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ABSTRACT
The paper examines the visual and verbal representation of the Holocaust in Israeli schoolbooks. The relations between images and texts or captions are revealed through a multimodal discourse analysis. Most photographs were transposed to Israeli schoolbooks, unattributed and de-contextualized, from Nazi archives and amateur albums. These photographs have become the icons of the Holocaust, and even the Holocaust itself, or its simulacra, for post-memory generations. Therefore, the perpetrator’s perspective often comes through as objective and factual. Schoolbooks transform these photographs to educational resources, or to means by which the state educates its young to remember. The question is, how do these images construct what the students need to remember or rather, what meaning are students prompted to make of them? In the schoolbooks, the photographs illustrate the Zionist narrative “from Holocaust to resurrection” in which the state of Israel is presented as the alternative to another Holocaust. The annihilation is graphically described in detail, but the annihilated are not narrated. Most are presented only as icons of the “final solution” and specimens of categories. This representation attests to an interest to traumatize, not to inspire mourning or arouse empathy and reverence towards the victims “we don’t want to become again”.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See, for example, Hayden White and Saul Friedländer, in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture. 2016, and LaCapra, Amos Goldberg, Alon Confino, Idit Zertal, Tom Segev, and Moshe Zuckermann.
2 Bauman, Zygmunt; Kimmerling, Baruch.
3 Zizek, Derrida, Benjamin, Adorno, Steiner, Arendt, Agamben.
4 Anthelme, Robert. 1947. L'Espèce Humaine; Levi, Primo. Is This a Man; Semprun, Jose. L'Ecriture ou La Vie; Duras, Margueritte. La Douleur; Perec, George. W ou le souvenir d’enfance; Kambanellis, Iakovos. Mauthausen.
5 For instance (Friedländer Citation1992; LaCapra Citation2000; Holtschneider Citation2011).
6 (Baudrillard Citation1984, 27; Susan Sontag Citation2004, 20; Gourevitch Citation1993; Ball Citation2003).
7 Struk, cited in (Holtschneider Citation2011, 52; Susan Crane Citation2008).
8 Lewis, Chouliaraki, Zelizer, Struk, Crane, Milton and others are mentioned in this paper.
9 Elkana, Yehuda. “The need to Forget.” Ha'aretz, March 2, 1988.
10 De-Koven Ezrahi, Sidra. 2015. “A Personal Postscript.” In Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age. Edited by Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan. The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 345–354.
11 The Other is Me. Israeli Ministry of Education. http://cms.education.gov.il/EducationCMS/Units/ui/
12 Naveh, Past in a Storm.
13 Cited in Naveh 2019. Ministry of Education, Tochnit Halimudim Behistoria Lebeit Hasefer Hamamlachti Lekitot Vav-Tet [History Curriculum for the National School System: Grades 6-9] (Jerusalem: Ministry of Education, 1992), 11.
14 Naveh, Eyal. 2018. Past in Turmoil Debates over Historical Issues in Israel. Hakibbutz Hameuhad Pub.; Bauer, Yehuda. 1996. “The influence of the Shoah on the founding of the state of Israel.” In Fundamental Changes in the People of Israel following the Shoah, edited by Yisrael Gutman. Yad Va-Shem Pub. 503–509 (Hebrew); Bauer, Yehuda. 2013. “The Shallowness of Israeli Air force planes flying above Auschwitz.” Haaretz, October 6, 2013.
15 LaCapra, Dominick. 1996. Representing the Holocaust. History, Theory, Trauma. Cornell University Press.
16 Zuckerman, M. and Zimmerman, M. Citation2023. Thinking Germany – an Israeli dialogue. Tel Aviv:Resling Publishers.
17 (Kress Citation2012; Machin Citation2013; Machin and Myar Citation2012; Van Leeuwen Citation2013; Kress and van Leeuwen Citation2006; van Leeuwen Citation2008).
18 Image, Music, Text.
19 Introducing social semiotics
20 Works by Susan Sontag; Vicky Goldberg; Cornelia Brink; Barbie Zelizer; George Didi-Huberman; Marianne Hirsch; Sybil Milton and Wendy Lower, to name but a few, inform the analysis.
21 Wendy (Lower Citation2021, 19).
22 The Einsatzgruppen were the “special action” squads that murdered more than a million Jews in Ukraine.
23 The Judenrat was the Jewish council appointed by the Nazis to govern Jewish life and help execute the German policy of extermination.
24 Milton (Citation1984).
25 Avieli-Tabibian (Citation2009).
26 Keller (Citation1984).
28 Ulrich Keller explains that “the photographs reflect such uniform social, economic and weather conditions that they must have been taken in the span of a few weeks. On the basis of numerous factual picture details, it can safely be determined that the period in question is late winter and early spring, 1941.”
29 Jorgen Lissner is project director of Denmark’s leading voluntary aid agency, Danchurchaid, and author of The Politics of Altruism, published by the World Council of Churches.
30 In 1961 during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, Al Moss (b. 1910), a Polish Jew who acquired it in May 1945, was living in Chicago gave it to UPI so that people “know what went on in Eichmann's time.” https://digital.kenyon.edu/bulmash/1085/ https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/last-jew-vinnitsa-1941/.
31 The Guardian, Saturday October 25, 2014.
32 See Friedländer (Citation1997, 361) about Vinnitsa.
33 The poet, Leon Volkovisky titled the poem Chiho Chiho in Polish and later Shtiler, Shtiler in Yiddish, which means Silence, Silence, as it begins with the line: “Silence, silence son, be quiet, here the graves are growing”.
34 reproduced in the book 1939–1945 We Have Not Forgotten, Photographing the Holocaust, 2004.
35 Empathic unsettlement recognizes the fundamental, inherent otherness of the individual who experiences the trauma, but despite the recognition of this radical and ineradicable otherness, it calls for a sense of empathy toward the sufferers. (LaCapra: Writing History, Writing Trauma.)
36 Yad Vashem / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive.
37 For an analysis of the poem see Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. 1980. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, p. 105.
39 https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/anna-maria-settela-steinbach/, https://www.yadvashem.org/blog/remembering-settela.html
40 Wagenaar, Aad. 1994. Settela: The Girl Who Got Her Name Back. https://www.brabantremembers.com/persecution/het-meisje-met-de-hoofddoek-vindt-haar-naam/?lang=en.
43 In the document affirming his identity we learn that his three children, Avraham (16), Feigle-Malka (15), and Nathan (12) were murdered as well. https://yvng.yadvashem.org/nameDetails.html?language=he&itemId=698476&ind=5.
44 It appears on the cover of the English volume of his stories and essays, Kaddish, and on his last book, Shivitti.
45 Quoted from: Ashray, Rabbi Ephraim. 1971. “The Extinction of Lithuania’s Jewry.” In Lithuania’s Jewry, edited by Dov Lipatz, p. 351 (Hebrew).
46 After he spoke to his pupils he turned to the German and said, “I have finished, you may start.” https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Lithuania5/lit5_060.html.
47 Van Leeuwen, personal communication.
48 See Struk (Citation2011) for” bloody Wednesday” and the trajectory of the photograph.
49 As the inspector general Avraham Green declared in the 1990s. Quoted in Miron (Citation1994).
50 Loshitzky (Citation2006, 327–335, 328): “Jewish powerlessness and vulnerability, epitomized by the Holocaust, was transformed into a fantasy of absolute power, exercised against the Palestinian as a substitute for the European goy (gentile).”
51 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Sharon Paquette. Photograph Number: 64407.” https://www.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/database/index.asp?cid=686.