Latin American connections with the Holocaust

Tomorrow we commemorate 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.

Utero.pe has a fascinating article on the Peruvian victims of Auschwitz - I confess, I had no idea there were any. But apparently, there were 17 of them. Like Héctor David Levy, shot for asking for water during forced labour, and his wife and two young children, who were gassed. The two children became Peru's youngest victims of the Second World War.

Victoria Barouh Avayü was the only Peruvian Auschwitz survivor, having lost her entire family. Many years later, she went back to the concentration camp to see what had become of it and of fellow survivors.

More information about Peruvians in the camps may be found in the book Estación final by Hugo Coya (Aguilar, 2013).

Los peruanos de Auschwitz, por Hugo Coya (Utero.pe)

Semana discusses the Auschwitz survivors who came to Colombia: Ana Orgel de Czeizler, Raquel Gedalovich, Jacobo Bron and Max Kirschberg. The article is worth reading and illustrated with beautiful photos by Erika Diettes.

"Most people have heard about what happened. But it wasn't just the Jews who suffered. There were non-Jewish Germans there, because they didn't accept the ideology, or because they argued about something, they ended up there. They took people from other faiths, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, and many gypsies", says Kirschberg. When the camp was liberated, Kirschberg had lost his parents, but he recalled that his mother had told him he had an uncle living in Colombia, so he came there. In 1952, he returned to Germany to study, marry and have children, but in 1976 he returned for good with one of his sons.

More information about Colombian survivors may be found in the book Sobrevivientes del Holocausto que rehicieron su vida en Colombia, edited by Hilda Demner and Estela Goldstein

Los sobrevivientes de Auschwitz que hicieron vida en Colombia (Semana)

Germany: Intelligence services do not have to release Eichmann info

This is a slight departure from my usual focus, but there is an Argentine connection.

German daily Bild, which is not exactly the first publication to spring to mind when you think of investigative journalism, has just lost a court case in which it attempted to force the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) to release information pertaining to Adolf Eichmann. The paper wants to prove that Germany knew Eichmann was in hiding in Argentina in the early '50s. It had already reported this on the basis of a partial release of the documentation.

The federal administrative court in Leipzig ruled that the BND does not have to released the unredacted documents. The paper is considering taking the case to Germany's highest court (the Bundesverfassungsgericht) in Karlsruhe.

The BND stressed that the majority of the documentation is available and said that the redaction was to protect personal data and sensitive security information. Bild lawyer Christoph Partsch said that the paper believes that Germany is harmed by the withholding of the information, not by its publication. 

Andreas Nachama, director of the "Topographie des Terrors" foundation, criticised the ruling and suggested that the redacted information could be embarrassing for Germany, since Hans Globke, the head of the federal chancellery (Bundeskanzleramt) after WWII and thus ultimate head of the BND, was a known Nazi supporter. Dieter Graumann, Germany's leading Jewish representative, also expressed his incomprehension at the decision.

This is disappointing. It's hard to believe that there can be 60-year-old information in these documents which could harm Germany's interests. Germany usually, and for obvious reasons, strives to be open about this kind of thing, so this feels like a step backwards. Good on Bild for pursuing the issue and I hope we will see inside the full files at some point.

Germany can keep Eichmann records secret, court rules (Guardian)
Die geheimen Akten des Adolf Eichmann (N24)
BILD verklagt Bundesnachrichtendienst (Bild)
BND muss Eichmann-Akten nicht freigeben (Bild)
Alemania: la justicia rechazó abrir los archivos sobre la fuga de Eichmann a la Argentina (TN.com.ar)

Argentina: BBQ at the ESMA, anyone?

An odd scandal blew up in the first week of the year in Argentina. Justice minister Julio Alak was accused of taking part in an end-of-year barbecue on the site of the former ESMA clandestine detention centre. This was interpreted by some as a sign of disrespect for the victims disappeared at the site.

Alak has responded by denying that there was a barbecue, stating that there was an event organised by his ministry at which sandwiches were provided. He has also blamed the media for blowing the story out of proportion.

Madres' leader Hebe de Bonafini says that "anything" is allowed in the ESMA and has herself previously cooked there. On the other hand, the association of former disappeared people (AEDD) has criticised Alak and is organising a protest.

Pagina/12 has published an excellent article by Cecilia Sosa asking the questions which arise in this context:

What is a "space of memory"? What are the activities which it is possible to imagine in a site which is characterized by the unbearable? And further, is it possible to celebrate in a place of death?

Sosa recalls the work of Jens Andermann, who has identified three positions with respect to a place of memory like the ESMA: the "testimonial", which situates it as an unalterable place of witness to State Terrorism, the "museal", which focuses on the pedagogical function of the space, and the "performatic", which maintains that only by opening the space up to artistic and politic activities can it be taken back from death and the perpetrators.

Since the opening up of the ESMA in 2007, Sosa points out, the site has attempted to balance all three functions - human rights groups have offices there, there are guided tours, and there are concerts and lectures, among other things.

She concludes,

The future of the ex-ESMA has still not been discovered. The co-existence of distinct rituals suggests a different path to that taken by Auschwitz: a politics of pain which reveals its capacity for experimentation, where absences help to forge new links and where the past may live alongside a future to be invented. In this time to come, perhaps a barbecue for two thousand people or other types of celebration will not be so scandalous and will turn out to be a new way for people to be together in their loss. The table is laid. It's time to feed our guests. 

My gut reaction when I saw Tweets about the ESMA barbecue was "Really??". But reading this article reminded me of some of my usual understanding of memorials. I'm a great believer in using spaces of memory, not shutting them off from the rest of society. This was the problem with the Parque de la memoria when I was in Buenos Aires in 2004: far from the centre of the city and close to the (then-closed) ESMA, it was completely empty at the time I visited. Dead. What's the point of a park no one sits in, walks in, brings their kids to? It was also the problem with the Ojo que llora monument in Lima which, following vandalism, was shut behind a gate (I don't know if it's freely accessible right now, but the last I heard it wasn't).

No, I'm not suggesting a picnic in Auschwitz. I don't even know enough about Alak and the particular event he was attending to comment on whether or not it was "respectful enough" for the site. But I am still sure that I like to see places of memory woven into the fabric of the landscape and not preserved in aspic.

Apareció la foto del "asado" de Alak en la ex ESMA (Clarin)
Alak: "El asado en la ex ESMA es una absoluta mentira" (La Nacion)
Bonafini: en la ESMA "se puede hacer de todo" (Terra)
Crece el repudio al asado en la ESMA y convocan a una marcha (Clarin)
La mesa está servida (Pagina/12)

Peru: Draft law to ban terrorism denial

Peruvian prime minister Juan Jiménez Mayor has announced plans to outlaw denial of the terrorism Peru experienced by the MRTA and Sendero Luminoso, in much the same way as Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. The proposed law is known as the "ley de Negacionismo" and is likely to be largely directed at MOVADEF, the new political successor to the Shining Path. 

Being very familiar with the German concept, I'm a bit torn on this one. It's pretty clear why Germany introduced its law, but I was discussing it with my German husband the other day and we agreed that it can seem outdated now. On a related issue, we were watching a programme where various parties were arguing about the terrible things that would happen if we allowed the population to actually read Mein Kampf (which is not, strictly speaking, banned, but the state of Bavaria holds the copyright and they refuse to allow publication). It's generally agreed that Mein Kampf is a terrible, rambling tome more likely to put the reader off Nazism than encourage it, but in Germany, access to it is still restricted. It's all a bit patronising, and we are generations on now. We shouldn't be denying the Holocaust because doing so is outrageous and the vast majority of people know that, not because certain statements are banned.

So, although I'm shocked by arguments that the Shining Path wasn't a terrorist group which committed major human rights abuses, I'm not convinced that banning such statements is the way to go. I think I'd be putting my efforts towards educating the younger generation about what actually happened so they would be less likely to be persuaded by them.

Peru to punish “negationism”, denying a past of killings and destruction by terrorist gangs (Mercopress)
Ley de Negacionismo se aplicará a quienes nieguen violencia de SL y MRTA (La Republica)
Jiménez: Ley de “negacionismo” protegerá a la población del terrorismo (Andina)

Tracing child Holocaust survivors

This is not directly Latin America-related, but it has obviously resonances for the region. The BBC drew my attention to a new project by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum hoping to find out what happened to some of the children who survived the Holocaust but became separated from their families.

The BBC article also included an amazing radio clip of 1945 broadcasts made in the UK. It's quite eery to hear the extremely well-spoken presenter (as they all were, in those days) reading out the horrors the young people had lived through. I'd not heard of these broadcasts before. I wonder what the chances were of them finding their relatives?

Remember Me: Displaced Children of the Holocaust (USHMM)
Tracing children of the Holocaust using social media (BBC)

El Salvador: Holocaust Hero Remembered

Thanks to Tim's El Salvador Blog for drawing my attention to the story of Jose Arturo Castellanos, a Salvadoran diplomat who issued fake Salvadoran papers to Hungarian Jews, saving from the gas chambers:

Unsung Saviour (Washington Post)