Animals and the Holocaust Workshop

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Dr Roseanna Ramsden, University of Leeds

 

In July of this year, Barnabas Balint and Charlotte Gibbs, of the University of Oxford and the University of Southern California respectively, together hosted an academic workshop on the topic of animals and the Holocaust. Held at Magdalen College, Oxford, with the generous support of the Social History Society, the German History Society, Magdalen College, and the Oxford Holocaust Studies Reading Group, the workshop brought together PhD candidates, ECRs and established scholars alike with a shared interest in the ways animals could – and indeed, arguably should – feature in our historical research on the Holocaust. The workshop sought, through a diverse and interdisciplinary range of research papers and round table discussions, to develop a methodological approach for including animals in historical research, to identify important examples from archives, and to explore how writing the history of animals during the Holocaust can enable us to produce a deeper and more complete social history of this period.

Emily-Rose Baker’s presentation on animal witnessing in The Zone of Interest

 

The first day of the workshop, held in Oscar Wilde’s former living quarters at Magdalen College, began with Panel 1 on the theme of representations of animals in film, literature and poetry. My own paper, which opened the panel, dealt with the published memoir of Polish Holocaust survivor, Seweryna Szmaglewska. In it, I argued that for Szmaglewska, remembering and narrativizing Auschwitz-Birkenau through its animal and plant life facilitated not only a bearing witness to the dehumanisation she experienced, but a reclamation and reconstruction of humanity in the wake of traumatic experience. Emily-Rose Baker followed by introducing the concept of cinematic animal witnessing, and ecological witnessing more broadly, in her paper on Dilla, the Höss family’s dog, in Richard Glazer’s 2023 film, The Zone of Interest, paying particular attention to the way in which Dilla destabilises the boundaries or binaries of Holocaust representation. Anna Elena Torres, who brought the panel to a close, offered an insight into the work of Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever. She considered, primarily, the work done by the animal metaphor in Sutzkever’s poetry, including undoing ideas of both valorised masculinity and becoming animal, and the animal world as providing spiritual transcendence in moments of crisis. These papers were united, then, by the concept that making visible the role of animals in depictions of the Holocaust can enable us to glean fresh insights on trauma, and can reveal much about the human experience of the Holocaust.

 

On day two, the first panel centred on the topic of animals in digital archives and survivor testimony, and the ways in which paying close critical attention to the presence of animals in these sources can give voice to silences in the historical record of the Holocaust. Sarah Ernst shared their thoughts on the manner in which exploring the use of animal imagery in survivors’ video testimonies can shine a light on their perceptions of queerness in the concentration camp setting. In particular, they discussed prevailing narratives about the experiences of queer bodies, with a focus on the repeated use of the term ‘pet’ in survivor accounts and how it operates to frame queerness as trainable or learnt. This was followed by Charlotte Gibbs’ compelling paper on the invisibility of female concentration camp guards – and the dogs they wielded – in digital Holocaust archives such as the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. She made the case that because of the link between female camp guards and German Shepherds, tracing non-human agents (such as dogs) in the archive can shed new light on female perpetrators during the Holocaust and their roles in prisoner societies. Barnabas Balint rounded off the panel by providing an insight into the existence of animals in the Yad Vashem archives. He both mapped some of the ethical and methodological challenges posed by using animals as a category of historical analysis, and pointed to the complexities of human-animal relations that, in their unpicking, hold the potential to open up new ways of viewing multiple histories and advance our understanding of victimhood and Nazi persecution.

In the afternoon, for the final and longest panel of the event, focus shifted from depictions of animals to animals during the Holocaust, as used by perpetrators, as the pets of victims and survivors, and as tropes in antisemitic propaganda. Ramneek Sodhi opened up the conversation with an introduction to the theme of natural hierarchies in Buchenwald Concentration Camp, exploring the use of animals in the camp not only as tools of terror, but as Nazis’ pets, livestock, subjects for scientific experimentation, and even as zoo animals.  This was followed by Peter Arnds’ paper on Nazi bee politics, in which he traced the trajectory from bio/bee politics to contemporary literature to emphasise that narratives involving bees affect racist ideology. He focused on Norbert Scheuer’s novel, Winterbienen, and the ways it responds to this legacy with its ideological abuse of metaphorics. Then came Hannah Wilson’s persuasive paper on “Barry,” the St Bernard of Sobibor Death Camp. In it, she addressed how, through the telling and retelling of encounters with him, Barry has become an icon of evil among the few survivors of the camp, and has even developed an intergenerational legacy, as is made evident in the artistic works of Israeli ceramicist and survivors’ daughter, Dov Freiberg. Cheuk Him Ryan Sun finished off the panel by offering his thoughts on non-human affinities in postwar Jewish refugee photograph albums. Through an examination of the cat photographs in the family album of Gerda Kraus, an Austrian Jewish refugee who was forced to leave Austria after the Anschluss and found shelter in Shanghai, he made the case that our understanding of experiences of displacement, survival and remembrance is complicated and enhanced by the inclusion of animals and animal histories in our research.

All in all, the workshop firmly established that the understudied and marginal topic of animals and the Holocaust demands a much more central position in Holocaust scholarship. Paying attention to the traces of animals in the archives – as the family pets of victims and survivors, as guard dogs and tools of terror and violence, and as livestock and wild animals – and in other types of source material – as imagery, as metaphor, as vehicles of memory, and as antisemitic motif – offers a fuller and more complete picture of Nazi persecution and of the Holocaust as experienced by its victims. For me, this novel and ground-breaking workshop opened up an important conversation about how animals and the Holocaust might shift from a niche issue to a central line of enquiry in Holocaust studies with significant methodological, archival and empirical value. I look forward to the continuation – and further development – of this conversation in the forthcoming Animals and the Holocaust Special Issue.

 

 

About the Author:

Dr Roseanna Ramsden is a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds, where she teaches on trauma and cultural memory of the Holocaust, with a focus on Holocaust cinema, art and photography. She was awarded her PhD in History by Northumbria University in 2021. Her research on gender and sexuality in women’s Holocaust memoirs has been published in Holocaust Studies and the Women’s History Review. She is currently working on her first academic monograph, provisionally entitled Against the Grain: Rereading Women’s Testimonies of the Holocaust. Her research interests include gender and queer history, testimony and representation of the Holocaust, the history of the senses and emotions, and feminist, queer and ecocritical theory.

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