Lecture 13: The Experiences of the Victims

1. Preliminary
   • midterm evaluation
   • Journals due: only one blue book, if possible
   • Film tonight, 7pm, Girvetz 1119
2. Film clip: 1968 BBC documentary "The Warsaw Ghetto"
   • Nazi footage, May 3 & 12, 1942; daily trains to Treblinka began July 22, 1942
   • German/Polish/Jewish police; Judenrat; "dirty" Jews; ritual baths; dining, gambling; sunbathing
   • Staging of scenes: quotations from diaries
     • Adam Czerniakow, Judenrat; Emanuel Ringelblum, archivist; Chaim Kaplan, teacher
3. The Victim Experience (discussion)
   • Examples: Primo Levi, Escape from Sobibor
     • What factors worked against them surviving?
     • What factors played a role in their survival?
4. Babi Yar (near Kiev, Ukraine): 29-30 Sept. 1941: 33,771 Jews murdered
   • A. Kuznetsov, Babi Yar; story of Dina Pronicheva
   • Essay by Lucy Davidowicz (not in reader, sorry)
5. The Murderers; my term "brown-collar criminals" (as in "white, blue collar workers")
   • Different types
     • bureaucratic "desk" murderers
     • organizers in the field (like Kommandants Höss, Stangl; Trapp)
     • participants in "assembly line" murder (loading trains, dumping cyclon B)
     • hands-on shooters, guards in camps
   • Different motivations
     • ideology
     • professional, scientific attitude
     • dehumanization of the victims
     • "ethical universe"
     • obedience to authority
6. Return paper proposals