Fifth Global Conference

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Session 5b: Responding to the Holocaust
Chair: Alan Udoff

The Monstrosity of Auschwitz in Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1948)
Marek Haltof
English Department, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, USA

Given the complexities of the Polish past, it comes as no surprise that memories of World War II haunt Polish cinema and, like many traumatic experiences, return powerfully on the screen.
In her landmark film Ostatni etap (The Last Stage, aka The Last Stop, 1948), Wanda Jakubowska shows the monstrosity of Auschwitz and draws on her firsthand experiences while portraying the “factory of death” (she was interned in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück). With its dramatization of the camp experience, The Last Stage establishes several images easily discernible in subsequent Holocaust narratives: the dark, “realistic” images of the camp (the film was shot in Auschwitz); the passionate moralistic appeal; and the clear divisions between victims and victimizers.
Today, in spite of its powerful imagery, The Last Stage may seem archaic and artificial, in line with the official cultural policy and the dominant aesthetic modes of the late 1940s. Yet its depiction of Nazi concentration camps (e.g., morning and evening roll calls on the Appellplatz) are present in a number of subsequent American films, including Sophie's Choice (1982, Alan Pakula) and Schindler's List (1993, Steven Spielberg). Certainly, to this day The Last Stage remains a seminal film about the Holocaust, a prototype for future Holocaust cinematic narratives.
The paper focuses on this internationally acclaimed film, which also marks the birth of the Polish post-war cinema. It discusses both the strengths and weaknesses of The Last Stage , which are also inherent in many later projects that aimed at the impossible task of re-creating the horror of the Holocaust. Also, the focus is on political and aesthetic problems the film's director, Wanda Jakubowska, faced while making her film.

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A Chasidic Anti-Theodicy: Rabbi Shapira’s Response to the Nazi Evil
David Patterson
Bornblum Judaic Studies, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

Drawing upon a work composed during the Holocaust in order to account for evil from a post-Holocaust perspective, this paper will examine Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira's Sacred Fire, a response to the catastrophe written from the depths of the Warsaw Ghetto (September 1939 – July 1942). Of particular interest is Rabbi Shapira's reflection on the withdrawal of the divine in the contexts of an assault on the divine. Arguing that existing Jewish responses to the evil of the Shoah have been ill-defined, the paper will show how Rabbi Shapira opens up new possibilities for understanding of radical evil.
First the paper will explain Chasidic views of evil as the formation of kelipot or “shells” that hide the divine spark within creation. It will show that these kelipot are predominantly characterized by the ego and ego-based thought, such as the ontological, totalizing thought that belongs the Nazi Weltanschauung .
Next the paper will explain Rabbi Shapria's account of evil in terms of Chasidic theology. Here Rabbi Shapira draws upon ancient sources to show that the radical evil of the Nazis lies in an attempt to destroy the G-d of Abraham—that is, the divine spark that constitutes the human image—by annihilating the Chosen of G-d.
Drawing on talmudic and mystical teaching, the paper will then show that evil during and after the Holocaust lies in a retreat of the Divine in the face of (1) an assault upon His witnesses and (2) a post-Holocaust turning away from that assault on the part of many scholars, thinkers, intellectuals, and other leaders.
Finally, the paper elaborates on how this Chasidic “theodicy” actually undermines theodicy by placing the power of evil in human hands, not in divine providence.

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Judgements about 'Bystander' Behaviour
Gideon Calder
Centre for Applied Social and Philosophical Studies, University of Wales, Newport

‘Bystanders' at the scene of acts of moral extremity are, by the nature of the term, connected to it: situated in more or less proximate relation to those to whose suffering they are not attending. Yet the space between – social, cultural, moral – tends not to feature centrally in diagnoses of responsibility and guilt. This paper seeks to explore two main questions. Firstly: whether the moral and cultural ‘relationality' of bystanders' acts and omissions makes any difference to judgements as to the ‘evilness' of such behaviour. Might there, for instance, be a non-facile sense in which in the notion that being a bystander amid acts of atrocity is a kind of moral bad luck – to which the honest response, from those not so situated, is that ‘there but for the grace of God go I?' And secondly, the idea that ‘evil' might be applied as much as to relations between individuals, as to the thoughts and actions of individuals themselves. Using recent work by Stanley Cohen and Norman Geras as reference points, I argue not only that there is sense in this idea, but that it offers a greater depth of explanation than a ‘methodologically individualist' conception of evil, by itself, is able to.
The point here is not to dilute the force of any judgement of evil-doing on the part of given individuals, nor to erode the sense of individual responsibility for action. Rather, it is to say that if, with St Augustine, we understand evil primarily as an absence (rather than some natural part of the furniture of life which must either be extinguished or accommodated to) then this quality of ‘lack', of the privation of the worth of being, is as much a feature of social relations in societies where atrocities are taking place as it is of the characters of the individuals concerned. Thus the moral position of the ‘bystander' should be understood not simply in terms of their relation to those who are suffering, but also in terms of the relation of both to the moral climate which their society is, or has been operating. Here I endorse (with qualifications) Geras's identification of a ‘contract of mutual indifference': a feature of liberal culture which, married with the socio-economic context of late capitalism, makes for a situation in which ‘bystanderism' is less an accident, or aberration, than a tendency inherent to the moral climate of the age.