>> I am not exhausted. >> By the end of 1942, there is a famous case of some people who had escaped and told someone named Jan Karski about what was going on, that this was indeed murder and massacre of the Jews. And he then informed Heinz Sokoloff in Switzerland, who then told American sources. And so the question becomes who knew that it was mass murder, and what did they do about it? And this is still an ongoing discussion. And there was a call, for example, to bomb Auschwitz, the camp, which was not done. The Americans bombed a nearby railroad hub, but they did not bomb Auschwitz. The argument within the Roosevelt administration was that our job is not to save Jews who are being killed, but to end the war, and to do it as quickly as possible, which is to target military objectives. The British bombers carpet bombed cities. They just destroyed everything in the city, and they targeted German cities, clearly remembering that London had been bombed in the same way by the Luftwaffe. So these are rampant emotions affecting policy in all kinds of ways. But, as Peter says, you need a war to let all of this loose, and that raises, for me, the question of what does it mean to understand what is happening? And the question of understanding is not a simple one, and I ask you to interrogate the issue and the idea. Social scientists are interested in understanding patterns. Historians are often seen as social scientists, therefore, patterns, institutions, etc. Literature tends to be about individuals as members of communities, and as members of communities, the issue becomes, afterwards, memorialization. How do you talk about what's been done to whole communities? So, in Treblinka, the people after the war brought boulders from each of the communities that had been destroyed, and if you go to Treblinka, just look at the pictures. You'll see the boulders, and this echoes an old Jewish tradition. That when you go to a Jewish cemetery for a member of your family, you find a stone and put it on the tombstone, as a kind of memorial that you've been there. But that also echoes an even older tradition that is Biblical, that you build a group of rocks as a tombstone. And you add to it because all kinds of things tear it down, weather, animals, etc. So the notion of memorials and memorialization. And, again, what is it we understand? Do we understand only as individuals? Or do we understand in a disciplinary way? Or do we understand as a member of a community? And what do you make a memorial for? One of the scary things is to think about the Nazi doctors who carried out first, the euthanasia experiments, they're educated, they went to college, they went to medical school, and then they agreed to honor that ideology. There are lives unworthy of living. I know some of you feel that way about your roommates. But thankfully, none of you are acting on that idea. You're not judging in that way. You're not members of God Squads, right? But the Nazis were indeed taking that right to themselves, and this also echoes the question of religion, when the Catholic Church objected to euthanasia, the Nazis continued the program in secret. So the question of ideology continues, and it's also a question of words. Because ideologies get expressed in words and in images and are part of how we communicate and in stereotypes. So, this is something to think about. And the irony that Dora Sorell, arriving at Auschwitz, would see the sign [FOREIGN] and what does that mean for her? The Nazis were expert at using slogans to trick people into thinking they were going to be resettled to the east. They were going for deportation for work. >> [INAUDIBLE] We must talk about euphemisms. >> And they did not want to say, ironically, it seemed to be easier to kill people than to say they were going to kill people. >> Euphemisms. >> So they used euphemisms to hide, not only from the people they were going to kill what was going to happen, but also to hide it from themselves. So we have to think about psychology in many directions in these situations. And literature is one of the ways in which we get sensitized, aware of how language works and what it's for. So, you should be thinking about this, and as you read Borowski, think about the title of that story, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. He's neither a Nazi, nor a Jew. And he's playing with ironies that he knows what the Nazis don't want to say to themselves, or what the Jews are going to experience without understanding it before they are killed. So, please read him carefully.
