2008 Joseph Gotthelf Holocaust Memorial Lecture
Friday, May 2 @ 7:30 P.M.
“How Writers Fought Back: Literature from the Nazi Ghettos"
”In spite of conditions of starvation, disease, exhaustion from slave labor, and constant terror, many victims of the ghettos of Eastern Europe defied the Nazis by secretly writing accounts of Nazi atrocity and Jewish suffering in the hope that after the war justice would be done. Their writing took the form of poetry, fiction, plays, essays, chronicles, and diaries. Fortunately, a portion of what was created has survived and is gradually appearing in English translation. I will speak about organized forms of resistance by means of writing—the Warsaw Ghetto Secret Archive, for example-- but also about writing done independently of the archival projects by writers who, fearing that their lives were about to end, buried their writing in the hope that one day their work would contribute to justice. A good deal of ghetto writing, created under the most difficult conditions and in violation of Nazi edicts, is thus a form of spiritual resistance. Such writing is further evidence repudiating the notion that the Jewish response to the Nazi terror was passivity, paralysis, submission.
Milton Teichman is Professor Emeritus of English and Jewish Studies at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York. He introduced Jewish Studies at Marist College and taught courses on the Holocaust from 1975 to 2003. For many years, he organized the Marist College Annual Holocaust Memorial Program aimed primarily at a non-Jewish student audience. In 1995, he was the receipent of the Louis E. Yavner Award for Distinguished Teaching About the Holocaust and About Other Violations of Human Rights, awarded by The Regents of the University of the State of New York. Now a resident of Brewster, Cape Cod, MA, he and his wife Sharon Leder speak on the subject of the Holocaust and organize an annual Cape Cod Interfaith Holocaust Memorial Program each spring. Milton Teichman is editor (with Sharon Leder) of Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust, Illinois University Press, 1994 (a volume that has widespread use in college and university courses on the Holocaust.) He is also editor (with Sharon Leder) of The Burdens of History: Post-Holocaust Generations in Dialogue, Merion Westfield Press, 2000.
