it as “a fundamental touchstone of the depth and extremity of the dislocation of Western civilization during the first half of the twentieth century.” It is probably the one case of genocide most people can identify. And similarly, as columnist Jonah Goldberg observes, the Second World War may not seem so much like history, because in fact it is the only history about which many people know – or think they know. People may feel more comfortable hearkening to it for lessons even while they may be wary of applying the unfamiliar experiences of far-off times and places. Moreover, I appreciate that many who address the subject have a quite different audience in mind from my colleagues in universities and research institutions. Many who address Holocaust themes regularly promote worthy public objectives to popular audiences, and are prepared to advance hypotheses that extend beyond the evidence at their disposal. Also, some who teach in primary or secondary schools may feel duty bound to promote the cause of civic betterment by allowing imaginations to soar and encouraging linkages that evidence cannot necessarily substantiate.

To those who work on the Holocaust in particular, given the sheer, unmitigated horror of the events themselves, there may also be irresistible pressures to find redemptive outcomes – conditions that restore one’s faith in human decency, or provide illustrations of exemplary human resilience. And sometimes these can be fashioned into lessons that can be digested and followed. The American writer Susan Jacoby argues that the search for Holocaust lessons may have a religious origin: “the idea that there are some sort of general moral lessons to be derived from the Holocaust is rooted in the religious concept that something good must come out of something bad – that everything, however terrible, is part of a greater plan wrought by an intelligent Designer. Otherwise, how could anyone justify continuing to believe in a benevolent supreme being after such a cataclysm?” Consequently, authorities on the Holocaust may feel that they are expected, even if not in so many words, to present lessons to be derived from their studies. Indeed, to the extent that I participate in civil society, I myself may engage in Holocaust-related public education, commemoration, memorialization, and civic commitments that sometimes associate the Holocaust, for heuristic purposes, with particular causes – most commonly, in the circles in which I move, those of tolerance, anti-racism, humanitarian responsibilities in public affairs, and the like.

Might it also be that audiences are intimidated by claims of lessons of the Holocaust because proponents wrap themselves in the authority that comes from exposing terrible wrongs, to the point that critics dare not push back? We need to remember that those who advance Holocaust lessons often assume great moral authority. And they sometimes do so in an environment facing desperate dilemmas and challenges, including some that entail quite calamitous implications. Does the growth of antisemitism prefigure mass violence against Jews? Should we read particularly violent political rhetoric as prefiguring genocide? How far should we go to aid victims in distress? Should one’s country intervene militarily in conflict X or in country Y? An appreciation of Holocaust history can be adduced as a key to resolving such questions. The idea seems to be that guides to correct courses of action lie just beneath the surface of Holocaust narratives, and that familiarity with such material, fortified with moral stamina, will reveal the right path to follow. Naysayers, one can appreciate, hardly feel in a strong position.

I sometimes think about lessons when I see, as I do several times a week at Massey College of the University of Toronto, a lengthy academic injunction that ends, “To be happy, you must be wise.” This quotation from the writings of the Spanish-American philosopher and essayist George Santayana completes a lengthy passage inscribed along the perimeter of Massey’s dining hall, where gowned students and professors file in regularly, for dinner. To the extent that those present gaze up at this quotation, they may connect not only with its encouragement to learning but also with a related notion, so often applied to the Holocaust that it has come to be taken as one of its core lessons. I am referring to what is probably the best known among Santayana’s observations, “Those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat it.” In some quarters Santayana’s dictum has come to be thought of as a Holocaust lesson in itself, a warning that a comparable cataclysm might recur if events like the destruction of European Jewry were not “remembered” and its lessons were to go unheeded. Note that, according to the quotation, what is necessary is not to understand, but to “remember” what has happened – although by remembrance is usually meant acquaintance or reacquaintance with terrible injustices and suffering. Moreover, claims of the existence of such lessons are often accompanied by a sense that promoting them is urgent – indeed, that inattention to such lessons is likely to prompt terrible consequences. History has spoken, and we ignore her voice at our peril.

This is another, less explicitly descriptive kind of lesson – a suggestion that a close acquaintance with atrocities that happened during the Holocaust constitutes a lesson that should prompt people to behave more wisely or humanely. In Washington, groups of military personnel and police officers constantly tour the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum precisely with this object in mind. I admit to being puzzled about the rationale that is assumed to be operating here. After all, those who are most familiar with the outrages of the Holocaust were the perpetrators themselves – and there is no evidence that a full knowledge of their own wrongdoing ever generated their revulsion against it. In his memoirs, the historian and essayist Walter Laqueur reflected on this theme while discussing how a great part of his life had been exposed to totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union. There is no guarantee that such “lessons of history” – that is, persistent acquaintance with cruelty to others – will clarify things one way or another, he observes. In his view, some will emerge from such exposure with a more acute sense of the possibilities of wrongdoing, but some will do the opposite. The lessons of history, like all lessons, “can be misunderstood and misapplied.”

Since I have devoted so much of my professional life to the study of the Holocaust, my commitment to its study should be clear. I do not disparage deep reflection on the knowledge we accumulate on this topic, which I believe is one of the foundational events of our age. I believe that the Holocaust is a moral signifier for thinking about good and evil and, perhaps even more important, for pondering what has been called the grey zone, the great space in between. And I also believe that studying the Holocaust contributes to the public good. But I contest the idea that there exist some formulae that constitute lessons of the Holocaust – or even worse, the lessons of the Holocaust. In a nutshell, the problem with such lessons is that, unfortunately, history does not speak to the present with so clear an admonitory voice. One of my objectives is to give people pause before they invoke too hastily the authority of the slaughter of millions of people in recommending this or that. And another is to encourage greater respect for the sophisticated understanding of the murder of European Jewry as it has emerged from the remarkable research on the topic conducted by historians in many countries in recent years. I also suggest that this inquiry reveals the complexity of these events and the difficulty of reducing them to neat formulae or recommended courses of action.

In a recent book on the uses and abuses of history appropriately entitled Dangerous Games, historian Margaret MacMillan contends that “the past can be used for almost anything you want to do in the present.” Her book cautions against the misuse of history, and warns that when we turn to it “for understanding, support, and help,” we should do so very cautiously. “If the study of history does nothing more than to teach us humility, skepticism, and awareness of ourselves, then it has done something useful,” she writes. “We must continue to examine our own assumptions and those of others and ask, where’s the evidence? Or, is there another explanation? We should be very wary of grand claims in history’s name or those who claim to have uncovered the truth once and for all. In the end, my only advice is to use it, enjoy it, but always handle history with care.” I share these views. We readily acknowledge the truths of these injunctions, I believe, when we think of events that happened long ago, in the very distant past. Most of us accept with equanimity contentions about what we might learn from the Greeks and Romans, the champions of European Enlightenment, or the origins of the Industrial Revolution. There are some hard cases: some modern-day Serbs remain deeply committed to certain conclusions about the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, seen as a pivotal moment for the creation of Serbian patriotism in response to centuries-long Ottoman and Islamic threats and as pointing out with great clarity the dangers that still threaten the Serbian nation. Catholic traditionalists I have met can be quite convinced of the baleful effects of the French Revolution, seen as opening the door to secularism and attacks upon the Church that constitute a continuing danger. Nevertheless, going back in time generally softens our views about the potency of lessons, rendering them less contentious, and in most cases understood as less sweepingly applicable to our own time.

Not so with the recent past. Particularly with human catastrophes, it usually seems to onlookers that the very least we can do in their wake is to distil essential messages from calamities that leave us stunned. Historian Alon Confino addresses the working of what he calls “foundational events” – great caesurae in societies, brought about by events such as the French Revolution or the Holocaust of the Second World War. Foundational events, in his definition, are events of “global symbolic power.” Widely understood as of earth-shattering significance by those who live through them, these historical markers are brief, radical, and self-avowedly transformational. As such, they not only command great attention but also implicitly call upon us to understand them. And even more than understand, we often say that people need to come to terms with them. For those caught in their grip, this usually means: We want to know what such events “tell us.” We want to know “the take-away.” We also want those who suffered or those who have perished in the still recent past not to have done so in vain. We seek some good to come out of such upheavals. We want those responsible for associated wrongs to be brought to justice. And we want restitution for those who have been wronged. Hence there follow commissions of inquiry, judicial reckonings with those responsible, the honouring of heroism, restorations of stolen property, and the extending of help to victims and survivors – including listening attentively to them and paying special attention to their explanations of how terrible things might have been avoided. All of these eventually enter a great repository of lessons.

After a while, I believe, this perspective is softened by the integration of catastrophic events into the general stream of history, by an increasing tendency, with the passage of time and generations, to see even the most terrible atrocities as being a part of a wider flow of events, the understanding of which is enriched by debate and discussion, requiring both a balanced assessment and deductions that are in keeping with the historical culture of the day. As well, if the study of a subject is deemed important enough to warrant global, or near-global, attention, immediate perspectives slowly give way to a global vision of justice and understanding – notwithstanding the value and persistence of early impressions and the resolution of particular wrongs. This is what has been happening with the Holocaust.

Writing about this subject in the mid-1980s in my book The Holocaust in History, I argued that the Holocaust was gradually entering history, by which I meant that it was residing less and less in the lived memory of participants and those drawn for personal or other reasons to the Jewish catastrophe, and was increasingly being considered as part of the wider history of the Second World War. This has entailed, to my mind at least, not a diminution of attention to it (quite the contrary in fact), but rather an acceptance that Holocaust history should conform to the methodology of the historical discipline: crafting narratives objectively, with due attention to chronology and context; presenting accounts resting firmly on documentary and other evidence; gradually relinquishing material claims against descendants of wrongdoers, as time makes these efforts increasingly difficult if not impossible; and finally, providing explanations that can be tested against generally accepted data – including some that come from other, related events.

Throughout this book I will suggest that this process clashes with the public preoccupation with lessons, and explain why historians of the Holocaust have preferred instead a sophisticated, open-ended, research-driven understanding of the Jewish catastrophe. Looking critically at the lessons of the Holocaust, I believe that, like all history, the Holocaust nevertheless has much to teach us, even when it does not direct us how to solve the problems of our time.

My discussion of the lessons of the Holocaust is very much a personal perspective, drawing upon my own formation as a Holocaust historian and my experience in teaching and lecturing on the subject for several decades. My encounter with serious history writing began in 1959, at the beginning of my undergraduate years at the University of Toronto, more than half a century ago. I was a beneficiary, then, of one of the University’s highly specialized undergraduate sequences of study, known as “honours courses,” some thirty closely prescribed programs that required four years to complete, as opposed to the less specialized three-year sequences that were called “general courses” or “pass courses.” First introduced in the 1870s, these honours degrees included legendary (to me) programs such as “English Language and Literature,” “Art and Archaeology,” “Maths, Physics and Chemistry,” and “Household Economics” (intended for women). For reasons no one seemed to know at the time, seven of these honours courses began with a common first year, known as Social and Philosophical Studies, or “Soc and Phil,” as we called it, followed by three more years of broadly defined specialty streams. The latter included Political Science and Economics, Philosophy, and Psychology, among others. My own stream was “Modern History,” in which “modern” was quaintly understood to be anything after the fall of the Roman Empire. After a year of “Soc and Phil,” a sprinkling of introductory courses in the humanities and social sciences, I found myself fully ensconced in a wonderful introduction to the historical discipline, studying little else but history for three years, and involving very little choice for two years. However, choice abounded in the last of these years, in which we were allowed to select from among numerous highly specialized, year-long seminars of about a dozen students, on very focused topics. Those who taught these courses appeared godlike, and whether we liked them or not, we trembled at the extent of their learning. My choices included John Cairns’s “Liberty and Authority: The Nineteenth-Century Tradition,” one of the best introductions to European intellectual history I ever encountered, Willard Piepenberg’s entire year on the English Revolution, 1640–1660, and a Canadian history seminar given by Donald Creighton, an irascible Canadianist, chairman of the department (a practically inconceivably august level of authority, so it seemed), who reminded us constantly of what peaks we had to scale to get to his level of knowledge of the Canadian past. One might think it natural, in a program such as this, to ask from time to time what might be the practical point of such an intensely specialized program – although I managed to avoid any such reasonable questioning so far as I can recall. Why would I have bothered, I might well have thought? There was just too much to read, and too little time to do so. After a year or so I was hooked.

What I did think about was how I wanted to become a history professor. What better career could there be, it seemed to me, than a lifetime of Modern History with occasional forays back into Soc and Phil – and being paid for it! (At that time, the freewheeling sixties, I had not the slightest doubt that I could get a good job and earn a reasonable living from doing just this. Everything changed in the seventies, but that did not affect me directly, for by then I had a post at the University of Toronto, to which I returned with a doctorate in 1968.) I was borne along in a tide of enthusiasm for the discipline, something shared by many of my fellow students in Modern History and most of my instructors. When an undergraduate, I was even invited to a prestigious social group called the History Club, where selected students and their instructors would meet at a professor’s home in the evening every month or so, and – guess what? – read papers to the rest, just as we were already doing in our regular program! I should add that, in keeping with the Anglophile culture of the University of Toronto in those days, we were heavily imbued with the work of English scholars and English history, and for that matter the empiricist culture of English academic life, something that may explain my disproportionate reference, in the pages that follow, to the kinds of scholars who particularly influenced me at the time.

After Toronto, I went to graduate school at the beautiful campus of the University of California at Berkeley, from a rather dour environment of changing seasons with plenty of ice and snow, where scholarship was taken desperately seriously, to a sparkling, culturally advanced if somewhat grungy Northern California place of near constant sunshine and political upheaval – “Berkeley in the sixties,” as my cohort will always, and usually with great affection and loyalty (certainly so in my case), remember it. The academic tone at Berkeley couldn’t have differed more from the Oxbridge-imprinted world I had known in Toronto, and there was not a trace in my new academic home of my undergraduate institutions’ somewhat insular self-satisfaction. The Berkeley campus led the parade of cultural and political radicalism of the day, and was among the first institutions to see students mobilized around social and political causes – in our case, American civil rights and Vietnam. I should add that I did, very infrequently, inhale. Much more important, the academic atmosphere was closely interwoven with moral and political contestation, culminating in 1964 with Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, led by a brilliant philosophy undergraduate, Mario Savio.

On a recent visit to its campus to give a lecture, I saw Savio in a photograph in an exhibit in the University’s main library, commemorating the demonstrations of the day, giving a speech from the roof of a captured police car – in his stocking feet! The idea was that demonstrators did not want to be seen to be scratching the paint of the vehicle, surrounded by students. I also saw myself in an accompanying photograph. There I am in a sport jacket and tie, regular garb for demonstrating students at that time.

At Berkeley I worked on a master’s and then a doctoral degree from 1963 to 1968, broken with a year spent doing research in Paris. (Unfortunately for me, I just missed the French student uprising of May 1968, when I was back in Berkeley defending my dissertation.) In my own cohort we managed to blend radical student politics with serious academic application, and quite unlike in Toronto we were encouraged to read widely outside history and in the social sciences in particular. At least some of this engagement, I can’t help but think now, drew me to the Holocaust, a subject that we were just starting to explore through such writers as Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim, Elie Wiesel, and Primo Levi. To be sure, these were very early days for the Holocaust, or for that matter modern Jewish history. I was certainly not trained as a Holocaust or a Jewish historian in graduate school; and indeed, so far as the Holocaust was concerned, practically no one in Europe or North America was at the time. I personally knew no one, anywhere, who would have claimed such a specialty. Neither university courses nor professors of such a subject existed outside Israel. And there were only the slightest glimmerings of the topic in my readings in Modern History in Toronto or my graduate work at Berkeley in courses and the preparation for comprehensive doctoral examinations. This was still before the time, as the British novelist Ian McEwan puts it, when the extermination camps were “universal reference points of human depravity.”

Along with my main focus, the history of modern France, I studied German and other areas of European history with such luminaries at Berkeley as Raymond Sontag, Hans Rosenberg, Wolfgang Sauer, Carl Schorske, Martin Malia, Richard Webster, and Gerald Feldman. While antisemitism certainly had its place in our surveys of modern Europe, and while the Germanists had some feeling for the Sonderweg, the allegedly special, authoritarian path of Germany to modernity, nothing in that material that I can recall brought the massacre of European Jewry into our historical field of vision with anything more than vague allusions. Seth Wolitz, a brilliant young scholar of French literature, fresh at the time from the University of Chicago and now retired after having held a chair in Jewish Studies as an authority in Yiddish at the University of Texas in Austin, introduced me to a few French writers who discussed related issues, but almost always in fictional form. Mainly what I recall from his direction were months of being dazzled by his conversation and by Jewish themes in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, the subject of his own doctoral thesis.

One of the very few books I took with me from Toronto was a well-thumbed copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political philosopher and refugee from Nazism who escaped to the United States in 1941. I still possess this book, about as heavily underlined and annotated as any in my library. I know I read every word, so important did my colleagues and I believe her work to be. I went back to it often, but I will confess that when I did so in the 1990s I found the work practically impenetrable, her prose dense and cumbersome, replete with long-winded, unsubstantiated, and highly abstract formulations. Looking back, I believe her influence had at least as much to do with her treating subjects we thought of essential importance than it did with advancing historical understanding. In my third year at Berkeley I read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, her reportage of the Eichmann trial, which appeared first in the New Yorker, and I followed closely the extensive polemics that accompanied her account, centred on both the person of Eichmann and the role of the Jewish Councils, or Judenräte, in the destruction of European Jewry. I read other works on the Holocaust as well, but I did not actually put them together in my mind as referring to a single theme, strange as this may seem looking back from our vantage point today. Raul Hilberg’s pathbreaking Destruction of the European Jews, published by Quadrangle Books of Chicago in a dense, double-column edition of 790 pages, appeared in 1961, but I did not read it carefully until I left Berkeley to return to the University of Toronto seven years later.

I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the Jews of France during the Dreyfus Affair – a topic on which I also drew from some of Arendt’s writings. In my thesis, completed in 1968 and published as The Politics of Assimilation in 1971, I made a few references to the Holocaust. In the introduction I ventured, somewhat anachronistically I now acknowledge, that as a consequence of their zeal for assimilation, French men and women were perhaps less prepared than they might have been for the catastrophe that came in the war years. So I thought at the time, drawing on Arendt and her brilliant book on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German-Jewish salonnarde Rahel Varnhagen, a Jew who felt haunted by her background. (No student of these matters could have avoided Arendt’s brilliant last chapter, “One Does Not Escape Jewishness.”) But my allusions were not much more than that, and the idea of examining the war years systematically never really occurred to me.

After arriving in Toronto in 1968, I worked in social history, a very dynamic field at the time, especially in France, encouraged and guided by my friend and University of Toronto colleague the social historian Ned Shorter, and heavily influenced by Charles Tilly, Richard Cobb, Natalie Davis, and other practitioners of the history of everyday life, la vie quotidienne. Eugen Weber, a brilliant scholar of Romanian origin who was then at UCLA, was another important mentor. Born in Bucharest in 1925 and educated at Cambridge University after wartime service in the British Army, Weber was a sophisticated, urbane conversationalist, as well as being one of the most erudite historians I have ever met. A wonderful storyteller, as one of his former students once observed, Weber “had a theatrical, rueful, or mordantly funny quality that characterized his intellectual temperament.” I enjoyed many lunches with him at a café near the Bibliothèque nationale on the busy Rue Richelieu in Paris, discussing our most recent findings of the day’s scholarly harvest in that wonderful institution. Following Eugen’s example, I read widely in French folkloric sources and local history, and published on the histories of drinking, dancing, and local religious expression. One of my topics was the emergence of leisure in the nineteenth century – something of which I had little direct experience in those years.

My academic focus changed abruptly when, a decade after I had left Berkeley, my friend the late Roger Errera, a member of the prestigious French Conseil d’Etat and an editor at the French publisher Editions Calmann-Lévy, approached me from Paris with the idea of joining with the distinguished American historian Robert Paxton, then in his late forties and teaching at Columbia University (and who had briefly been my teacher at Berkeley), to write a history of what happened to Jews in France during the Second World War. The book, Roger insisted, would appear first of all for a French audience. At Calmann, Errera edited a remarkable series called “Diaspora,” which had published a French translation of my book on Jews in France during the Dreyfus period, and had brought some major works on Jewish subjects to the French public.

For modern European historians at the time, Paxton was a towering figure: his Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944, published in 1972, was a turning point in the historiography of wartime France, drawing upon German archival material in order to present the French collaborationist regime, in what has been called la révolution paxtonienne, as being far more actively engaged pursuing French nationalist and authoritarian objectives than had been customarily believed among French historians, or for that matter the general public. Our book on French involvement in the persecution and eventual deportation of over seventy-six thousand Jews from France, sending all but 3 per cent of them to their deaths, first appeared in French in 1981 and some months later in the United States as Vichy France and the Jews. The book was remarkably well received in France and elsewhere, and found an important place in a just emerging Holocaust historiography.

Importantly for my engagement with Holocaust history, the last chapter of our Vichy volume included a section entitled “A Comparative View” that compared events in France with those in other European countries in order to demonstrate the varieties of collaboration in the persecution of Jews across the continent. Our point was the crucial importance of context. Through such considerations, my reflections on the Holocaust in France drew me to subjects as diverse as the refugee crisis of the 1930s, the origins of the Final Solution, the nature of the German occupation, the role of the Catholic Church and the Vatican, Jewish resistance, and many other mainline Holocaust themes. This was my introduction to Holocaust history on a broad scale, and it happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the subject as a whole was beginning to take off. Fully engaged by that point, I devoured works on the subject by scholars in Europe, Israel, and North America.

I also travelled a great deal – a logistical challenge in those early years, when my wife Randi and I went with our infant twins, Jeremy and Naomi, born in Toronto in 1973, and later also Adam, born in Oxford in 1979. Our travels began in Paris, where we had a tiny apartment on the sixth floor, sans ascenseur (no elevator), and a miniature kitchen without hot water. A few years later we went to Oxford: Randi and I were beneficiaries of the wonderful academic hospitality of St Antony’s College (significantly, for Oxford, welcoming women at the time), then under its warden the genial Spanish historian Raymond Carr, and for two years at the end of the 1970s I thrived amidst brilliant colleagues, both locals and other visitors from abroad, splendid scholarship, and – unexpectedly for me – great food and drink. Learning the ropes of high table, I marvelled at the gowns, the college silver, candles, port, and academic ceremony. One result, so far as I could see, was a remarkable degree of civility and stimulating conversation. It was over port and cigars that I met my Israeli friend, the Sinologist Aron Shai, now rector of Tel Aviv University. Oxford’s academic dining, my colleagues in Toronto correctly observed much later at dinners I would host when I was an academic administrator, set an example I did my best to emulate. The inspiration I followed was that colleagues who eat well together tend to get along – something of no small importance in academic life.

Jerusalem was another major influence. A few years after the appearance of Paxton’s and my Vichy book I participated in a year-long seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Hebrew University, or the “Machon” (Hebrew: Institute), together with Israeli, American, and European academics. Among fellow visitors at the Institute were Yehuda Bauer, Israel Gutman, Dov Kulka, Saul Friedländer, Richard Cohen, Dina Porat, Christopher Browning, and Bernard Wasserstein. We met regularly in weekly seminars, debated major issues of Holocaust history, and received invited outsiders from time to time. From these challenging and stimulating discussions I wrote a book on this emerging historiography, The Holocaust in History, first published in 1987 and translated widely. This put me squarely into the international scholarly conversation about the Holocaust, as well as into direct contact with other scholars, teachers, and students from whom I have learned so much, and indeed continue to do so.

From the mid-1980s, I had a clear focus on the Holocaust, both in teaching and publication. Within a few years, scholarship on the subject established an international presence. In 1988, I attended one of the first international gatherings of Holocaust scholars, in Oxford, called “Remembering for the Future,” assembled under the patronage of the gracious, aristocratic Elisabeth Maxwell, of Huguenot background and a promoter of Holocaust scholarship together with her husband, the media mogul Robert Maxwell – a swashbuckling personality, wartime hero, and subsequently disgraced financier. With a great sense of occasion that included luminaries such as Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann, and Franklin Littell, Elisabeth Maxwell brought scores of Holocaust specialists together – not only for academic presentations but also for a spectacular banquet at the Maxwells’ Oxford home, Headington Hill Hall. Meetings such as this accented, for me, the international flavour of Holocaust research. As interest in the field intensified, I attended conferences and symposia on three continents, eventually organized quite a few myself, and visited colleagues to lecture at numerous academic institutions. I taught for a year at UCLA in the 1939 Club Chair subsequently held by Saul Friedländer – the first endowed position, I believe, in the history of the Holocaust outside Israel. And it was there that I first met my friend Pierre Sauvage, an Emmy Award-winning film-maker whose documentary Weapons of the Spirit broke important ground for understanding the rescuers of persecuted Jews.

The late George Mosse, beloved mentor to so many European historians of my generation, was one of those I saw regularly at this time. Born in Berlin in 1918, Mosse was one of the most senior and respected German scholars of the émgré generation, scion of one of Germany’s wealthiest families and head of a publishing empire that included the Berliner Tageblatt, one of the most important liberal newspapers in Germany before it was taken over by the Nazis. I met him often at meetings and in Jerusalem – particularly at the home of Hannah and Steven Aschheim, a German intellectual historian and a former Mosse student at the University of Wisconsin. While George, as everyone called him, regularly protested that he was not a Holocaust historian, I always felt his probing of the subject was continuous, if just beneath the surface. Certainly he was an exemplar – embodying the very ideal, for me and many others, of passionately engaged objectivity. Somewhat later I also met and indeed continue to meet with colleagues at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where I sit on the Academic Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies; I assisted the work of Zev Weiss’s Holocaust Educational Foundation of Chicago; and I have participated actively in meetings of the history and research commission of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris, now chaired by Annette Wieviorka.

At the beginning of the 1990s, at the invitation of a charismatic English anthropologist, Jonathan Webber, I joined a group of scholars who met on several occasions with Polish museum authorities to communicate Jewish concerns about the public memory of the camp of Auschwitz Birkenau. Meeting first in May 1990 at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Yarnton Manor, and then at the camp itself, we discussed the huge museological challenges presented after the collapse of the Berlin Wall by hopelessly out-of-date Soviet-era exhibits and historical descriptions, by offended religious and other sensibilities, and by the politically antiquated Polish-national and Soviet interpretations of the history of these camps. Working at the camp complex itself, we gave our perspective to the Polish authorities, and heard theirs. We discussed improvements needed to the dilapidated presentation of that huge camp and prepared for the reception of masses of new visitors from outside the former Soviet Bloc – Israelis, West Europeans, Americans, and others. Our group pressed the case of Jewish sensitivities with the site, something that had been woefully neglected in the past. But from the Museum authorities we heard their concerns – importantly for them, for example, the significance of the Auschwitz camp (not Birkenau) as a symbolic site for the persecution of Poles in the early part of the war, the radically different Catholic and Jewish approaches to burial grounds, and the painful dilemmas concerning some exhibits, like the piles of human hair, that were in a terrible state of deterioration and that should properly, according to some Jewish preferences, be given a proper burial rather than be exhibited publicly. Participants included Serge Klarsfeld, David Cesarani, Annette Wieviorka, Robert Jan van Pelt, Antony Polonsky, James Young, and others. Working through these issues was a crash course in modern museology, involving some of the most difficult issues of group sensibilities and conflicting heritage-related claims. Much of our work coincided with the international controversy generated by a twenty-six-foot high cross put up by a Carmelite convent adjacent to Auschwitz – an issue that remained unresolved for several years and which involved related clashes of perspectives about the symbolic significance of the camp and its ruins.

Towards the end of the decade, I received an invitation to join the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission to examine the role of the Vatican during the Holocaust, an inquiry by six scholars, plus two coordinators, Seymour Reich, a senior Jewish community leader from New York, and Eugene Fisher, a leading staff person of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops with a distinguished background in Jewish-Christian relations. The Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews launched this inquiry together with the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, or IJCIC (known awkwardly as “itch-kick”), a body with broad Jewish religious, communal, and political representation. The other academic participants were the somewhat prickly historian, the late Robert Wistrich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whom I had known for many years, a down-at-heels Belgian researcher, Bernard Suchecky, who then had a tenuous affiliation with the Free University of Brussels, the quiet and respectful Reverend John Morley of Seton Hall University, author of an important book on Pius XII and the Holocaust, the feisty Gerald Fogarty, SJ, a professor at the University of Virginia and a specialist on American Catholicism, and Eva Fleischner, a gentle, Austrian-born theologian of Jewish ancestry who had been deeply involved in Jewish-Christian dialogues.

Widely understood to be a serious exploration of the role of the Vatican during the Holocaust, our commission’s work suffered from a somewhat ill-defined mandate, practically no logistical support, and the absence of any organizational structure whatever. The three Catholic and three Jewish members, living on three continents, were somehow supposed to deal with this complex issue – and in the Vatican’s declared understanding at least, were to do so by examining the long-accessible eleven volumes of documentary material edited under the authority of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State and published between 1965 and 1981. Before long I received several packages from Rome with all eleven volumes of the Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde guerre mondiale, bound in blue-grey paper and containing hundreds of documents that had been selected by its Jesuit editors. This was hardly an auspicious beginning. And as it turned out, there were not going to be any surprises. At the end of our work, the Vatican’s wartime archives remained firmly closed.

Much of our labour turned out to be a tug-of-war in which the Jewish members, sometimes with the support of some or all of our Catholic colleagues, agreed with the case for an opening of the archives, while the Vatican insisted on limiting the inquiry to the long-available volumes. Still, our discussions of our reading together were generally cordial, free from the polemics that normally accompany this issue. Uncomfortably bound by the Vatican’s restrictions, we nevertheless got along, and I at least felt that we learned considerably from one another. In the end the exercise collapsed, following our interim report, which raised many questions that the commissioners felt remained unanswered in the already published material, and called for the opening of the Vatican’s archives.

Very little about this inquiry, I should add, bore any relationship to some two dozen commissions that were established by European governments about this time to look into the spoliation of Jewish property and the persecution of Jews in collaborationist societies that were part of the Hitlerian empire. While these commissions differed in scope and structure, almost all were well-funded inquiries by distinguished scholars assisted by research staff. The most important of these, the Bergier Commission that looked into the wartime role of Switzerland and in particular Swiss banks, included historians from Switzerland, Israel, Poland, and the United States, and operated with a budget of some twenty-two million Swiss francs and some twenty-five staff persons in Zurich and Bern. In addition, some forty researchers worked on the project on a part-time basis. The Swiss inquiry enjoyed unimpeded access to public and private archives, and companies were explicitly forbidden to destroy any documents pertaining to the Commission’s work. Its final report, published in French, German, and English after six years of labour, was a weighty tome of over five hundred pages that contributed significantly to an understanding of the wartime Swiss situation.

In addition to the Vatican inquiry’s internal failings and a lack of infrastructure, our commission was steeped in Catholic-Jewish politics, as we were well aware at the time. There was much talk, in the media and among ourselves, about plans then under way in the Holy See for the beatification and canonization of the wartime pope. Indeed, one of the people with whom we spoke, Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel, was the “relator of the cause” of Pius XII, the official who had spent many years moving this dossier forward to what he fervently hoped would be its successful conclusion. Referring to the Vatican’s published collection of wartime documents, Gumpel declared that the issue was open and shut: “Anyone who has read this work can see how the Supreme Pontiff made every possible effort to save as many lives as possible, without any distinctions whatsoever.” We disagreed. As to the archives question, it seemed only sensible to see more. On this matter, our commission operated utterly unlike other truth-seeking commissions that were set up at the time, in that ours was explicitly precluded from bringing new archival evidence to bear. The core of our commission’s problem, not to mention its credibility, in my opinion, was this limitation to previously published documents. Inevitably, this restriction constantly kept suspicions alive – an unhealthy situation for any loosely articulated body of inquiry, to say the least. Needless to say, these circumstances only increased the aura of mistrust that has dogged the controversy over the conduct of the wartime pope going all the way back to the 1960s.

Nevertheless, I have many fond memories of my time on the Commission, in particular our visit to the Vatican in 2000 and our stay at the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican’s elegantly austere guesthouse adjacent to Saint Peter’s Basilica. During our visit I realized how similar, in some ways, the governing structure for over a billion Catholics was to the administration of a large university, something in which I was then engaged at the University of Toronto. The pope was analogous to the president, the cardinals to the vice-presidents, and the bishops to the deans (of which I was then one, back in Toronto). Priests were like the professors, including parish priests and members of holy orders, the latter like chaired professors having more autonomy and sometimes prestige within the structure than mainline members of departments. (Our commission had one of each.) Needless to say, there was plenty of internal politics. Getting all these moving parts to work together was no mean feat. Outsiders to both kinds of institution wrongly assume that authority always flows top down, neglecting the intense deliberations and jockeying for authority that went on laterally and from the bottom up. I certainly learned that in the Vatican, as in the university, people do not all think alike. I have no doubt that not all churchmen whom we met, even at the Vatican, shared Father Gumpel’s enthusiasm for the cause of Pius XII, although no one would actually say as much. Hospitality at the Vatican, I have to say, was somewhat meagre – perhaps reflecting Church suspicions about the likely results of our labours.

Still, there were flashes of understanding. The exchange that I remember best occurred when our commission met with Archbishop Jorge María Mejía, the elderly Argentine cleric in charge of the Vatican’s Secret Archives, widely respected as a pioneer of Catholic dialogue with Jews. Then the Vatican’s chief archivist and librarian, Mejía had taught Old Testament, biblical Hebrew and classical Greek at the Catholic University of Buenos Aires for some twenty-seven years. He had also organized John Paul II’s historic 1986 visit to Rome’s synagogue, the first such visit by a pontiff in modern times. “What would his Eminence do in our position?” I remember asking him, pressing our demand for the opening of the archives. The Archbishop turned to me with a twinkle in his eye and said, “I would pray, my son.”

All of this engagement with Holocaust history has enabled me to ride the great crest of the wave of work in this field that developed with such force beginning in the 1970s. A quarter-century later, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of archives in the former Communist Bloc, there came a new burst of scholarship, of which so many of us who do not do this primary research ourselves have been grateful beneficiaries. As a result, Holocaust history has matured as a field, associated now with an international community of colleagues, state-of-the-art scholarly resources, a stream of admirable publications, the training of talented and multi-lingual apprentices, and legions of bright, interested undergraduates. Over these decades I have been extremely lucky for the way in which my own interests and opportunities have coincided with an explosion of Holocaust research and writing – but also for the formation that I enjoyed, extending back to my first encounters with the discipline of history at my university, long before Holocaust history existed for North American scholars. My own bookshelves are now jammed with journals, monographs, biographies, surveys, atlases, collections of essays and documents, encyclopedias, and transcripts of archival material. My file cabinets are packed with photocopied articles, collections of clippings, and other material that have survived multiple moves and my periodic struggles to cut back, give away, and discard. And now that I have yielded much of this scholarly terrain to younger and more energetic colleagues, I feel acutely how easy it is to fall behind the vast outpouring of new scholarship, even while I marvel at their ability to keep up.

For several years before my formal retirement in 2009, I enjoyed a platform from which to engage with several generations of undergraduates and graduate students both at Toronto and elsewhere, thanks to the University of Toronto’s Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair of Holocaust Studies, of which I was the inaugural professor (now succeeded by my good friend Doris Bergen). One of my own ways of dealing with this rapid expansion of the field has been to push in some new directions – in my own case by pursuing a graduate degree in law, which I earned in 2005, and studying Holocaust-related issues of postwar justice seeking and matters of restitution and reparation. And with this, some more good fortune: a series of excellent graduate students who have come my way to write doctoral dissertations on these and related subjects.

This book tells something of the historian who has emerged from my much-appreciated professional background, how the study of the Holocaust has, at least as I see it, matured and extended and evolved into a major international enterprise over the years I have been involved in it, and also, in its main focus, how Holocaust history addresses one of the central claims, that is the lessons, made on its behalf.

chapter one

Public Lessons and Personal Lessons

Footnotes