By David Gordon, associate editor
The CVPost
For many people, the Holocaust is something that was perpetrated by Nazi Germany many years ago and thousands of miles away.
For Tim Scott, it’s a horrendous chapter in human history that reverberates today and whose lessons continue to demand our attention.
Scott will lead a program titled “American Denial: Extinguishing the Flames” on Saturday (April 11) in Eau Claire.
Scott’s program will run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Lutheran Church, 1005 Oxford Avenue. The symposium is part of First Lutheran’s “Community Conversations” series and is co-sponsored by JONAH (Joining Our Neighbors Advancing Hope), a faith-based Eau Claire area organization focused on social justice.
Scott, 56, who maintains a solo law practice in New Richmond, has been involved with presentations about the Holocaust since the early 1990s, when he was a law clerk for Judge Thomas Utschig in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Eau Claire.
Scott said during a recent interview that he presents 40 to 50 programs a year, mostly in Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota and primarily to middle school and high school students. He also presents to civic groups and five or six times a year at the St. Croix Correctional Center, a “boot camp” facility near New Richmond.
“Every inmate that goes through that will have heard my message,” he said.
That message, Scott said, is designed to make his listeners confront lessons from the Holocaust that remain relevant – and important – today. He begins by personalizing the history that led up to the Holocaust, framing events as if they were happening to audience members and their families. During the second half of the program, Scott holds up a mirror in which individuals have to examine their own and community attitudes toward people and groups who are not like themselves.
To do this, Scott provides examples of hatred, prejudice and racism that, he said, “gradually come closer to home.”
Scott said audience members frequently react at first by denying that these examples – which he links back to Holocaust history – could apply to their communities or to themselves.
His goal is to help – or force – people to look inward and extinguish any vestige of what he calls “the flames of hate.” These stem, he said, from individuals’ often unconscious attitudes toward whomever they may regard as “the other.” Scott said he has received occasional death threats as a result of his efforts.
Scott’s interest in the Holocaust began when he was an eighth-grader in Medford and he found a book about the Auschwitz concentration camp in the school library.
As student at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN, Scott visited two concentration camps while spending a semester studying in Austria. Those experiences left him even more intensely interested in the attitudes that enabled the Holocaust to occur, he said.
After graduating from the University of Minnesota Law School, Scott spent two years in Germany on a fellowship to study German law, and he used that opportunity to further explore Holocaust history. When he returned to Wisconsin, he spoke to several groups about his visits to the concentration camps and began receiving requests to speak to middle and high school students.
At his school programs, Scott asks students to write essays about their reactions to the presentation. He plans to use that same technique at Saturday’s symposium.
Those essays will provide the material for a follow-up discussion at Phoenix Park at 6:30 p.m. on July 15, said Roberta Joern, coordinator of First Lutheran’s “Community Conversations” programming. A second follow-up session is planned for First Lutheran’s fall “Community Conversation,” tentatively titled “American Denial: Embracing the Other,” she said.
The summer and fall follow-up programs are intended to “keep the conversation going,” according to Shelley Fredson, a member of the interfaith committee planning the events.
Scott’s presentation on Saturday stems from comments made last October by Eau Claire County Circuit Judge Paul Lenz at a meeting called to explore ways to improve the courts’ intake procedures. In his remarks, Lenz drew a controversial analogy between the intake court’s process for sorting new criminal cases and the sorting done by the Nazis at the Auschwitz death camp, where more than a million people were exterminated during World War II. Lenz showed at least one photo of Auschwitz to illustrate his comparison.
The judge’s remarks drew criticism from members of the local legal community, though much of it was muted because at least some lawyers at the October meeting were concerned that speaking out could create problems in their future appearances in Lenz’s courtroom.
Four county judges signed a letter apologizing for Lenz’s use of the Auschwitz analogy, and Lenz later issued a written apology for his Nazi references.
Fredson, a member of Temple Sholom in Eau Claire, and others were upset about the situation and suggested to JONAH’s religious leaders group that there was a need for the community to discuss the situation. Joern said First Lutheran offered to host Saturday’s program and a planning committee has developed the details.
In addition to Joern and Fredson, the planning committee includes Rev. Sandra McKinney of Unity Christ Center and Betty Hurst of the Newman Community at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s Ecumenical Religious Center.
Admission to the Tim Scott symposium is free and a light lunch will be provided. Lunch reservations can be made by calling the church office at 715-832-8321 or by sending an e-mail to office@First-Lutheran.org. The deadline for lunch reservations is noon Thursday (April 8), but reservations are not required for Scott’s presentation.