[ Music ] >> Good afternoon everyone. We'd like to thank
Evon Barta [phonetic] and Miriam Brege [phonetic] for underwriting Professor
Segal's lecture today. Raz Segal earned his PhD in
history at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide
Studies at Clark University. He is assistant professor of
Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Sara and Sam Schoffer
Professor of Holocaust Studies at Stockton University where
he also serves as coordinator of the MA program in
Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Dr. Segal focuses on the
Holocaust as an integral part of a very complicated process,
the collapse of empire, the struggle for survival
of new nation states and the destructive policies
that that struggle encouraged. Dr. Segal has taught at
the University of Haifa, the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, and he held a Harry Frank
Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and
a Lady Davis Fellowship. His latest book published
by Stanford is Genocide in the Carpathians:
War, Social Breakdown and Mass Violence 1914 to '45. Last week, most of us read
Christopher Browning's compelling piece on the
suffocation of democracy. In European politics
classes all over the nation, we watch with growing anxiety
the collapse of democracy, a death by small cuts in nations
we once believed were the democratic stalwarts
of the future, most notably Hungary and Poland. Professor Segal's historical
study could not be more timely. Please welcome him. [ Applause ] >> Great. Thank you. So everyone, so that's
okay over there, and everyone can
hear me, obviously. Good. Thank you. Thank you, Diane, for
the generous introduction and thank you for
the invitation. And I'll just jump right in. So, I'll present two related
arguments in the next hour. One, state violence of the kind
we observed throughout the 20th century until today,
primarily in the form of mass deportations played a
central role in the destruction of Jews and Jewish communities across Europe during
World War II. In Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria,
Italy, France and Croatia, with almost two million Jews
in these states before the war, the vision of the state,
together with the dynamics of the war, decided what
would happen to Jews and other groups viewed by the
state authorities as disloyal, dangerous, foreign and
otherwise unwanted. In some cases and times, these
state visions proved compatible with Nazis designs and
policies about Jews and other groups or issues. In other cases and times,
less so or not at all, which prompted friction
with German authorities and opportunities
for survival of Jews. Furthermore, state violence
hardly ended in 1945 but continued as part
of a violent processes of wartime state and
nation-building in Europe and across the world,
at least until 1948 with the violent partitions of the disintegrating British
Empire in India and Palestine in 1947-'48 as key examples. Broad contextualization of the sort suggested
here should seem obvious from the standpoint of
serious scholarship, certainly in history, among
my many sins on the historian, so that's my prime perspective. But not in our world where
we continue to view Nazism as unique, unprecedented
or evil or any other word that effectively
decontextualizes this history. And not in our world
where we continue to use the term Holocaust, that
even apart from its religious and sacrificial meaning, effectively detaches the complex
set of events and processes of anti-Jewish persecution,
mass violence, mass murder and cultural destruction and
erasure from related events and processes of persecution,
mass violence, mass murder and culture destruction
and erasure of other groups in the same places
and times and carried out by the same state
authorities and perpetrators. The destruction of Jews
and Jewish communities in the Carpathian region
during World War II, one focus of this lecture,
the Carpathian region, about which I wrote a book, happened within a
20th century history of clashing state building
projects of Czech, Hungarian and Ukrainian nationalists
in the interests of the Soviet Union to gain
a strategic foothold south of the Carpathian
Mountains after World War II. So just to give you some
geographical background, I thought I would be
able to point to the map, but in the bluish areas, the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Everyone can notice it, okay. Nod your heads. Yes. So in the upper
northeastern quarter of Hungary, the Hungarian Kingdom within the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire before World War I, that's the area that the Carpathian region
is prior to World War I. After World War I it becomes the
eastern part of the new state of Czechoslovakia, you see
there Subcarpathian Rus, part of Czechoslovakia
after World War I. During World War II,
the Carpathians there, you see them again, the
middle, becomes part of Hungary. Hungary occupies the region
during World War II, okay. Hungary, Slovakia,
east of Slovakia, the Carpathian region,
all right. And after World War II,
actually in October 1944, the Soviet Army captures
the region. It becomes part of
the Soviet Union. And after 1991, part
of independent Ukraine, as you can see here on the map,
Ukraine and on the tip there on the western tip
the Carpathian region. Okay? You with me? So very typical Eastern European
region that changes hands. Its borders changes. Occupiers come and go
multiple times throughout the 20th century. So now you can understand some
of these maps what I meant by Czech, Hungarian and
Ukrainian nationalists and the interest
of the Soviet Union to gain a strategic
foothold south of the Carpathian
Mountains after World War II. The result of this history,
this 20th century history, was the destruction, not just
of the Jewish communities and the region, which
consisted of a bit more than 100,000 Jews
before World War II, but of its social
fabric as a whole. In the process, almost the
entire local German-speaking population around 15,000
people before War World II fled or suffered internment
and mass deportations. Tens of thousands of
ethnic Hungarians, about 120,000 people,
met the same fate. Tens of thousands of Carpathian
[inaudible] the majority East Slavic population of the region that numbered roughly 450,000
people faced abuse, loss of land and internment with Soviet rule
after the war recognizing them as nothing more than
Russian speakers, though many of them spoke
very little Russian if at all. And with Ukraine, after
'90-'91, with the fall of the Soviet Union, viewing
them only as Ukrainians, which many of them have
rejected and continue to reject. State and nation
building projects. Finally, most of
the Roman population and the region during
the war, several thousand at the very least, suffered
daily harassment and violence, internment and mass
deportations. Most of the Roma who live in the region today had
arrived after the war. So again, just to restate my
first argument, the first part of this lecture will deal with
the persecution and destruction of Jews as part and parcel of state violence during World
War II in the frame of state and nation-building
projects before, during and after the war. The second argument
concerns the ironies of global Holocaust memory. We continue to use
the word Holocaust within a global Holocaust
memory culture that operates through state institutions
such as Yad Vashem in Israel, the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, the USHMM in the US, or international
institutes consisting of state representatives such
as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IRA, a high-level international
organization that deals with Holocaust memory
and education. Founded in 1988, it includes
today 31-member states primarily from Europe but also including
Israel, the US and Argentina. By their nature, and
this is a crucial point, state institutions
blur state violence. States don't tend to like
to admit state violence. Hence, the idea of
Nazism as evil, and the Holocaust is unique well
beyond any conventional state violence became the
defining element of global Holocaust memory. Even though, as historian
Tom Lawson has stressed, this idea of the uniqueness
of the Holocaust originated with survivors immediately
after World War II at a time when it seemed highly unlikely
that a global memory culture of this kind tied to
state power rather than to powerless
survivors would ever emerge. And so we find ourselves today,
I will argue, in an ironic, actually absurd,
situation in which states that play important
roles in institutions of global Holocaust memory, in
these institutions, for example, like Hungary, on which we will
focus, also engage explicitly in distorting the
Holocaust as history. So we have a very strange
situation that we'll try to unpack of distortion of
the Holocaust as history, but for the first time,
within the framework of global Holocaust memory. And they do so, these states
like Hungary, by blurring, indeed blurring, state violence,
Hungarian state violence in this case, while reproducing
discourses and policies aimed at the same kind of nation
and state-building projects that produced violence during
World War II also against Jews. So the two arguments,
the destruction of Jews within the framework of state
violence and then the ironies that we face today of global
Holocaust memories that blurs that state violence,
which I argue was crucial and which is crucial to
understand the Holocaust. This lecture, therefore,
forefronts the agency of state authorities
in designing and perpetrating mass
violence during World War II, not as collaborators
of the Nazis, more or less willing,
collaborators. But as people operating
according to nationalists' visions that
predated Nazism, and in fact, rendered Nazism and Nazi
violence imaginable, not the other way around. It would be worthwhile to
return to this point later on in our discussions. State violence that makes Nazism
and Nazi violence imaginable. Furthermore, the term
collaboration figures among other key concepts in Holocaust
scholarship that blur the agency of state authorities and
mass violence against Jews and others during World War II. But whereas collaboration
assigns agency primarily to the Nazis, and that's its
way of blurring state violence, bystanders, a concept
I will discuss at length this afternoon,
assigns agency or in the negative
passivity to individuals. Indeed, eminent Holocaust
scholar, Yehuda Bauer, one of the founding
figures of the IHRA and its current honorary
chairman, concluded a speech in the German Parliament
in 1998, the year when IHRA was
founded, with the idea that Holocaust memory
requires adding to the Ten Commandments,
and I quote from him. "Three additional ones,
you, your children and your children's children
shall never become perpetrators. You, your children and your
children's children shall never ever allow yourselves
to become victims. And you, your children and your
children's children shall never, never be passive onlookers." He emphasized in the text,
in the written text, never, the second never is highlighted. Infusing Holocaust memory
with religious zeal, Yehuda Bauer here really almost
as a Moses when you think about it, inscribed its victims,
the victims of Holocaust memory as concerning only individuals,
their responsibilities, their agency, their failures
with bystanders arguably as the most severe of failures. One which should
never, never happen. This dehistoricized static
and moralistic lesson of the Holocaust, which has
sense become a focal point of Holocaust research, as
well as Holocaust education, paradoxically hinders our
ability to work towards it because it alides [phonetic]
from our view the key role of the state and shaping and
manipulating social relations in conditions of state violence. Some Holocaust survivors,
however, describe themselves in their testimonies as
bystanders to state violence against non-Jews
during World War II but without using
the term, of course. These moments and their
narratives, which we will see, as flitting as they are
unsettling, open a window for us to reclaim the agency
of state authorities in this history of
mass violence. So through survivors, we'll see
how survivors themselves point us to reclaim the agency
of state authorities that states today aim to blur. My readings of these glimpses
into a complex reality as it unfolded call
for a rethinking of the term bystanders,
rethinking in order to understand it as denoting
a process of social breakdown that is the very goal
of state authorities, state assaults, on
diverse societies. Where numbers of groups face
different yet related attacks as in the case of the
Carpathian region. So if we just restate
this, bystanders, the constant bystanders, should
turn our attention to processes of social breakdown
that are the goal of state assaults on
diverse societies. Right. So the state
is crucial here. It's not simply,
certainly not simply about individual agency
or the lack of it. So let's return to
the maps for a second. So as I said, the end of World
War I and the Trianon Treaty of 1920 took from the Hungarian
Kingdom and, what you see here, the Hungarian Kingdom in the,
a bit light, darker blue, is the Greater Hungary, right. That's the Greater
Hungary image. That's the history of
Greater Hungary territorially within the frame of
Austria-Hungary after 1867 and before World War I. That broke down in World War I,
Hungary and the Trianon Treaty of 1920 lost two-thirds of its
territories and three-fifths of its population and became
the Hungary that you see here, below Czechoslovakia
above Yugoslavia, between Romania and Austria. All right? Yes? All right. So as you can see,
dramatic change. Greater Hungary, very small
defeated, humiliated, Hungary. We know a lot about the
humiliation of Germany and the Versailles
Treaty of 1919. Hungary, and by the way,
also Bulgaria down there, suffered very similar
defeats and humiliations, territorial losses, losses
of populations, refugees. This set the stage
for the emergence of a revisionist's consensus
in Hungary and the longing to establish, re-establish
a Greater Hungary, though now with a marked
ethnic Hungarian majority. So not this Greater Hungary
where many different kinds of people of different
religions, languages, ethnicities, lived together
but a Greater Hungary with a marked ethnic
Hungarian majority. The nation state idea. This longing, which
cut across political and theological divides,
uniting communists, conservatives fascists and
liberals, including the majority of Jews in Hungary at the time,
has stretched until the present, illustrated in the
numerous memorials about the Trianon
Treaty across Hungary. And I have just a few
examples here, a couple. This is one from a town
in Southeast Hungary. And you can see, I don't
know if you can notice, it's a guillotine,
of course, right, coming down on Greater
Hungary, right. The image, yes, you with me? All right, a guillotine,
so it gives you the sense of the emotions, the
sense of loss of defeat, of destruction really. We have this from Eger
in Northern Hungary, which is my personal favorite
because, as you can see, the weather has damaged
it severely, so parts of Greater
Hungary have fallen, right. This is not vandalism. Memorials of Greater Hungary
of the Trianon Treaty today in Hungary are numerous. No one dares to touch them. There's a wide consensus about
this revisionist discourse, so this is clearly the weather. There's also stuff like this. Greater Hungary for
the greater good. This is what path-breaking
scholar of nationalism Benedict
Anderson called in his celebrated book Imagined
Communities, map-as-logo. And he writes, "In this shape, the map entered an infinitely
reproduceable serious, available for transfer to
posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine and
textbook covers, table cloth and hotel walls, tee shirts
and so on and so forth." He continues, "Instantly
recognizable, everywhere visible, the
logo map penetrated deep into the popular imagination." This imagination entailed a
multilayered attack against Jews and others under Hungarian
rule during World War II. Essentially against
diverse social fabrics as a whole, all right. You'll hear me again returning
to this again and again, diverse social fabrics
as a whole. So the target of the attack
is also specific groups, and Jews were very dominant. But the ultimate target was
the idea of diverse societies as a whole, not just of
each group on its own, but of all the groups
living together in one territory destined to
become part of Greater Hungary. And first and foremost,
in its borderland region, so this is again Greater
Hungary in red, okay. In the shaded area, that's
the Hungary after World War I, and all the regions,
the border regions around it were the regions
that Hungary had lost after World War I, which
were very multiethnic, multireligious, multilingual. These territories, including
the Carpathian region in the northeastern corner
there, were the prime targets of the imagination, the
imagining of Greater Hungary. And these were the region
that Hungary, part of them, had occupied during World War
II and actually even before as it joined Nazi Germany
in destroying Czechoslovakia at the end of 1938 and
early 1939 and then as it took Northern
Transylvania in the east in August 1940 from Romania. And then the Yugoslav
territories that it occupied when it joined Nazis
Germany and meets allies in destroying Yugoslavia
in April 1941. While Hungary perceived
non-Hungarian populations in the borderlands of
the Hungarian Kingdom, before World War I,
as backward and tried to assimilate them
aggressively from 1938 onwards. As the Hungarian Army
occupied these regions, the authorities turned
increasingly more to mass violence in order
to shape these societies into integral parts of
Hungarian-dominated state. Therefore, anti-Jewish
policies unfolded as part of the greater [inaudible]
to remove large numbers of people deemed foreign
and essentially disloyal and dangerous to the
ethno nation state. Jews, Roma, Romanians, Serbs, and Carpatherosinians [phonetic]
primarily, with the aim of destroying again
borderland societies as a whole. Hungary occupied the
Carpathian region, again in the northeastern
corner, in two stages in November 1938 and March
1939 in the first phase of territorial expansion meant to overturn the post-World
War I Trianon Treaty and thus create the
new Greater Hungary. From the very beginning
of Hungarian rule in 1938, the Hungarian authorities
in the region targeted Jews for discrimination and exclusion
alongside other groups. I want to focus here on one
example of this sort of attack in the Carpathian
region in summer, 1941. If you'll excuse
me for a second, I'll take a sip of water. And so, as you can see
in the upper quote, writing to Hungarian Prime
Minister, László Bárdossy, Hungarian governor of the Carpathian region
Miklós Kozma declared on 10th of July 1941 quote. At the beginning of next week, I will push all the
non-Hungarian Galicians who escaped here, the uncovered
Ukrainian agitators and gypsies, gypsies tigani, that is
the word in Hungarian that he used, across the border. End of quote. The first group that
[inaudible] depicts Jews as quintessential foreigners,
a reference most likely to the large-scale
immigration of Jews from Galicia to the Carpathian regions
throughout the 19th century and the early 20th century. The second group describes
Carpatho-Ruthenians as a security threat, an image
that stemmed from expressions of Ukrainian nationalism among
Carpatho-Ruthenians, though far, far less threatening than
the Hungarian authorities had imagined. Finally, only Roma appear
on the list with no need for explanation, foreign,
dangerous and unwanted in no uncertain terms. The mass deportations
that took place in July and August 1941 engulfed
around 20,000 Jews. I want to remind you, this is
a completely Hungarian project. The Nazis, the Germans
are not yet in Hungary. They'll take almost three more
years until they invade Hungary. We'll get to that. This is a completely
Hungarian project. So the mass deportation
engulfed around 20,000 Jews, about 20% of the Jewish
population of the region at the time, and an
unknown number of Roma, including many Jews who
held documents proving their Hungarian citizenship and who
were therefore not at all quote, non-Hungarian Galicians. This kind of wording, therefore,
non-Hungarian Galicians, reflect how the authorities
viewed Jews in the region rather than the actual scope
of the deportations which resulted furthermore
in the destruction of several Jewish completely
already in summer of 1941. Again, no German
involvement whatsoever. Fast forward in time
now for a second. Remarkably, seven years later
in 2014, Sandor Szakaly, this person, the head of Veritas
Historical Institute in Hungary, this institute which with
this name, Veritas, truth, was established in
2013 with the goal of constructing a revisionist,
therefore, a distorted account of modern Hungarian history. And they called it Veritas. So Sandor Szakaly referred to
the mass deportation of Jews in Roma in the summer of
1941 precisely as Kozma, the Hungarian governor of the
region in 1941, had at the time. They were nothing more
than a legitimate measure as Szakaly said in
2014 quote/unquote, police action against aliens. This distortion rationalization of mass violence is doubly
remarkable since Hungary was and still is a member of IHRA, the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance, which I mentioned
just previously, and the Hungarian
government declared 2014 as the Holocaust memorial here to commemorate the mass
deportations from Hungary of more than 430,000 Jews in
spring and early summer in 1944, again, we'll get to that,
primarily to Auschwitz. So this absurdity of
Sandor Szakaly in 2014, the Holocaust memorial year, engaging in distortion
rationalization of Hungarian mass violence in
1941 in the exact same language that the Hungarian
governor of the region at that time used
didn't end there. The following year, 2015, Hungary served as
the chair of IHRA. Each year, the chair
is a rotating position, which meant that it hosted its
meetings in Budapest in June and in Debrecen in November. At the very same time in 2015, Roma faced concerted
discrimination and persecution in Miskolc, the third
largest city in Hungary, as local authorities pressed
forward with a campaign ongoing since 2012, fully
supported by the government of depicting the area where Roma
lived in the city as a hotbed of criminality, intimating
Roma families, evicting Roma and trying to expel Roma
beyond city boundaries. The IHRA proceedings unfolded without anyone even mentioning
this state assault not far away. On the ground, in many
cases, non-Roma joined Roma in demonstrations against,
just as you can see here, the result in many cases was
nevertheless this, evictions and destructions of Roma homes. Thus, a central institution
of global Holocaust memory, the IHRA, seems not to have
followed one of the core lessons at the heart of this memory
culture, the view of the other as an integral part of society
and the protection of the other. And this other, in
particular Roma, who figured among the
main victim groups of genocidal violence during
World War II including in Hungary. It's important to mention
that Roma, particularly, and the plight of Roma
across Europe today, call into question our world
of global Holocaust memory because their plight, not
only in Eastern Europe, but actually more so in
Western Europe, includes racism, systematic discrimination by
state authorities, harassment and daily violence including
murder, constant evictions from their homes, expulsions
and forced removal of children by state authorities,
which by the way, falls within Article Two of
the Genocide Convention of 1948 as an act of genocide. All of these things Roma
today face across Europe, not only in Eastern Europe and
Hungary but actually in Italy, in France, in France, and this
challenges, this by itself, should open our eyes to
the problems with our world of global Holocaust memory. Back to summer 1941. As in the case Jews, uncovered
Ukrainian agitators easily apply to far more Carpatho-Ruthenians
than to those who actually engaged in anti-Hungarian
activities in the region. When, for example, 33
Carpatho-Ruthenians stood trial in a military court in
the region in July 1942, accused of disloyalty
to the states because of their
alleged activity in the Ukrainian
Nationalist Organization. The court concluded without any
evidence that the organization, the Ukrainian Nationalist
Organization, had quote gained a special
impetus among the secondary school youth of
Carpatho-Ruthenian ethnicity who joined the organization in
mass but without any evidence. It is therefore not surprising
that tens of thousands of Carpatho-Ruthenians, as I
had mentioned, suffered arrest, torture, internment, expulsion,
the theft of their land and death during the
Hungarian occupation of the region during
World War II, including a few days
in mid-March 1939. During and immediately
following the Hungarian invasion in March 1939 when Hungarian
soldiers conducted a number of massacres of Carpatho-Ruthenians
targeting mostly youth members of the local militia that had
just offered meager resistance to the invading army but also
targeting non-competence. We'll come back to this
massacre in a few minutes. This kind of violence,
small-scale massacres, which stem from imagined
or real, though certainly exaggerated
security threats, occurred again when Hungarian soldiers
took Northern Transylvania from Romania in August 1940. Notably in the massacres of
Romanians in [inaudible]. Again, we'll come back
to these in a second. And again, this form of
violence, small-scale massacres, became particularly
extreme in the territories that Hungary occupied from
Yugoslavia in April 1941 where according to government,
Hungarian government decree at the end of April 1941, quote,
Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins, gypsies or Jews who
did not themselves or their parents have
citizenship within the territory of Greater Hungary before 31st
of October 1918, end of quote, all these groups
were now ordered to leave the state
within three months. Again, without considering
whether one held citizenship papers or not, the Hungarian
authorities proceeded with an assault on the area,
mostly against Serbs and Jews that included mass killings,
mass deportations, arrests and torture and that culminated
in January 1942 in the massacres in the city of Novi Sad. Within several months, the Hungary state murdered
several thousand Serbs, several hundred Jews and
expelled another 30,000 Serbs to German-occupied Serbia,
despite strong protests by the German authorities. So we're talking
about Novi Sad here. You can see on the lower
end of the map, right, that's where a massacre
occurred in January 1942, mostly against Serbs, but
also against Jews in the city. And then the deportations of
30,000 Serbs across the border into what was during World
War II German-occupied Serbia. Nazi Germany's interest
and visions the Germans, as I just said, protested these
deportations of 30,000 Serbs into their territories. Nazi Germany's interest
and visions collided with Hungarian policies
elsewhere as well, accounting also for
the termination of the mass deportations in the
previous summer, summer of '41, from the Carpathian region. So not only actually these
deportations in the summer of '41 were completely
Hungarian project, but the Germans actually
had a conflict of interest with the Hungarians
concerning these deportations. German authorities
on the other side of the Carpathian Mountains, the
destination of the deportations, so the deportations from
the Carpathian region were across the Carpathian Mountains
into Galicia, into East Galicia. In those areas, the Germans
had just begun to engage in systematic mass murder
of Jews there as part of their attack on the
Soviet Union that summer. And they objected,
therefore, to the prospect of receiving more Jews. This anti-Jewish violence in Hungary unfolded well before
the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 and
before the final solution of the Jewish question assumed
its European why genocidal dimensions in spring of 1942. So this is very important
because in summer '41, the Nazis were not yet at the
point that they had decided to murder all Jews
within their reach. At the time, they were
engaged in the mass murder of Soviet Jews, very
much within the frame of the German occupation
of the Soviet Union, the German invasion
of the Soviet Union, and their main goal was to
destroy the Soviet state. Soviet Jews were
perceived as part and parcel of the Soviet state. And therefore, the last thing
they wanted was more Jews in the area. Okay? Violence against Jews
thus took place within a system of mass violence
in wartime Hungary in which the states
strove to take advantage of the possibilities of warfare
and its changing alliance with Nazis Germany to eliminate
existing social fabrics. Raphael Lemkin, the
Jewish-Polish jurist who coined the term genocide
noticed as much during the war when he wrote in his book,
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. During the war, he wrote, quote, that the Hungarian authorities
have introduced a genocide policy, a genocide
policy, by endeavoring to impose a Hungarian pattern
upon these territories. He referring to the territories
that Hungary occupied for Yugoslavia in April of 1941. Genocide policy. This reflected Lemkin's view
of genocide as wholesale social and cultural destruction, not necessarily systematic
mass murder and not aimed only at one group. Some Jews, and here I turn to
the survivors that I mentioned, some Jews remembered the assault
of the Hungarian state precisely in this way, in a Lemkin way. Particularly when describing
themselves as bystanders to stage violence
against non-Jews. Indeed, Jews in the Carpathian
region witnessed the massacres of Carpatho-Ruthenians that
I mentioned in March 1939 by Hungarian soldiers. A few quick examples, and
then we'll turn to some of the main accounts that
I want to read with you. Rabbi Yehoshua Greenwald from a
small town in the eastern part of the region, Huszt,
wrote shortly after the war that quote, Hungarian
soldiers killed numerous Carpatho-Ruthenians. In her memoir written
40 years later, Iranka Segal [phonetic]
described bodies of Carpatho-Ruthenian competence
which she saw floating in the river that ran through
her small town, [inaudible]. And Aaron Wrought [phonetic]
from [inaudible] related in his Shoah Foundation
foundation testimony from 1997, the incarceration of local
militiamen in a school into town where, quoting him, every night for several days
they would take some of them out and kill them in the forest. Some survivors offer
in their accounts more than just a description. Eva Slomavits, or instance, in
her Shoah Foundation testimony from 1996 stated that in Zarici where she lived quote,
they killed them. The Hungarians killed
these young boys, referring to the
militiamen, a lot of them. She repeated, as you
can see, her statement about the killings three
times in this short sentence. One after the other, each
with a bit more information. The identity of the
perpetrators, the youth of the victims
and the scale of the attack. It's very short, but
it has a rhythm to it. It is almost as if she wished
to disrupt her flow of words, perhaps remain with
anonymity of the first part of the sentence,
they killed them. But I suggest that some degree
of disbelief, disbelief, even as she recounted this
episode after many years, pushed her to restate the
mass killing, unprecedented in her life until then, that she
had witnessed in her hometown. So I argue that there's,
even as she recounts this, remember this is after
many, many years, there's some disbelief that
she remembers from the time, nothing like this
had ever happened in her life before, right. And with her account,
she also gives us a sense of this disbelief. We'll see from other accounts
why I think specifically that we're talking
about disbelief. It was Saul Friedlander,
another imminent historian of the Holocaust who evoked the
disbelief of Jews as victims in the face of persecution and mass murder during
the Holocaust. He argued that Jews could not
fathom the [inaudible] that many of them felt had suddenly
opened to devour their worlds. Seeking to place this acute
alienation at the center of the narratively crafted in a celebrated two-volume
Nazis Germany and the Jews, Friedlander asked his readers to retain what he called a
sense of disbelief as well. With regard to the ways I which
this case of genocide happened. So there is a disbelief
of the Jews as victims, but he also turned to the
reader and asked her or him to retain a sense of
disbelief as well. That is, he explained, to
mistrust any explanation in order to remain on
the pre-knowledge level of experience where,
to quote Friedlander, disbelief is a quasi
visceral reaction, one that occurs before knowledge
rushes in to smother it. Now, a critical engagement with this somewhat religious
proposition extends way beyond the confines of this lecture. But what is important
to note and to stress is that Eva Slomavits' disbelief
relates to the position here, not of the victim, but
actually of the bystander. Here, she's describing herself
again without using the word as a bystander, whose familiar
world changed abruptly as well, if, to paraphrase her,
they could kill them. Violet Mittelmann, who witnessed
the mass killings of Romanians by Hungarian soldiers in
her hometown Ip [phonetic] in August 1940, conveyed
disbelief born of abrupt and violent change
more explicitly. Quote, it was very
scary, because one night on Friday night, they
went and they killed. They killed all the
Romanians in the town, and we were very scared. They will kill us too,
the Jewish people. And we were looking out, and
we saw how they took them. They took them away, and
they put them in a big grave. All of them. And we were very
scared that time. I never forget that. My father, my mother, everyone, we were thinking
they now will come after the Jews, but they didn't. It would take almost four
years until they would. Violet Mittelmann stresses
repeatedly how scared she and other Jews felt,
an experience that she quote, never forgets. Significantly, she describes
this violence as part of her response to a
question from the interviewer. When did things start to change? A very typical question in the
Shoah Foundation testimonies from the people conducting them. After Violet Mittelmann
refers to antisemitic measures by the Hungarian authorities,
which made her very scared, quote, the interviewer
then proceeds to ask, what is the first thing that you
remember that made you scared? Which prompts her description of the massacre of
Romanians in town. So beginning with
antisemitic measures and moving on to this description of
violence against Romanians. She thus explains Hungarian
actions against Jews and Romanians as connected. Which indeed, they were. Final example. Moshe Lichtenstein
remembered the violence of Hungarian soldiers against
Romanians in a different, though no less illuminating way, in his Yad Vashem
testimony in 1992. He begins by saying that quote,
Jews at some point rejoice that the entrance
of the Hungarians, because the Romanians had
become unbearable to Jews, referring to the anti-Jewish
atmosphere and persecution in Romania that turned
evermore intense and violent in the late 1930s. And here a sidebar comment
that's very important, we know what happened, right. Moshe Lichtenstein and
victims of the times and survivors afterwards,
right, we need to remember that they didn't know
what would happen, right. The Nazis in 1940 still did not
know what would happen, right. So when he said at first
we rejoice at the entrance of the Hungarians, the
Hungarians who would bring about complete annihilation
on the Jews of Northern Transylvania were
perceived initially by the Jews in the region as almost saviors. And we have the same kind
of dynamics among Jews in the Carpathian
region in March 1939. Lichtenstein then describes
the welcoming reception of Hungarian soldiers in his
village, Bosume [phonetic], during which, quote,
suddenly they, the soldiers, mounted their horses
and hurried away. We wondered what had happened. The next morning they received
news of the quote pogrom that the Hungarian soldiers
committed not against Jews but against the Romanians. And after a few days,
the went to Treznea and saw quote the
big destruction. And here he uses the
Hebrew word hurban. Eight Jews were also killed. Hurban is a very loaded
Hebrew word about destruction and Jewish history more broadly, but it's Yiddish equivalent
hurban actually denotes the Holocaust in Yiddish
until today. Lichtenstein employs language
that marks anti-Jewish violence, pogrom and hurban, to make
sense of the literally sudden, suddenly, sudden rupture
that these events had caused, even though the vast majority
of victims were not Jews. Indeed, Moshe Lichtenstein,
like Eva Slomavits and Violet Mittelmann, recounts
these events with himself as a bystander, even
if one removed from the immediate
scene of violence. And like Violet Mittelmann,
he recounts Hungarian violence against Jews and
against Romanians. Thus, Friedlander's evocation
of completely unexpected and unprecedented violence that begets this belief
opens an unexpected window onto the destabilizing
experience of the bystanders. The disruption that
state violence creates. Which recasts the
routine possibilities and constraints in society. Now remember, the
admonition never, never to be a bystander
would mean nothing at all for Eva Slomavits,
Violet Mittelmann and Moshe Lichtenstein, who
stood powerless in the face of Hungarian state violence,
against her neighbors and against themselves, just as
their neighbors stood powerless in the face of Hungarian
state violence against Jews and against themselves then
and later during the war. If German interests in summer of 1941 obstructed
the implementation of Hungarian designs or stop
them in the Carpathian region, the German invasion of
Hungary in March 1944, the Germans invaded
Hungary in March 1944, primarily because they knew that the Hungarian leadership
was conducted negotiations with the allies in order to
change sides and join the allies with the war, in the war. They invaded in order
to prevent that and to harness the
Hungarian economy to the German war effort. So the German invasion
of Hungary in March 1944 provided an
opportunity to move forward with greater Hungary vision. The rapid ghettoization and
mass deportation of Jews from the Carpathian region
and the rest of Hungary, except Budapest, to Auschwitz in
spring and summer 1944 resulted from the intersection at the
time of the plans, policies and actions generated by the
vision of greater Hungary with the German machinery
of genocide which then, unlike in summer 1941,
was in full swing. However, only a small group of 40 SS men oversaw
the anti-Jewish measures in the Carpathian region. Hungarian authorities on all
levels were the ones who carried out the swift campaign
of violent uprooting and disposition of tens
of thousands of Jews. And these authorities included
the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Finance in
Budapest that issued decrees and orders, the Hungarian
National Railways, the Region's governor, mayors,
the gendarmes on the ground who harassed, beat, expelled,
plundered and killed. It is in this way that
the Holocaust in Hungary, Gesundheit, the Holocaust
in Hungary before, as well as after March
1944, is Hungarian history, Hungarian history, concerning
Jews and other victims, rather than a straightforward
case of German or Nazi antisemitism that
resulted in a campaign to murder Jews on a global scale
regardless of any other matter. And it is therefore important to understand the
Carpatho-Ruthenians who witnessed as bystanders
the destruction of Jews and Jewish communities across
the Carpathian region in 1944 in relation to Jews
who witnessed violence against Carpatho-Ruthenians
five years earlier, rather than caused by social
breakdown, bystanding, this form of behavior, reflected
the destruction of social ties that figured as an integral
part of the drive to return to Lemkin quote, to
impose a Hungarian pattern. So genocide in this view is
about the destruction of people, the destruction of culture,
but it's also the destruction of social ties as a measure to impose a Hungarian
pattern in this case. This project furthermore did not
end with the mass deportation of Jews in spring and
early summer in 1944. Immediately with the conclusion
of the anti-Jewish violence, Roma faced an intense
attack against them by the Hungarian authorities
in the Carpathian region, including beatings, sexual
assault and expulsions. And this violence continued
also after the arrival of Soviet forces
in October 1944. The Soviets set out immediately
to ensure the incorporation of the Carpathian region as
part of postwar Soviet Ukraine. This vision branded
local Germans and ethnic Hungarians now,
not only as people associated with enemies, Nazi Germany and
Hungary, but also as obstacles to the political
consolidation of the area as a Soviet stronghold south
of the Carpathian Mountains, which was strategic, military
strategic goal and still is, by the way, a strategic
stronghold. The Soviet authorities just
ordered all Hungarians, civilians of military age,
to report to three days of labor in mid-November 1944. Those who complied and
those caught in other ways, about 40,000 people found
themselves imprisoned in a Soviet concentration
camp in the region from where deportations headed
towards labor camps deep in the Soviet Union. Arrests and deportations
of local German speakers who had not fled
before the arrival of Soviet forces
followed in March of 1945, ultimately leaving only very
few of them in the region. There's about a village and
a half of German speakers in the Carpathian region today. Many Carpatho-Ruthenians also
faced Soviet mass violence as did many among the
15,000 Jews from the region who had survived Nazi
concentration camps and death marches and returned
to the region in the month after the war, mostly
searching for relatives. Soviet mass violence
quickly pushed most of them to leave the region
either before or shortly after June 1945 when the Soviet
Union officially annexed the Carpathian region. A period had thus ended. A region meant to form
part of an imagined empire, Greater Hungary, now war torn
and ravaged, came under the rule of another very real
empire, the Soviet Union. The latter now completed the
destruction of the region, society and culture,
the diverse society of the Carpathian region, that the Hungarian
authorities had effectively done and incorporated into the
postwar system of nation states and the frame of Soviet
Ukraine in this case, that as historian
Mark Levine has shown, united long-term political
visions of both axis and allied powers west and east, all the significant
differences notwithstanding. And we know today that the
vision of the nation state, the idea of the homogeneous F
donation state indeed united President Wilson and the
US, Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler and Stalin and many
other people in between who might have disagreed
about many, many things and fought each other to death. But agreed on the vision of
how the world should look like, how the nation state
should look like. But the vision of Greater
Hungary had not faded away. And so the last part of this
lecture, again fast forward to today, on the
contrary, following the fall of the communist regime
in Hungary in the late 80s and early 90s, the vision of
Greater Hungary has resurfaced to stand at the heart of
the political discourse. With particularly dangerous
implications in the case of the Carpathian region, let's just see the
map again, all right. So today, part of
independent Ukraine on the border with
Hungary, okay. So there's particularly
dangerous implications in the case of the
Carpathian region which, as mentioned Ukraine and Ukrainian nationalists have
always seen as an integral part of the Ukrainian state. And so, it came as no surprise that following the Russian
invasion of Ukraine in 2014, this fateful year, 2014, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor
Orban has expressed a number of times his support
for autonomy for the 150,000 ethnic
Hungarians still living in the Carpathian region, and his government has
moved beyond words, including issuing
Hungarian passports to one million ethnic Hungarians
living outside of Hungary also in the Carpathian region. Significantly, if you can
see behind Sandor Szakaly, there's a large map of
Greater Hungary in his office. Can you see it? And what you see here in the foreground is
actually a bust of a gendarme. So behind him a map
of Greater Hungary. In front of him a
bust of a gendarme. And the Hungarian Gendarmerie
was the main vehicle of Hungarian mass violence, the
main vehicle of the destruction of Jews in Jewish
communities across Hungary also in the Carpathian region. That's what he sits between,
Greater Hungary and a gendarme. In Hungary today, where Orban, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor
Orban considers Miklos Horthy, Hungary's head of state
during World War II who oversaw the destruction
of Jews and Jewish communities across the country an
exceptional statesman, as he recently said. Secondly, he admires
the gendarmes who perpetrated the mass
violence against Jews, Roma and others on the ground. Viktor Orban. In his speech in July 2014,
again 2014, in [inaudible] in Romania in a summer camp
for Hungarian speakers, Orban highlighted
political systems that quote, that are not Western,
not liberal, not liberal democracies,
maybe not even democracies, and yet making nations
successful, right. His infamous turn to
illiberal democracy or maybe not even democracy. But he then declared,
today the stars of international politics
are Singapore, China, India, Turkey, Russia. And I believe that our political
community rightly anticipated this challenge. And if we think back on
what we, that is the Fidesz, Orban's party, which has been in
power since 2010, continuously. What we did in the last four
years and what we are going to do in the following
four years, then it really can be
interpreted from this angle. We are searching for, and we
are doing our best to find, parting ways with
Western European dogmas, making ourselves independent
from them, the form or organizing a community
that is capable of making us competitive
in this great world race. And he continued, and
this is how he finished, this is how he finished
his speech. In times like this, when
anything could happen, should we be afraid, or
should we instead be hopeful, because the present order of the world is not
exactly to our taste. That this future,
although it is uncertain, it could even cause
huge trouble, it also holds opportunities
and developments for our Hungarian nation. So instead of seclusion,
fear and withdrawal, I recommend courage,
perspective thinking, rational but brave action to the
Hungarian communities and the Carpathian basin but
also throughout the world. As anything can happen,
it could easily happen that our time will come. Now the illusion to
Greater Hungary in quote, the opportunities for
our Hungarian nation. And note that he was speaking
to Hungarian speakers in Romania but referring to our
Hungarian nation. The opportunities that
require quote brave action from Hungarian communities
in the Carpathian basin, all these illusions to Greater
Hungary indeed in Romania, he was talking in Romania, could not have been
lost on his audience. Significantly, and
here I turn to the core of the second argument that
I make, Orban has also turned to Holocaust memory in
this context in a way that has proven ironically,
particularly effective in strengthening the discourse
of Greater Hungary, okay. So, he's turning now, as
we'll see, to Holocaust memory in order to reinforce the
discourse of Greater Hungary which was the very vision that
excluded and then destroyed Jews and others during World War II. Doing this now through
Holocaust memory as we'll see. The Hungarian state now
reclaims as Hungarians, the Jews that the wartime
Hungarian state had deported and murdered after branding
them, if you remember, non-Hungarian, non-Hungarian
Galicians. This works well with
the broad agenda of the Hungarian government
about Holocaust memory. The Holocaust in this
view unfolded entirely as a German project, a
result of a unique Nazi evil, which reflects a
dominant idea indeed of global Holocaust memory. And so, in Orban's
speech in March 2018, in Subotica in Serbia
to mark the renovation of the town synagogue
from the time of Hungarian rule
before World War I. Subotica is right on the,
So [inaudible] you see, the Yugoslav territories
that Hungary occupied. On the border, the,
well you see Subotica and Sega, do you see them? Southern Hungary. Okay. So on the border, it's
very close to the border today of Serbia and Hungary. In a speech there in March
2018 to mark the renovation of the town's synagogue
from the time of Hungarian rule before World
War I, Orban stated, quote, in 2014 the Holocaust
memorial year in Hungary, the Hungarian government decided to launch a synagogue
renovation program with a budget around 10 billion forints. Within this program, many
buildings from Budapest to Vynhradiv Nagyszolos and
from Berehove Beregszasz to Subotica Szabadka
have been renovated and saved from destruction. End of quote. Orban, however, did not mention that it was the Hungarian
government, not the Nazis, that had ordered the
destruction of synagogues in the Carpathian
region, for example, immediately after its gendarmes
completed the task of interning, robbing, abusing, killing and
deporting the region's Jews. Instead of mentioning that,
Orban took his listeners on a quick tour indeed
of Greater Hungary through the towns of
Berehove and Vynhradiv in the Carpathian region, all the way to the
southern region occupied by Hungary during World
War II to Subotica. As in the era before World War I when Hungarian nationalists
counted Jews throughout Greater Hungary primarily in its
borderlands as Hungarians in order to boost the
numbers of Hungarians who would otherwise
be a minority in Greater Hungary, right. So before World War I Hungarian
nationalists counted Jews as Hungarians, as Hungarian
speakers, and that was a way to boost their numbers. Now, Hungarian nationalists
again turn to Jews for help, only this time to the Jews that the state had
destroyed during World War II. The Jews thus figured in the Hungarian Holocaust
memorial year in order to legitimize the very
vision that excluded them and then sent them
to their deaths. And their synagogues, which the
Hungarian authorities during World War II had used the
sites of internment and torture and suffering and pain in the
deportation process now served to distort the truth
about their fate. Orban used Jews with the wartime
Hungarian state had murdered in order to imagine
Greater Hungary today. He did this, however,
in Subotica, very close to the border fence that his government had just
finished constructing in 2016. Very close to where
he was talking. This border fence now stretches for over 100 miles along the
border with Serbia in order to keep refugees
from the Middle East and North Africa
out of the country. The fence thus also renders
Greater Hungary literally beyond reach, even as it reinforces its
exclusionary and violent nature. Indeed, the fence predictably
has intensified xenophobic anxieties which brings us to
one more and one last irony and absurdity in this
history for this lecture. There are more ironies and
absurdities in this story, I assure you, but we can
turn to them in the Q and A. So in recent years, Holocaust
survivor from Hungary and billionaire George Soros
has criticized the nationalists and anti-democratic policies
of Hungary and other countries, including against refugees,
while supporting organizations that oppose these trends
and promote democracy. In summer 2017, Orban turned
to Soros, turned Soros into a target of a vicious
antisemitic election campaign, accusing him of a plot
to destroy Hungary through an invasion of
migrants, quote/unquote. Migrants which is a word used
widely today across the world to deny that refugees
are indeed refugees. In other words, to
deny the state violence that they had experienced,
experienced, while adding another layer of
state violence to their ordeal. The Fidesz in summer 2017
ran a campaign with hundreds of posters, such as this one,
calling on the public quote, let's not allow Soros
to have the last laugh. That's what's written here. Using a classic antisemitic
image about Jews' supposed
international influence and power and the image
of the laughing Jew. Which was also a key image that
Hitler used many, many times. In his speech in November 1942,
for example, he said quote, today countless Jews
who laughed at the time, referring to the early
1920s, laugh no longer. Those who are still laughing
now also will perhaps laugh no longer soon. International jury
will be recognized in all its demonic peril. This came as no surprise that some individuals
added antisemitic graffiti to the posters such as dirty
Jew, which you can see here. The results of the recent
elections in Hungary in April 2018 granted
Fidesz a landslide victory, proving that many
Hungarians react positively to antisemitic political
propaganda. This is terrible enough. But it gets worse. For Hungary joined all other
IHRA member states, again, the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance, a major organization of
global Holocaust memory. Hungary joined all other member
states in 2016 and agreed on a definition of antisemitism,
a definition that aims to help in the struggle against
antisemitism as part of the commitment to
Holocaust remembrance. Yet, not a word was
uttered by anyone in IHRA about the anti-Soros campaign
in Hungary, which clearly falls within the organization's
definition of antisemitism and is in any case a clear, crude and violent
antisemitic image. This episode gets now
even uglier actually, but this too we will
leave, if you would like to pursue it,
for the Q and A. So IHRA that convened in
Hungary in 2015 as Roma were under attack and said not a word
about that, now said not a word about a clear and crude and
violent antisemitic attack in a political campaign
in Hungary again. Finally, after all this, in
July 2018, Orban visited Israel and was received at Yad Vashem
with the regular honor accorded to heads of state at Yad Vashem. Pointing to what I call
the systematic absurdity, systematic absurdity of
global Holocaust memory as an institutional phenomena. Indeed, the next head
of state after Orban to visit Yad Vashem was
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who in 2016
compared himself favorably to Hitler while initiating
a mass murder campaign of alleged drug dealers and
addicts the state had killed so far more than 10,000 people. You've heard about this? Both Orban and Duterte
planted trees, one exactly next to the other in Yad
Vashem's grove of nations. It is in this strange
and terrible way that the destruction of
Jews and Jewish communities in the Carpathian region
during World War II by the Hungarian state
is linked to mass murder in the Philippines today. Rather than never again,
never again, the distortion of the Holocaust's history
and the legitimization of the nation state
vision of Greater Hungary through global Holocaust memory
now provide the framework to legitimize state violence
in the Philippines as well and in many other places. How should we move forward
as callers, as educators, as students, as people,
in this ironic absurd and cruel situation? Or should we move
forward at all? Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Anyone have questions? >> Hi. So my question
is, how does the denial of the Holocaust benefit
the Hungarian government? >> Did you turn the mike on? >> Yeah. >> What's your name? >> Joseph. Joseph. >> Joseph. So, good question. It's not about denial, okay. We're not talking
here about denial. We're talking about distortion. But distortion that now
happens in a very specific way through global Holocaust memory
by using a central component, a central element of
global Holocaust memory that is the uniqueness of
the Holocaust by referring to the uniqueness of Nazism, the
uniqueness of Nazi antisemitism and the uniqueness of the Nazi
antisemitic attack on Jews. So the Holocaust, the
Holocaust now becomes something that is only about Nazis,
only about Nazi Germany. And it's completely unrelated to
the time in which it happened, that is, the middle of the
20th century in Europe, the era of the 20th century,
the era of the nation state, the era of state
violence before, during and after World War II. Completely disconnected
from that essential context to understand it,
which works very well for Hungarian nationalists
and for many, many other nationalists, not only in Europe
by the way, right. Because on that kind of
hierarchy, on that kind of scale, right, state violence
and primarily mass deportations, as I said at the beginning, which we see throughout
the 20th century. Which is a core element
as we saw in Lemkin, of genocidal violence,
actually, of wholesale cultural and social destruction
of whole groups of whole communities,
of whole societies. State violence, maybe
it's a problem, but it's not the Holocaust. It's not Nazism, right. And there we get distortion
of the Holocaust's history because we don't treat the
Holocaust as Romanian violence, as Hungarian violence as Bulgarian violence,
as French violence. We treat the Holocaust as a unique eruption
of Nazi violence. That's how it serves
Hungarian nationalism. That's how it serves
Hungarian nationalists. And that's how ironically it
legitimizes today the very vision Greater Hungary that was
at the core of the destruction of Jews and Jewish
communities during World War II. All right? >> Hello. So I was reading
an article for class about the new Holocaust
Museum that they're opening up in Hungary or
they're working on. And then I saw that
some people were arguing that what Hungary did to
the Jews wasn't too bad because they had kicked out
other groups during war. So I just kind of wanted to know
what your thoughts were on that, and yeah, just like
your thoughts on that. I'm Jazelle. I'm Jazelle. >> Okay. All right. It's okay, the -- >> Yeah. >> All right. So yeah, so good question. So we have a number of
actually, a number of projects to build new museums for the
Holocaust today in Europe. Two major controversies
in this context, one, the new museum that's planned
about the war so ghetto and which might open in 2023. There's a major controversy
about that. And then, the House of
Fate Museum in Hungary. The building is already there,
but it's, it hasn't opened yet. It might open this year, so
the Hungarian government says. But there's a major
controversy around this as well. There's other projects. There's a project in
Thessaloniki in Greece to open a new Holocaust museum. And there are others. But so you read a piece that
argued that what Hungary did to the Jews wasn't that
terrible because they expelled and deported other
groups as well. So this is, and you wanted to
know what I think about this. So, here's what I
think about this. We have a big, big problem in
how we think about genocide and mass violence in the
20th century because we think about genocide and mass
violence through hierarchies and through zero sum games. We think about them in comparative perspectives,
primarily. We have comparative
genocide studies, which is really the
origins of genocide studies in comparative works, of political scientists
and sociologists. And in this comparative
perspective, we have a hierarchy in the name of the
field, by the way, Holocaust and genocide studies. Have you ever thought about
the name of the field? Why is the field named
Holocaust and genocide studies? Why not Rwanda genocide
and genocide studies? Why not? The Holocaust, however
we think about it in the name of the field, creates a
hierarchy of mass violence. We have the Holocaust. We have genocide, which
usually means various kinds of classic cases. The Armenian genocide,
even though it's still under institutional official
denial throughout the world, the Holocaust, Cambodia,
there are four that are on the genocide of course,
Yugoslavia in the 1990s in some case, [inaudible],
the [inaudible] in the early 20th century in
some cases enter the list. So genocide, but
really classic kind of cases, quote/unquote, right. And then everything else. And everything else, by
the way, is state violence. Everything else is down
here in this hierarchy. So we think about
it comparatively. We think about it in
hierarchies, and we think about it in a way in which
really blurs for us in how to think about mass violence
that reflects this history that is attacks against
different kinds of groups by the same state authorities
in the same time in order to realize a vision
like Greater Hungary. So I don't know which
piece you read. There's a lot of controversy on
the House of Fate, but the idea, right, that what Hungary did
to the Jews isn't that terrible because it deported
other groups as well, is a very ridiculous idea
because that's exactly the core of the genocidal violence of
the Greater Hungary vision. Right. And again, one that
we don't actually notice when we look through the lens of
Holocaust and genocide studies as we're used to looking. All right? >> Hi. I'm Katrina. I don't go to this school,
but I'm very interested. You said you've taught in Israel
in Haifa, and I just wanted to know, this is kind of
off-topic, but what is your view of the Palestinian authority
and/or it versus Zionism. >> What is my view about Palestinian
nationalism versus Zionism? I don't quite see
how it's related to what I talked
about in the lecture. So, unless there's a
specific question that ties into what I talked about, I think we'll take
other questions. And if there's time maybe
we'll return to this. There is a way to connect
it to what I talked about, but it's a very round about way. >> My name is Adam. My question is that I've seen
that Poland has engaged in kind of distortion as well by
denying any Poland action in the Holocaust saying,
like when they're saying oh, it wasn't a Polish death camp,
it was a Nazi death camp. So, I guess my question
is Poland engaging in more or less the same
actions as Hungary today, or is there something
that's unique about Poland? >> Yeah. In the Polish case,
we also have a situation where Poland today and Polish
state authorities depict the Holocaust as a completely
German project. Now, just to stress, we should
not be saying actually Polish death camps, because they
weren't Polish death camps. They were Nazi death camps on
German-occupied Poland, right. So that's absolutely
true that insistence by the Polish government
and by Poles. But the Poles also engaged, like
the Hungarian government today, in depicting the Holocaust as
a completely German project and in the case of Poland, we also have what we might
call memory laws, memory laws. We don't have it only in
Poland, we actually have them in Ukraine, well before Poland. We have them in many other
places, actually memory laws, that regulate by law what you
can say and what you can say but then you might go
to jail or be fined about a state's history. And you're not allowed to say,
I mean it's been criminalized, the law has gone through
various stages, and it's kind of took the sting out of it,
the debate and the changes in the law in the last year. But it's still considered a
civil offense now in Poland to refer to the involvement
of the Polish state or organizations of
the Polish state, like the Polish government
in exile during World War II. Or Poles as engaged in the
persecution and destruction of Jews and Jewish communities
in Poland during World War II. Now, the situation in
Poland is a bit different because of course, Poland was
destroyed during World War II by both Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union in September 1939. And then it came under
complete German occupation with the invasion of the Soviet
Union in the summer of 1941. So a very different
historical context in Hungary during the war,
which is an independent state. And even after the German
invasion in March 1944, retains a lot if
its independence. But nevertheless, we have
the same kind of mechanism of what was the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a
completely German project, unrelated at all to, in
this case, Polish state and nation making, right. Completely unrelated. And of course, this blurs
a much more complex history that we don't have time, and
I don't think that I will get into here right now, of
the relations between Jews and non-Jews in Poland
before, during and also after World War II to how many
non-Jewish Poles rescued Jews during the war and how many
non-Jewish Poles indeed collaborated and assisted
the Germans in persecuting and killing Jews
during World War II. And in some cases, the
same people rescued Jews for various reasons
also murdered Jews. There's very significant
scholarship on all of this, and there is very significant
debate, but for our purposes, indeed we see the same kind of mechanism concerting
all the differences in historical context, right, about what was the
Holocaust, right. The Holocaust was a German
project, and we can engage in global Holocaust memory because it legitimizes our
national project, right. Who killed the Jews? The Nazis and only the Nazis. >> I'm Alexa, and
I was wondering if you know why the IHRA
was willing to overlook that campaign that was so
clearly antisemitic in Hungary? >> Good question. >> What was it? I couldn't even hear her. >> So the question, the
question to repeat was why IHRA, the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance, was willing to overlook
the antisemitic campaign, the anti-Soros campaign
in Hungary in 2017, 2018? Why nobody in IHRA, right, after
IHRA in 2016, including Hungary, had all the member states
had signed on a definition of antisemitism, and
here we have a clear case of antisemitism without
anyone uttering a word. Why was that? So, the IHRA is an organization
that the member, the delegations of the member states are
made up of both scholars but also politicians
that are, for example, in Hungary the delegation
is made up of Fidesz people, Fidesz party people,
the ruling party in Hungary today, and scholars. Both of them sit
on the delegation. That's how it goes, all
the delegations in IHRA. So, we have to consider
that IHRA, of course, like all institutes of
global Holocaust memory, as I said at the beginning,
like Yad Vashem in Israel, like the USHMM here in the US,
are political organizations. Holocaust memory, global Holocaust memory is
an institutional phenomena, not as ideas in our heads, as
an institutional phenomena, is of course, a political
project, global Holocaust memory. Now, why specific
people in IHRA decided to remain silent is
one kind of question. But what's important to
emphasize in relation to your question is that,
and this is a core part of my argument, is that global
Holocaust memory, the institutes of global Holocaust memory,
are state institutes. And as such, state
institutes are not interested in criticizing themselves. They're interested in
blurring state violence. That's the main concern
of state institutes. And that goes also for
state instituted engaged in global Holocaust memory. And therefore, why certain
people chose to remain silent, because these organizations are
made from people, of course, with different kind of agendas. Different kinds of people. But as an institution, right,
this very much is an indication like why did the IHRA people
choose to remain silent when not far away
in Hungary in 2015, Roma houses were demolished
for the very same reason. What we have here is a clear
indication that shows us, right, how global Holocaust
memory legitimizes state and nation-building projects. Blurs state violence, right. And it does this, again, by
also distorting the Holocaust's history by blurring the aspect of state violence
in this history. Okay. I just want to emphasize
specifically about the IHRA that in the IHRA meeting in
2015, in Budapest and Debrecen, the two meetings there, there
were a small minority of people in IHRA from various delegates,
including from the delegations of the US who decided
to boycott the meeting. But it was very small,
tiny minorities. So there's different
people in these institutes. >> Thank you. My name is Brian. I thought it was
interesting that that picture of George Soros was there. In my section, my class, we
actually received some articles that talked about him. He's a Hungarian Jewish
man, pretty famous. I kind of researched him. I found a 1998 60 Minute
interview where he proclaimed that he helped Nazis
rid Hungary of Jews and helped steal
different wealth. I just wanted to hear
your take on that. >> If you, I think
the way you meant that actually you saw a
piece that accused George of collaborating with the Nazis. >> No he self-proclaimed
that he did. He said that he did. George Soros? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, he said that he did. >> In where? Which -- >> A 60 Minute interview
in 1998. >> All right, I'm not familiar
with this 60 Minute interview. But I will say this. There is, since George Soros
is engaged in his philanthropy, he's a very, very rich person,
in combatting and struggling against anti-democratic
tendencies and the world around us, and there's a lot
of them, as you said, Diane, we see the breakdown of
everything we thought was stable in democracies around the
world in the last decade or so. George Soros is struggling
against that. He's supporting and
promoting democracy. He's supporting organizations
and groups that struggle for democracy in places
like Hungary, for example, where it's becoming very,
very difficult to struggle against authoritarian
and violent nationalism. And therefore, therefore, he's
under various kinds of attacks, including accusations
that he collaborated with the Nazis during
World War II that I find I have
to say ludicrous. And including accusations
like this, which are clearly
antisemitic, right, that he's out to destroy
Hungary basically. Why? By promoting the people who are most defenseless
in our world today. Anyone knows, by the way, how many refugees there
are in the world today? >> Eighty-five million. >> How many? >> Eighty-five million. >> Almost. I mean you're a bit exaggerated. But we have a bit over
70 million refugees and displaced people in
the world around us today. More than 70 million, right. This itself, by the way,
also, as I said about Roma in Europe today, should open
our eyes to the state system in which we live where there
are 70 million people rejected by the state system. George Soros, part
of what he does, is try to support these people. In response, he's
depicted as someone who tries to destroy Hungary. And not only Hungary, he's
a person that's under attack in other places as well,
in Poland and other places. So I don't find these kinds
of accusations convincing. I actually find them
ludicrous, as I said. And I think that we should
focus rather than on these kinds of ideas on what this means
in the world around us today. >> You brought up a couple
organizations that Orban and others were, that were
involved in state violence and genocide that
Orban were venerating. I assume that they, Orban is
not venerating them purely for their state violence and
genocide and that he believes that they did some good things
for the country outside of it. And I have a follow up question
based on that, when you answer. >> Could you just, which organization
are you referring to? And if I understand
your question, that he's supporting
organizations [inaudible] because of mass violence
that he perpetrated. But he also thinks they
contributed in some way to this, so can you just say
which organizations -- >> That one person
had a bust of. >> Sandor Szakaly from the
Veritas Historical Institute? >> Yes. Yes. >> About this. So. This is not an organization. Veritas Historical Institute
is a state institute as again, was founded in 2013 in order
to craft a revisionist, that means a distorted narrative
of modern Hungarian history, not just the war, modern
Hungarian history, right. So that's Veritas. But I do want to comment in
response to what you said that sometimes we have the ideas
that yes, violence occurred, but there's also various
other positive things perhaps that resulted from a period
of violence from organizations or institutes of violence. We call this, I'm just
referring to what you said, we call this progress
in the world in which we live,
progress, right. Yes, terrible things happened. This is also, by the way, how
we think about the Holocaust in this history as kind
of an eruption, right, in the 20th century, that destabilizes our
idea about progress. But then, we, the good guys,
defeated them, the bad guys, the Nazis, and now we can
move on with progress. Well, not really. As we all know, who
defeated the Nazis? >> The Soviets. >> The Soviet Union, right. One really bad guy defeated
another really bad guy, right. And if we think about the
world around us today, 70 million refugees and
displaced people, zero progress. Right. So the idea that, and
we can think about the history of this country as
well in this frame, and particularly this
state, California, where we are the idea that era
and a period of mass violence and genocide also has various
kinds of positive results within the frame of
progress never works. >> I was just wondering
if you think that because the states
are taking on so much of the responsibility to
acknowledge the Holocaust that there are people who are
kind of being let off the hook for learning it themselves which allows the states
to distort the truth? >> So, you mean the role
of states in organizations of global Holocaust memory. Which then people like us
feel that they don't need to actually learn the history. No, I mean, a couple of things. One, the major idea of global
Holocaust memory is actually Holocaust education is
that we'll learn this, and then there are
various victims, as I said, for example, never again. Never be a bystander. These kinds of things. So they're meant
to offer us lessons about our world and our lives. So there isn't design to be
this kind of disconnect, right, between the state and what the
people are supposed to learn. But it's a good question
because, I don't know if you're aware of it, we
had in just a very recently, the last couple of years, we had
a big claims conference survey in the US, here in the US
among millenians [phonetic], have you heard about it, about what millenians
know about the Holocaust. Right. The results are, to put it very briefly,
absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Many of them have never heard
about Auschwitz, for example, even could not name any
Nazi concentration camps. No details, nothing at all. Now, we had a similar survey
conducted just recently in Canada with not as bad as
results but pretty similar. We had another systematic
study done on the extent of Holocaust knowledge, you
might call it, in Britain today. And there we have similar
results, nothing at all. And we have some anecdotal
evidence, not systematic, not as a result of these
kinds of studies about Israel, about Israel, and from this
anecdotal evidence, we also know that Israelites actually
know nothing at all about the Holocaust as well. Now, this is very, this
is very interesting, this, how is it that in an era
of global Holocaust memory, where every day there's at
least one new book that comes out about the Holocaust, right,
where there's so much film and art about the Holocaust, where the Holocaust has become
a marker of Western identity in the last three
decades, right. How is it that in the US
and Canada and Britain and probably also in Israel,
we know nothing about it. This is another paradox
and irony to think about. The whole system of
thinking about Holocaust and genocide studies
as a hierarchy where the Holocaust is unique
well beyond any conventional state violence, that is the
Holocaust is not related to our world, to the
world around us, right. We, people who study and teach
the Holocaust have actually done a very good job in the last
20, 30 years to tell everyone that the Holocaust actually can
teach us nothing because it's so unique, it's so exceptional,
it's so outside the framework of state violence
in the 20th century that it's not related
to our world at all. So why study it? Why learn about it actually? Right. And here we are in 2019,
we don't know anything about it. We need to ask ourselves
how that is actually. >> Raz, thank you very much. [ Applause ] [ Music ]
