Clark University - Clark News spring 2003
From memory, to scholarship, to change
Clark's first Ph.D. candidates in Holocaust history reflect on their experience in this first-of-its-kind program. "The knowledge just blew me away."
That was Beth Lilach's reaction to "I Am Rose Marie" and "The Diary of Anne Frank." Perhaps 12 years old when she read these books, Lilach could not believe that this monumental, albeit horrific, historical event—the Holocaust—was not being covered in her school and longed to know more. Later, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Lilach took the only course offered on the Holocaust and was disappointed. Likewise, a trip to the concentration camps in Germany and Poland was disheartening.
"There was a man selling ice cream, someone filming," she says, recalling a cameraman flicking his cigarette butt on the ground. The atmosphere was eerie—vivid blue skies, plush green grass. "This is not a museum," she states emphatically. "It is a graveyard. How dare the sun shine in Auschwitz-Birkenau?"
Lilach's yearning to connect with the core human aspect of this atrocity, backed by anger and frustration with experiences like this, drove her to research.
This summer, Lilach will join Christine van der Zanden and Beth Cohen as the first graduate students to earn Ph.D.s through Clark's Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. With the establishment of the center in 1996, Clark became the first institution in the world to offer a Ph.D.-granting program in Holocaust history. Today, the center's internationally recognized scholars and graduate and undergraduate students continue to work beyond the boundaries of conventional scholarship to learn about the Holocaust and how such atrocities can be avoided in the future.
"A dynamic program"
Van der Zanden's interest in the Holocaust also began when she was a young girl. Like Lilach, she read "The Diary of Anne Frank" and immediately felt a connection. She envisioned herself in Anne's world and tried to imagine what she would have endured. Van der Zanden also noticed the absence of Holocaust studies in her history classes.
"The history chronicles always seemed to stop short at the end of World War II," she says. "We never heard about what happened to the survivors."
While an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in Dearborn, van der Zanden immersed herself in anything that had to do with the Holocaust. She even helped one of her professors with the Voice Vision Oral History Project, a collection of hundreds of oral histories of Holocaust survivors. Recognizing van der Zanden's passion for the discipline, the professor told her about a new graduate program at Clark.
Van der Zanden describes the program as "amazing" and center director Debórah Dwork, as "brilliant, a genius, and so supportive. She has formed a dynamic program with a solid foundation—with room to grow—and a definite spirit."
Innovative research
"It was exciting to be part of the first group," Cohen agrees. "We really got to know the professors on a level that wouldn't have happened elsewhere."
Cohen, a former director of education at the Rhode Island Holocaust Museum, says the professors took a clear interest in her and her work. Cohen raved about a seminar led by Professor Robert Gellately, which exposed her to current thinking in the field. Cohen says her mentor Shelly Tenenbaum, chair of the Sociology Department, had a big influence on the course of her dissertation. She was impressed with the diversity of classes, looked forward to the lively discussions and was touched by her friendships with Lilach and van der Zanden. All three women emphasize that the supportive bond they share was invaluable.
"Friends for life," says Lilach.
Cohen says the program experiences are incredible and the opportunities—innumerable. For example, in London, Cohen and Lilach presented papers at an international conference on current research of Nazi persecution. Cohen says their work was warmly received and credits this to the center's emphasis on innovation and originality.
"This reflects well on the center and its approach to research," Cohen explains. "The center is living up to its mission."
Moving beyond memory
And so are these women. All three are working on progressive research, which is firmly rooted in the center's mission "to move beyond memory to create a permanent home for enduring knowledge of and scholarship about the history of the Holocaust."
Cohen's dissertation focuses on the postwar reception of Holocaust survivors by the American-Jewish community from 1946 to 1954. She analyzed about 350 case files, interviewed nearly 30 survivors and viewed recorded testimonies collected by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Although emotionally exhausting, Cohen says that giving a voice to these survivors is satisfying. Her study will help us understand how the American-Jewish community absorbed and came to terms with the enduring losses of Jewish people. And it will help us understand how that knowledge affected the community as it went forward.
Van der Zanden's research examines rescue. She focused on the Jews who were hidden and the people who hid them in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its surrounding region. Van der Zanden traveled to Paris, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the villages of the Plateau Vivarais; to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania to investigate their archive collection; and to a number of places across the country to collect oral histories of survivors rescued by the villagers of the Plateau.
For van der Zanden, the history of the Plateau Vivarais and the few thousand people sheltered there is one of the few bright spots in the abyss of the Holocaust. She has always had a visceral reaction to violence, so it was comforting to find that there were people during this time who were neighborly and tolerant.
Learning from the past
Lilach, whose dissertation investigates Jewish life in displaced persons camps in Germany, says she plans to dedicate her life to this field.
"Do we reach out, or do we turn away and declare neutrality?" she asks. "There is no such thing as being a bystander when genocide and mass murder are going on. We have to intervene. And prevention is the first goal."
Lilach, who hopes to become a professor, wants to educate others about the truth and dispel myths to help them make important connections to what is happening in the world today. In this way, Clark's Holocaust history program and its first three Ph.D. graduates exemplify the University's mission to use knowledge to change the world.
"It's not just about the history," Lilach says. "It's about making the world a better place."
Learn more about the program online.
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