Jan T. Gross building new history of the Holocaust
JAN T. GROSS BEGINS HIS keynote lecture by projecting an old photograph onto the screen behind him. He promises to talk about it at the end of the presentation, knowing that the picture, ostensibly a somewhat commonplace snapshot of Polish peasants resting on their tools behind their harvested crops, is disturbing. The picture is fuzzy, and the lunar-like landscape is too desolate, the harvest is too meager, the colors are too gray.
The overflow audience at Yad Vashem listens intently to Gross’s lecture, entitled “Opportunistic Killings and Plunder of Jews By Their Neighbors – A Norm or an Exception in German-Occupied Europe?” while distracted by the image.
At the end, as promised, he relates to the picture. “Is this not,” he challenges, “a familiar scene, a snapshot of summer vacations with distant relatives in the countryside?” But then he points to what is only vaguely visible in the enlarged image seen from a distance – “the crops scattered in front of the group are skulls and bones. In this photograph we see a bunch of peasants standing atop a mount of ashes. These are the human ashes of 800,000 Jews gassed and cremated in the Treblinka extermination camp between July 1942 and October 1943. The Europeans captured in the photograph have been digging through the remains of Holocaust victims, hoping to find gold and precious stones that Nazi executioners may have overlooked, despite carefully checking the body cavities of the murdered Jews… And while the scale of the Treblinka excavations was unique, the practice of digging up Jewish remains from the sites of mass murder to strip them of valuables was common.”
He continues, “Not only the Poles, many peoples across the continent have benefited from the Nazi policies of stripping Jews of civic and property rights and eliminating them from public life, and, ultimately, from life. [I present you with] a question and an answer to frame the photograph: What do a Swiss banker and a Polish peasant have in common? And the answer to this question would be, a golden tooth extracted from the jaws of a Jewish corpse.”...
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The overflow audience at Yad Vashem listens intently to Gross’s lecture, entitled “Opportunistic Killings and Plunder of Jews By Their Neighbors – A Norm or an Exception in German-Occupied Europe?” while distracted by the image.
At the end, as promised, he relates to the picture. “Is this not,” he challenges, “a familiar scene, a snapshot of summer vacations with distant relatives in the countryside?” But then he points to what is only vaguely visible in the enlarged image seen from a distance – “the crops scattered in front of the group are skulls and bones. In this photograph we see a bunch of peasants standing atop a mount of ashes. These are the human ashes of 800,000 Jews gassed and cremated in the Treblinka extermination camp between July 1942 and October 1943. The Europeans captured in the photograph have been digging through the remains of Holocaust victims, hoping to find gold and precious stones that Nazi executioners may have overlooked, despite carefully checking the body cavities of the murdered Jews… And while the scale of the Treblinka excavations was unique, the practice of digging up Jewish remains from the sites of mass murder to strip them of valuables was common.”
He continues, “Not only the Poles, many peoples across the continent have benefited from the Nazi policies of stripping Jews of civic and property rights and eliminating them from public life, and, ultimately, from life. [I present you with] a question and an answer to frame the photograph: What do a Swiss banker and a Polish peasant have in common? And the answer to this question would be, a golden tooth extracted from the jaws of a Jewish corpse.”...