The word 'Holocaust' is the term most often used in describing the Nazi's attempt to exterminate the Jews. However, many people now think that other terms may be more appropriate.
Look at the definitions below of the three terms that are currently used to describe the events of 1939-1945:
Holocaust - sacrifice
Shoah - great catastrophe
Chuban - destruction
Why do you think that the last two terms are now being used to describe the Final Solution? How does their meaning give a different interpretation to the events from "Holocaust"?
"Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say "hunger", we say "tiredness", "fear", "pain", we say "winter" and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who live in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new harsh language would have been born and only this language could have expressed what it means to toil the whole day in wind, with the temperature freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one's whole body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing near."
Primo Levi
How important is it to use the 'right' word? At one moment in 'Schindler's List', Schindler says to Stern that when he is sent to Auschwitz, he will make sure that Stern is given "special treatment". Stern replies that he would rather not have this because to him it does not mean the same as Schindler intended it to mean. Schindler asks whether they should invent a new language and Stern says that possibly they should.
Compare the film 'Schindler's List' with your own study/knowledge of the Holocaust:
- Which scenes in the film illustrate areas you have explored?
- Has the film added to your understanding of the period? If so, how?
- Are there any major areas you consider relevant to an understanding of this period which are not addressed in the film?
- Does the film provide evidence of the period in which it was made?
- Draw up a list of the advantages and disadvantages of the film as a resource for historians.
Using your knowledge of the Holocaust, discuss some or all of the following questions:
- What were the reasons for it happening in Germany when it did?
- What were the conditions in Germany? Have any of those conditions existed anywhere since, and if so with what results? Do some of the conditions exist now? How many/what combinations of those conditions do we or should we regard as tolerable before becoming concerned?
- To what extent are we, individually or collectively, aware of injustice, prejudice, discrimination, persecution - in the world, in Europe, in Britain, in our locality, in the playground/classroom?
- If we know that there are injustices to what extent do we either individually or as a group do anything about them?
- Do we know of occasions when people ignore violence against other people, and even stand by watching it without doing anything? What is involved in these attitudes and actions/inactions? Are they something we should be concerned about? Is there a difference between individual and group responses to someone being attacked? What is the connection between such attitudes and actions/inactions and the Holocaust?
When the death camps were liberated by the Allied armies in 1945, the soldiers who first arrived in the camps had no idea of what they would find. The sights were shocking and repulsive. It is important to remember that prior to 1945 there had been no precedent in history for the mechanised human destruction of the Nazi death camps.
A film such as 'Schindler's List' presents only one incident in the history of the Holocaust. Oskar Schindler and a few others like him were able to save only thousands of Jews. Millions were killed in mass executions - shot, gassed, beaten or starved to death.
Thousands of ordinary men, women, children such as those we see in 'Schindler's List' were brought to death camps such as Auschwitz Birkenau every day, usually by railway from many hundreds of miles away. Those selected for immediate death were then made to undress and were gassed in specially constructed gas chambers.
It was not only Jews who were killed in this way - gypsies, Russian and other Slav prisoners of war, homosexuals, people who were mentally ill and anyone who was seen to be an opponent of the Nazi regime - were destroyed.
