The present study suggests that Israeli schoolbooks are equally negligent and irresponsible (Peled-Elhanan 2023). They display the photographs in a de-contextualized manner and do not discuss their phenomenology, even when the details of the photographic event are available. Therefore, students can never know whether the photograph was exploitative, reportorial, or memorial in nature and are often prompted to adopt the perpetrator’s perspective as objective and factual.
As Hirsch reminds us, when we confront perpetrator photographs, we cannot free ourselves from “the murderous National Socialist gaze” (2001, 26). The present study suggests that Israeli schoolbooks are trapped in this gaze.
[…]
Since many photographs of these two photographers were manipulated and staged, as documented in the diary of Adam Czerniakow (1999) and were taken during a short span of time²⁸ it is quite likely that photograph 101366, reproduced in Israeli schoolbooks, was also staged. The couple and the small man emerging from the building, are exceptionally well-dressed, and were apparently added to the first photograph.
The identity cards of both photos mention Jewish Police, Corpses, Ghettos, and Buildings, but the schoolbook captions refer only to the building and to the well-dressed people. In Avieli-Tabibian’s schoolbook (2009) the caption is “a couple leaving the Judenrat building, 1939,” and in Naveh, Vered, and Shahar (2009), the caption reads, “People at the entrance to the Judenrat building in Warsaw,” both are prompting us to focus only on the couple and the building.
Without its phenomenology, the staged photograph becomes authentic. What is lodged in the viewer’s mind is the image [that] the [Axis] sought to embed in us (Keilbach 2009): there are rich Jews in the ghetto, and they are indifferent to their starving brethren (Keller 1984) as the students are prompted to be.
[…]
Unlike Anna Frank and a few other victims who are shown individually and have a story, all the others are presented in the museums as “orphaned” and their photographs are not treated as historical documents that deserve to be labeled. On the contrary, they are chosen from the outset as examples of larger categories (Holtschneider 2011, 60).
It appears that the same criteria render these photographs appropriate for inclusion in Israeli schoolbooks. Most of the photographed people are displayed not as individuals but either as icons, symbols, or indices (Pierce in: Hoopes, J. Ed. 1991).
[…]
Hertz (2015, 108) writes as follows:
The method of direct killing had its shortcomings: it was slow, wasted a lot of ammunition (at least one bullet per person) and was hard to conceal. The explosive sounds of shooting were heard from afar. The method presented certain hardships as far as the German soldiers were concerned: the work was dirty and required direct contact between murderer and victim […] This is why the Germans searched for more effective alternatives for the mass murder of the Jews.
Here we experience the interplay between the extreme nature of the subject matter and the “normality” of the text (Rothberg 2000), an expository, seemingly dispassionate reasoning style which is devoid of “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra 2000).³⁵
The text asserts that the method of direct shooting was not perfect though not altogether bad. It seeks neither to invalidate nor reject this method, but rather to adopt an objective and neutral position on the matter; to examine the method technically, weigh its pros and cons, and convince readers that gassing was a better alternative. It simulates a sphere where the extermination of people is a reasonable practice.
[…]
“A Jewish girl from Germany with a yellow badge. When was the yellow badge used to identify Jews in the past? What is the difference between past usage and that of the Nazis?” These questions divert the focus from the little badge bearer to the badge. In Yad Vashem archive she is identified as
Hanna Lehrer, 6 years old, a Munich Jew, who wears both her personal golden Jewish star around her neck and the mandated Yellow Star badge identifying her, isolating her, and alienating her from other Germans. Hanna was later sent to Riga, Latvia, where she was killed.³⁶
Here the concept of interest becomes crucial. What was the interest of the rhetor not to mention Hanna Lehrer’s name, age or death? Probably because her function is to feature metonymically as a specimen of her category, and not as an individual worth remembering and commemorating. Hannah was to the [Axis] a sample of her category of badge bearers and nothing else. In the schoolbook, she remains an anonymous specimen of the category to which she was assigned by the [Axis].
The students look at Hanna, ignoring her life and her death, though death emanates from the photograph whose “existence may be the most astounding, disturbing, incriminating thing about it” (Hirsch 2012, 74). Had they known Hannah’s name and life story, their attention would have shifted from the badge to her person, and they could have mourned her.
[…]
Each of the five pages is illustrated with an iconic photograph of a girl looking through a slot in the cattle wagon that carried victims to the extermination camps (Figure 12).³⁸ Her name and nationality are not mentioned.
On the final page, the cropped face of the girl appears under a huge Israeli flag, which covers the entire sky, apparently symbolizing the triumph of Zionism over National Socialism (Figure 13). However, this nine-year-old girl is not Jewish and has nothing in common with the flag of Israel, nor with Hebrew mythology or with Zionism. She did not return home after the war and was not hiding under the staircase when her photo was taken; she was murdered in a gas chamber in Auschwitz with her mother and nine siblings, on the night between 2–3 of August 1944. Her name is Anna Maria (Settela) Steinbach.³⁹
The book appropriates and functions her as a sample of Holocaust child victims. But the students are prompted to empathize with the boy Avram, not with her, to identify with the Israeli flag flying above her head, not with her people.⁴⁰
[…]
The textbook shows Hagerman as the [Axis] wanted him to be: nameless, voiceless, impersonalized, a unit in a category of many other Jews “praying before death.” His true person is obliterated, excluded from the event for which he is remembered, and indeed from history itself, since this is a history textbook.⁴⁸ Chouliaraki (2006, 106) maintains that the
absence of a person, somebody with a name […], deprives the encounter between spectators and sufferers of any sense of humanness […] The anonymous sufferer is annihilated, no matter what the magnitude or the depth of his suffering is. He remains irrevocably ‘Other’. (Chouliaraki 2006)
[…]
We are not Nazis, Crane observes, therefore we do not look at the images in the way Nazis did. Yet, we often watch the victims from the point of view of the photographer-executioner.
For a long time, Israeli society regarded Holocaust victims with contempt and disgust. Displayed in schoolbooks nameless, as samples of categories, they are unlikely to arouse respect, empathy or reverence that post-memory students, who relive the horrors through photographs and texts, need in order to feel an affinity with the photographed sufferers, often defined in Israeli schoolbooks as “our people.” As Wendy Lower claims,
if we knew what preceded that moment of death, what followed, and what happened to each person we see in the picture, we could unmask the killers and restore a semblance of life and dignity to the victims by restoring a voice to the voiceless. (2021, 12)
The question remains, what is the interest of Israeli schoolbook writers? Do they wish students to mourn for the dead, or to remember only the horror? The traumatizing photographs and the inculcation of Nazi perspective, attest to an interest to “punch the children in their guts”, to traumatize them and thereby guarantee their loyalty to the [bourgeois] state; “not to let the fire of vengeance die out.”⁴⁹ However, this fire is not directed toward the [Axis] persecutors and their collaborators in Europe, but toward Palestinian colonized subjects and citizen.⁵⁰
Formless Oedon
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formlessoedon@lemmy.ml