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Rachel Deblinger, "Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust" (Indiana UP, 2025)
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C
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone. Welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Hans Wagenberg. I star in Penn State and Kyush University. Today we're talking to Rachel Deblinger about her book Saving our How American Jews Learn About Holocaust, which came out with Indiana last year, 2025. I'm thrilled to have her here today. Hi, Rachel.
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D
Hi.
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C
So Rachel, thank you for coming on the podcast. Let me start with a question we ask everybody, which is what brought to this story. Can you tell us more about your own background as well?
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D
Sure. So there's lots of places to start, but I think the most obvious one is I got a master's degree at Brandeis University. And following that I went to work at the not yet built Illinois Holocaust Museum of Education. And the work that I did was around fundraising for this new museum. There was a small storefront in Skokie, Illinois, and this group of survivors was working with David Pritzker as the chairman of the board to build a large museum in Skokie. And I was working on the fundraising team. And at the time I was really interested in how the survivors I was working with were shaping their stories for the fundraising events we were doing, but also for the education events that they were participating in. And when I went back to graduate school at UCLA to keep working on kind of exploring history, exploring Central European history and Holocaust history in particular, I found myself really drawn back to those stories of how survivors shape their own narratives, how they choose to tell their stories, and in what avenues they choose to tell their stories. And so I found myself kind of interested in institutional and organizational records. And when I first started going to the archives, I was interested also in that immediate post war period, thinking about how survivors kind of came to tell the stories they tell now, how they shaped these stories that we now understand as a Holocaust story. And I remember in the center for Jewish History reading room finding a miscellaneous box from the YIVO collection. And in that miscellaneous box was all of these fundraising brochures and pamphlets from a range of institutions that had clearly been sent to yivo in the 1940s. And finding the ways that survivors were not quite represented in full, but kind of represented in fragments for fundraising campaigns, for campaigns that were focused on immigration and material aid. And that kind of opened up this story for me, and I had a sense that there was more to tell.
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C
Yeah, I like how. And this is also a lot of time I tell grad students that, like, you let the materials, like, lead you. The materials basically tell the story, which is the way history should be told. Right. So I want to talk about the materials themselves, but before I want to ask a bunch more basic questions, which is another thing that comes with maybe more with undergrad than with grad students. It is that a lot of people, both general public, but also our students, assume that Americans in general, not just Americans, but particularly Americans, didn't really talk about the Holocaust. The very term didn't really exist. Right. Until 1960s or even later until, you know, the usual date people give is the 1978, the Meryl strip holocaust TV series. But your book really complicated this idea quite a bit. I mean, we knew for a while it's not true, but you really show how early it is. So what did survivors hear about. What did Americans hear about survivors in late 40s and early 50s? And why is it so easy to overlook this kind of conversation that you show existing at such a scale? I mean, every house, right. You had those materials.
- [04:38]
D
I would argue every house. Yeah. You know, I think the question of did people talk about the Holocaust after the war? Is such a curious one, because the assumption is that they were talking about it in the way we talk about it now. Right. Where the Holocaust has really taken on a kind of central place in public discourse, in Jewish memory, in communal engagement, also in American political discourse. There's so much conversation and attention to the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish event from World War II. And when people look back, whether that's historians or whether that's people or students, there's an assumption that we must have always been talking about the Holocaust in this same way. And so I think part of why it's been missed, and because there's such a Mountain of evidence once you start looking in the archive. Every Jewish organization at the time was talking about what was happening in Europe. They were talking about the survivors. They were talking about what they could do for the survivors, how they would help them, what would happen when they came to the United States. And I think a lot of the, the mismatch around why we haven't seen that or had that be part of the conversation is because it didn't look or sound like what it sounds like today. So even thinking about the term survivors, the group of survivors thought of themselves as the Charit Haplata, but they weren't necessarily coming as a community to the United States. There was not open immigration, they did not have pathways for coming here. Many of them didn't speak English. So they weren't in a position to talk for themselves with American audiences. And they were really. The stories themselves were reshaped, repackaged, brought from Europe to America by these institutions and by individuals who were there working in post war Europe. And you know, as you said, other historians have talked about this time period and have looked at the breadth of memory and communal work that's happened around this kind of history in the 1940s and 1950s. And I really think about this book and this work, thinking about the ephemera, ephemeral material of the Jewish community, of the Jewish communal experience of Jewish communities, Jewish communal organizations, all of that is kind of adding the texture of understanding, not just that Jews were talking about this in America, but how were they talking about it, what kinds of images were they using, what kinds of stories?
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C
Yeah. And I think your book show real, well, like how our biases as historians and when we go look for particular materials through particular organizations, those materials and organizations didn't exist in the late 40s. Right. Because people didn't think about them, as you just said now. And I have the same thing in my research on Japanese survivors. Now everybody's. I have a quote from someone, a Holocaust survivor, who said, everybody suffered, we wanted survivors, everybody were. And it's really. No one really think about themselves until later as such. So when we go, historians go and look for them for civil organization and it exists and they don't find it, but you went and found it through other materials. And there's one particular way that I think that really shaped the way people talk. And that's um, and showed very well that the fundraising campaigns, that a lot of it, as you just said, was about trying to help, but who we now call survivors. And this really changed the conversation. Um, And I want to ask how this practical need to raise money shape the kinds of stories? I mean, how does it change a conversation, the kind of stories American Jews told about survivors and what kinds of images or narratives seem to resonate most with donors? And we know, because we both work with donors, that it changes a lot of what we do. Right. So how did this impact early discourse about what we now call the Holocaust?
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D
So I think one big part of thinking about the practice of fundraising is really that the fundraising conversation is focused on what can be impacted through the funds raised. So the conversation wasn't necessarily detailing what happened to Jews under Nazism in Europe. It wasn't necessarily talking about concentration camps or roundups or deportations or gas chambers. I think a lot of the knowledge of that having happened was in the background of the kinds of stories that I'm focused on in this book. And those images and those narratives were circulating through the military media that was coming back from Europe in the late 1940s. It was circulating in other ways. The narratives around fundraising were really focused on this immediate post war moment and what Americans could, could do, American Jews could do to impact the situation for survivors. So it was focused on the need for clothing, the need for medicine, the need for individuals to find their families. It was also really heavily focused on the need for immigration pathways out of Europe. And so a lot of the stories we're talking about the kind of precarity of post war Europe and the precarity of Jews in displaced persons camps to really highlight that this is not a sustainable future, that these Jews are not going back to where they were before, that they needed a pathway forward. And so I think that that kind of presentist approach of these narratives, but also then like a future looking approach to these narratives is maybe not what we would assume Holocaust narratives would look like. And I think that is one really particular way that the fundraising imperative shaped these narratives.
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C
Yeah, because a lot of it is about future, as you just said. Right. I mean, because the stories and materials, you see them almost always, like future oriented. Right. They're like, as pioneers. And we're going to talk about this particular pilgrim thing in a minute. But they're future Israelis. Right. They're future Americans. Always, like, projected. Right. But you do see them as victims sometimes. Right? As people, especially the children. There's a particular image of like a little girl that never held a doll. Or if I recall correctly, it was very touching. What is this flexibility like? There's so many different ways that people talk about them. What is tell us about uncertainties of this particular, particular moment and how does these connected materials that you use.
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D
So one of the things that I argue in the book is that our contemporary Holocaust discourse really centers survivors as survivors of Nazism, of the Holocaust. It's really one way of viewing survivors. And their narratives are often very chronological. It's what happened to them before the war, what happened to them during the war, and then what happened to them after after the war. What I found from materials in the late 1940s, early 1950s, is that there's so much more flexibility in how survivors were described. And the kind of terminology that was used to describe this community of Jews who remained in Europe after the war, many of whom were coming back from Russia, they had kind of escaped during the war, they were coming back from points further east, Some of them had been in hiding. So it was a kind of diffuse nature of how survivors were represented. And a lot of that has to do with, again, a fundraising imperative that early in the post war period. So in 1945, the United Jewish Appeal, which had been jointly fundraising for the Joint Distribution Committee, who worked largely in Europe, the United Palestine Appeal, who had been working in Palestine, and the National Refugee Service, which had been working in Israel, the United Jewish Appeal had been fundraising collectively for these three different sites of Jewish life during the war. In the immediate aftermath of the war, in mid-1945, they fell apart. And their united fundraising didn't succeed because the United Palestine Appeal and the Joint Distribution Committee couldn't agree on how much of the total they should each get. They each felt like their vision for the future of Jewish life was most important. JVC wanted to go to Europe, they wanted to deal with the immediate needs in post war Europe. And the United Palestinian people wanted to build in Palestine and make sure there were viable pathways for immigration to Palestine. And so in 1945, they. They dispersed and they both struggled to fundraise. Their fundraising was really low in this moment. When they finally were able to get back to the Jews in Europe, they just didn't do a good job of fundraising. And so by 1946, the campaign, the United Jewish Campaign, the United Jewish Appeal Campaign, which was wildly successful, had to combine all of these visions of a Jewish future. And so part of the flexibility was because there wasn't an agreed upon narrative or an agreed upon term. But part of it was because the different organizations were forced to fundraise together to be most successful. And so suddenly, Jewish survivors were both victims in Europe. They were pioneers in Israel. They were new Americans coming to the United States. So they were. They were depicted in all of these different ways in order to fundraise for all of these different initiatives.
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C
Can I ask maybe something a little bit off script about competition between those organizations? Because they seem to aim at slightly different groups, especially the. I know from the Palestinian, the Palestine Appeal and the Zionist Organization. They wanted young men. Right. Was there any competition over particular kind of groups or kind of division of labor rather than competition?
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D
So I don't know so much about the young men part, but. So, for example, Hadassah was the largest Zionist organization in America in the 1940s, and it was a women's group. It was. It raised more money than the United Palestine Appeal every year in the 1940s. So that was really focused on women and fundraising primarily for hospitals at first. And then in the mid-1940s, while the war was still going on, early 1940s, Hadassah became the sole fundraiser. They, like, negotiated the unique ability to fundraise specifically for a program that was bringing Jewish children to Palestine during the war to get them out of Nazi Germany. And there. So there was competition to compete for who could fundraise for this program because it was something that people really wanted to give to. And I think more broadly, I see this across all the fundraising campaigns that the use of children as the centerpiece of the fundraising campaign helped to promote and bring about more fundraising, more success, more interest. And so there was some competition about these programs that, yeah, different organizations wanted to support. There were organizations also that were outside the United Jewish Appeal umbrella that were also competing for donors and constituents. And there's evidence that some people gave to all of them. Some people gave to one of them. There was a kind of a range of responses.
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C
Yeah, because I was coming from. I'm not familiar with the Israel research. And it's very, you know, it's ideological agenda to it also to a point where people are. The new historians or post Zionist historians are thinking about how there is Zionist organization that want to mobilize young men for the war, for the coming 1948 war. So maybe there's an overemphasis there. I do get your point about the children. I wonder what happened to people who didn't fall into those categories. Right. Like older people that was maybe people who had health issues and like, it was hard for them to go to either America or Israel at the time. Right.
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D
So one of the things that's interesting is the fundraising campaigns don't necessarily reflect the humanitarian efforts or the aid work that happened on the Ground. So, so just because a child was the picture of a campaign doesn't mean that they were the only people that were receiving aid on the back end once that funding was raised. So, you know, a lot of organizations at the time had programs that were designed around adopt a child. And so, I mean, I think I listed in the book there, I. But every single organization I looked at at some point had like an adopt a something kind of campaign. And they took on all kinds of shapes. So for example, like Bnee Brith had like adopt a Teenager and then they would pair up people who are the same age and they were kind of like pen pals, but they would also send them packages. There were ones that were really focused on children. And eventually most of these programs that had been trying to pair up people one to one found that the scale of maintaining a one to one relationship was too hard. And so they ended up, you know, could still like adopt someone, but you would adopt them by donating $360 a year that, that would support one child in a, in an orphaned home in Paris or something like that. But what happened for some of these organizations is that they also proliferated these adoptive programs. So there was adopt a Family, they had Adopt a Grandparent. And so there were these ways that organizations were trying to connect American Jews and American Jewish donors with the diversity of people who had survived the war in post war Europe. But for the most part, the fundraising campaigns were not as focused on what is the need specifically in post war Europe. They were really focused on how can we make sure American Jews are aware of the kind of overall urgency of this problem and raise as much funding as possible.
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C
So I want to switch from Europe to back to America and talk about radio because again, the material question is happening fascinating in the book because you did a lot of with ephemeral materials, materials that were not supposed to survive. And of course, the most ephemeral of these is voice, right? Radio. Like you have a whole chapter of Radio, which is really striking because it also shows. And again, this can be lost. So because we don't have the actual voices in all the scripts, we have
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D
some of the voices.
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C
Well, we do have, right. I mean, you gave me, I used them in my class. You were kind enough to share. But yeah, so, but, but what really struck me and like you, you showed it and it's unthinkable now that like, you know, of how often actors and Jewish American saviors, quote unquote, rather than survivors himself, told the stories of the survivors. Right. So I want to be radio. The radio. Radio as a medium here. And how this. The medium of radio play and the whole idea of radio. Right, which is you. Which is ubiquitous in 40s. Right. How did it shape the way of the encounter between displaced persons and survivors? Because now it'd probably be all on TikTok or something, right?
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D
But yeah, I mean, I think that's like another work that I have done, some other work on social media and all cost representation on social media. And I think this question of method and format and the sense that there is a limit to what formats we should use is. And wow, for lack of a better term at the moment, just it's limiting for how we understand the possibilities of representation. And so I think making the analogy between radio in the 1940s and social media today, I think is very apt and one that I think should be open to kind of understanding and thinking about how these voices and stories proliferate and circulate, which I think is part and parcel of what I'm interested in in the book. Right, because even the fundraising narratives, it is about how they're depicted on that pamphlet, but it's also about how that pamphlet arrived in every single American Jewish home, bringing that story to people who maybe weren't necessarily looking for it, but the radio, to kind of go back to your question, the radio. I think there's a lot of really specific ways that the genre of radio impacted the stories of. Of the Holocaust. And in particular, because it's kind of an initial representation. So, for example, sound effects were really like wildly popular in the 1940s for radio. And, you know, maybe we've seen background footage of people, like using shoes to make the sound of people walking. But this kind of idea that we could replicate sound for narrative on the radio, even without the visual, I think is really interesting. And so for I follow this one story of Kurt Mayer, who's a Holocaust survivor. He came to the United States pretty early. He had a sister who was in the United States. He was a musician, and he spoke with a reporter in the New Yorker. And his story was on a kind of long form New Yorker article which was then adapted into a radio broadcast. And there is an adaptation that adds a story of someone getting shot in the middle of the story that was not in the New Yorker article. And I argue that it's because it was this like, incredible audible moment to highlight a gunshot that was not in the original story, but it still translates this sense of life and death that translates the sense of like, urgency and immediacy and the kind of, yeah, bad luck of why one person and not another person that is prevalent in Holocaust stories. And so I think that's one way in which, like, the stories at that time were not necessarily powerful because they were 100% accurate to what happened. They were powerful because they were depicting an overall sense of what Jews endured under Nazism.
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C
And there was never a question of the Jews on voice versus actors. It was never at the time. Because that will be a big. Again, very different time now. Right. If you can talk about TikTok and authenticity and everything, but there was never a question of actors should not play survivors.
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D
Well, I think we have Hollywood films now that bring actors into play survivors. I think the practice itself isn't that uncharacteristic. I think what was interesting is in a lot of Jewish organizations that were kind of national organizations with chapters around the country that the. The content was coming out of New York. They would distribute scripts and encourage their local chapters to connect with the local radio station, see if they could get airtime and then perform for the radio. And so there's not even like a central recording of a hired actor coming in and performing as a Holocaust survivor, but actually this, like, broad dispersal of just inviting anyone. And I think there's something really compelling about the idea that young women or young men were invited to kind of perform and think about themselves in this space. It's definitely not something we would see today kind of like skit practice of like B' nai brith or like, right. Fadasa having a script for their chapters to participate. But it was at the time a really key way in which these stories were circulating and providing information and insight for American Jews and really activating fundraising campaigns at the time.
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C
Yeah, I want to talk about particular. It was a script, I think. I love my notes, but I want to Delayed pilgrims one that you start with. It was a radio script, right?
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D
No, it was a radio broadcast. It was not scripted. It was a live broadcast.
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C
Live broadcast. So I was really intrigued by this opening because this talking about. And again, me coming from more of the Israeli and European part of Holocaust research, talking about America, talking about them, about the survivors. Delay pilgrims pursuing freedom. This is. I never thought about this. And of course it makes sense from an American point of view, but in this context, survivors were European, right? They were foreign to a large extent to at least to a second, third generation American Jews. How did this framing, this metaphor of the delayed pilgrims help translate the experience of those survivors to America? AUDIENCE and when did this Change. I mean, why don't we, don't we talk about it? I mean, we love talk about freedom in America, right? All the time. But so why and when did it change?
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D
Well, so a couple things about it was like a lot of parts of that question. So the delayed Pilgrims dinner was a radio broadcast that was sponsored by the United Service for New Americans, which is an organization that focused on supporting Jewish immigrants when they came to the United States. And it was aired on Thanksgiving Day. So first of all, there's a long history of American Jews aligning their kind of communal activity, but also their communal narratives around American history. This is not new to the like post Holocaust world. This is kind of part of how American Jews became part of America and aligned their history and their communal practice with the kind of standards and narratives of America and in particular around the narratives that Americans tell about themselves, whether they're true or not true. And in the post war period, there was a heightened sense of America as heroes, right. Having kind of one World War II and a lot of I'm going to come back to the radio broadcast. But a lot of the American Jewish fundraising errors at the time, especially material aid ones, aligned very closely with other American initiatives to kind of send friendship to post war Europe. So there was a kind of activity happening in post war America that was focused on sending freedom abroad, maintaining the freedom after the war. There was like a real linguistic focus on sending freedom. Right. Sending freedom abroad in all kinds of ways. And so I think that's part of what was happening here, that American Jews were aligning themselves with the dominant narrative of America in the post war period. But I think there's also something specific that happens in these radio broadcasts where I highlight in the delayed pilgrims, but it happens in other ones as well that Holocaust survivors who were recently brought to the United States are invited on microphone and on broadcast to talk about what America means to them and contrast their experience in America directly with their experience in concentration camps or in post war Europe. And by learning English, by speaking in English, by participating in Thanksgiving and other kinds of American holidays, these foreign Holocaust survivors, these foreign Jews are kind of transformed into Americans. And that's a big part of the advocacy of this period because even after the war, the there were not open pathways for Jews to come to the United States. And so these fundraising campaigns are happening at the same time as immigration advocacy campaigns. And those kinds of narratives are really reinforcing each other.
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C
Yeah, I was struck by all those campaigns that are very, again, you can't even think about like, this guy was spreading kindness in order to fight the atomic bomb. And it's all. It's all coming together, this particular moment in 1940s. But so it changed when the idea of the melting pot changed. Like, people stopped talking about themselves as American pilgrims. When the idea of being American change or when. When did it stop? This kind of stuff.
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D
This is a good question. We're going to have to, like, loop in an American historian to a conversation to really talk about that, I would say from the American Jewish communal perspective in this period. Jewish organizations are also starting to see the kind of broad impact of popular culture. And so organizations are sending representatives out to Hollywood to make sure that Jews are well represented in the movies that are being produced, especially in movies about soldiers and at the end of World War II, making sure that the representation of American Jews aligns with the kind of, like, heroic image of Americans in the end of the war. And so I don't necessarily see those narratives as contrary to one another. I think they are happening really, like, alongside each other. That on the one hand, American Jews were in the army, they were part of this kind of liberating force. On the other hand, European Jews are coming. They are becoming American through this very kind of patriotic way of being American, which is like a pilgrim. Right. Like, what could be more American than coming to this new country for religious freedom? There are some Jewish campaigns. This is not like a dominant narrative, but I definitely found some campaigns that talk about European Jews and Jewish survivors as like, the first enemies of fascism. There's this. They're trying to really weave in this Cold War narrative that helps establish European Jews as Americans and transforms them into Americans at the moment where America is really kind of turning against kind of Eastern European practice of communism at the same time. So when we get into like, the later 40s and early 50s, this idea that survivors were like the first enemies of oppression or like, the language gets very broad.
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C
Yeah. I can see how it. It metaphors into anti communism and Judeo Christianity and all this stuff.
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D
But they're all happening kind of at the same time too. It's not like one's replacing another.
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C
Yeah. And the representation tend to blare into each other. I mean, we think about it in very particular terms. Kind of going back to a conversation about survivors and survivor materials, organization that focus on them as survivors. But, you know, that's much more fluid moment. Right. Those narratives were still not set, so there's a lot of blurring at the time. And you see the same thing in other contexts. As well. So I want to go back because this book, in many ways I see it, and correct me if I'm wrong, is about Jewish Americans who are written about survivors. It's saving our survivors. Right. There are survivors, right. And there's a whole chapter of Americans abroad that you have about secondary witnesses that also, again, people that I didn't see. There's no focus now because now we only focus on survivors.
- [30:31]
D
Right.
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C
As a field. Right. And you know, as a society also. Right. We forget about those people, but they had very important role. Right. Those secondary witnesses, the aid workers, rabbis, organizers, people who traveled to Europe. And in many ways there was the first people who told those stories back in the States. Right. We forget survivors did not speak English most of the time, if they did with a very bad accent. And those stories were told for them. Right. And there's this tension all the time in your book, we're saving our Survivors. I'm kind of like not quite condensation, but like some coming, stepping from high above to save someone. Right. I don't think they see this condensation, but there's this tension here, right. Why? I mean, I kind of answered myself a little bit here, why those figures became so central, the circulation of Holocaust knowledge. And how does this differ here? Like, I'm really thinking about again, this context, this contrast between the way we tell the stories now, like with dimension in testimony, you were in Illinois when it happened, right. And the way the stories were told by secondary witnesses. So, yeah, I know I answered myself a bit, so I apologize.
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D
But I can add another dimension too to kind of to your own self answer. So I think part of it is that survivors really weren't in a position in the late 1940s to tell their stories to American audiences. They didn't speak English. They largely weren't here yet, especially in the, you know, 1945, 1946, 1947, when there still is not an immigration path for them. So they weren't able to tell their own stories directly. The people that could tell their stories directly were people who had worked with them in displaced persons camps in the spaces of post war Europe. They came back to the United States or they wrote letters and they circulated those narratives of what they saw directly. And so one of the things, one of the reasons I really wanted to highlight this group of people was that the way we now in Holocaust discourse kind of center at eyewitness experience. The people listening to these stories in the 1940s also centered that sense of an eyewitness. But it wasn't the survivors eyewitness account. It was these secondary witnesses eyewitness account. So they saw the survivors, they talked with them, they were able to tell their stories not only in English, but in American idioms as well. So they were really. It was like an act of translation and transformation of these narratives of who they saw. And again, I want to come back to something I said, I think, to your first question, which is that what we think of now as a Holocaust story is really something that is bound by the post pre war and post war period. It's really about the World War II, the years of World War II and the years of the Holocaust. At the time, in the 1940s and 1950s, the stories that were circulating for fundraising and advocacy for were really about the post war period. So these secondary witnesses weren't coming back and telling stories about Auschwitz. They were coming back and they were telling stories about the people they met in Paris or they were telling stories about the families trying to escape Poland after the Kielce pogrom. They were telling the stories about the post war period. So it really was a direct witnessing of what they were communicating. But from our perspective today, it was like a refracted witnessing.
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C
Yeah, it's the wrong. It's not what we wanted to hear. Right. Because the story, it's always. It's the same with a bomb survivors. I look at the focus, there is kind of a gentrification. Right. People tell the stories audience want to hear. So the people still now, for example, in Dimension and Testimony, the. I know I'm supposed to call them holograms, but lack of a better word, digital representation. Right. What's the actual phrase that we should
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D
use for digital representation? Seems right to me.
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C
Yeah. Okay. I know it's not the proper one. So this particular one could tend to tell a particular story which reflects our time. Right. And you see the same with bomb survivors. Like, they tend to tell eventually a story that people want to hear. Right.
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D
Or what they expect to hear in some sense.
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C
Yeah. So when we don't talk about Anna Blockner in a couple of minutes, which is for me the highlight of the book. But. But no one really talks about this time that you mentioned, like the time in Paris, like the Americans or the Soviet or the British come in and then that's it, we're saved and then we're in America suddenly. Right.
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D
That was actually what first drew me to this project. I was so interested in, like, well, what happened right after the war. It's not like people suddenly went from a concentration Camp to, you know, the pink corner living room in the Shoah foundation video. Like there was a lot of time in between. The other thing I would say is that the wartime period and the kind of devastation of the Holocaust, you know, the, the 6 million people lost that number. And that kind of narrative was circulating right away. But in fact, many of the speeches from these fundraising campaigns, many of the pamphlets talk about how there's not really anything American Jews could do about those 6 million loss. What they could do is save everyone who survived. And so the focus of the narrative were on the people that survived and what they were living through after the war. And so these secondary witnesses became witness to that. And I think that's part of why, you know, we don't hear about these people anymore. We don't think about what they did because we as a culture, the discourse, we're not looking at that post war period anymore. We're really looking at the wartime period and the experience of survivors. And they are in fact. Yeah, they aren't often talked about in that kind of more expansive way.
- [36:17]
C
Yeah, there's some amazing stories, especially the women get their stories. I mean, again, we don't. And this might just be my own ignorance, but not knowing the stories of American Jewish women going to Europe, you know, it's, it's. Those people had really some amazing stories. So I want to talk a little bit about materials again, but not materials that are cover materials, but actually the material aid. And again, it's still focused on the same, on this period that is often forgotten, the period between the camps and America, between, you know, the persecution and becoming a survivor in America, which is the time when they're in, in DP camps and when Americans and in campaigns like SoS and others encourage were encouraged to send clothes, packages and letters. And I think we mentioned before, you really show how those, those campaigns really penetrated almost every house. Right. Even if it was in a form of leaflets in your mailbox. Right. Uh, how does everyday act? How does the, the campaign's presence in people's every day through the donating of unnecessary for fur coats, for example, that you talk about and, and high heeled shoes. How does this, how does act shape the relationship to the survivors? Right. And again, this is very affirmal. Right. It's the materiality of it is really important. And for me it's really, it's really interesting.
- [37:51]
D
I mean the fur coats is just such a wonderful story and it really gets at the heart of this that I think.
- [37:58]
C
Yeah. Made me laugh.
- [38:00]
D
Yeah. You know and for anyone listening who maybe hasn't read the book, which is probably most of you, there was a furrier group who donated fur coats, a set of fur coats, children's fur coats, to an orphan's home in Paris. And the aid workers in Paris so said, what are we going to do with fur coats? Like, the idea that these children would walk around in fur coats with shoes with holes in them was just like, not what they needed. And it was a criticism that American Jews didn't understand what European Jews were going through. It was really voice as a way of highlighting the kind of, like, lack of awareness, lack of knowledge, lack of care that American Jews were putting into this project. But I. I think there's another way to read these stories, which is that American Jews were trying to do everything they could, including, like, donating the clothes in their closets. And I think that's a very human response. Like, I think I live in Los Angeles, I think about the response to the fires last year. People were trying to donate anything that they could, because at a certain point when the scale of the devastation is so vast, the, the aid response needs to be at a higher scale than an individual. But individuals still want to act on an individual scale. And so that was part of what SOS was doing. They were trying to activate the impulse of American Jews to give on an individual scale. And they were trying to make that work at a kind of communal scale or like a continental scale, I would say, for Europe, for the devastation in Europe. And so the materials became really important for the American Jewish donors, even if they were less successful for the European recipients. And what happened with SOS is that people were giving used clothes. They couldn't be worn in Europe because they were too worn. They were too used. But JVC set up workshops for women to train in sewing, and they would repair the clothing. So they were. They were kind of these, like the material aid piece. There's so many different ways that that kind of thread goes through the humanitarian work of post war Europe. But I think it speaks to the impulse that American Jews had to want to help and want to participate. And the campaign for SOS was everywhere. The records show that there were donation bins in grocery stores, that every Jewish summer camp had an SOS campaign at the end of the summer, that there were local schools, local libraries, had donation bins of these kind of. The SOS campaign and the material aid campaigns went far outside the Jewish communities as well.
- [40:34]
C
Yeah, And I think it shows. And one thing that I was thinking, I was reading the book is that it really pushed back against this whole idea. American Jews didn't care its survivors came and no one want to hear what they say, which is very dominant narrative and USHMM and other places that how people came. And no one wanted to hear their stories. In many ways, they didn't want to tell their stories also. I mean, again, talking as a generalization here and based on maybe my own family experienced it, you know, just some people just didn't want to talk. But also, I mean, going back to the book here, people were very engaged at the time. Very, very engaged. Maybe not any particular one, but people are very engaged. But once those people were in America, can you say the role of Jewish Americans was seen as over with their follow up or.
- [41:24]
D
That's a good question. I would say I didn't follow those trails as extensively, but there were. Yeah, so I mentioned earlier there were all of these Adopt a Something campaign and a lot of them came with a pen pal program. And some of the pen pal programs kind of collected feedback from their pen pals. So that's like the best peek I have into how did these American Jews feel about the relationships they were building with survivors through these communal projects. And I think to your earlier question about like survivors didn't necessarily want to talk about it when they came here. I think, you know, our contemporary society in general is like very trauma informed. Right. We might recognize the need for people to kind of process or talk through things that they had lived with. And on the one hand, maybe we should expect that people from this earlier generation should have known that as well. But I don't think that's an assumption we can apply to everyone. Right. I think a lot of American Jews were working with the best knowledge they had. So there's this one letter from a pen pal woman who wrote in and so that she has been writing faithfully and sending gifts to her, to her, you know, adopted child. And she writes to her about all the beautiful things in America and all the things she should look forward to because she's had so much ugliness in her life that she should be looking forward to beautiful things. Right. And I think like from that perspective, there's one way to read that letter that's like American Jews weren't interested in what survivors had lived through. They weren't interested in hearing those stories. I think there's another way to read that letter, which is that she was very interested and she wanted to do what she thought was right to help that young child move forward and build A life after what she had lived through. And then there are other letters from pen pals who went to Europe. I don't know how, but they, like, chose to go to Europe in the late 1940s and meet up with their pen pal and build real life relationships with them. So there's kind of a range of experiences. I do think there was a communal expectation. So not necessarily at the individual scale, but the communal level. There's an expectation that when Holocaust drivers came to the United States, they kind of, like got jobs or went to school and like, got on with their lives. I don't think there was a lot of communal space given to survivors to kind of process what they had gone through.
- [43:41]
C
Yeah, and it's a good segue to Hannibal Kovner. But I just want to mention, because I wrote a whole book about trauma. I completely agree with you about the trauma, but about the damaged thinking through trauma studies have done to our thinking about the generation did not have the same thinking about coping that we do. Right. So again, as I think mentioned before, everybody suffered. I'm not that special. There's nothing to talk about. It's over. I'm in America now, or I'm in Israel now, and now Israel is now Americans. I mean, this kind of thinking that we don't really expect because. Except because there is so much emphasis now on PTSD and trauma and dealing and coping with the hidden legacy which did not exist then to the same extent. It's a really good point. So let's talk about Hana Block. Koner. Sorry. Koner. Right. K O H N E R. Sorry. I'll let you explain more about this particular moment. I mean, this is one of my best teachable moments. I show this clip and here it is. Then there's another Hiroshima clip that I use in conjunction. How does her appearance on this Is yous life in 1953, which is a little bit after the period of the book. Right.
- [44:59]
D
That's kind of the bookend. 1953 is really the bookend because it's when the displaced persons camps largely close, with the exception of the kind of hardcore displaced persons camps that exist into the 60s. So the kind of period I'm looking at really wraps up in 1953.
- [45:15]
C
Is this a moment of transition? Because the way I read it is a moment from a moment of mediated stories, like scripted stories and secondary witnesses and people telling their stories for them to survivors being on stage. Is there a transition here to a survivor testimony? But maybe you can tell us a little bit about this moment. People Are not familiar with this. For me, one of the amazing television moments.
- [45:43]
D
I think if anyone is listening to this podcast, they are invested in Holocaust memory enough that maybe they've seen the this is your Life episode of Hannah Block owner, so is it episode. So I think there's, like, two really important contexts. One is that this is your Life was the most popular American show in the 19, early 1950s. So that, I think, is, like, really important to recognize that this is not like, a little show that nobody was watching. Like, this was, like, the most popular, most watched television show in America. And Hannah Blau Corner was the first Holocaust survivor to be on TV in America. So those, I think, are like, the two big, like, breakthrough pieces of information. And I think there's a lot about the episode that does transition us into thinking about testimony. Hannah's face is kind of centered often in the broadcast. She's on stage. She is really, like, beautiful and well dressed. She. The story is told in a chronological way. I think this is, like, a really big part that the story is told from, like, her life as a child to then, like, the pre war and then the wartime and then the post war. So, like, that chrono chronology of it, I think fits, but I would argue that it is more of the earlier generation of narrative because it is still mediated. We actually don't hear her voice, I mean, maybe for a brief second, but her voice is not really centered in the television episode. And in fact, the narrator, the host of the show, is telling her story for her, and her face is betraying the exact kind of positivistic American narrative that the host is trying to offer. He's really telling this story of, like, contrast from her life in Europe to her life in America. And she is devastated. So I think there's a lot going on, more than a contemporary testimony that we might think about.
- [47:38]
C
For those of us listening who didn't see that. What's. What's the story? Who is she? How is she presented? Maybe you could tell a little bit.
- [47:46]
D
Yeah. So for anyone who's not familiar with this Is yous Life, the structure of the show is that usually a famous person is surprised to be the center of this show, and then the narrator walks them through key moments in their life and. And brings people from off stage to, like, represent that time in their life. So, for example, like, a famous writer or maybe like, their teachers are brought off from off stage. And that's kind of the structure of the show for Hannah. What happens is she is surprised. So she thinks she's in the audience of a TV show, she's surprised to find that this is about her. So that's already. You see her kind of, like, shock of being on this television show. And then they start walking through her story of her life in Czechoslovakia. Then she leaves with her family and goes to Amsterdam. And then she falls in love. And then her husband moves to America. He kind of emigrates to America. And then throughout, people are brought out onto this stage, including, like, her best friend who she was deported with. And so the narrator is telling this story about the first time Hannah was brought into a concentration camp. And she went into a shower, but it turned out to be just a shower. But then her best friend, who she hadn't seen in many years, is coming out, and so she's crying. But also, this story is tragic. There's so much tension between the narrative and the visual. And I think it really helps us think about this moment and the kind of challenge of telling Holocaust stories and really asks us as viewers to think about, like, what is. What is the goal of telling the story? And I think ultimately, what this Is yous Life does is tells us that part of the goal of telling these stories is fundraising. Because at the end of the episode, the episode ends with a call for donations to the joint distribution committee. And one of the interesting legacies about the show is that Hannah ended up writing a book about her experience and used this Is yous Life and the kind of things that came with this Is yous Life to create a teaching module about the Holocaust. And so there's lots of ways that we can think about this. I think there's this interesting tension between the narrative and the visual. But then ultimately, her family chooses to use this moment as an educational moment. They've created an educational organization, they've written a book, and they've created a pedagogy module that people can use to teach about the Holocaust in schools. All from this moment on, this is your life. So it's a long legacy of this story.
- [50:25]
C
Yeah, I wasn't aware of it. I'll check it out. It's for. It's. For me, this moment. Yeah. I'm going to teach the course next semester. So the moment. The way they should talk about the moment with the showers, we had to talk about Auschwitz. Right. It's almost like they talk about a summer camp. It's like they're kind of rushing through to the real moment is a liberator comes. Right. Like that guy who liberated her, an American soldier, because she was. She moved From Auschwitz to. I don't remember what camp she ended up in, but it was liberated by Americans. There is really. No, no, not much of a focus on. On Auschwitz, which is kind of unthinkable to us now. Right. It also is shown as like, you know, almost like a summer camp in. In a way. Yeah. We were called a bit, but, you know, we. We went through it. Right.
- [51:14]
D
I think for me, the part that stands out the most is at the end, they bring out her brother, who she hadn't seen in 10 years because after he immigrated to Israel. And she cannot contain her emotion as seeing her brother, who she hadn't seen since before the war, and her brother is like, patting her arm, telling her like, it's okay and like, trying to. There's just something like. About the rawness of her emotion and the narrative that the narrator keeps enforcing on the kind of positivity of life in America, that just really stands out to me as what is like. I do think it's a transition of this moment of the. Of these narratives because his insistence on the American ness, on the, like, the happy ending in America and her emotion, I think, tells us that these narratives don't necessarily sit well together.
- [52:05]
C
Yeah. It's a great. Again, it's really great, as you mentioned, the way that emotion overload from a narrative that is. Right. It's so concrete. It's really looked. So I have to just. I mean, can talk about it for hours. But I just want to wrap up with the gender aspect of it because my students brought it up, female students, like, they're touching her all the time. What's going on? Like that she is presented as a beautiful college. What I think she called it like a college.
- [52:30]
D
College graduate. Right.
- [52:31]
C
Graduate. But she's a beautiful woman that again, we don't expect survivor of the Holocaust to be seen like that. And my students brought it up. They were. I think the word used was cringe, which. About how the presenter and the soldier that she doesn't even know hug her and like, rub her arm like this. It's. There's a whole gender aspect also that doesn't fit there. It's really. Yeah, it's really a great mo. It's a very interesting teachable episode there.
- [53:04]
D
Yeah. I think in general, because of like, the Shoah foundation videos and the kind of really central place that those testimonies have in our understanding of who Holocaust survivors are, we don't think about Holocaust survivors as being young.
- [53:18]
C
Yeah.
- [53:19]
D
And I think that's another piece of this, which is that There were so many young people. I mean, children and. Yes. But also like teenagers and people in college and they, they. The. Another one of the radio broadcasts that I'm able to highlight focuses on teenagers who got college scholarships to come to the United States and finish their college degree. And I think thinking about the life, the lives that were interrupted not for. From a longer perspective but in that moment, I think is really. Yeah. It's not what we've come to expect. When we think about who a Holocaust survivor is and what their story is going to sound like. It's unfinished in the 1940s. We don't know what's coming next. And I think by the time we get to a kind of testimony culture, the stories feel more confined. They feel like they have an ending.
- [54:09]
C
Yeah. It's more generous and more somber. And it's all about like the really. The horrible experience in the camps. You forgot they survived. And the whole like joy de veer of surviving. Right. I mean, all the stuff that Tina Grossman write about, all the. The world parties in the camps. I mean, I remember reading Applications by Jorge. There is one woman who wanted to have money for plastic surgery on her feet because she couldn't. She couldn't wear dance shoes and she wanted to go dance parties. And like half the letter is about how she want to go dancing. And the social worker kind of like pooh poohing it. It's like it's not we give money for, but it's like, why not? Right? I mean, we have to remember they're young. Not just young, but people who survive and wanted to live a full life after everything they've been through. And we think of them as, you know, witnesses. Now. We really, I think. And I can talk for hours about DIT and what it does, but yeah, I think also your book shows so much the kids with their sandwiches and I guess it's almost a comic moment. Right. They brought this like two little. What is it? They brought two little kids.
- [55:16]
D
Yeah. So Irene Gutman, who later became Irene Husman and Charles and I'm absolutely blanking on his last name, but it will come to me.
- [55:25]
C
There's amazing photo in the book.
- [55:27]
D
So they were featured in a Life magazine spread and they were brought to the United States specifically to go on this little campaign tour, meeting with donors who had sponsored orphan homes in the United. In Paris and in France and around post war Europe. They met with the President. They like were brought to meet with President Truman. And then they were kind of photographed on this spread of like walking around New York and kind of the splendor of New York and then the story of what happens to them after I think is again, right. Like the, the narratives and the Images in the 1940s were not necessarily about the tragedies of the Holocaust. They were really about, like, what the future for these people looked like and how American Jews could help influence that and impact that.
- [56:13]
C
Charles Caro, I just checked.
- [56:14]
D
CHARLES Caro, Sorry.
- [56:16]
C
Yeah, well, I just checked. But the picture of them, like, looking at this huge plate of sandwiches, it just, yeah, it tells so much about this moment. Well, as we can keep talking about it, it's like there's so much to talk about the book in general, about Holocaust testimony now, but before, but we really, we're running past the, the one hour mark. So I want to ask, what is, what is, what are you doing now? What are you working on now?
- [56:42]
D
So I'm the director of a program at the UCLA Library called the Modern Endangered Archives Program, and we are in our eighth year of funding cultural heritage preservation projects all around the world. And so through my work with me ap, I get to take a lot of what I've thought about and think about in terms of why these stories matter, what ephemeral archival materials can tell us about the past and help other communities around the world preserve their own cultural heritage. Make sure that those archives are available and accessible, make sure that they're well documented and that they are able to help future historians tell these kinds of stories, too.
- [57:21]
C
Thank you. And again, that's another thing we can talk about for hours. But again, we've been talking for over an hour and can talk for two more hours. But let's just end here. Thank you so much, Rachel.
- [57:32]
D
Thank you.
- [57:33]
E
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