Differing historical perceptions between cultures has resulted in varying remembrances of the Holocaust, a British professor said yesterday at the College of Arts and Sciences as part of the Boston University Holocaust Education Committee’s ongoing Holocaust Education Week.
Tim Cole, an author and professor at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, is currently touring the United States, lecturing on the Holocaust while his students are on Spring Break. After speaking at BU, he will talk at Brandeis University later this week. He was first intrigued by the Holocaust as an undergraduate when two inspirational professors introduced him to the topic.
“I am not someone who wants to teach a lot about the Holocaust,” Cole said. “We have to understand who we are and where we came from. I don’t set out to teach any specific moral or ethical lessons in my lectures.”
In Cole’s lecture, titled “Making Sense of the Holocaust: From Anne Frank to Oscar Schindler,” he said numerous angles regarding how history perceive the Holocaust and how those perceptions vary between culture affect the way it is remembered.
While America and England show homegrown soldiers as liberating heroes, Hungary and Poland continue to exclude the impact on Jews in their teachings of the Holocaust, he said. The way the Holocaust is represented at the museum in Washington, D.C., he said, is obviously much different than the way people in Israel depict the event.
“There are also official and unofficial tellings of the Holocaust,” Cole said. The story of Anne Frank and the details of Oscar Schindler’s courage are “unofficial and non-state sanctioned tellings of the Holocaust with true ideals.”
“[Schindler’s List] gives us someone we can identify with, but also someone who is not perfect,” Cole said. “While the rescuer in the movie is relatable, the movie also offers a real hero.”
Cole also said the anti-Semitism in the story of Anne Frank becomes racism, similarly indicative of American culture in the 1950s. “There was a downplaying and generalization of Jewishness.”
American museums show the Holocaust through the eyes of American soldiers, Cole said, turning American ideals on their head as the horrors of the Holocaust are unimaginable to some Americans.
“In trying to find a happy ending to the Holocaust, we come dangerously close to sugar-coating it,” Cole warned.
“Should we try to forget about it?” he asked. “I don’t think so. We need to teach how it really happened. The Holocaust becomes a marker of Jewish ethnicity.”
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