By David Gordon, Associate Editor
The CVPost
Putting some 50 people inside the Holocaust 70 years after it ended is no easy task, but that’s what Tim Scott did on Saturday morning (April 11) at First Lutheran Church in Eau Claire.
Scott, who makes 40 to 50 presentations on the Holocaust annually, spoke at the church’s spring “Community Conversations” program co-sponsored by JONAH (Joining Our Neighbors Advancing Hope), a faith-based Eau Claire area organization focused on social justice. He repeatedly emphasized “why this message has importance and relevance” for everyone today, including “you and me as Americans.”
The word “holocaust” is derived from Greek terms meaning “whole” and “burnt,” and Scott asked his audience to think of the word in terms of a “firestorm” ignited in Germany by many small flames of individual hatred.
Adolf Hitler fanned these flames until they exploded, Scott said, with the result that “tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people engaged in the murder of millions of people.”
Scott said he couldn’t understand how this could originate in a nation that gave the world masterpieces of literature, music and architecture. Part of the explanation, he said, was that there were two groups of people in Germany: the death camp people and a second, far larger group that chose to remain bystanders.
The people in that second group “played the game and got by,” Scott said, adding his concern that the same scenario could be repeated in the United States.
He cited a paraphrase of the famous aphorism by philosopher George Santayana that “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” That statement is on display at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial outside of Munich, Germany.
Scott used his storytelling skills for two and a half hours to personalize the Holocaust with a detailed account of how a fictional Ukrainian Jewish family with four children could have become immersed in it. Scott’s story – “a verbal historical novel” – was drawn from testimony of survivors and details from individual stories that he’s picked up on his many visits to Europe.
“I’m going to put you in the Holocaust with your family,” he told the audience, “and tell you what might have happened.”
The story started in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor and ended in several parts of a concentration camp – including a gas chamber. At one point, Scott took note of the absolute silence in the room as the audience, made up mostly – but not entirely – of people over 50, seemed to hang on every detail and twist of the story.
The account included a vivid description of “Kristallnacht” – the name given to the night of Nov. 9, 1938, because of the shards of glass littering streets throughout Germany and Austria after 1,200 synagogues and more than 8,000 Jewish businesses had their windows smashed in well-orchestrated attacks. Many of the structures were set afire, as well.
Speaker’s tale steeped in history
Scott stressed that his presentation “is not fiction, this is history.” He asked the audience to regard the 18-year-old protagonist’s story as the “journey of one human being who lived, suffered and died,” and then to multiply that story by 7 million – the minimum estimate of the number of Jews and many other groups who were put to death in the Holocaust.
In the second part of his presentation, Scott asked, “How do you see the spirit of the Holocaust alive and well in the world today?”
He provided a series of answers to that question, some from media accounts of persecution and racism and a half dozen drawn from essays that he has students write following his school presentations. One of those essays contained a direct death threat to him for his adamant opposition to marginalizing groups on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation or any other criterion.
Scott related the story of a youth from the Somali community in the Twin Cities who lost eight teeth when he was battered by a truncheon wielded by a member of a gang called – ironically – the “All-American Boys.” He drew a parallel between that incident and the grandmother in his fictional Ukrainian family who was fatally clubbed by a truncheon wielded by a Nazi soldier.
Scott related his experiences in talking with several older German and Austrian men who reversed the figurative finger-pointing, usually before Scott could even raise a question about the Holocaust.
In one such encounter, on the subway returning to Munich from the Dachau Memorial, an older German man turned the tables and asked Scott how he could justify the way Native Americans have been treated in the United States. He said he’d deal with Holocaust questions only after Scott had learned what happened at Wounded Knee, SD, because some of the elements were the same.
On other trips, Scott’s questions about the Holocaust were met with return questions about the Allies’ one-night fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, in early 1945 that reduced the city known as the “Florence of the Elbe” to smoldering rubble and killed some 135,000 people; and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which killed more than 100,000 people. An Austrian man, referring to a concentration camp that Scott was visiting there, noted that it took the Austrians and Germans more than seven years to kill 100,000 people at the camp.
Spirit of the Holocaust lives on
Scott said the spirit of the Holocaust begins when people categorize and label entire groups and figuratively shove them into corners. Among the relatively recent results of this that he provided were racist graffiti in Oregon, WI, “gay bashing in downtown Madison,” swastikas and the phrase “die, Jews” painted on the wall of a Madison synagogue, and an anonymous letter a decade ago saying that “it’s time for a Jew to die in Eau Claire.”
Scott said that at least 90 percent of the student essays resulting from his presentations have been positive, but he called some of the others “chilling” in the rage and hatred they express. One essay he read stated, “I think the gays should be lined up and shot one by one.” Another said that Mexicans should “be butchered like cattle, but the cattle have more value.”
The next Holocaust could begin with such “tiny, flickering flames” of hatred and bigotry, Scott said. He exhorted his listeners to extinguish those flames wherever they find them, including in their own hearts – an experience he went through as a high school freshman when he was forced to look into his own attitudes.
“Sadly, in some young people I encounter, it’s a raging fire,” Scott said, suggesting that the next Holocaust could begin in the hearts and minds of people like him and his audience.
A follow-up program to discuss some of the student essays that Scott’s presentations have evoked is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on July 15 at Phoenix Park. Further information is available from Roberta Joern, coordinator of mission and outreach at First Lutheran Church, at rjoern@first-lutheran.org.