Category: Holocaust & Genocide

11/28/2022 5 Comments

How the South African press reported news of the holocaust

by dmitri abrahams

Dmitri Abrahams looks at how the South African media reported on the Holocaust between April and November 1945. He suggests that the different reportage reflected not only the ethos of the publication and their stance on World War II, but also the deeply polarised thinking of the papers’ respective readership -- with regards to both the war as well as what was happening back home in South Africa.

A cartoon from The Rand Daily Mail (1945) lampooning DF Malan's attempts to deny Nazi atrocities.

THE liberation of concentration camps in 1945 and the revelation of atrocities committed by Nazi Germany caused major upset in South African society.

As a part of my dissertation on Holocaust memory in South Africa I analysed how the South African press reported on and understood the liberation of the concentration camps. The liberation of the concentration camps by Allied forces happened during an uncoordinated, chaotic period in which information emerged piecemeal. The press had already reported on the persecution and mass murder of European Jewry from at least 1942 so when the news of the liberation of the camps reached South African shores, they had some background with which to engage with the topic which suddenly flooded the pages of their daily and weekly newspapers.

5 Comments

7/26/2021 3 Comments

The forgotten Jewish victims of World War II: Reorienting the focus of South African Jewish commemoration

By Michael Kransdorff

communal matters

exploring the concerns of the South AFrican Jewish community

Michael Kransdorff argues that memory and commemoration of the Holocaust often does not give its due to those murdered in the "Holocaust by Bullets." He suggests that there is a particular imperative for South African Jews to remember this less well-known history.

MY first encounter with Mordechai Perlov came at a fortuitous moment. In 2015, a few weeks prior to our first conversation over drinks in his Johannesburg flat, Litvaksig -- the Jewish Lithuanian heritage organization, for which I volunteer as a research coordinator -- had discovered a misplaced file in the Lithuanian archives listing thousands of Jews who had been ‘evacuated’ from Lithuania to the USSR during 1941.

Initially I had hoped that this list might unlock the secret to some unknown rescue attempt of Lithuanian Jews as Nazi forces invaded the country. This would have been a remarkable discovery in a country where local collaboration was widespread and over 90% of the entire Jewish population was murdered. Mord scoffed at my suggestion. This was no humanitarian rescue effort. The people on the list were not Jews saved. Rather, like Mord and his family, they were Jews who were exiled and imprisoned in slave labour camps for being designated as enemies of the Soviet state. The majority would die of hunger, cold or disease.

"South African Jews have deep historical and cultural roots in Eastern Europe ... Nevertheless, we too have, until recently, also largely ignored the Eastern European Jewish experience in our commemoration of the Holocaust".

3 Comments

4/8/2021 8 Comments

How Covid-19 in South Africa helped unearth my family’s Holocaust history

by michalya schonwald moss

reflections 2020

Michalya Schonwald Moss reflects on how the experience of Covid-19 in South Africa catalysed her search to uncover her family's Holocaust history.

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
Leonard Cohen

Jolan Vida Schonwald, gassed at Auschwitz when she was 43 years old.

IT was an unimaginable curveball and it landed hard, right in my solar plexus. My husband had just returned from a scouting trip to Israel in March 2020 and we immediately went into quarantine, one week before the rest of South Africa. Being unable to control our circumstances and having to abandon our plans to emigrate, I found myself struggling to navigate this “new normal”. The only context I had to compare our situation to was the Holocaust. As a third-generation survivor, I felt trapped, anxious and afraid. It was then that hairline cracks started to appear, and with inherited transgenerational trauma overshadowing my present reality, I realized that I needed to find the courage to be curious about why a global pandemic had triggered an emotional reaction to a story belonging to my progenitors.

My grandfather, Moshe, had never spoken about his life before the war or his wartime experiences. My father and his brother were uncomfortable bringing it up. My uncle, David, described the impact of living with family secrets as having a constant elephant in the room, “and that elephant was death.”

8 Comments

9/10/2020 0 Comments

Never again, but yet again: Why the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre explores the history of the Holocaust and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda side by side

by tali nates

communal matters

exploring the concerns of the south african jewish community

In this article, Tali Nates discusses how memorialising the Holocaust and 1994 genocide in Rwanda enables South Africans to grapple with racism and xenophobia in South Africa.

The Holocaust and Genocide Centre allows us to bring to public attention and keep in public memory the abiding dangers of supremacist thinking, whether based on race as in wartime Germany or on ethnicity, as in Rwanda. The Centre does, and should remind us, daily, how quickly ordinary people can turn from living and learning alongside one another to exterminating each other with deadly justification … may you through this very powerful memorial teach us as South Africans to reconcile rival memories, to recognise the pain of others and, most importantly, to become more fully human”.

Prof. Jonathan Jansen, September 2015, at the JHGC building dedication ceremony.

In April 1994, while South Africans were jubilantly voting in the country’s first democratic elections, in Rwanda, a mere three and a half hours’ flight away, hundreds of thousands of Tutsi, as well as Hutu who opposed the genocide, were being slaughtered[i].

1994. Two countries in Africa. Two very different paths.

Not that South Africa’s transition to democracy has been easy. As xenophobic violence has shown, South Africans too have the potential for horrific violence against an “other”.

0 Comments

YOUR CART

MANY ISSUES. MORE VOICES.

How the South African press reported news of the holocaust

by dmitri abrahams

The forgotten Jewish victims of World War II: Reorienting the focus of South African Jewish commemoration

By Michael Kransdorff

communal matters

exploring the concerns of the South AFrican Jewish community

How Covid-19 in South Africa helped unearth my family’s Holocaust history

by michalya schonwald moss

reflections 2020

Never again, but yet again: Why the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre explores the history of the Holocaust and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda side by side

by tali nates

communal matters

exploring the concerns of the south african jewish community

Archives

Categories

KEEP UP TO DATE

YOUR CART

MANY ISSUES. MORE VOICES.

How the South African press reported news of the holocaust

by dmitri abrahams

The forgotten Jewish victims of World War II: Reorienting the focus of South African Jewish commemoration

By Michael Kransdorff

​communal mattersexploring the concerns of the South AFrican Jewish community

How Covid-19 in South Africa helped unearth my family’s Holocaust history

by michalya schonwald moss

​reflections 2020

Never again, but yet again: Why the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre explores the history of the Holocaust and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda side by side

by tali nates

​communal mattersexploring the concerns of the south african jewish community

Archives

Categories

KEEP UP TO DATE

communal matters

exploring the concerns of the South AFrican Jewish community

reflections 2020

communal matters

exploring the concerns of the south african jewish community