By Nicole Findlay
Students enrolled in Deidre Butler’s seminar in religion embarked on an unusual road trip last November.
The 11 students were not satisfying a light hearted wanderlust or taking advantage of a strong Canadian dollar when they got in their cars and headed down to the United States. Instead, they journeyed back into one of history’s darker periods to explore the impact of the Holocaust through the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.
Throughout the past term, students participating in Butler’s fourth-year class have been examining the Holocaust and its subsequent representation in scholarly work. The trip provided an added dimension to their studies they couldn’t glean through books. During their visit, they also attended a workshop presented by Dr. White, a scholar in residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. The presentation focused on the WWII ghettos and camps currently being chronicled in an encyclopaedia project, as well as the Jewish Diaspora in the United States and Israel.
“The talk by Dr Joseph White was special because undergrads almost never get that insider’s view of current, cutting edge scholarly research,” said Butler. “They heard about the opening of major archives that were happening that week and were in the news and were seeing the excitement of a researcher getting his hands on archival materials the world hasn’t seen in 60 years.”
The visit will inform each of the student’s final research projects. For Suzanne Le, a fourth year student majoring in religious studies, the visit to the museum confirmed the thesis she is developing for her project on the differences between Germany’s and Poland’s subsequent portrayals of the roles each regime played during the Holocaust. Specifically, Le’s paper will address the murder of the Jedwebne Jews by their Polish neighbours. She will compare incidents like these with Polish representations of the citizenry as Nazi victims.
“The purpose of my paper is not to denigrate the suffering of Poland at the hands of Nazi Germany, only to explore the suffering of the Jews at the hands of Poland under Nazi rule,” said Le.
Butler’s class focuses on the religious responses to the trauma of the Holocaust and examines the interpretations through multiple disciplines among them ethics, film, literary theory, public policy, political science, feminist theory, cultural studies and historiography.
Abigail Bimman, a journalism and English major, will examine the impact of the Holocaust on women, which she says has been overlooked in representations of the period.
“Seeing the exhibits helped my thesis expand and develop, as women were not represented separately or given their own place in the exhibit,” Bimman said.
The trip led some students to take a broader view of the world’s response to conflicts that cumulate in mass murder.
“I view genocide as a continuum,” said Le. “Each genocide sets the stage for the next, and how we, as an international community handled the Holocaust created the environment for subsequent genocide.”