Echoes of history: Holocaust voices resurface at IIT

January 14, 2007|By Ron Grossman, Tribune staff reporter

When psychology professor David Boder arrived in Europe in 1946, World War II was scarcely over and Hitler's surviving victims were still coming to grips with the horrors they had suffered.

Scattered across Europe, some were just beginning to realize the enormity of the crime. Their view of the Nazi era had been limited to what could be glimpsed through barbed wire or a cattle-car window. There wasn't yet even a name for what they had endured.

Inspired by a plea from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower that the horrors of the concentration camps be documented, Boder hauled an unwieldy, primitive recording device overseas and began seeking out displaced people in transit centers and refugee camps across Europe.

The professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology would emerge with some of the earliest and fullest narratives of what came to be called the Holocaust.

For decades, the transcripts of his interviews lay neglected on a library shelf at the South Side school, only to resurface by happenstance. Now IIT is in the process of posting the material online for all to see and hear. The timing couldn't be more propitious: As the generation of Holocaust survivors comes to an end, the need to preserve firsthand narratives is ever more urgently felt.

Assembling a `mosaic'

When Boder conducted his interviews, the world was still grappling with the news that human beings had herded other human beings into gas chambers and crematoriums.

"That is why I interview many and have them tell their story. So from the little that I get from everyone, the mosaic, a total picture can be assembled," Boder is heard to say on one recording as he explains the project to Abraham Kimmelmann, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

"Where were you when the war started?" he asks Kimmelmann, deported from his home in Poland as an adolescent. "What has happened to you? Tell me, possibly day by day, week by week, what has happened."

Eventually, stories like Kimmelmann's, and of the millions killed, were collectively designated as the Holocaust.

Richard Hirschhaut, project director of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, notes that Boder's recordings are particularly valuable because they directly refute the persistent idea that none of it ever occurred. The museum will feature Boder's work in its new Skokie quarters, scheduled to open in 2008.

To Holocaust deniers--who aired their views last month at a conference in Iran--the Holocaust is an intellectual fabrication of academics and Jews that slanders Germans and, by providing a pretext for the founding of Israel, harmed Arabs.

But the subjects of Boder's interviews were widely dispersed and preoccupied with restarting their lives; they had neither the energy nor the means to come together to generate and coordinate stories into a vast conspiracy.

"There is something so pure and unvarnished about these interviews, an authenticity that is raw and personal and beyond denial," Hirschhaut said.

In August 1946, Boder interviewed Nechamah Epstein-Kozlowski in northern Italy. She had been interned in the Warsaw ghetto and sent to Auschwitz. Boder asked her about the crematoriums and gas chambers, disguised as showers--the ones called into question at the recent Iranian conference.

"When we went out at night, we saw the entire sky red from the glow of the fire. Blood was pouring on the sky," Epstein-Kozlowski responded. "When we went to the shower hall we saw the clothing, of the people who were not anymore, lying there."

Death leaves work unfinished

Boder spent years translating some 70 of his interviews into English from the half-dozen languages in which they were conducted. He died in 1961, leaving 39 still not transcribed.

A few were published in a 1949 book, "I Did Not Interview the Dead," that quickly went out of print. Raul Hilberg, who went on to become the pre-eminent Holocaust historian, said he once read a library copy.

"I was a student then and couldn't afford to buy books," said Hilberg, author of "The Destruction of the European Jews." "Years later, when I tried to get a copy from inter-library loan, I was told it was extremely hard to find."

IIT became reacquainted with Boder's work when Ellen Mitchell, head of the psychology department, got a letter asking what had happened to his projects. Not finding the transcripts, Mitchell feared she might have discarded them while cleaning out old file cases. In a panic, she ran to the library--and discovered them on an open shelf.

"I sat and read them, weeping, until late in the night," Mitchell said. "I realized we had to do something to make them available."

She took her discovery to Sohair Wastawy, then head of IIT's libraries and now chief librarian of Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, a modern reconstruction of the greatest library of the ancient world.

Wastawy, who holds a bachelor's degree in Hebrew studies, called her staff together.