By: Adam Janosko
“It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8
Since I’ve begun teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most ubiquitously read novel, there has yet to be a class section that doesn’t stumble, stop or pause upon the word “holocaust.” It naturally becomes a teachable moment– Fitzgerald published Gatsby in 1922, approximately two decades before the attempted extermination of the Jewish people and culture. Few students see this as a glaring anachronism; in fact, most know better– it is the quintessential jazz age tome– but I can understand their slip-ups. United States’ obsession with opulence and excessiveness, perpetuated by a “Real House Wives” sentiment, places Gatsby as “closer to home” in the American psyche.
And, I think that many students feel this exact way: a disconnect from the Holocaust for this reason. Times (78 years) and places (across the pond and most of Europe) that are so foreign, that the Holocaust can be so easily placed as a chapter or unit in 11th grade history class.
Here lies the puzzling dichotomy of this trip: a moral surreality vs. the tangible reality. I see the camps, the menacing apparati for annihilation and murder, the barbed wire and the ghetto walls, but similar to endlessly trying to comprehend the vast age of the earth or the ever-expanding universe, my mind becomes hopelessly lost about why there was such an attempt to destroy a culture and a people. In our first follow-up session with students, they grappled with this question. Historians can naturally point to causes of the Holocaust, sure, but the moral causes are mind-boggling: how can this happen when it goes against every thread of humanity’s moral fiber?
And then it hits you: a braid of hair, a child’s shoe, Zyclone B stains on the ceilings, a singular family photo of teens playing musical instruments. My trigger occurred on a hot day at Majdanek as Howard Chandler stood, with his hands folded behind his back, and a blue numbered tattoo caught my eye. This singular, powerful and potent moment catapulted me to further realize that this devastating reality of a time and place should never be forgotten.
Howard’s narrative of Birkenau pushed the Holocaust to greater lucidity. Yet, it was Howard’s seemingly everlasting vitality, though, that energizes me to be a steward of tolerance in my own life and classroom. In a perfectly poetic moment, as Jewish singers wailed at the Jewish Cultural Festival, I could fully recognize the resilience of a man and his culture: Howard danced well into the night in a country where the Jewish population was almost completely obliterated seventy odd years before. A Hillel and Jewish preschool are slated to start next year in Krakow.
As I go home and process more, I don’t think that the moral question will become any easier. In my teaching, though, this question will be at the foundation of my courses. Through the literature that we read and through open discussion, I hope that students will push themselves to be tolerant and open to others, and to know when to speak and act out for the oppressed.
The Holocaust is complete, but it was never completed. We have a responsibility to ensure that this remains.