Most first-year students arrive on campus knowing little about the Holocaust. Six million Jewish men, women and children were killed; that’s about it, explains Ted Rosengarten, who has had the task – he might say the honor – of teaching the Holocaust at the College for 18 years.
The Second World War ended 70 years ago, so the conflict can seem as distant to young people as the Civil War or the American Revolution. How does one get beyond the numbers and the gross images of the crime to fathom the period and the responses of people who lived then?
Rosengarten, chair of Holocaust studies for the College’s Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Education, uses all the tools he can.
Catherine Mueller ’15, a recent College graduate from Dallas, describes his classes as “predominantly lecture. But in his case,” she says, “it’s really effective. He has a very powerful speaking presence. And there’s always – always! – room for questions.”
He shares with his students books he has been collecting for more than 50 years: historical narratives, memoirs, fiction and poetry, and also still photos and film. He introduces wrenching letters and other texts, and he helps students know the writers as people who have been thrust by history into the role of documentarians.
“My work is oriented to the victims’ experiences,” Rosengarten emphasizes.
He welcomes to his classes survivors who live in the area, increasingly difficult to do as their numbers decrease every year. Once he encouraged the daughter of a survivor to come listen to her father describe his years evading death in a series of concentration camps, stories she had never before heard; she spent the entire class circling the building in her car, unable to enter the classroom and take on that burden.
Rosengarten’s students are engaged. He strides the classroom, peering over his glasses, tossing out questions. The students don’t hesitate to offer their thoughts, even when they seem unsure of what he’s looking for. No shyness here. Early each semester, they realize that they’re being asked to consider one of the most defining events in human history. They learn that versions of the Holocaust have happened many times before, in widely scattered countries, and are happening still, often with people around the world paying scant attention.
But Rosengarten tries to keep the focus on the genocide of the Jews. That’s a large enough topic, though he suggests analogous situations in recent history.
There was no name in the 1940s for the murder of millions of Jews and other people in Europe by the Nazis. The word holocaust came into our language in the early 1960s. “We are nearer to the beginning,” says Rosengarten, “of grasping the enormity of the annihilation, its causes and consequences, than we are to the end.”
As in all wars, he points out, the aggressor is not satisfied with a single target. So gypsies, gays, Slavs and the Christian populations of places like Belarus were burned up to feed the Nazi beast. In Rosengarten’s freshman seminar, Children and the Holocaust, students probe the experiences of all children in Nazi-occupied Europe – Jews and Christians, young people in Ukraine, Germany and France – and the different ways in which they responded to the killing around them.
This isn’t a class to sleep through. Or to skip. Students simply don’t feel like it. This is important. And these students know that their participation in this discussion matters, too.
“It’s not a struggle,” explains Mueller. “It’s riveting.”
Three-quarters of the students in Rosengarten’s classes are not Jewish.
Some of their rapt attention may be generated by the knowledge that Rosengarten himself is a bit of an academic celebrity. He has won a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a “genius grant.” But he is also as approachable as any professor on campus: casual, with darting, eager eyes and a ready smile beneath his bushy mustache. Students circle him after class. He stays and chats. He laughs.
“I want to teach young people,” Rosengarten explains, “but also to train them in how and where to get knowledge, how to apply their analytical powers.”
His care for his subject matter is intense. “His level of passion as a teacher is what drew me in,” says Mueller.
Every other year, Rosengarten and his wife, Dale, who oversees the Jewish Heritage Collection in the Addlestone Library’s Special Collections, take a group of 20 students, half from the College of Charleston and half from the Honors College at the University of South Carolina, to Eastern Europe, where they tour Holocaust and Jewish cultural sites, including former concentration camps, museums, restored and derelict synagogues and cemeteries.
“I lecture on the fly,” he explains, “with help from Polish and German friends, in Krakow, Łódz, Warsaw, Białystok, at the sites of former Nazi death camps and in the streets of Berlin, where memorials to the murdered Jews of Europe are part of the fiber of the city, storing memories that would otherwise be a burden to conscience and make ordinary life impossible.”
This summer, two of his students, Mueller and Deirdre Douglas-Hubbard ’15, are interning at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, coveted positions to which hundreds apply every year.
“It gives me chills,” Rosengarten says, “to think that Anne Frank and I were alive at the same time. That’s how old I am.”
Part of Rosengarten’s concern for the future of his program is the simple question he phrases as, “Who will be the custodians of the story?” He explains that the first generation of teachers about the Holocaust were the survivors themselves, but the youngest of them now are in their upper 70s. The second generation of custodians are teachers like Rosengarten and his predecessor at the College, Beatrice Stiglitz, who didn’t directly experience the Holocaust, but had close ties to those who did.
“My mother’s father,” he explains, “was born in Tarnow, a city of small garment factories in southeastern Poland. The Jews who made up half the population were deported to Auschwitz and Belzec. About one in 30 was alive in 1945. My grandfather had immigrated to America before World War I, so he was unharmed. His cousins who stayed behind were ‘burned’ – he never used the word gassed– in the camps.”
Rosengarten fears that the third generation will be people of the growing ranks of scholars who are more focused on the historiography of the Holocaust than the actual experiences of individuals. Under their guidance, the events of the period often seem distant, impersonal.
But maybe the future of Holocaust teaching will be shaped by people such as Mueller or Douglas-Hubbard or some of the others who have experienced Rosengarten’s classes and those of similar teachers, or who have traveled in Eastern Europe through the College’s study-abroad programs.
Mueller, an English major, thinks she may enter the field of human rights studies. When she first contacted the directors of the Anne Frank House, she wrote, “This is what I feel called to do.”
Though she started reading about the Holocaust when she was young, she acknowledges that part of her passion grew from her classes with Rosengarten.
“Holocaust education is a kind of intervention in normal life,” he explains. “It’s disturbing because it’s all about living and dying in the extreme. You never know how the learning about it will show up in later years.”
And through his teaching, his students – no matter what careers they go on to pursue, whether teachers, lawyers, salespeople – they, too, in their ways, are now custodians of the Holocaust.
– Stephen G. Hoffius
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A Double Best-Seller: 1974 and 2014
In 1974 Ted Rosengarten published his first book, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, an oral history of an Alabama tenant farmer who was born when Lincoln was president. It was praised on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, won a National Book Award, sold well, had its film rights scooped up by James Earl Jones (he eventually gave them up) and was transformed into a one-man off-Broadway play starring Cleavon Little. Rosengarten wasn’t yet 30 years old.
Forty years after publication, the book inexplicably became a hit again. In April 2014, critic Dwight Garner of The New York Times asked the owner of Square Books, the bookstore in Oxford, Miss., to identify the one book that best describes the South. He named All God’s Dangers. Garner praised it on the front page of the Times’ arts and culture section: “It is superb – both serious history and a serious pleasure, a story that reads as if Huddie Ledbetter spoke it while W.E.B. Du Bois took dictation.”
The next day, the book soared to No. 1 on Amazon’s list of bestsellers. Several companies have since asked about the film rights. An audio book has been released.
