Holocaust education as relevant as ever, says speaker
It’s important to consider both the Jews and non-Jews who were victims of the Holocaust in contemplating how the atrocities were able to happen and in building possible solidarity among the different persecuted groups, a visiting scholar says.
Doris Bergen has the only endowed chair in Canada in Holocaust history, at the University of Toronto. Her particular area of focus is on the role of Christian churches and Christianity in Nazi Germany and anti-Jewish destruction. She was in Sydney Thursday to serve as keynote speaker for the seventh annual Holocaust Education Week seminar held at the Temple Sons of Israel Synagogue in Sydney.
Bergen’s research focuses on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and the Second World War and comparatively in other cases of extreme violence.
“I told the group here that if we define the Holocaust as the Nazi German statesponsored program of persecution and killing, it’s clear that Jews were at the centre of that target … but that other groups were also targeted and there’s a relationship and connection,” Bergen said in an interview. “Sometimes it was the same perpetrators, same people who carried out the killing of disabled people in Germany, they became the commanders of the killing centres for Jews.”
There is much that is still not known about the Holocaust, Bergen noted.
“First recognizing how much we don’t know is the beginning of being able to learn more,” Bergen said. “Secondly, with these events now, Charlottesville is such a good example, you think, ‘Why would white supremacists who are protesting the removal of a state of a Confederate general wave swastikas?’ It’s because anti-Semitism is inseparable from racism, they feed on each other in really crucial ways.
“We can only understand them by thinking more deeply about the past.”